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Jan 16
Love1

Mastering Emotions, Moods and Reactions

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions

(This is from the introduction to my book, Mastering Emotions, Moods, and Reactions)

Mastering our emotions, moods and reactions begins with understanding our fundamental nature as living, growing organisms. Our biological processes are full of rhythms, pulsations, flowing liquid and moving breath. Nature’s forces are powerful and enduring. If we try to fight against a powerful wind, we can be quickly overcome by it. But if we can accept, study, and harness those same forces, we can power a sailboat or a windmill. By stepping back and looking at the bigger picture of our own internal nature, we can more easily understand our own patterns and rhythms; and if we begin by accepting these as they are, we can use their power and direct them in ways that work better for us, rather than fighting against ourselves; against our own nature.

We begin our exploration with orienting to our biological nature.

From this perspective we can begin to make sense of our flowing emotions, our changing moods, and our sudden and intense reactions.

Distinguishing these three qualities from one another can help us learn what to do with each, with much more clarity than when they’re all thrown together as one experience.

Our emotions are more recent, connected with language, and useful primarily for self-reflection and growth. We’ll explore how to use our emotions in ways that allow us to learn from experiences that anger, hurt, frighten, or delight us so that we can function better in the future.

Our moods are more primitive and move more slowly. They have more to do with energy – raising our mood to meet a challenge or seize an opportunity, or lowering our mood when we suffer a loss, feel stuck, or take on goals that are impossible to achieve. We’ll learn to pay attention to the things that raise and lower our moods, and how to manage the natural ebbs and flows so we can stay connected and engaged through life’s ups and downs.

Our reaction of flight is at the heart of anxiety and panic, and is essentially designed to get us away from serious physical danger quickly. We’ll learn ways of calming and managing anxiety, and finding the actions we can take to strengthen and empower ourselves.

Our reaction of fight is the source of our explosive anger or rage, and is designed to provide us with an extreme intensity of energy and power, to fight against a physical threat from which we cannot escape. We’ll look at how to manage the often destructive reaction of rage, and how to distinguish it from the more useful emotion of anger.

Our reaction of freezing is our most primitive reaction, and is a last ditch effort to save our lives – by immobilizing us and anaesthetizing us when we’re trapped and terrified in the face of mortal danger. We’ll learn ways to come back into our body, and expand our sense of safety and well being.

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Jan 11
Love1

What Happens When We Try To Change Somebody

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

One of the most common questions I get in my coaching practice goes something like this:

“My (husband, wife, son, daughter, friend, neighbor, etc.) has this behavior, or belief, or way of doing things… How can I get them to change it?”

Now, if it’s a very specific behavior, and changing it would make a big difference in your relationship, it’s always worth just simply asking, for example, “When you talk with your mouth full it really bothers me, could you please do your best to not talk while you’re chewing?”

But often what we want the other person to change is much bigger and more abstract than that.

Of course, we’ve all felt this at some time or other – “If only this person we care about would just stop being so negative, or change this one belief… then they’d be so much better off.” (It’s always something that seems so obvious and simple… to us.)

The big problem with this is that it’s hard enough to change a big habit or belief within ourselves, when we want to. Trying to get somebody else to change a habit or belief, that maybe they don’t want to change, is really a long-shot.

I’ve been working with people to – in part – help them change their beliefs and habits for over 40 years. It’s something I enjoy very much, and have a lot of success with. But it’s not easy. It takes time and energy – and often a good deal of courage – to face our troubling behaviors, and the fears that sometimes accompany them.

When we nag, lecture, cajole, or manipulate those we love to be more the way we think they should be, in that moment we’re not really in relationship with them. In that moment we’re not seeing them as a human being, with all the complexity and unique internal experience that we each live within. We’re seeing them as a thing to make different. In order for them to live up to our expectations of them.

I don’t mean to say that we don’t generally love or understand them, but when we go into that particular mode of “teaching,” and what we’re teaching is the lesson we think this person needs to learn… in that moment, we’re disconnected from that person.

When was the last time you changed somebody else’s behavior by nagging or lecturing them? Or better yet: When was the last time you changed your behavior from somebody else nagging or lecturing you?

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Jan 03
Love1

A Belief, a Goal, a Plan, and the Persistence to Hold to It

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

New Year’s resolutions usually don’t work very well. The reason is that we often will pick a general life changing scenario liken “get more fit and healthy,” or “turn my finances around.” Or it could be a big specific thing like “quit smoking.”

What’s missing with this – which is why it’s not very effective – is that underlying these behaviors are habits. Often strong, long practiced habits. And a single behavior may include several habits.

To make effective changes in our lives, we must focus on the habits underlying the behavior, and create a plan of action for changing them, and to keep them changed over time.

That’s what we’ll be looking at today.

For most living creatures, instincts take charge of the necessary ordering which life requires: finding food, finding a mate, sleep cycles, protective behavior… But we humans are different in a fundamental way: our basic survival tool is our conscious mind, and unlike instinctual animals, we can choose to use our basic tool of survival… or not.

Because of this, we can do something pretty amazing: with our conscious minds, we train our own brains to hold the structure of our lives. We do this by creating habits. The habits we practice daily, weekly, monthly… are all maintained through neural pathways that we’ve established in our brain that make it easy and natural for us to follow these routines.

These habits – if they are good ones – help us to build a sense of meaning, purpose and direction. They are what allow us to persevere and reach long term goals. Without habits, we’d need to use our willpower for every single action we take.

The trouble is, we acquire many of our habits by default: from routines that our family valued and practiced, or that we learned in school, or from influential people in our lives… or from adapting to challenging circumstances as best we could.

This can be wonderful if the people we learned from all had good habits and great values, or when our adaptations have strengthened us. It can be awful if the habits we learned are awful.

But even in the best of circumstances – a loving family, a supportive community, great opportunities for learning, responsibility, and growth – the habits we learned earlier and that come easily to us may not be the best ones for our current and developing lives.

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Dec 06
Love1

What Happens When We Expect a Catastrophe

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Happiness

I write sometimes in these columns about thinking biases that can affect our decision making. Today I want to talk about a way of thinking that can undermine our resilience during hardship, as well as our ability to flourish and succeed.

Catastrophes happen in life. Natural disasters, tragic accidents, terrible illnesses, heart-rending betrayals, economic calamities, war, famine… Human history has been filled with these, and most of us have been at least touched by something catastrophic.

But a catastrophe is not usually the most likely scenario – if they were common, we wouldn’t think of them as catastrophes; they’d just be the kind of normal troubles we expect in life. There can be disappointments, hardships, struggles, and losses that hurt badly, requiring us to step up to challenges we would rather not have to step up to. These are not uncommon.

But a true catastrophe is rarely likely. When we expect catastrophe as a likely scenario, that expectation creates its own troubles, and they can run deep.

Yet our current media and political culture thrives on creating and maintaining an atmosphere of impending catastrophe. This is true across the political spectrum, and throughout much of the common space we share through internet, TV, movies, print media… The conversation that is mediated by every kind of media is filled with visions of catastrophe.

The very way that these threats are framed do not encourage us to think clearly, investigate deeply, or to search for practical solutions.

The way they are framed encourages us to feel terrified, enraged, and helpless. And this can undermine our capacity for success, happiness and well-being across every aspect of our lives.

This orientation is guaranteed to activate our primitive reactions of fight, flight, and freeze – reactions that are designed to give us a last-ditch possibility of surviving the mortal attack of a predator.

While these parts of our nervous system serve an essential survival function when needed, they are very rarely actually needed. They also undermine our capacity to think clearly, our desire and ability to seek understanding, empathy, and compassion for others, and our internal sense of well-being and basic trust.

Catastrophic thinking can undermine resilience, and increase our risk for anxiety, depression, and PTSD. It can also undermine our capacity for success: those who tend to not engage in catastrophic thinking also tend to be the ones who excel.

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Nov 28
Love1

Love and Playfulness

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

Most couples wait six years or more from the beginning of trouble to when they seek help with a counselor, even though prevention is much easier and more effective than repair.

When I was working primarily as a marriage and family therapist, it was heartbreaking when a couple would come to my office as enemies, having long ago crossed the point of no return.

Once trouble starts, if a couple ignores it or just “lets things work out on their own,” that bond can degenerate quickly, and two people who were once deeply in love can find themselves in an agonizing cycle of criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling (silent brooding) – what relationship researcher and therapist John Gottman calls “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

That’s why I now work with couples primarily as a coach. It seems to take less time for couples to seek a coach than a counselor or therapist. With less accumulated pain and fewer hurtful habits, we can dive right into work on that prevention part.

The problem isn’t conflict. Successful marriages have plenty of conflict. The problem isn’t even unresolved conflict. Successful marriages also have plenty of unresolved conflict.

Conflict is where our differences meet; in many ways, our conflicts help us to get to know one another. A marriage without conflict is also likely a marriage without much intimacy.

It’s how we treat each other when there’s conflict that is the essential difference between a happy marriage and a miserable – or a finished – one.

A marriage is not a game; it’s not a trophy to win or a position to battle for. A marriage is a connection between two people who love each other, trust each other, respect each other and enjoy being with each other. It’s not about winning something over the other person; it’s about achieving something together, with the other person.

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Nov 21
Love1

Consciously Creating Relationships

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

An acquaintance the other day asked me what I do, and I told her that I’m a Marriage and Family Counselor, as well as a Life Coach. Then she asked an interesting question: “Is compromise the key to a happy marriage?”

At first I was tempted to say yes. Compromise is certainly one part of two different people sharing a life together. We can’t do everything we want whenever we want it; we have to find ways of adapting to each other’s needs and inclinations.

But thinking about it a little more closely, I instead said an emphatic, “no.” Compromise is not really the key. Compromise is kind of like when one person wants a room painted yellow, the other wants it painted blue, and we compromise and get green – but neither of us may even like green. Compromise is sometimes win/win, sometimes not. There are certainly times when we compromise, but it isn’t the driving force of a great relationship.

What is the driving force of a great relationship? A winning premise; a conception of what our relationship is all about that includes a shared vision of the two of us together.

A relationship is a creative process between two people. The two of you create what the two of you choose to create – whether you do that consciously or based on unexplored habits and beliefs is what can make the big difference between a happy, successful relationship, or a less happy, less successful one.

A great relationship is founded on the premise that you and your partner are allies; that you are a team together.

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Nov 15
Love1

Psychological Challenges are More Interesting than You Think

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Habits and Strategies, Happiness

When we approach any problem, how we approach it begins with an idea, a belief, a story about what that problem is, and what needs to be done about it.

To considerable extent, we can choose the fundamental belief or premise from which we approach any problem… and how we frame a problem can be the very key to success or failure.

In the movie Apollo 13, when the spacecraft was in grave peril, and people at Mission Control were freaking out expecting disaster, Gene Krantz (played by Fred Harris) stopped them and said, “What do we got on the spacecraft that works?”

With that one powerful question, he reframed the situation from helpless disaster to solvable problem. Everyone immediately shifted from disaster mode to focusing on the strengths and resources available to bring the astronauts home safely – which they did. The story would probably have ended much differently – and tragically – had they stayed in disaster mode.

How we approach our psychological challenges also begins with an idea, a premise, a story.

Currently, the widely accepted premise is that psychological problems – depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), addictions et al – are abnormal phenomena.

They don’t belong here. They were brought to us by some unfortunate circumstances – an unhappy childhood, a personal weakness, a society that’s sick. They’re polluting the system, like a harmful bacteria or virus, and we want all trace of them eliminated immediately.

But what if that premise is wrong?

I’ve been working with people as a teacher, a marriage and family therapist, and a life coach for well over 40 years now. I started with that premise of problems as aberrations – the “disease model” of psychology. I don’t buy it anymore.

Let’s explore a different premise and see where it takes us.  The exploration starts with asking certain questions:

Nov 09
Love1

How To Save a Lot of Money by Recognizing This Bias

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions

You’re out for a very nice dinner with your spouse, and you decide to share a bottle of wine. You look at the wine list, and you see several bottles listed in the $170 range, a few that are in the $50 range, and quite a number of them around $80-$90. $80 is more than you would’ve thought to spend when you left the house, but somehow you’re drawn to the $87 bottle of Cabernet.

$50 being the lowest price seems miserly for a special evening out, and with $170 as an example of a “very nice bottle of wine,” $87 now seems very easy to accept.

This is an example of anchoring. The $170 figure drew your expectations in the direction of that figure, higher than you would’ve chosen otherwise.

If the highest price bottles were all in the $80-$90 range, you probably would’ve chosen a less expensive bottle.

Another example of anchoring is called “rationing,” where you’re told that there’s a limited supply of something.

In one experiment at a supermarket, Campbell’s soup was on sale at 10% off. When there was a sign that also said, “Limit of 12 cans per person,” people bought an average of 7 cans per person – twice as many as when there was no limit. The “anchor” of 12 cans drew people away from the 3-4 cans they would otherwise have bought, and toward the number 12.

If you look for it, you’ll see this technique everywhere in marketing. In most cases it’s relatively harmless, drawing you to buy something that’s a few dollars more than some other product, or to buy a higher quantity of something you would probably use anyway. But as we’ll see, awareness of this technique when you’re facing higher cost items like a car or a home can save you a lot of money.

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Nov 01
Love1

Pressing the Pause Button

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions

 

Anybody can become angry – that is easy; but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy. – Aristotle

It’s easy to get caught up in emotions, to follow the flow and intensity of our impulses. It’s natural… animal… primal. And without intervening with our consciousness, it can be dangerous. This is how we operated throughout much of human history… which is why most of human history was so terribly, horribly violent.

But it’s not how most of us today usually operate, because we have a choice. Over time, particularly through the Enlightenment, we’ve culturally refined our ability to choose – and that ability is central to what makes us human.

When we feel like reacting with anger, fear or hurt feelings – anything that feels like it’s an automatic, purely emotional response – we can react without thinking, blindly following the tides of our emotions.

Or we can choose to do something different.

Stephen Covey talks about this ability to choose as being a “pause button.” A moment between stimulus and response, that transforms that response from an automatic, rote behavior to a conscious, human one.

When we feel like reacting to a situation, instead of going right into the reaction, we can “press the pause button” and consider what we genuinely – from our consciously chosen values and priorities – want to do.

During the ‘60s, ‘70s and well into the ‘80s, the idea that we should “let our feelings out” was a common message in psychology that found its way into popular culture.

This had a positive side. Our emotions are where we live. Awareness of our feelings deepens our experience, and can help us understand one another and even think more clearly. Love, joy, excitement, elation, satisfaction, peace, warmth… as well as fear, pain, grief, anger, and sadness… These all bring us essential information about how people and events are affecting us.

Our emotions are how we experience the meaning of life. To be more in touch with our emotions is to be more in touch with ourselves. To be able to easily and appropriately express our emotions allows us to live a rich, full life with satisfying connections with others.

“Appropriately” is an important qualifier here, though. There can be a downside to emotional expression, in two ways:

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Oct 24
Love1

The Great Enrichment

By Happiness

 

We are in the midst of remarkable times, and our relationship to money is very different because of it. Appreciating this can open up possibilities for how you think, feel and act with your money.

We all see the world through the lens of the culture and the times in which we live. People living during the Renaissance didn’t know they were living during the Renaissance and didn’t call it that. It’s often only in hindsight that we can see the pattern.

Today it’s hard to fully appreciate the truly remarkable conditions in which we live. For us it’s just life. For our ancestors, it would be breathtaking.

Consider that for nearly all of mankind’s existence, our ancestors lived on the equivalent of about $1-$3 a day. Imagine paying for your home, your food, your clothing, your medical needs – everything – from a total of $1,095 for the entire year/$91 per month. For us that would be dire poverty, yet that’s what our ancestors have lived on – and, until recently, most of the population on earth.

Something changed all that, beginning in the later 1600’s in Holland, and spreading and growing in England in the 1700’s and moving gradually – and then recently more quickly – throughout the rest of the world.

That $3 a day grew by a very conservative factor of 16, and more realistically, when you include the vast improvement in the quality of goods and services, more like a factor of 100 (how do you compare an iPhone, or antibiotics, with anything in existence a few hundred years ago?).

This was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, followed soon after by what Deirdre McCloskey calls “The Great Enrichment” – which we are very much still enjoying.

Throughout history there have been times and places of improved economic conditions. But for perspective, the best that you’ll find is maybe a raising of average income to $6 or maybe $8 a day, and that never lasted for very long; and it’s still dire poverty by our standards.

Today, worldwide average income is about $33 a day, and in the wealthier countries it’s more like $100 a day or more.

So if you’re reading this, it’s very likely that the average income among everybody in your country – not just a fortunate few – is more than 30 times what our ancestors could expect to live on. Adding the incalculable innovations and improvements (those iPhones and antibiotics again), we can conservatively more than triple that.

This isn’t the difference between having a clunky car or a nicer car; a small apartment or a large house; shopping at a discount store or a fancy store. This is the difference between a high probability of an early death by starvation or disease; or living a relatively good life until about 80.

In other words, this change since about the year 1800 is a phenomenal improvement in life for all people.

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