So Much Happier Blog
Feeling Reeeeeally Tired?
“History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”
Photo by Ethan Brooke
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that this year has felt like an endless Groundhog Day-style slog for a lot of people. We’ve all had to adapt to major changes nearly overnight, and these changes have involved confusion and sacrifice. Much has been uncomfortable, frustrating, contentious, and challenging. Living in times when everyone is feeling these things has led to drops in efficiency across all of our activities, and interactions with other people that are increasingly strained by the pressures everyone is facing. We’re being called to think and function in new ways, and many people have been pushed over the edge past where they can find any sense of balance.
Times of intense challenge require innovation, as the “old way” of doing things will often no longer be effective or even tenable. Unfortunately, humans don’t seem to like change very much! Throughout history, there are endless examples of blind resistance to change that was doomed, yet the trend was to dig in and refuse to reckon with change anyway. It takes work to change our thinking, our habits, and to change our own sense of identity—which, because of the endless antics of the ego, can actually feel like a kind of death. Fun!
To cope with all of this challenge, we need tools to foster internal adaptation and resilience. Unfortunately, most of us have been told that the answer to everything related to mind and emotions is willpower, a.k.a. stubbornness. You’re “supposed to” be able to muscle through whatever comes up, and if not, well, you’re weak and useless. This thinking paints people into corners where they think they need to suffer in silence in order to be valuable. In fact, if we want to be the most effective (not to mention happy) people we can be, just the opposite is true! We need to acknowledge where we’re struggling, find ways to vent off and transform our emotions into useful knowledge, and take action to create healthier balance in our lives.
You probably know by now that I find Tapping to be one of the most effective tools in existence for helping us to do all of these things. It’s simple, direct, and it works on all levels, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. And it’s free to learn and use as a self-help tool whenever you need it. It does encompass a lot of techniques that take time to master, but just the simplest version can make all the difference in how you experience your every day. If you haven’t yet started to practice using it, I strongly recommend that now is the time to put in a few minutes here and there to remind yourself of the steps and practice.
One of the things I like best about Tapping is that we don’t need to try to force anything to happen in this medium. We just express the reality of what’s going on in our inner world, and allow change to happen organically while we Tap. How we feel is not just ok, but important, and allowing it can lead to illuminating understandings and change that naturally occurs in right timing for our capacity. Symptoms of stress may melt away, sleep may improve, and you may find yourself feeling a lot less resistance to appropriate change with continued use. (Those are side effects we can all live with!) The name for the specific version of meridian tapping in which I am trained is called EFT, Emotional Freedom Techniques, for good reason!
I also want to share an article this week that makes some excellent points about how much the sheer uncertainty of the current environment can wear on us. Of course life always involves uncertainty, but these are unusual times to be sure. I hope you find it a useful reminder that you are not alone, and that it’s ok to be feeling on edge right now. Just don’t forget that you have the power to help yourself feel better about whatever stresses are on your plate, maybe after just a few minutes of Tapping.
Acupressure Points that May Help with Anxiousness
“Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.”
This week I came across an article on some acupressure points that can be helpful for anxiety, and I wanted to share it with you. As you well know by now, my absolute favorite method for emotional management is Tapping, but anything accessible that can help us all dial down stress right now is crucial. If you want to try what this article suggests, you can apply pressure at a level that feels good to you, or you could tap on these if you prefer, and see if you get extra relief. Sometimes, you’ll find that a particular point feels amazing and really seems to get you extra-great results. At other times, you might want to spend a minute or two on each and see how that goes. Just be sure to heed the warnings about not using some of these if you’re pregnant. I also want to mention that the one on the back of the hand near the thumb has been known to induce nausea in my experience, so you might want to tread lightly with that one as well.
Here’s the link to the article. Note that natural health methodologies tend to be poorly funded because they don’t have huge, powerful industries behind them like drugs do, but Tapping can now claim a growing number of well-constructed studies showing that it works across a range of issues. Acupressure is derived from the same knowledge base, Traditional Chinese Medicine, some of the principles of which are echoed in a number of other traditional health systems established long before the Western version of scientific inquiry was born. When treated with respect and common sense, and pursued with appropriate education or consultation with experts, many of these natural approaches can be gentle and helpful.
As always, I wish you and yours health and peace, and the ability to keep working to make the world a better place even through the most challenging of times.
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.
Living Your Best Life
“To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.”
One of the reasons why sometimes people new to Tapping have trouble getting results is that they have trouble identifying their emotions and noticing what’s going on with their bodies. For numerous reasons, in many cultures, we’re taught to deny the importance of signals from our bodies just as we’re taught that emotions are mostly useless and best ignored; often we’re encouraged to place the value of intellectual learning and displays of mental ability above all else. The body may be seen as just a sensory apparatus and a vehicle for moving the brain around in space. Only athletes are generally exhorted to pay more attention to their bodies because this is necessary to gain competitive advantage. Even then, they’re often told that they should push through pain without considering any more sophisticated methods for understanding an unthinkably complex body-mind system. The upshot is that most of us have no experience with tuning in receptively to what the body might be trying to tell us, particularly when doing so means feeling discomfort. Not only are most of us profoundly uncomfortable with feeling discomfort, but we also may not even have the language to describe physical sensations, because we’ve spent a lifetime running from them. Add in the very common knee-jerk fear reaction so many of us have about what pain might MEAN to us and our lives, and we have a tangled, heavy ball of obstructive habits that can be hard to contend with. It can also prevent our learning to build bridges to understanding our bodies’ signals in ways that only we can, and then taking appropriate action.
If you want to enjoy the best possible experience of life, here are some ideas on how to unwind this unfortunate tangle and free up energy for the creation of more synergy with your body and its innate intelligence:
Consider what an incredible thing your body is, and how much it does for you every day. It allows you to perceive the vast and varied world around you with your senses; it processes all the air and fuel you feed it and turns that into energy; it allows you to think, feel, and move around at will, and it maintains a million delicately balanced processes that allow you to all of this at all times, throughout thousands of changing internal and external conditions both seen and unseen. Do you think, just maybe, it might be possible for it to communicate something of value to you here and there if you were willing to listen?
Last week we looked at a few ways to get started with meditation. One of the reasons why it can be such an advantage to learn to work constructively with your mind rather than just letting it run wild is that when your mind is not always screaming like a banshee, you have some space to notice what’s actually happening—including with your body—at any given moment. Until you can create such space, you are at the mercy of a mind that will always try to distract you from anything it’s not creating, such as the other parts of your self, as well as opportunities being offered to you by others and the world around you
Practice challenging yourself so that you can become more comfortable with remaining calm in the face of discomfort. Just to make things interesting, we live in a world that offers endless distractions from outside of us, in addition to those that our busy minds create. It’s so easy to seek comfort constantly through food, entertainment, other sensory pleasures, and busy-ness of all kinds that many of us convince ourselves that we’re keeping our discomfort at bay. Unfortunately, suppressed thoughts and emotions have a tendency to build pressure until they cause an explosion we can’t ignore. If you become used to the fact that some discomfort won’t kill you, it’s easier to make small choices every day that are better for your life in the long term. You build confidence in your ability to grow and make progress through small challenges, which then lead naturally to larger ones. If you’re afraid to feel anything unpleasant, you’ll probably always stay stuck right where you are. Conversely, a little courage put into action will multiply until you’re hard to stop
Work on handling your fearful reactions to noticing how you actually feel. Feeling, naming, and being willing to work with what’s true for you leads to awesome power, but it takes work to build these skills, and as you do so, you’ll discover a bunch of stuff that it’s not fun for you to look at. This is ok and completely normal! Trust me, everyone experiences stress and panic when faced with the idea of injury, illness, uncomfortable emotions, restrictions, and eventual death, but all of these are a normal part of the human experience, and finding peace with them is both possible and healthy. Too many of us live our lives in an almost-constant state of stress and panic about this, that, or the other thing, and this takes a major toll on our physical and mental resourcefulness, our capacity for enjoying life, and our long-term health. States of high stress can be useful when your life is at immediate risk, but if that’s not the case right now, that stress is killing you. When you have a high-stress reaction to something that is not life-threatening, in other words, an overreaction, it’s time to lovingly dial it down, and I know of no faster, easier, or simpler way to do this than through Tapping. Lots of other tools can help, like deep breathing, exercise/movement, talking or journaling, etc., but as you probably know, Tapping’s my favorite!
With practice, you become more able to patiently and receptively confront what’s going on in your internal world, identify it descriptively, and endure the initial discomfort of doing this until the Tapping begins to bring you relief. If you can’t allow yourself to notice your emotions and how they express themselves through your bodily sensations, you may not be able to get the results (the on-demand relief and clarity) you want, and that’s waiting for you once you create the space for it to emerge.
Ready, Set, Tap!
“When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.”
Clients often ask me how long is the right amount of time to Tap when they’re on their own, and how they should approach it when they’re just getting started. As for the amount of time, I usually say, “However much time you have!” There’s really no wrong amount of time, unless your intent is to work on something with a big emotional charge—in that case, it’s best to give yourself plenty of time so you don’t feel rushed (and you may even want to get help with the process). But if you’re just looking to get some daily stress relief and manage emotions that come up over the course of your daily routine, then even a few minutes of Tapping can help you calm your body and your emotional state noticeably, so it never hurts to just do a round or two in the time you have.
One of the easiest techniques to use when you’re getting started with Tapping is the “Tap and rant” approach, in which there are really no rules, so you can just have fun with it. It works like this: You Tap your way around the points and vent everything that’s bothering you in no particular order. It really is that simple! I recommend that you pretend you’re talking to a sympathetic best friend who will relate to and be supportive of how you feel, and even enjoy the humor in any situation you’re describing. Initially what comes out of your mouth might sound very negative, with you complaining up, down, and sideways about any number of things, people, situations, etc. Usually we hold all of this in, and Tapping is a safe way to let it out without reinforcing the negativity; it’s designed to help you get those stuck feelings up and out so you can allow their intensity to dissipate. Note that this happens organically, and it cannot be forced, so it’s super important that as we Tap, we only say what really feels true. If we stick with it for a little while, generally the intensity just begins to subside on its own and our perspectives shift so that we can see things in a new light. Even if we only get a small amount of relief, it’s still a helpful way to spend a few minutes. Often when we have time to think about what’s bothering us, we tend to get upset about it all over again. With Tapping, we’re at least inching in the other direction!
As with all Tapping, it’s good to ask yourself before you start how intense what you’re about to work on feels. If it’s a general sense of stress and overwhelm, for instance, that’s fine. Give it a subjective number on a scale of zero to ten, where zero is no intensity and ten is the worst you could possibly imagine feeling. This way, after each round, you can take a deep breath, let it out, and ask yourself if the number has changed. When it does, you’ll get to feel how you made progress, and your confidence around Tapping will build. Sometimes, starting with a rant helps you to walk the perimeter of everything that’s on your mind, and map out what specific thing you might want to work on when you have more time. The best results through EFT generally happen when we’re getting specific and working patiently on that one specific thing until the intensity comes way down. However, in today’s busy world in this Information Age, many of us need a way to calm the too many thoughts that are rattling around in our heads all the livelong day before we can even focus enough to get specific about anything. That’s where a good rant comes in as a perfect place to start.
For many people, ranting and Tapping feels great once you’ve given yourself permission to actually voice the negative feelings you’ve been holding in. This becomes a whole lot of fun, and a huge relief. But every once in a while, I run across someone who finds it depressing rather than freeing to focus on the negative for too long. Remember how we don’t want to say anything that doesn’t feel true while Tapping? If this is you, you don’t have to dwell on the negative to the point where you don’t enjoy it; go ahead and acknowledge the negative, and then move to statements about how you’d like to feel differently. Even if you don’t know how or it doesn’t seem possible, just express willingness for these feelings to subside and Tap. That willingness puts you in a more receptive state, which helps the Tapping to work all the better.
There are lots of other more specific techniques under the umbrella of EFT, but for just a quick few rounds of Tapping, the rant can be a simple, easy way to go, especially when you’re first starting out and getting used to the whole idea of Tapping. Next time you have a few minutes where you won’t be overheard, and would like to bring a little more calm and sanity to your day, give it a try and see how it goes! Don’t be afraid to use colorful language and enjoy the process. You just might find that it becomes one of your favorite parts of your day!
Crash Landing!
Well, that’s not what I thought would happen…
Sometimes we overestimate what we can pack into a day, a week, a month, or even the hour or two we have free in between other commitments. This is entirely normal, and sometimes it’s just due to unexpected issues arising in the midst of something routine that you thought would be smooth sailing. But what if this is the norm, how you’re living your life habitually? If you constantly overschedule yourself, there will be a lot of misery subtly built into your routines. You’ll feel like you’re always running on empty. You’ll tend to be irritable, grumpy, and resentful of requests, even from people you love. You’ll have to push yourself to do everything rather than powering your actions on enjoyable anticipation. And the truth is, this just isn’t necessary.
If you’re in this position, there can be a few things going on, and a few solutions that can quickly help:
You were taught that you should always be striving, and it’s lazy, or bad, or even dangerous to take time for relaxation when there are things still on the to-do list. This one can be the hardest to grapple with, because what we learn when we’re small can seem so true that we don’t even notice that there might be other options—the beliefs we were fed before our conscious mind really developed can be invisible, and therefore hard to change without help. In this case, you’ll need to either find yourself some assistance, or commit to setting an intention to find the beliefs that are running your behavior, and spend some time noticing what you’re thinking when you’re most stressed. These beliefs are invisible only until we concentrate on finding them. Once you turn a spotlight on your mental processes, it doesn’t usually take more than a few days to get an idea of why you’re acting the way you are. Once you have seen the inner workings, you can do the good work necessary for changing your problematic beliefs. Tapping is an amazing tool for this!
Somewhere along the line, you got used to trying to meet everyone’s expectations without remembering that you always have a vote. This one can also be fairly tricky to deal with too, because if the pattern is very old, as in, you learned in childhood that you should be seen and not heard or some other negating message, you’ll have to do some work on understanding where this comes from and changing your beliefs about what you deserve and what is possible. This takes some doing, but it’s so worth it!
Your stress levels have gotten out of hand, and you feel like you have to run to keep up with a fast-paced life over which you feel you have no control. This is extremely common in today’s world. There is so much to balance, and expectations of what we should be able to do (based on what other “non-us” people are doing) bombard us from all sides. Since you are a unique person with unique abilities and desires, much of this really makes no sense at all, but we take it on anyway. In this case, you need to give yourself permission to make your own decisions about what makes your life good; you then need to make a plan for how to rebalance based on this and carve out time to counteract any tendency you have to just churn and burn through every day without making conscious choices about what’s actually happening in the here and now—is it serving you and what you really want?
You’re a driven, goal-oriented, or very competitive person who genuinely loves getting things done, and ticking things off your list is part of what makes life fun. If this is you, you’re lucky to have consistent access to motivation, but it’s easy to burn yourself out to the point that this becomes essentially an addiction. You must take regular compensatory measures to counteract the effects of so much hard work. If it helps, you can add sleep, leisure activities, lazy family time, and alone time to your to-do list so you can acknowledge that recharging is still “doing” something very important. Notice what works here, what renews your sense of excitement at getting back to your tasks, and make sure that those are a consistent part of your schedule.
Life is complicated, and it’s often impossible to predict just how your days will go. We all get tired, overwhelmed, and disheartened sometimes, but if you start keeping an eye on why you’re doing what you’re doing and how consistently you’re at your best, you can begin to do a better job of recovering from overwhelm and predicting ways to create a better balance. Challenging yourself is often a good, inspiring thing. Consistently running yourself on unrealistic expectations, on the other hand, just produces disappointment, shame, and frustration. None of these will help you; motivating yourself with healthy vitality, balance, and inspiration will fuel your life beyond what you might believe to be possible.
Keeping Hold of Your Heart
“The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness.”
Despite the fact that this world gives us access to greater technological advances and opportunities for cooperation and success than ever before in known history, it's also true that it can be an incredibly hard place to live. We all have to keep so many plates spinning at all times, and we're often stretched very thin; so is everyone else. This plus an exploding world population, increased levels of pollution, lower-quality food than what was generally available a few generations ago, etc. etc., can make for a pressure cooker of an experience. Without a steady, committed daily practice of some sort of calming modality such as meditation, mindful breathing, prayer, gratitude journaling, or Tapping, you're likely to be building layers upon layers of stress into your mind and body that will add up to lots of unhappy, unhealthy days.
I'll just take this opportunity to remind you that physical exercise is also a key element in the construction of a life that works. It helps you naturally bust stress and feel happier, it helps your body's overall health in so many ways that you probably already know about, and it keeps you strong and limber so you can enjoy using your body all throughout your days. Sleep is also incredibly important. You know I'm going to keep reminding you about all these things! If you're not minding your body, mind, and spirit each day, you're not living your best life, and I want the absolute best for you. But more than all these, and less possible by far without them, we long for creativity—the creation of new ideas, solutions, and artistic expressions. We might want to create them or just observe and appreciate them, but either way they bring a great deal of zest to life that creates enthusiasm and energy. Therefore, whether you consider yourself a creative person or not, I urge you to find ways to bring more creativity into your routines.
If you're not currently in creation mode, get out there (or stay in!) and consume some creativity that others are offering for your enjoyment. Keep in mind, though, that when you do this, you go on a ride of sorts that someone else has designed. You have a great deal of choice in the kinds of experiences you can elect in this realm, so you should think and choose wisely. Decide what kind of ride would be most helpful to you at this moment. Do you want something thrilling and death-defying to wake you up and add some excitement to your day? Something sweet that will restore your faith in humanity? Something about people who have risen to challenge to become the best in themselves? Something that just makes you laugh until your belly hurts? I personally don't go after experiences based on horror, as I find these to be the opposite of energizing for me, but we're all different. Experiment to find the kinds of experiences you really enjoy riding along for, and then allow yourself to enjoy them regularly. These journeys can be musical, they can involve films or stand-up comedy, visual art, culinary adventures, documentaries, Ted talks or other educational lectures, books, whatever you'd like to try this week. But keeping new experiences rolling in helps keep you from becoming stale or retreating into a smaller life experience than you could be having. Why not avail yourself of everything you have access to?
I came across this list of films that might foster empathy, according to the author, which I found interesting. If there's a quality you're trying to build into a strength, consuming supportive creative products can be a part of your practice toward that end. You can also poll people around you with different tastes to find a list of potential ideas. Even just a few minutes per day spent appreciating the product of someone's creativity can give you a tremendous life and remind you of what's good when there's a whole lot of chaos and madness around you. Find something to sample this week, and feel free to comment with some of your favorites below!
Happiness According to Yale
“Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.”
In the last century, much of psychological study was centered on plumbing the depths of neuroses. There's now a corresponding inquiry into what helps us to build and maintain happiness. Currently, one of the most popular courses Yale has ever offered is a course on how to build and maintain happiness, which seems to evidence two things—that today's Ivy League students are pretty stressed out, and that they want to learn another way of operating. Good for them.
Since you're reading this, I suspect you are interested in such things as well! Therefore, I thought I'd share an article in which someone who audited this class gives us a book report on what he learned. It's a tour of the teacher's research on this worthy topic, and while I found myself disagreeing with a few of the points presented here and there, I thought you'd find it valuable and enjoyable to explore. You can even take the full course for free here if you want to. I think that's pretty cool.
When It's All On the Line
“Revelations come when you’re in the thick of it, pitting yourself up against something larger than yourself.”
No matter how well you plan, there will be times of high activity as you drive toward a goal. Sometimes that goal might be continuing to do your darndest to raise your child right as s/he goes through a trying phase. Sometimes it will be coordinating numerous pieces of a business project that will make or break your position in your job or seriously impact your bottom line. It might be moving to a new location. Some goals just require that we power through difficulties to some extent because timing is critical. How can we do this without losing our grip and letting everything fall to pieces, including us? Here are my suggestions:
- When you're truly being stretched to the edges of your capacity, it's time to get serious about the fundamentals. You can't power through anything when you're floundering without proper nutrition, exercise, and sleep. These basics are never optional, but least of all when you need to perform at peak productivity and resourcefulness.
- This is the time to ask for help. This may seem like yet another way in which you're stretching yourself beyond your comfort zone, but if you can challenge yourself to reach over your ego and tap someone else on the shoulder, you'll find a huge source of help and support waiting for you. Maybe you won't find what you were hoping for on the first try, but keep at it. You don't have to do everything alone, and depending on the complexity of your project, sometimes you literally can't. If you want to get more done in life, you need to improve your interpersonal skills and your willingness to partner with others to get where you want to go.
- If you have forewarning, front-load some routine tasks, or set up a way to outsource them whether through cash or trade. With just a little thought and time invested, you can make sure what's absolutely necessary will be covered even if you can't handle it in the midst of everything else.
- Realize in advance that when your life is in a state of high demand, you may need to make some messes that will get cleaned up later. It's very rare that a highly challenging period will come and go entirely smoothly, and that's normal and ok. By all means do the best you can to keep on top of everything, but don't add unnecessary stress to the cacophony by expecting or trying to insist that everything be perfect. When things calm down again, or once you acclimate to the new pace of things, you can address the results of any minor explosions that occurred en route.
- Plan to do something relaxing for yourself on the other side of all this heightened activity so you have something to look forward to, and sneak in relaxing moments throughout this time whenever you can. As a teacher of mine used to say, a muscle that's always tense is not useful. You need to stay flexible in order to get things done, and to do that you need to be able to relax and breathe.
Most of this may seem fairly obvious now, but when we're being challenged in a major way, sometimes we stop thinking because we go into some degree of fight/flight/freeze mode, and it all goes out the window. The more you get used to thinking along these lines, the more this habitual thinking will remain an asset when you find yourself overwhelmed and on auto-pilot. Times when you feel pushed to your limits may be among the most difficult of your life, but if you have a few helpful strategies at the ready, they can also be among the most rewarding.
Sniff, Cough, Blech
“‘Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.”
No matter how well you take care of yourself, there will be times when you get sick and need to take some time to recover. Modern life is a complex, high-speed high-wire balancing act with a lot of moving parts. Think about it—if you're moving around at all during the day and eating food you haven't produced yourself, then you're constantly coming into contact with various microbes from far-flung locations and all manner of influences that are potentially challenging to your system. Everyone is trying to get our attention for one reason or another, not to mention influence our behavior. We are asked to be more and do more than ever before. We're completely out of touch with natural rhythms because of the 24/7 opportunities technology has produced. We live in a world of high demands and we don't get enough high-quality rest, nutrition, and exercise unless we're really prioritizing our own high functioning. For many reasons, most of us aren't. But even if we are, being human means that sometimes plans go awry.
Which leads me to my main point. Getting sick is not a failing. Sure, it may point out to you some of the ways in which you need to up your game in the arena of your own care and feeding, but it doesn't necessarily mean that everything is out of balance, or that you should have been able to avert this. Our bodies have natural defense systems that respond when they come into contact with invaders, building up immunity to those microbes in the future, but this takes time, and sometimes we experience symptoms until this work is complete. In this case, your body is doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
Sometimes, as our bodies balance with the cacophony of daily influences, a clearing out becomes necessary. Perhaps some substance has accrued to unsustainable levels in the body, and needs to be expelled. This is sort of like spring cleaning, and though I'm not a health specialist of any formal kind, from my own observation, I think this happens to all of us sometimes. Our bodies do their very best to maintain health no matter what we put them through, and they use various tools and options to do that.
When you feel under the weather, it's a fine time to consider what you might do better in supporting your health and balance from the outside, as well as how your own stress levels and mental and emotional discord may have gotten out of control. Stress is now widely understood to be a major risk factor in not just immunity to day-to-day threats like the common cold, but also in more serious health conditions across the board. Look first to the classic trifecta of sleep, exercise, and good nutrition. During times of high demand, you might also want to think about supplementing with herbs such as adaptogens, which help your body to keep returning to balance no matter in which direction you tend to get off track, whether too yin or too yang, "too much" or "too little." It's always best to consult with a professional before trying this, as herbs are powerful, and not generally a one-size-fits-all solution. I'm fortunate to have a close friend who is an accomplished herbalist, but you can probably find someone good locally by checking online reviews for your own and nearby communities. You should also talk to your main health practitioner so that everyone advising you knows what's going on.
To me, it's excellent common sense, now that we know the pervasive corosiveness of stress to our long-term health, to get serious about dealing with it—not just when sick, but on a daily basis. That's why I suggest having a daily practice that addresses this area of your life. Everyone knows that you can't just exercise one time and feel great forever. I'm telling you that you also need to think about what an "emotional gym membership" would look like. Some people get a lot of mileage out of pure expression—talking things out with friends, writing in a journal, creating artwork in any number of media. While I agree that all of those are wonderful outlets, for me, the practice of regularly using EFT has added an exponentially more powerful dimension to the mix. It allows for faster, more complete processing of thoughts and emotions, and facilitates amazing new understanding of self and others in a way that's easier, more enjoyable, and more natural than anything else I've found. Whatever you find appealing, choose to use it more often and you'll most likely find your ability to relax, renew, and heal improving over time. The goal is not a perfect body (impossible) but one that can bounce back from times of higher demand with some measure of grace. When you support it with what it needs, you make that more possible, more probable, with every helpful action. So what will you do this week to build a better set of resources for your body and your long-term health?
Jumping Off the Hamster Wheel
“To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.”
If you've been reading my blogs for a while, you know that I'm all about helping you find ways to dial down stress. This week, we'll look at the importance of making choices that are right for you despite the lure of endless possibilities. Living in a world with 24/7 access to electric lights and incessant information means that we know there's always something we could be doing. That can be overwhelming, and some people feel this as a constant. Combine that feeling with the Puritanical ideals of our country's European settlers, which became a part of the fabric of our collective philosophy, and you have a culture-wide tendency to believe that if we can be doing something, then we must. Anything else makes us lazy, selfish, and useless. This is a recipe for anxiety; it will erode your happiness and physical health more insidiously than almost anything else you can experience. No one wants that, but how do you halt this cycle when so many options and imperatives are always staring you in the face?
First, let me acknowledge that this is difficult. Options, information, and entertainment are fun to play with, and therefore hard to put down at the best of times. Also, if you believe that opportunity is obligation, then your self-image will suffer when you take time away from attending to the constant requests of people and advertisers that will assail you throughout your waking hours, never mind the things you'd like to be doing to address your own priorities. Then there are any frantic mental habits you inherited from family and others before you were old enough to notice. This constant stimulation gets your mind into the habit of racing, and then it takes serious effort to retrain it to allow some empty space and relaxation to permeate.
When there's an abundance of anything, whether information or food or opportunity, maintaining health and balance requires that we learn to set boundaries. We need some hard stops that will carve out appropriate time for sleep, exercise, healthy eating, and leisure. Those can be planned and tinkered with until they seem optimal in the grand scheme of your life, your needs and your desires. The trickier boundaries to set and police are those that will keep you functioning well when unexpected circumstances arise. These you need to brainstorm on the fly. Learning to do this well is a constantly evolving effort, since we change throughout life, and in small ways each day. It's more art than science, and only you can really know how well it's working for you at any given time. If you're constantly exhausted, resentful, or frustrated, it's not! So where does one start when it's clear that better boundaries are necessary?
There's a concept in Qi Gong, a Chinese healing art, that one should never do anything to more than 70 percent of one's capacity. Reserving 30 percent at all times means that there's leftover energy at the end of the day. You're not collapsing into sleep desperate for regeneration without which you cannot function; instead, you just need small adjustments to keep you in balance, and your sleep can regenerate you more deeply on all levels as well as build yin—energy reserves and power. Then, when you go through any periods of high activity, you can get through them in better shape. You'll have to rebuild your yin later to replace the overage you've used, but you are not a mess if you have to overextend yourself somewhat. If you encounter a health challenge when you're in the habit of reserving your 30 percent, you'll be able to bounce back from it more easily, and that's obviously very important to your quality of life.
Some other keys for learning to set appropriate boundaries:
- Write out and read daily two lists: Your goals and your highest values. Both help you to work out your long-term plans, and to make those on-the-fly decisions about when to say yes and when to pass. These decisions are subjective. If you don't have a strong commitment to your plans and values, you'll flounder more than is necessary when faced with a choice.
- Remember that no one can do everything that sounds interesting in any given lifetime. Focus on doing the things that seem most right for your interests and abilities (while remaining creative about workarounds and breakthroughs where you identify limits). Revel in how these things are yours, and make you unique and wonderful!
- Just because someone wants something from you doesn't mean you need to say yes to the request. If you're afraid of what will happen if you say no, you may need to work on your communication skills, your list of priorities, or your self-esteem. This last one is a long-term project in most cases, but every day is a good day to start. In order to set appropriate boundaries, you have to see your own life as valuable, just as much as everyone else's. If you're not sure what to do here, get help from a book, class, or specialist.
- Start to watch for beliefs that keep you stuck and challenge them. This takes some doing, but once you decide to notice your thoughts, you'll begin to become aware of them--whenever you feel frustrated or irritable, that's a great time to ask yourself what you were just thinking. Very often those thoughts will comprise some destructive beliefs that are sabotaging you. The stories we tell ourselves, when they're fatalistic (suggesting we are powerless to change our conditions) or negative in ways that trigger and prolong old, outdated patterns, have a huge effect on what's possible for us. Once you know your patterns, you can work on untying those old knots and freeing up powerful stores of energy for whatever you choose. I'll write more about what to do to change old beliefs in the future (and you can bet it will include using some EFT!) but the first step is noticing what's happening and being aware of what you'd like to change.
You will be most successful, and most able to help others, when you know how to live in balance. It's no good to anyone if you're chronically exhausted or overwhelmed and cranky. When you prioritize your own health, you are a living example of principles that can help everyone around you. No one else can do this for you, because no one else has first-hand knowledge of what you need. A willingness to set appropriate boundaries is an essential step in fostering your balance, happiness, and ability to be the best of yourself every day.
The Constructive Rant
“Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive - the risk to be alive and express what we really are.”
Since last week I mentioned the usefulness of EFT/Tapping in maintaining positive momentum, this week I wanted to share a tip from my own experience about getting started with it. While working on something specific is where all the long-term benefits are really at, in the beginning, for me personally, the best thing ever was the "tap and rant" approach. To do this, all you need is the points for EFT's Basic Recipe, the Shortcut version. Your setup statement can be something simple, like "Even though I'm stressed out, I deeply and completely accept myself." As you move around the points, you just talk about everything that's bothering you in no particular order. I recommend really enjoying the drama of it all, as you would with a sympathetic best friend; also, I find that it's best to actually speak out loud, even if you're not in the habit of talking to yourself! It's easier to stay focused on how you feel when you do that, and being in touch with your emotions while you tap, rather than off in your head, will tend to give you the best results. It's best to do this alone where you will not be heard, because then you'll be free to admit exactly how you feel without worrying that anyone else will take what you say personally. This is not about being reasonable or logical. It's about not sweeping your thoughts, opinions, and emotions under the rug as you've probably been taught to do when they're not so cute, and instead getting them off your chest in a timely manner.
While it's often helpful to express yourself in words either in writing or verbally to another person, this is not only about that. Studies have shown that using EFT significantly reduces cortisol, a stress hormone, and generally de-escalates the body's fight-flight-freeze response. In practical terms, that means that when you use it as you express what's weighing you down, you may soon find yourself much more relaxed physically, and able to regain helpful perspective. This often translates into better sleep, the ability to stay more calm and productive over time, and an increased ability to be restored by rest and recreation.
Allowing yourself the time to do this has the added benefit of helping you to get better at identifying how you feel and why. When your emotions are experienced only as a background haze and a confused jumble, bailing out your moods seems like a lost cause, effective methods for doing so an unsolvable mystery. When you start to gain clarity about what's going on in there, only then can you address issues in ways that actually solve problems. When you can access clarity quickly and easily, which is a skill you gain over time with Tapping, you waste a lot less time. You can make better decisions and take appropriate action without delay. Everything in your life becomes more efficient. You start to feel more empowered to change your life for the better, whether anyone else changes around you or not. What may once have seemed a somewhat self-indulgent leap of faith proves itself to be a powerful tool for supporting happiness and productivity.
After getting relief through the Tap-and-rant process, eventually the specific things that are bothering you will tend to stand out more starkly. That's when working on each one in turn will tend to produce better progress for you. A wider range of techniques may be required if you really want to make lasting change in specific areas. You can learn these online or in books, or you may prefer to take classes or work with a practitioner who can guide you. This can be a very comforting option, and is also a more appropriate option when what you want to change seems too big, too confusing, or too scary to confront on your own.
However you choose to do it, I hope you'll get started with Tapping and start to leverage its many benefits for yourself. If you're someone who is already perfectly happy with your life as it is, well, good for you! If not, Tapping is a simple, free way to start improving it. As with meditation, you can get noticeable benefits from spending just minutes per day on it; unlike with most meditation, though, you're doing something active rather than struggling to quiet your mind in stillness, so it's easier for many stressed-out modern people to begin. Plus, the benefits are often easy to notice immediately, which helps you want to keep it up. Once you understand what it can do, you'll probably only wish you'd had access to it sooner!
The Virtues of Lazing Out
“If a man insisted always on being serious, and never allowed himself a bit of fun and relaxation, he would go mad or become unstable without knowing it.”
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have a busy, demanding life. Some have more obligations than others, and just meeting the demands of daily life can take up all one’s time and energy, but it seems like pretty much everyone has a lot to do these days. Maybe this is because even if we’re blessed with leisure time, it’s a small world now that we can see in real time what’s going on oceans away, so we feel called to participate more than ever. Maybe it’s partly peer pressure; if everyone else is running at a breakneck pace, it seems like we should be keeping up. Or maybe it’s just because we have so many options, and trying things, having adventures, is fun. Whatever it is that keeps you busy, you are not a machine. It’s important to find ways to relax and breathe even in the midst of a full daily routine. If you don’t, you’ll burn out, get sick more often, feel less energetic and enthusiastic, and have trouble focusing on being where you are in each moment; your performance and your attitude will spiral downward, and everything will feel more difficult than it needs to.
We’re all familiar with the concept of taking time out of a busy schedule for specifically relaxing activities (or non-activities) like reading for fun, indulging in a hobby, taking a bath, going to the beach, lying around in bed for no reason, getting a massage, finding a beautiful place outside for a picnic, etc. Enjoyable relaxation is good for you in so many ways. It gives your mind a rest, helps your body unwind tension, reassures you that you deserve to feel good, and helps you to reconnect to your best, happiest self. But how often do you actually make time for this kind of thing? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but wishing you were relaxing doesn’t have the same positive effects as actually doing it! Unfortunately, in many cultures, we’re told that wanting downtime, and particularly quiet time by ourselves, is lazy and self-indulgent—even bad, from a spiritual perspective, because when we’re not busy being helpful, we might somehow get ourselves into trouble. If we take these beliefs on, then if we choose to relax, our basic sense of identity, and of our own goodness, may suffer. We’re supposed to measure our success by the volume of what we’ve accomplished, but realistically, we can’t remain productive without renewing ourselves regularly.
It’s also possible, and, I would argue, important, to find ways to bring relaxation into even moments of the highest productivity. I had a teacher in theatre school who used to say that a muscle that is constantly tense is not useful; a muscle needs to be capable of both tensing and relaxing in order to maintain flexibility, which is required for health and proper function. The same principle holds true for our minds and emotions. If there’s always tension in these, we will be less aware, less resourceful, and less able to function at our best. We’ll be more likely to become brittle, which is not useful, rather than remaining creative and able to roll with whatever comes along, which is. In order to avoid becoming stuck in a mire of self-perpetuating stress, we can choose to keep reminding ourselves to bring an attitude of deep calm to everything we do. We can activate an intention to bring a sense of contentment and mental and emotional relaxation with us wherever we go. We can work to manage our thoughts and emotions so that they are not always spinning and grinding away at our inner peace.
I’m not going to pretend that this is easy. Most of us have not been taught how to do it efficiently, nor given the tools we need when we feel like we’ve gotten ourselves backed into a corner. Even when you’ve spent significant time on learning techniques for success in dropping unnecessary tension and remaining present, life will likely continue to challenge you such that this work remains a life-long pursuit. For some ideas on how to maximize your mental and emotional game, you might want to check out previous blogs of mine. That work is essential—and so is building sources of refreshment, relaxation and joy into your life. The human experience is already plenty difficult, and if art and written records throughout recorded history tell us anything, it’s that this is a constant. If you want to feel flexible and truly alive every day, you’ll need to break up that difficulty with steady doses of enjoyment and renewal. You know best what activities leave you with a burst of joy, energy, and enthusiasm about the future. Make sure you find a place for these in your routine to support your best possible life.
The Parade Approaches
“I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up—they have no holidays.”
It’s November 1st, and we might as well acknowledge that the holiday season is upon us, love it or hate it! Many of the world’s most prominent religions celebrate important holidays in the course of the next two months, and while this means something different to each of us, there are commonalities. We’re likely to be busier than usual with social engagements. We may travel to be with loved ones at the most traffic-jammed times. We may be planning to host festivities, and be preparing for both fun and lots of unusual tasks and people underfoot. We may be feeling trepidation about spending time with people who we don’t really enjoy. Dreading seeing (or being!) that crazy uncle, or difficult memories from prior years. Most families, and groups of friends, experience plenty of love and fun, and also inevitable complexity. It’s a mixed bag of joy and obligation. Strap in. It’s on!
If you love it, you still need to remind yourself to take time to breathe, rest, and rejuvenate periodically throughout the coming weeks. As the calendar year draws to a close, it’s a natural time to start reflecting on what happened this year and start envisioning what we might like to work toward and experience in the new year. Don’t miss this moment, this opportunity. If there’s no contemplation at this time, you’re more likely to ring in the new year with a scattered, frantic, overstressed desire to turn back to and turn up the volume on your routine and your own personal priorities, and this can escalate into poorly chosen New Year’s resolutions; if we try to legislate ourselves into unrealistic changes, we end up disappointed and demoralized. I think it’s a much better policy to make resolutions throughout the year as needed—when we’re in a calm, centered state and we can choose sustainable plans that support our deepest desires and purpose. But if you must jump on the resolution bandwagon in January, you’ll do a much better job of it if you allowed yourself some room to breathe and reflect in November and December.
In order to really be present and drink in the enjoyment of the moments with loved ones that we’ll be given, that same allowance of breath and self-care is important. If you’re going like a speeding Mack truck for months at a time, running on too little sleep and no personal downtime, you’re more likely to resent what you give to others, and more likely to be a little irritable all throughout. If you’re not getting in a few workouts per week of whatever variety works for you, you won’t feel vital and healthy as you pile on the extra busy-ness. Instead, you’ll end up feeling slower, heavier, and you’ll likely have a harder time managing stress. If you’re not planning healthy meals among the indulgences, you’ll become nutritionally depleted to some extent, which will impact your stamina for the worse. If you’re giving no thought to your internal world, you’re likely to let your own needs go for too long before you tune in and rebalance, and it’s when we’re out of balance that we’re more vulnerable to getting hit with colds or the flu. You can’t party if you’re coughing and sneezing up a storm! To keep yourself in the game, start thinking now about how you can reserve at least some time every week for catching up on your own rest and other physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs.
If you tend not to enjoy this time of year, now’s the time to give some thought to why that is. Make sure you’re clear about the factors in play and see if you can proactively address at least some of them in a new way.
· If you tend to overschedule yourself, block out time every week that’s for your relaxation and catching up on things so you don’t have to feel so overwhelmed, and don’t compromise it!
· Build in time doing, watching, or listening to things that make you laugh. This helps in regaining perspective, plus it’s really good for you!
· If you like to give gifts but tend to procrastinate and make yourself miserable, put time on your calendar starting now so you can spread this out over time and enjoy it more.
· If there’s someone you dread seeing, enlist the help of someone else who knows how you feel, and brainstorm about how you might improve the encounter. Ask for help from someone who might be willing to run interference, for instance. Read up on ways to communicate more effectively. Don’t just tell yourself that nothing can be done! You might find ways to make everyone more comfortable so that more good times can be had by all.
· If you tend to feel down at this time of year because of unhappy memories, or the anniversary of a sad event, plan ways to honor how you feel, and again, get help if you need it. There are lots of people who have this kind of experience at this time of year; those people can understand much of what you’re going through. You don’t have to go it alone, and that’s not a healthy thing to try to do. Seek the help of a professional or find a support group or a friend who can listen when you need some caring attention.
· EFT/Tapping can be a great help in getting your true feelings up and out in a productive way, and in restoring your calm as challenges come up. If you haven’t taken the time to learn the basics, now is a great time to do it! Don’t wait until you desperately need it to get comfortable with this simple yet very powerful tool.
Perhaps you’ve noticed I’m suggesting that you work to become conscious of where the pitfalls are, and map a route around or over them rather than just allowing them to take over again this season, whatever they may be for you. Sometimes it takes time to improve your experience, but if you just keep inching forward, it can be done.
There are wonderful opportunities for enjoyment and fulfillment during this season. Take some time before things kick into high gear to look around and remember what tends to go wrong and plan for the things you’d like to go right. Nothing ever goes exactly according to plan, but why not give yourself an advantage and see what happens? Time with family and friends is precious, and it deserves the same kind of care and attention we would give to any important goal or endeavor. When you turn your conscious attention on something and pursue it with clear intent, chances are you will improve it. I’ll be cheering you on! I wish you happiness in all your holiday festivities and solemnities, and I hope that the remainder of 2016 is filled with blessings for you and those you love.
Gene Pool: Sink or Swim?
“Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.”
The unfortunate effects of aging, like lower energy levels, physical discomforts, waistline increase, and grumpiness, are normal. Right? That's what we're told, and it seems like these things are inevitable. After all, older people who manage to avoid the worst of these seem few and far between; we tend to think of them as lucky ducks who inherited gold-standard genes. But recent discoveries are showing us that we actually have far more power to affect our own gene expression than we've been taught. Bruce Lipton’s book, The Biology of Belief, examines how cells function in relation to their environment, and explains how genes are turned on and off by environmental factors; he also touches on how many areas of scientific study, including biology, are woefully behind the times because the discoveries of quantum physics have never been accepted and incorporated into their thinking. The book is a fascinating explanation of how much power we have to affect the way our bodies function, and about how much of the body’s functioning happens at the non-material, energetic level. Dr. Lipton is one of the pioneers of the new field of epigenetics, which delves into the mechanisms behind how environment (everything but gene sequence) affects physical functions. Dawson Church’s Genie in Your Genes is also chock-full of interesting data about how our environments and actions affect life span and quality of life. For example, he writes that according to James W. Vaupel at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, identical twins, who may lead very different lives and develop different habits, die an average of ten years apart! They have the same genes. Environment, physical and mental/emotional, seems to be what makes the difference.
The idea that stress adversely affects our health in myriad ways may be familiar to you. That's been borne out in numerous studies over decades now, and you may have observed in your own life that when you're stressed out and worn down, that's when you're most likely to get sick. I know that this seems to be true for me. Learning to change one’s mindset to better cope with upsets, then, is an obvious way to decrease wear and tear on our bodies. In The Tapping Solution for Pain Relief, Nick Ortner writes about the surprising fact that pain is not an inevitability even when physical condition would suggest it should be, and vice versa: “Studies show that many people whose X-rays reveal a herniated disc have no pain, while others whose X-rays reveal no herniated disc (or any other abnormalities) report excruciating pain.” There is clearly something going on here that’s not purely physical. The placebo effect, which is widely acknowledged in the medical community, allows people to improve in health only because they think they will; the nocebo effect is the opposite, and causes a person to decline in health only because they think they must. I find it heartening knowing that these effects operate with such regularity. That means I have the power to affect my own health with the choices I make every day.
In fact, in my own work, I've found it amazing how lightening the load of one's long-standing emotional buildup can relieve both physical discomforts and the negative beliefs and thought loops that feed dissatisfaction. As we move through life, it's inevitable that we will encounter disappointments and difficulties large and small. If we don't have healthy ways to release the confusion, resentments and bitterness that often result, these will begin to affect us in ways that are profound, but often remain hidden. Tension mounts, whether we are aware of it or not, and I believe that this is a primary cause of the collection of symptoms that we ascribe to the process of aging. When someone uses EFT/Tapping (or other effective techniques that combine physical, emotional, and mental elements) for a physical issue, he can take care of the portion of the cause that may have been emotional in nature, and effects may be noticeable immediately. However, there are also many accounts of people using EFT and finding that it didn't seem to work, only to notice a few days or even weeks later that the problem they addressed with EFT is suddenly gone. When this happens, it seems to me to demonstrate that when we can get ourselves out of the way mentally and emotionally, the body can do its thing and heal itself with much greater efficiency.
I love that there are so many brilliant people now studying the complicated, holistic functioning of the human form, and I enjoy reading about what these people are learning every day. But I still find that what’s most exciting to me is having tools at my fingertips that make it possible for me to make progress of my own each day in a way that’s safe and satisfying. EFT fits that bill for me, helping me to make change toward a calm, peaceful inner life every time I use it, and to leverage a more buoyant perspective over time. While nothing will solve all your problems at once, and there will always be a place for professional medical help and advice, there are many wonderful techniques you can learn to support your health and happiness. I hope knowing that what you think about and how you feel contributes meaningfully to your body’s health as well will inspire you to learn and use some of these helpful techniques sooner rather than later. Old age need not require an inevitable decline. The sooner you build your tool box for supporting your own daily rebalancing, the sooner you can start discovering benefits and building your confidence in your own resourcefulness.