So Much Happier Blog
Melting that Stress Away
This week I want to share an article about a recent study on the efficacy of EFT on stress relief. This study replicates a previous one that showed a significant decrease in cortisol (one of the main stress hormones) production, with an even better average result. This confirms what anyone who has actually learned and used Tapping knows, that it quickly helps to relieve stress and calm the body and mind. On the right side of the above linked page, you can access other studies about EFT’s efficacy as well. You may not want to wile away your day perusing these articles for fun, but if you need a reminder about why it’s highly practical to spend some time becoming comfortable with Tapping and weaving it into your daily routine, perhaps these articles will provide that for you. It’s my hope that you will use this incredible simple, free, supportive range of tools for your benefit always, but particularly at times of high stress and uncertainty, like the ones we’re living through right now.
Need reminder about how to do it? Head over to this page. It only takes a few minutes per day to start practicing and gaining confidence that you can improve your moods and functioning across the board with these techniques. A lot of people have more time right now, so you may have a perfect opportunity to spend a little time each day using Tapping to decrease your stress and clear your slate for a better day, no matter what you have going on. I would never want to be without the ability Tapping gives me to completely change how I feel about my current challenges in just minutes, and I hope it brings you the same kind of solace.
Remember Reading for Fun?
“You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
I recently read about a study that was done in 2009 at the University of Sussex in the U.K. on some basic stress relief techniques and how effective they could be in short periods of time. It held some happy surprises, and I wanted to pass them along to you this week. While you know that Tapping/EFT is definitely my favorite stress relief technique, I like to make sure you know about lots of others you can weave into the fabric of your daily life. Nothing is the right tool for everyone all the time, and what I like about this study is that it points out the utility and surprising rapidity of results you can get from enjoying everyday things you already know how to do! Fast, easy, effective, and no learning required? Yes, please!
In this study, subjects’ heart rates and muscle tension were monitored while they engaged in various activities. Here are the results they recorded for each:
Playing video games: 21% improvement in stress levels. So maybe that silly game you downloaded onto your phone is not just fun, but more helpful to you than you knew!
Taking a walk: 42% improvement. Sometimes age-old low-tech wisdom is the best!
Enjoying a cup of coffee or tea: 54% improvement. Whoa. Does this surprise you as much as it did me? Next time you feel tense, maybe grab your favorite hot beverage and just savor the flavor for a highly effective relaxation break. Amazing!
Listening to music: 61% improvement. I don’t think it’s too much of a surprise that music we like takes most of us to our safe, happy place, but with this kind of proof, we really have a case for working it into our days more consistently. Turn the volume to your preferred level and enjoy. Extra points if you twirl and jump around while listening, because plenty of other studies have shown that moving around and getting the blood pumping produces endorphins, our “happy” chemicals.
The grand prize winner, reading: 68% improvement in as little as six minutes! What?! (Take note that this is based on reading fiction for fun—NOT news or business articles and the like.) Enjoyable reading distracts us from our own thoughts and problems (and distraction techniques have been shown to be quite helpful for anxiety, for instance), as well as firing up our creativity, which adds another supportive element. I find this to be pretty exciting, because it’s so simple. Plus, I’ve always been a big-time bookworm. As long as you’re not multi-tasking, but allowing yourself to be absorbed in the story, I’m guessing you’d get the same results from listening to an audio book.
Isn’t it nice to hear about a few things that are fun and not at all bad for your health (as long as you don’t sprain your thumb playing video games)? In the week ahead, how about digging out your library card (or getting one) and reading a chapter a day of something fun? Even better, walk to the library to get that book, listen to music and gyrate as you make a cup of tea, then curl up with said tea to read that chapter. It’s all good for you! Simple yet powerful pleasures. Who says stress relief has to be hard work?
Timeless Communication
“To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.”
Last week we looked at some of the ways ways to become more comfortable with uncertainty and vulnerability. I suggested that one helpful exercise toward this end is practicing your communication skills, which can involve you in feelings of vulnerability more quickly that most things I know—not just for the sake of just feeling vulnerable, but in order to demonstrate that it’s possible to feel vulnerability and to live through it just fine. You may even come out of the experience with valuable knowledge that will help you in the future, plus greater confidence that feeling uncertain doesn’t mean anything very bad is happening. This week we’ll look at some basic ground rules for engaging in communication in a constructive way so that your practice can be more rewarding.
Do you ever feel like no matter what you say, you're not being understood? When this happens, it may be that the framework, the assumptions, the methods you're using are getting in the way of what you're trying to get across. Think about how differently you react when someone approaches you calmly and respectfully versus when someone ambushes, pressures or screams at you. It may be that there's valuable content that the person is attempting to relay in the second scenario, but you are unlikely to hear it because of the unpleasantness inherent in their attack. Numerous skills may be lacking in such a case, and while we'll only cover a small number today, here are some thoughts on methods that will affect your communication styles for the better with consideration and practice.
- One of the most helpful guiding principles for skillful communication is the ability to acknowledge and represent that your feelings are no one else's fault. This may seem like a radical idea, because it often seems that our feelings are a direct result of how others behave, i.e., if he would just listen, or if she would just stop nagging me, I wouldn’t have to be so angry…etc. But this line of thinking puts you in the position of the victim, and predicates your happiness on the choices of others. This suggests that you are powerless to change the situations in your life for the better, which is rarely the case.
- You have choices in your thoughts, which do much to give rise to your feelings; you also have choices in your actions. You have the option to do the internal work necessary to understand and handle your own emotions on a daily basis, then take any appropriate actions so that they don't spiral out of control. It takes two to tango, and (unless you've been kidnapped) you always have a part in the creation of interactions with another person, if only by choosing to be there and interact at all. In your communications, it is often important to share how you feel, but this is best done without blame. You might say, "When you slam the door when you come in and out of the room, I jump every time, which isn't pleasant for me. I end up feeling irritated, and then I end up resenting you." You are explaining the situation from your point of view in a somewhat mechanical, logical way that is less likely to put the listener on the defensive. It represents how one thing leads to another in your personal experience. This makes it more likely that the listener will actually see the problem you describe as understandable and, hopefully, be willing to participate in finding a solution. (Timing is key here. Ideally, you will find a time to attempt a communication like this when you’re calm and can remain solution oriented.)
- This may be pretty difficult to do depending on the situation. When we haven't practiced this skill, we have a tendency to get lost in thinking things like, "You're stupid. You're selfish. If you cared about anyone but yourself, you would pay attention to what you're doing and think!" Yet it's possible for someone else to have a viewpoint sufficiently different from yours that it has very sound logic, based on their unique experience and goals, that you would not have been able to figure out without their explanation. If you allow yourself to presume that the other's viewpoint is valid and seek to understand it, you may be surprised how much there is to learn, and how much cooperation then becomes possible.
- It's essential to allow others the space to have their own reactions. This is often one of the hardest skills to learn for numerous reasons. We have a tendency to react to others’ emotions, whether out of a desire to help the other to feel better, or out of fear of certain outcomes, which can include fear of aggression or abandonment. These fears can be based on ingrained past experiences, including in childhood, such that primal survival instincts kick in. This may seem automatic, inevitable, and activate your physical fight/flight/freeze response even if you're just discussing who is going to walk the dog. You may not even know consciously why you're getting so stressed out, and it's not easy to work with an issue you can't even see. Psychological work like traditional talk therapy is designed to help you understand why you behave in certain ways so that you can spot these seemingly automatic reactions and practice responding differently when you choose to. It may take some doing to recognize that flash point when old patterns start to smolder, but it can be done. Somatic modalities like EFT can also work to release stress regarding both old situations and recent ones from the body, which helps you to stay calmer when facing something that triggers a disproportionate reaction.
- Allowing someone else to express difficult emotions without immediately trying to “fix” them or defend yourself from direct or implied (or imagined!) blame absolutely takes practice. Depending on your upbringing, your values, and the roles you tend to play in social groups, it can feel downright painful. Yet everyone else’s emotions are created from a complicated mix of elements just as yours are, and no matter what someone else claims, they are not your fault, nor yours to fix. Obviously if you love someone, you don’t want them to be in unnecessary pain, and you certainly may be able to help them to feel better in some ways, including by taking responsibility for your motives and actions. But they have a right to feel their emotions and work through them. If you try to be too involved in that process or take too much responsibility for how they feel, you are depriving them of important experiences. Meditation and other calming practices help you to solidify states of mind that you can learn to recapture when you’re in challenging situations, which is part of why such practices are so valuable. When you have a well-practiced state of calm that you can call upon when you’re being tempted to get drawn into emotions that are not your own, you have a lot more power to communicate in helpful ways.
These are just a couple of skills you can practice to improve your ability to communicate effectively and respectfully with others in your life, and they are definitely among the most challenging. I didn't start with the easy ones, but with the ones that may take the longest to master! I hope you'll dive into some area of these and see if you can make some progress. When you can be more skilled with your communication and remain calmer while doing it, it's incredibly empowering.
Never Enough Time!
“Time abides long enough for those who make use of it.”
Since I know I’m not the only one who often feels that there just aren’t enough hours in the day, I thought I’d write this week about how to cope with that feeling of “never enough time.” Because we live in a fast-paced and complex world, I don’t think this issue is going anywhere anytime soon, so we might as well find ways to cope with the constant pull toward busy-ness and the limitations of our daily 24 hours. For much of human history, things were different; before the advent of electric lights, the period of daylight marked the limits of productive time, but now that we can work around the clock, finding balance in our use of time has taken on a whole new dimension of complexity.
I’ve heard it said that the only truly limited resource is time; yet our experience of time can be so different from moment to moment—even our relationship to something so inevitable is not an intractable, hopeless case in which nothing can improve. Here are some ideas for adding more space into your dance partnership with time.
· Tap! Using EFT really is the most effective way I know to introduce more of a sense of calm about what is on your plate. If you’re someone who tends to live on the edge of overwhelm a lot, you might need to make a regular practice of this for a while to really see the results you want. Use it throughout the day whenever tension starts to rise, and eventually you’ll find that your responses to life events and task lists will be less intense. You’ll build an ability to stay out of crisis mode when the situation doesn’t warrant it. Our perception is shaped by our emotions, thoughts, and beliefs; when you can sustain more positive internal states, everything can feel less dire and positive change can seem much more possible.
· Breathe. Remembering to breathe deeply as often as you can, really expanding the belly as you do so, is a quick way to calm your body and mind and refresh every cell with more oxygen than you’d otherwise be getting. If you’re not breathing well, you’re not going to have nearly as much energy as you could with just a little extra effort in this area. It’s fast! It’s free! There’s no downside.
· Know that living with a certain tension in your relationship with time is a normal part of living the human experience. Everyone who has ever lived has had to contend with this. Much remains mysterious as far as why sometimes a vacation day can seem long and lazy, or sometimes it can seem to fly by in two blinks of an eye when you’re doing essentially all the same things. Some days you accomplish far more than you thought you would. Other days, it’s a struggle to do anything at all. All of this is normal, so don’t beat yourself up about it.
· But also know that as with any area of life, with attention and experimentation, you can find ways of handling it that will be more helpful for your unique personality and needs. You can also learn a great deal from others by reading, listening to podcasts, taking workshops, etc. You might want to go reread my previous blog on time management here for some immediate ideas on that subject. As you become comfortable with some best practices for organizing and focusing your efforts, you will find that getting more done for yourself is a less mysterious process. It might take some doing, but you’ll be able to set yourself up to really leverage the time you have when you need to. Still, accept that you’ll experience an ebb and flow in your experience of time, allow yourself to reschedule when you need to, and just keep moving.
· Learn how to say no if you’re bad at it. There is only a certain amount that you will be able to accomplish in a day, and if you’re never leaving enough time to take care of your own needs and goals, you will always feel frustrated to some extent. Saying no is a skill like any other, and it can be learned and mastered. It may not only require making a new decision and practicing, though. Often the reason we say yes to more than is healthy or realistic is that we’ve been taught, through direct teaching or through experience, that this is what it takes to be a good person, to get love, and to be safe. Again, EFT can be incredibly helpful in making change more comfortable by helping you to more easily transform and let go of fears that are keeping you stuck in place.
· Build some time into your schedule for physical activity. Yes, this requires an investment of time, but eventually it will create more energy, enthusiasm, and well-being than it uses up. Similarly, you need nutritious food, clean water, and a reasonable amount of sleep each night to function effectively. If you’re not getting these basics, you’re always going to feel like you’re behind the ball.
· Ask for help when you need it. You may not always get exactly what you wanted, but if you don’t ask, you’re definitely going to be stuck doing much of your task list on your own. If you don’t have anyone to ask for help in your immediate vicinity, there are lots of people you can connect with online who might be willing to barter services if you can’t pay for help.
· Learn to cultivate gratitude for what’s going well in your life. Spending more time appreciating the good has a calming influence. This can help you to be less frantic about making progress, and thus more discerning about what’s really necessary or important for you to do. Maybe there are a bunch of things on your mental to-do list that you could get rid of completely, or put off because they’re not essential at the moment. Panic ensues from an inability to prioritize, and then it perpetuates a vicious cycle, because when you’re panicked, you can’t think clearly. Keep breathing and coming back to appreciation for what’s good already.
· Make sure you’re reminding yourself somehow about your goals every day. That also will help you to stay on track and resist the temptation to scatter your attention on things that don’t advance what’s most important to you.
· Celebrate what you have accomplished. It’s helpful to write down positive actions you took every day before bed, as that helps you to give yourself proper credit for all the good work you did. It’s also fun to look back at this later and see what you’ve been able to achieve, and this is a great way to build your confidence in your own abilities. Even if it’s only one thing per day, you’ll see that you’re making progress little by little, and everything counts—did you manage to make better food choices? Did you handle a recurring situation better than you have in the past? Did you realize something new that will help you in the future? Celebrate it all.
I hope these ideas help you to find more peace in your relationship to time. This is a huge subject, and one in which we continue to learn and grow for a lifetime, so we’re just focusing on some basics here. Time will always be, in important ways, a limiting factor, but it is possible to grow in your contentment with natural rhythms; you can learn to enjoy getting done what you can and then reverting to rest and renewal before doing it all again.
Chasing Your Tail?
“To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.”
Do you ever find yourself asking, “Why does this keep happening to me?” If so, you’re in good company! You may have encountered this kind of confusion many times. We all get stuck sometimes in patterns that aren’t helpful, but also aren’t easy to solve. You may have no idea what’s going on, or you may know exactly what the problem is and feel powerless to change your outcome. Assuming that you want to start getting better results when this is your complaint, read on. We’ll look at how to break out of a persistent pattern and move toward happier developments.
When you feel stuck, you’re probably also feeling frustration, anger, sadness, pessimism or hopelessness. Since good ideas don’t usually pop up in the midst of strong negative emotions, it’s best to work on changing your emotional state before working on your issue. You might do this by venting how you feel in any number of ways (writing it all down, talking with a friend who won’t mind hearing your tale of woe, working out to let off steam, etc.), or by just getting your mind off the subject for a while. If you’re tired, hungry, or thirsty, you may need to address those physical needs too. At a time when you can feel fresh physically, mentally, and emotionally, you’re more likely to be able to take a good look at what has happened or is happening with curiosity and openness to new insights and ideas.
When you’re ready, here are the steps I recommend for moving yourself forward.
1. Start with your mind, as it helps to figure out what your level of clarity is before troubleshooting. Think through your pattern and how it tends to show up in your life. How have the circumstances played out over time? Have recent experiences been very similar to those further in the past, or are they different lately? Have you made any progress at all on the issue? Can you see any way at all in which you may be contributing to the problem? Treat this like a full-on investigation—feel free to enlist the help of a supportive friend and really get your Sherlock on. Sometimes telling someone else about all the times something similar has occurred gives you a chance to have your experience validated as unusual, which can help you feel like it’s not just all in your head. Sometimes it’s just helpful to have someone there to help as you think about your problem, and bring a different perspective to illuminate aspects you might have missed.
This is a good time to brainstorm, meaning to toss around any wild idea that comes to mind about what’s happening and why, and then try it on to see whether it seems to have any merit. Trying to exaggerate, get creative, and make things outrageous to the point of silliness (without judging yourself) brings in an element of fun, which helps you to remember this is not the only thing in your life, and it may be possible to change things for the better.
2. Hopefully, you now have some clarity about what you know. If this is a case where you know exactly what the problem is and have some ideas about how change it, but you feel a lack of confidence or an unwillingness to try your best options, skip to #3. On the other hand, if you still feel thoroughly confused, it’s now time to find an expert. You can run an online search for information about your problem and see who has experience with this, and who’s offering information about it. You can visit a library or bookstore and see what information is available there. You could find a support group for people with a similar problem, and see if anyone there has valuable insight for you. You could talk to a coach or psychologist or religious counselor, depending on the nature of your issue, and see whether that helps you to gain clarity about your options. Once you have a better idea of how others have dealt with your issue, you should have some ideas about possible steps to take.
3. If the thought of taking any of the steps that would be part of your best ideas makes you want to have a meltdown, you need to go back to physical needs (do you need hydration or nutrition, sleep, exercise, stretching, or other attention to your physical body?) You don’t have to be in perfect condition to move forward, but if any of those physical needs is very loud, you’ll do better to address it first so you’re not distracted. Once those are taken care of, it’s time to look at your emotional state.
How you feel is a powerful indicator of other factors that might hold you back if not given some air time. You can want to make progress all you want with your mind, but if some part of you is afraid to because of previous experiences or outsized worries, you’re going to have a hard time getting anywhere. We’re so often taught by well-meaning mentors that we must ignore and power through fears and other emotions, but I find that emotions are often there for good reason. They may hold important information that can help us understand how to proceed in the most efficient way for our unique needs.
This is where the use of EFT can really save the day. If emotions come up when you consider taking some reasonable step toward a solution, Tapping can help you to get clear on why you feel the way you do; it can then help you to release the fear or other emotion that is keeping you feeling stuck. I’m not suggesting that this is a one-time endeavor, because change is often difficult, demanding, and scary. Emotional management is a crucial component in maintaining motivation and effective action at all times. A persistent fear, for instance, might be difficult or impossible to completely remove from your experience, but having a tool like EFT makes it much easier to keep coming back to a calm, more resourceful state; with it, you can take useful messages from your emotions and settle them with reassurance rather than ignoring or trying to dominate them out of existence.
4. Take action on some of those good ideas you came up with in other steps. There’s no substitute for experience and the feedback it results in. Keep reminding yourself that any change requires practice; your new action may not be a comfortable tool to use at will until you’ve experimented with it numerous times. You will probably make mistakes, or find some of the shortcomings of your new policy, and you will need to start back at #1 with anything that doesn’t work for reasons you can’t quite make out.
Then, rinse and repeat. Your life is unique, and solutions that are right for you may not be such that you can copy them directly from others. It may take a lot of experimentation and refinement to find what works best for you. That’s normal and ok. Only you can decide how to best be yourself! You get to choose how to express who you want to be in every moment, and that’s a privilege. It’s one of the exciting things about being alive. The willingness to concentrate on and truly observe your own life and experience makes understanding and innovation possible. If you want a life that is more to your liking, getting there must involve focus and observation—bringing your desires into being requires that you first notice what is true for you and what you want. While not everything can be solved with the mind, it is our best tool for beginning the process of appropriate and fulfilling change. I challenge you to start paying attention to what you’re not enjoying in life, and activate the power of your curiosity.
Silence Is Golden
“Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.”
Even if you’ve never meditated, you’ve probably heard that one of the benefits of many kinds of meditation practice is supposed to be a quieter mind. Since most cultures today place great value on the use of the mind, the benefits of a quiet mind can seem mysterious. Use it or lose it, right? Aren’t we supposed to be exercising our minds in order to stretch their capacities and keep them nimble? Well, just as our bodies need both weight-bearing exercise, cardio, stretching, AND rest in order to function at peak capacity, our minds need various kinds of use and rest in order to provide us with the capacities we want from them.
Modern life is so hectic, demanding, and distracting that we don’t generally get much time for silence and reflection. This leaves is with a mind that is mostly running at high speed all the time. With a mind so busily engaged, it’s harder to notice the patterns that are running on autopilot, keeping us stuck in ruts that we never seem to be able to break out of for reasons that elude us. When we put ourselves into a situation where nothing is required of us, and practice meditation with the aim of quieting the mind, we allow the mind to rest a bit; by the way, this in turn allows the body’s stress response to calm down, which is great for physical health—a bonus side effect! While it definitely takes practice to make progress in disengaging from normal patterns of thought, so that benefits may not be immediately felt, over time, it’s possible to build familiarity with new mind states. This familiarity makes it easier to take them with you, or recreate them when you’re experiencing something difficult, so that you can function more smoothly throughout your life. A hyper mind isn’t necessarily a resourceful mind, just as a chronically tense muscle isn’t always useful—it needs to be able to relax and stretch in order to do everything it’s meant to do.
When you’re meditating for the ability to quiet the mind, there are numerous benefits that I know I immediately experience, and you may as well, such as:
· As I head toward greater quiet, my mind will usually chime in a few times to reveal things I need to do or remember, which is legitimately helpful. I can make note of these and continue the process. Without giving myself a few minutes of quiet, I would not have remembered these, and opportunities would have been lost.
· As my mind slows down, I become more aware of my body, and anything about it that I need to address.
· I start to notice more about what is really going on with me, how I really feel about things that have been going on recently in my life. I begin to feel more like myself and less like someone just running around at the behest of every distracting thing I encounter every day.
· I begin to feel that there’s more time available to me than I would otherwise.
· I begin to feel calmer, more at peace, and more powerfully able to define what’s important and where I will choose to put my energy and focus.
· I feel more in touch with my intuition.
· My body feels more pleasantly calm and peaceful.
· I feel like my to do list falls away and I’m able to recognize the goodness of just being alive, which at this point is much more a feeling than a thought.
Once you’ve practiced an expanded state of mental quiet, there are many other meditation techniques to pursue depending on what you want, but being able to create that quiet space is a foundational skill without which only certain kinds of progress can be made. This state also becomes something you can remind yourself to revert to when you find yourself getting hyper for any reason. It can immediately help you to regain helpful perspective on the ways in which you may have been contributing to your own stress. Bringing a greater sense of calm to challenge allows you to stay more creative, less reactive, and more reasonable. You’re then more likely to be able to solve problems and work well with others, which makes you less likely to spend your time feeling stuck and confused.
In a seemingly unlikely way, spending time creating mental quiet leads to greater focus and energy, which can make it seem like you have more time rather than having lost it in the pursuit. Even if you don’t think you can spend more than a few minutes practicing, you can still benefit from the attempt to create a few minutes of internal quiet throughout your day here and there. I highly recommend making this a little game that you play with yourself. You may have other mental games you already play, like doing crossword puzzles. This is just another category of game that builds capacity your brain needs to function with excellence.