So Much Happier Blog
Believe You Can?
“Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.”
Last week we looked at the importance of changing beliefs in order to make better choices and foster balance in your life. Often, the reasons we don’t make good choices come down to either being unaware of our habits and where they come from (hint: Our beliefs!), or from failing to slow down long enough to make a new plan and take a few sane actions to get moving in the right direction. This week, we’ll explore how to do all of this using EFT, or Tapping.
We’re all so used to the idea that whenever there’s an issue confronting us, we need to “figure it out” with the mind; if we can’t, we may be tempted to give up in disgust and despair of solving the problem. What I’m about to offer is a non-linear approach that may stand usual assumptions on their heads. It may not seem like it could work because it doesn’t involve logical mental exertions. We will surely be using the mind, but in different ways than perhaps we usually do, and you may need to step aside from the mind sometimes as it flaps around in confusion and protest.
In order to find the causes of your behavior, we’re going to start with your body and your emotions. When you sit quietly and tune into these, what do you notice? What is bothering you? Particularly when you think about whatever is most uncomfortable, what emotions come up, and what sensations in your body seem connected to these emotions? Take a few deep breaths and be patient while you wait to see and feel what surfaces. Usually we exert so much pressure in trying to stay unaware of discomfort that this may seem like a pretty odd thing to do, but there’s a purpose here.
In the beginning, what you notice may be a confused jumble of a whole bunch of sensations, competing emotions, and related thoughts. When this is the case, I sometimes like to ask people to do a round or two of Tapping while “ranting,” basically just giving voice to everything that’s bothering them in no particular order, listing off everything that comes up without overthinking it. This allows us to tread the perimeter of the pile-up and get a general map of the landscape involved. It also helps with the “What do I say?” dilemma that sometimes stops people from actually beginning a Tapping practice, because you can’t do this wrong! Once the Tapping has helped to calm and focus you somewhat, it’s often easier to pick just one thing to work with. Tapping works best when we get very specific about something and focus on it singly until it shifts and changes, so this precess of getting specific is an important skill to build.
Once you have made a choice about one thing to target, you’ll want to describe the issue, write it down if you can, and note how intense the emotions are, as well as the sensations in your body, when you feel the emotion. Give the intensity a subjective number on a scale of 0-10 so you have a good sense of where you’re starting. Then, you’ll Tap around the points repeating a short reminder phrase that sums up or symbolizes the feelings for you. As you do this, you may notice that at some point, you have seemingly random thoughts that come up. Often, these are extremely relevant to what you’re focusing on, and can tell you more about your underlying beliefs and the life experiences when you took those on. If this happens, you can use one of the many Tapping techniques to work on the originating event and change how you feel about it. This does almost all of the work for you in changing a belief, though you may have to repeat it to address multiple experiences that have contributed to the belief.
Another tactic to try is to Tap on the statement of the problematic belief itself. For instance, Tap around the points while repeating, “There’s never enough time,” if that’s the belief you want to work on. When you give it a subjective intensity number, you’re rating it on a scale of 0-10 for how true it feels, where 10 is 100% true. As you do this, you may find that the number reduces, and/or you may find that, again, memories surface that will clarify where this came from. You can then work through those experiences to reduce their hold on you. Once you’ve done that, the belief change you want is often a natural byproduct of the work. Once the intensity of the belief is low, you can use Tapping to supercharge any affirmations you want to use around the issue going forward.
This is just a broad outline, but it should give you a good sense of a couple of useful approaches for working on limiting beliefs. As always with Tapping, you start with expressing what feels true, no matter how outrageously negative it may be, and you do not try to force a change. As you Tap and continue doing this, the change will begin to happen in its own timing, even if you don’t notice it right away. Take breaks if you need to and come back to it later. Try different approaches. Keep breathing. As long as you’re not taking on something that feels too big or otherwise overwhelming, just keep at it and eventually, there will be a shift. If you get stuck, find a practitioner and get some help. When you free yourself from limiting beliefs, great reserves of energy can be unleashed, and then your life can open up in ways you might never have imagined before. Take it from me that this is a triumphant experience, one that you can’t put a price on, and one that ripples through every area of your life adding joy and confidence that builds as you continue this kind of work.
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.
Hit or Fold?
“Growth is painful. Change is painful. But, nothing is as painful as staying stuck where you do not belong.”
Sometimes working on a personal project ends up, at some point, feeling like a real slog through the mud. What started as a seemingly great idea is now causing you to wonder whether you were crazy to have ever taken up the banner. You start to wonder whether you should give up and can it. This can be a hard decision, though, because what about all that time and effort you’ve already sunk into your project? No one enjoys feeling like time and energy has been wasted! You also have to confront how you’ll judge yourself if you walk away—will that mean you’re a loser/a failure/a (fill-in-the-blank)? It may be tougher to ignore this question if your project is visible to others, because then you end up thinking about how others might judge you as well. Is it better and more noble to keep throwing good resources into a mysterious hole in hopes that things will work out eventually than is is to quit too early, and maybe never be sure you did?
Making good decisions about what to do in this situation requires multiple dimensions of consideration. Your deliberations need not take long, but if you don’t cover these bases, you may be left with nagging uncertainty and an unnecessary hit to your confidence. Here are the areas that I recommend you explore before making your final decision:
- Physical. Are you guilty of ignoring your own basic human needs (sleep, nutrition, exercise/movement)? If so, you may need to rely on answers within the other areas to make your decision, because ignoring your body over time will make everything feel like a slog! It’s fairly trendy in some circles to claim that only weaklings need these things, and “real men,” “warriors,” “entrepreneurs,” or whoever, can power through without without all those silly indulgences the peons distract themselves with. I’m sorry to break it to you, but this is an old-fashioned myth left over from less educated times! We now know that without these things, the body, and the brain that resides within as an inextricable part of it, falters, struggles, and ages far more quickly than necessary. You can use your precious energy to rail against the fact that you can only experience life on planet Earth in a body that has limitations, OR you can learn to choose the simple decisions that allow you the joy and fulfillment of functioning at peak capacity. Like adequate sleep and healthy food. Which would you rather?
- Mental. Our culture is very focused on logic, so this area should be familiar to you. Logic is, of course, an amazing tool for assessing where you are, extrapolating where you're headed based on this, and figuring out how you might want to change course. If you're not great at thinking through things logically and analyzing your situation, find someone with more skill in and enthusiasm for this area who can help you do this. If you think things are taking way too long, or you just don't have what it takes to reach your goal realistically, you may be right that there's something you're missing. That may not mean you can't fix it, but isolating the problem, where it lives, and how to address it may take some digging. Access to the super-computing power of the mind is one of the benefits of being human, so let's not leave its powers on the table in our decision making!
- Creative. Once you've figured out what the problem seems to be, you need to get out of pure logic and turn on your natural, playful creativity. This can be tough when you're stressed out, so you may need some help here too. You can search the Internet on the topic in question, find a book on how others have solved similar issues, or rope in a friend to troubleshoot how you might bust up your impasse and move forward more productively. The problem might even be that you just forgot to have fun and bring creativity to the daily work you've been doing on your project. That'll kill anyone's enthusiasm over time. Life is supposed to include elements of fun. If your project doesn't have any, you'll feel like something is wrong, when it's just that you need to loosen up a little to make it over the long haul.
- Emotional. That brings us to the emotional side of things, another area where we may have been taught there's nothing important to learn and we should just sweep everything that comes up under the rug! But emotions exist for a reason, and they're an important tool in our toolbox, even if we're not yet sure how to wring the magic out of them. In order to trace the emotional connections to our projects, attention and the openness to decoding hidden meanings is required. Yes, you may have to devote some actual time and attention to this! You may feel like this is a self-indulgent idea, but that's likely because you've never been taught what to do to get helpful results out of such time with your emotions. Tapping/EFT is an incredibly productive tool in helping you to stay calm through the act of creating openness to the emotional realm, and in gaining clarity about what's really going on in your emotional states and why. That clarity doesn't necessarily arise immediately, but it tends to result after you've done some Tapping on exactly how you feel without filters or judgment. Sometimes this is all you and your project need. Once you've blown off some steam and allowed yourself to express what seems true, the clarity starts to arrive, and new perspectives on possible solutions often effortlessly appear. However, you may find that your emotions tell you some truths about what you really want that you've been unwilling to look at. This can help you make new decisions that will serve you better. Sometimes you might even decide to end the project as previously imagined. Sometimes you learn as you go that the realities of reaching your goal are not acceptable to you, not healthy for you, or just not something you're ready for at this time. Accepting this may be the best choice even if it doesn't seem entirely logical to you or others.
- Spiritual. This is the hardest area to quantify, because spiritual experiences often defy explanation. We all have this part of us that is an "x" factor, explain it as you will. Sometimes, you just experience a strong knowingness that something is or isn't true for you, or right for you, or good for you despite how it looks on the surface. Often this part of you speaks in desires and joys that are unique to you. Again, if this isn't an area you feel comfortable with, you can consult others who live more easily in this space and see if anything they have to offer resonates with you. But without taking it into account in some way, you may be missing an important piece of the picture.
Sometimes, when you're hung up with a project, something has changed with circumstances, and you just need to recover from the shock and get more creative. Sometimes, you're tired and frustrated, and you need a break or to bring your sense of fun back into play. Sometimes, what has changed is you, and the truth is that you no longer really want to support the project at all.
Once you have a better sense of all this, the final challenge is accepting the good work you've done on the decision, and finding a way to let go of any worries about what it means about you, the world, and your future potential. This is another area in which Tapping can be a life saver. It can help you work through any resistance to doing what you think is best that arises because of your (or your perception of or anticipation of others') judgment or fears. You have a choice as far as what meaning to assign to the events of your life. When you forget that, you become a victim to every outside influence.
Making truly good decisions, ones you can look back on with satisfaction because you did the best you could with the knowledge that you had at the time, is a process best served by considering numerous areas of inquiry. When you've done this to the best of your abilities and used all the tools you have to make your peace with what you choose, you can get back to putting your energy toward what you really want, and working toward it with renewed resolve and patience. Life involves work, but if it feels like every moment of yours is tiresome, it's time to stop and consider whether new decisions are in order, or whether you're already on the best path and just dealing with the challenges of the journey.
Getting Off That Crazy Wheel
“Enlightenment must come little by little - otherwise it would overwhelm.”
Most people I encounter these days feel as if they're always trying to do too much, that the world moves too fast, that they're always on the edge of falling behind and going under. We're a chronically overwhelmed culture. Now, get ready for a radical statement—part of the reason for this is that we ARE trying to do too much! When the sum total of everything you could be doing in any given moment is infinite, as it is in this age of "convenience," including 24/7 access to nearly all information ever collected, we suddenly need amazing focus and time management skills. And guess what? No one ever formally taught us any of these unless we grew up in a monastery, or with a parent with insanely effective natural organizational skills, in which case maybe we were lucky enough to have had mentors in these areas. Of course that's an exaggeration; you may have learned some excellent tidbits along these lines from any number of sources throughout your life, but it's a rare person who has been able to cobble together an effective set of strategies from these random references. The rest of us have to deal with the outrageous fortune that dumped an endless glut of opportunity in our laps, but with no way to turn off the fire hose when it all gets to be too much.
Since feeling chronically overwhelmed and ineffective doesn't feel like living a fulfilling life, we must find ways to do better. If you want to take back your life, it's time to get friendly with the concept of focus. There are two aspects I want to mention here: Inward focus and outward focus. The inward version is the one we practice in meditation when we observe our breathe or keep returning to a mantra—it's the ability to place our mind's awareness on, and continually bring it back to, a subject or a feeling of our choosing. Building this internal skill allows us to hone our capacity to spend time living in the calmest, best parts of ourselves, and therefore to have access to an ability to make the best possible choices, with the greatest possible sense of peace, in each moment. This is called sanity! Getting better at holding onto yours grants you a kind of personal power that's hard to describe, but imagine how great it would be to be able to choose your internal state more often than you react, automatically and without choice, to whatever assails you from your mental and emotional worlds.
The outward aspect of focus is the ability to deflect, in real time, distractions that bombard us from the outside world. Being able to do this efficiently all day long takes clarity (about your values and your purpose), intent, and relentless determination. While willpower is involved, a lot less of it is required when you've taken the time to write down your goals and priorities, and you remind yourself of them often so that in a moment of stress you can remember WHY a choice is right or wrong for you. Being clear about why you're choosing what you're choosing serves to inspire and galvanize you when you start to get confused. However, this constant decision making can still be exhausting when you have to do it all day! It's important to simplify where you can and find times each week when you can be restfully free of constant sifting and value judgments. This ability may also be hard to imagine, but I bet you've come across someone who seems able to stay functional even in the face of a whole lot of chaos, showing you that it is possible. If you have, think of that person as a model in this regard.
We also need those pesky time management skills mentioned above if we're going to succeed in getting things done when we choose to. These may include accurately estimating how long tasks will take, scheduling your time but not overscheduling yourself to the point where you burn out, transitioning between tasks in ways that assist you in refocusing, balancing your physical needs throughout the day so you don't crash, planning anew when things change so you can stay productive, managing your emotions when things aren't going your way, and others. Some of these you might already be good at, and some less so. When you think through the kinds of things that tend to stop you when you're working toward something you want, you'll probably be able to come up with your most likely challenges. Like all acquired skills, these take time to build, and you are a complex and ever-changing thing, so this work is never done. Choose just one or two of your personal challenges and start practicing improving your skills around them.
As you work, be patient with yourself. It's always annoying to feel like a beginner at something, but as I remind myself often, we've all been through the learning process many times. What feels painful and unlikely inevitably turns into something you can easily do on autopilot with practice. Over time, our capacities increase, and we can achieve heights that seemed vertigo inducing from former vantage points.
Whatever skills you think need your attention, there are probably lots of emotions, as well as habitual thoughts and negative self-talk, that come into play when they are challenged. This is where Tapping is absolutely brilliant in helping you to move through what's holding you back and come out the other side relieved—and often with new and revolutionary insights about why this thing has been hard for you and how that can change for you now. Humans are hard-wired to resist too much novelty because we have come to associate it with danger. You will always be working against the tendency toward caution because self-preservation is one of our most powerful drives. Dealing with the resistance that comes up when you attempt to make a change is a constant, never-ending process, so you might as well master techniques that can help you to do this quickly and with a sense of enjoyment and adventure. When you become comfortable with releasing unnecessary fear and immobility, the feeling of empowerment that results is amazing. I and my clients find this to be one of the best things about EFT/Tapping. Knowing that you can reduce your fear, overwhelm, and feelings of being stuck whenever you need to is truly something to be grateful for.
If you continue to work on your skills and your emotional management, you will eventually make progress. It may not be as rapid as you want, and it make take trials, errors, and seeming failures, but really, what's your alternative? We are evolutionary beings. We like to grow and test boundaries, even when doing so is scary. And human progress relies on our following this impulse. Failing to focus means that you will spend all your energy on recovery, and ultimately, that's not a lot of fun. This week, think about the ways in which you can work inward and outward focus, as well as better time management strategies, to create more available energy to feed into your goals and passions.
Planting the Seeds of Healing
“Just knowing you don’t have the answers is a recipe for humility, openness, acceptance, forgiveness, and an eagerness to learn—and those are all good things.”
Something I've learned in my adventures with Tapping is that there is an intrinsic timing to the unwinding of old issues and traumas. While I absolutely believe that it's necessary to decide on and keep affirming your intent to heal from the effects of your past experiences, such healing can't be forced or willed into being. Some things can be healed surprisingly quickly. Others can have an astonishing number of aspects that will need attention before all the pieces can fall into new and healthier places. And the difference between these extremes cannot be predicted, because the psyche is a complex and mysterious thing.
Knowing and accepting this means that if you're serious about revamping old patterns, you'll get used to the idea that your best bet is to work on whatever feels most current for you today, and trust that the progress you are able to make is enough. Tapping, for instance, takes focus, energy, and a willingness to confront unpleasant feelings before the process has a chance to work and reduce them. Some days you can really make strides you'll feel proud of. Others, you get some relief but don't necessarily feel that you've resolved anything. This is sensitive work, and you're doing it in the context of your life's many moving parts, including all the influences of the outside world over which you have little control. The road can seem excruciatingly long and confusing. This is where what I call constructive stubbornness comes in! Sometimes we need to disregard day-to-day feedback that might suggest our efforts are not yielding fruit. When you plant an apple tree, it takes weeks for the seed to germinate and grow up out of the soil, and it may take years to produce an apple you can hold in your hand. We live in an impatient world, but some processes just take time. If you give up on them too soon, you never get your fruit at all.
The more you fight what's true for you today, the more you'll find yourself feeling drained and demoralized. The more you can learn to celebrate small wins each day, and the overall picture of how far you've come, the more your calm, open energy will welcome in the healing you're creating. The act of worrying (note that I'm not talking here about strategic thinking, but a constant mental spinning over possible negative outcomes) is toxic. Acceptance, breathing, and appreciation for what's good in your life are forces for radical positive change. By investing continually in them, you carve out supportive space for your happiness and your journey to a state of vibrant health, wherever you may be starting.
When we're frustrated, it's so tempting to try to force things we want into being, but this approach rarely yields results that are the best we can do—and in my experience, it really doesn't work at all in the healing sphere. Frustration is a normal part of longer projects, and it can be a wake-up call to periodically assess our direction and progress, but it sometimes arises because we just don't like the wait. If what we're doing is growing an apple tree, the frustration is useless, as the tree is only ever going to grow in its own timing. In this case, it's time go back to accepting and appreciating the journey as best we can yet again. We manage our emotions through Tapping or some other daily method, and keep making healthy decisions while Nature works its magic.
Even if you're not gardening, but healing, working through the trial-and-error process may take time. You have to envision a path, take a few steps, learn from external and internal feedback, seek out new information, reformulate your vision of the next few steps, and repeat, sometimes many, many times before you reach your destination. You have a right to whatever emotions come up for you along the way, but you must find ways to process and manage them if you want to maintain a clear path to tread. It is in a sacred space of self-love, compassion, and emotional release where healing processes truly thrive. This may seem counterintuitive and even impossible as a standard, but I promise you that any progress toward maintaining this kind of internal state will help you get where you want to go faster. Here's a mantra for you: Struggle less, heal more.
Who's Your Inspiration?
“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing—that’s why we recommend it daily.”
Who or what would you change for if the stakes were high? Motivation, which is the willingness to confront challenge and surge toward a specific purpose in the face of uncertainty, can be a tricky beast to harness. If you're struggling with motivation, there are causes you'll need to handle at the root. At the same time, until that work is finished and beyond, there are some hacks that may help you to get through tougher times.
When you're languishing in the "blahs" and you can't seem to want to do anything, the biggest culprits to look toward in today's world are 1) physical needs that aren't being met, which cause a constant energy drain (such as proper nutrition and adequate sleep) and 2) a lack of clarity about what stirs your passion and enthusiasm, or a failure to leverage your passion effectively. Both of these should be thoroughly addressed if you want to reach maximum performance, but here's a shortcut that can act as a booster in the meantime: Figure out who you're drawn to serving and enlist their help in goading yourself into targeted action.
It's amazing how many of us will take action all day long if someone we love needs us, but never take action for ourselves! This is often because of unfortunate beliefs that were instilled in us (such as "To be a good person, I have to put my own desires and needs last") by family or other cultural elements. It can then become sheer habit for you to live out these beliefs, and they may run in the background virtually invisible to you, seemingly a core part of your identity, hard to clearly recognize let alone consciously change. Finding the beliefs that keep you feeling stuck under a mountain of reasons why your life is the way it is, and why you can't have what you want, can be a complicated process, but if you become comfortable with Tapping, it becomes a lot easier! Suddenly you don't have to figure out how to untangle this hopeless ball of string with just your logical mind. Your far-more-powerful subconscious mind starts to get on board when you Tap, and can lead you through a non-linear, but still amazingly effective, process of discovery and release from limited perspectives. If we have a solution to all the overwhelm that keeps us frozen in place, it's much easier to take action in the name of our own goals.
When you want to effect change, first setting up underlying support structures that will create a stable platform on which to anchor your work is a smart strategy. Having healthy exercise routines and mental, emotional, and spiritual practices in place can really help us to be in it for the long run. In addition, finding crafty ways to build your overall motivation and focus is well worth your time so that you have a variety of options on call whenever you just want to lie down and quit! No matter how positive you are, there will be times when you're running up against an obstacle that feels like it might be the last straw. For me, that's usually technology! I do appreciate all the incredible inventions that we have access to in modern life, but when my computer is refusing to talk to my printer for reasons unknown, the thought of spending the afternoon trying to mediate an argument between virtual entities with inscrutable motivations can make me want to climb the curtains. People I get. High-tech machines, not so much.
We're all different, so finding what motivates you will take observation. With some focus over even a week or two, you should be able to isolate a few ideas or activities that really get you excited about life. To find them, ask yourself questions like, "If I could stop time and do absolutely anything I wanted with no consequences for weeks at a time, what would that be?" If you answered "Sleep," then that gives you a clue about what you need in your life to recharge! Imagine that you've had 6 months to a year to just laze about and do nothing, and then try this question again. You'll probably come up with a thing or two that you'd love to do or explore.
Chances are, though, if you're not already adept at motivating yourself with passion, there will be someone else in your life for whom you would get out of bed no matter what. Knowing this is gold! If it's true for you, guess what? You can now enlist that person's help in any number of ways in your efforts toward a goal or a making a new habit stick. Sometimes all it takes is reminding yourself that you're exercising, for example, so you can be healthy for major events in your loved one's life that are still years away. You can also ask them to act as a cheerleader, and give them frequent updates on your progress so they can encourage you regularly. For some people, the idea that their actions affect their pets is a super-potent driver. Those who work with energy in healing practices know that your health, both physical and mental, affects the health of those around you, including that of your companion animals, in both subtle and more overt ways. Helping oneself in order to help a pet can be a very motivating way to commit to change. This is one of those hacks that can boost your motivation when nothing else is working because love is an incredibly powerful force that can be harnessed to impel us into action. As an added bonus, doing things for those you love makes you feel great, as long as you're doing them out an authentic loving spirit and not out of an attempt to control other people or events.
No matter where you are in your journey toward utilizing consistently effective self-motivation skills, you can build toward mastery in this area little bits at a time. Gaining the ability to motivate yourself no matter what's going on takes work over time for sure, but any effort toward building these skills will leave you more empowered and self-aware than before. Waking up to what works for you, and putting what you've noticed to work for you, will help you to build strong habits that will serve you well in the pursuit of all your goals. Pick a suggestion from above and get started! You deserve to feel excited about getting up in the morning, and these will help you get there.
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.
Getting Sane about Emotions
“If you don’t think your anxiety, depression, sadness and stress impact your physical health, think again. All of these emotions trigger chemical reactions in your body, which can lead to inflammation and a weakened immune system.”
While I posted something else somewhat like this not long ago, I think it bears repeating that we've been a bit culturally mesmerized by the idea of quick, easy solutions to life problems that deserve our full respect and attention. When we're in any kind of pain, it's so tempting to just silence that discomfort with a pill, a quick fix, a distraction, or by compartmentalizing around the pain. The sensations can be so frightening, and our mental habits so reactive, that we can't handle considering our options long enough to find a possible long-term solution. (I'm not saying that finding short-term relief is a bad thing at all, but using it as a way to numb out warning signals is maybe not the smartest thing to do over the long term.)
And after all, in the absence of good alternatives, this habit makes complete sense. Pain is no fun at all! It feels bad, it drains our energy and will and enthusiasm, it drops a roadblock in front of everything we want to be doing with our time, and we are certainly not taught any practical tools for dealing with it. Instead, we're often fed the line that pain and discomfort are just what it is to be human. Once you've got them, you better get used to them because you're not getting any younger, and you should just stop being such a whiney little baby about it! This attitude is a product of millennia of generations who had extremely limited life expectancy and little access to information about health and healing. The body/mind/spirit can often be astonishingly resilient, but solving any problem takes energy. We have to be willing to invest it. We also have to be willing to stubbornly hold to the belief that there may be solutions out there, even if they don't immediately present themselves. That takes mental discipline, which also takes energy to build.
I find that on the subject of emotional pain, we have very little guidance available, perhaps because emotions don't lend themselves to neat and tidy scientific study. In this article, we have an examination of the most common approach to addressing depression, specifically in the West. Unfortunately that approach tends to leave out much consideration of context, and tries to make an excess of any emotional state about a purely mechanistic chemical process. As a life coach, I find this particularly frustrating, because I find that no part of our lives exists as separate from the rest, and nothing is ever this simple. We tend to have all the same challenges/misconceptions around the other big, unpleasant human emotional experiences, including sadness, grief/loss, anxiety, fear, and anger. None of these exists in a vacuum, and there's usually at least some experiential reason for feeling them. For some, these experiences become more intense, but we can all recognize them as familiar; while the human experience is broad, it's not unique in its sensations. We all have all the basic emotions in common, and they all tend to be produced out of similar experiences. In my Tapping work with groups, I find that this realization actually tends to be quite reassuring for people. We often think we're much more isolated in our pain than we are, but it turns out that even in a small group, there will inevitably be a lot of crossover regarding what's on our minds. With honesty and the support of others, we can find ways forward that are a relief.
I do understand that everyone is unique, and bodies can sometimes malfunction such that someone has a tendency that needs constant intervention. I also know that it can be uncanny how when when we improve life situations that cause misery, physical symptoms can sometimes dramatically improve. Even finding ways to just release some stress and feel a bit better about something unpleasant that hasn't changed at all can help the body to inch toward healing itself. I hope that the way emotional difficulties are dealt with in the future evolves to include a broader, more wholistic approach that allows people more latitude to access multiple approaches. If each person could customize an overall plan that helped her/him to feel more supported and understood, I think our results would be drastically better. My contribution to being the change I wish to see in the world in this area has had to do with seeking out modalities that can gently bend a person's future toward greater balance, and sharing those publicly as best I can. If you feel so moved, I hope you'll do the same. The realm of emotions is one in which we drastically need improvements to become available as evidenced by the number of people acting out their pain with varying degrees of violence toward others. If we can normalize even the desire for people to find better long-term solutions, and start getting information out there about good work that's being done on such things, that will be the beginning of positive change.
Getting Free of the Past
“Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.”
In light of the reported suicides of some very famous and successful people this week, it seems more important than ever to get out whatever information I can about what we know about the pursuit of happiness, and how we can be most effective in it. I'd like to remind everyone about the large-scale CDC study on adverse childhood events and their effects on adult health and happiness that you can find information about here. The story behind it is pretty interesting—a scientist was working with a group of people on weight loss, and was flummoxed about why some people would lose an enormous amount of weight in the confines of a scientific study, but drop out before it was over or then gain it all back very quickly after the study's conclusion. As he looked deeper, this led to startling findings about what types of experiences trigger weight gain and loss. The results are some of the most important information about health you'll probably ever read, but I bet most of you have never even heard of this study.
I hope you'll take a look at those links, but in short, traumatic experiences wreak havoc on physical, mental and emotional health. If you're bothering to read this, that may not seem like a revolutionary statement. Yet the medical community still has not acknowledged, in many ways, that major illnesses are influenced by more than genes and mechanistic chemical reactions within the body. The events of our lives have profound effects on our futures, and who we have the opportunity to become. And even the most rich and famous among us often don't reach out for help or can't find all the help that is available to address the things that hold us all back from our inherent potential. What about those with few resources and many competing responsibilities? We can do better than this.
We can all keep an eye out for those around us who may be struggling and help them connect with information that might help, or just lend a sympathetic ear so that no one in our circle feels alone. We can commit to learning about all the options that exist to help us all spring back from the ways in which life happens. We can all work on instituting some sort of a daily practice that helps to preserve our sanity and make us more of a resource to the world around us, even if this is no part of our career responsibilities. In today's world, it's so easy to feel isolated even in a world teeming with people. Whatever else I'm doing, I hope I help others to know that they are not alone, and help is available all around. You know that I'm a huge proponent of EFT (Tapping) in the quest for health and happiness, but it's just one of many, many helpful modalities. We can all find something that can help us through our next steps, whether it's cognitive therapy, traditional systems of health/medicine from all over the world, or modern blends of numerous techniques used together.
Above all this, we need to destigmatize the work of addressing mental and emotional pain. Experiencing pain of any kind is not shameful, and admitting that you could use help with the aftereffects of difficult life experiences is one of the strongest, most courageous things you can do. Not to mention one of the most effective, because as long as you struggle with daily life, you are denying yourself and the world around you the best results of your inherent brilliance unleashed. Let's stop acting like everyone should be able to just suck it up and handle everything that's ever happened to them alone and in silence. Some kinds of life events are overwhelming. This approach is killing us.
We're going to keep talking about how to get happier, but whatever you do, don't go back to sleep. Please engage with your own needs, your own life, and the others around you, and let's work on growing past this fatal ignorance together. When people find out about all the helpful tools that exist, hope returns and the work of reclaiming desperate, frozen aspects of our complete selves can begin. Balance and happiness may take time to build, but what is a better use of our time than learning these life-saving and quality-of-life-saving skills?
The Health Risks of Loneliness
“A true community is not just about being geographically close to someone or part of the same social web network. It’s about feeling connected and responsible for what happens. Humanity is our ultimate community, and everyone plays a crucial role.”
There is increasing scientific evidence that loneliness is extremely unhealthy. We all know that it feels bad, but it is now apparent that lonely people have worse health outcomes than those who are not plagued by loneliness, often to a striking degree. This article mentions many ways in which the problem presents itself, but one of the most amazing statistics I found in my travels was that chronic loneliness has negative impact that is comparable to smoking about 15 packs of cigarettes a day! Well, when you put it that way, I guess we all need to pay attention!
There can be many reasons for rampant loneliness, as the causes of it are obviously subjective. Some of the main factors may be:
- The pace of modern life, which leaves little time for the kinds of unhurried interactions in which we build feelings of closeness with others
- The fact that we often don't live in close proximity to those we care most about, when in olden days we would have lived in small villages where everyone knew each other, and everyone we knew was physically close
- Young people may experience a great deal of social isolation until they build social skills and find acceptance in a group of friends. This can take much longer than is healthy
- Older people who made friends in school through proximity with others may not have built adequate social skills to continue making friends throughout life. Social skills are generally not specifically taught, so those not naturally talented in this area may struggle for a lifetime
- Because the expression of emotions is still considered taboo in many ways, those in the midst of adversity may retreat inward; admitting to having difficulty could lead to being judged as weak. They then don't receive the healthy support that could help them get through the tough times, which reinforces the experience of loneliness
- Mental and emotional health assistance is still stigmatized, so many who could really use professional health of some kind don't seek it
- Social media, where many get a lot of their interactions these days, can foment nastiness and resentments in public discourse as much as they connect us with creativity and support
Obviously these are just a smattering of the possible causes of modern loneliness, but do any of these sound familiar? Knowing that your long-term health may depend on it, what do you think you might do differently in order to foster deeper, more satisfying relationships? We'll look more at possible solutions going forward, but why not start thinking about ways that you can make the most of the social time you do get?
How can you stay present with the most important people in your life? If you have a choice to make about how to spend time and one of your choices might deepen a friendship, can you choose that one this week? Can you write a note or have a quick conversation with someone about something meaningful to remind both of you of the bond of trust you share? I bet if you just keep thinking about this in the background of your routines, you can find little ways to appreciate and build the relationships you have in small but impactful ways. Relationships are built and nurtured over time, so there's never a better time to start than now. The benefits of growing better habits are and will remain of the utmost importance to the quality of your health and happiness.
Teaching Happiness
“Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.”
Many of us struggle with creating happiness, motivation, and fulfillment, in large part because we weren't given the tools to successfully foster these things on a daily basis as part of our schooling. It's never too late to learn, though, and that's what this blog and my work are all about. It was refreshing, then, to read this week about how various governments are beginning to experiment with adding the development of important happiness-related skills to their school methodologies in order to help kids to be healthier mentally and emotionally, and perform better in school. Predictably (I think) it works really well.
Here's a link to the article I read, and I thought I'd just go ahead and pass it along this week. I hope it serves as a reminder that increasing focus on learning things like giving ourselves credit for what we do well, feeling grateful, and empathizing with those around us has real and measurable positive results. What can you do to model these results this week?
Is Now the Best Time for Change?
“Clever people master life; the wise illuminate it and create fresh difficulties. ”
Last week we looked at some of the reasons why it can be difficult to create change in your life. We'll continue the same line of inquiry this week with some information about how our brains function and how we can best set ourselves up for success given their needs and limitations. In his book Your Brain at Work, David Rock lays out the conclusions of a wide array of scientific studies on brain functioning. If you're someone who wants to be highly efficient and productive, you might want to read it yourself, but I'll let you in here on a few ideas it offers that are relevant to this discussion. This is just a quick summary, so some of these concepts may not seem self-explanatory, but the evidence for them is there.
- Completing actions you know how to do on "autopilot" is easy for your body as it doesn't require the expenditure of much energy. Learning new things, on the other hand, is an energy-intensive activity that can quickly drain your brain's reserves
- Even processing new experiences when you're not trying to learn anything at all is taxing. Evolution has encouraged us to be wary of the new because anything unfamiliar might be a threat. Too much newness tends to ramp up our fight/flight/freeze response, which quickly exhausts resources and switches off our reasoning functions
- Dialing down internal distractions, otherwise known as "inhibition," is another demanding task that burns through resources quickly. Deliberately focusing on something to the exclusion of all else takes effort, so you can only do this effectively for a relatively short time before you'll need to take a break to refuel. Rock does not immediately specify, but food, sleep, deep breathing, and exercise all help us to recover from such efforts
- Switching focus back and forth rapidly as we do when multi-tasking is also draining, and doing this decreases our efficiency such that studies show no net gain in efficiency. Multi-tasking takes the same amount of time and energy as doing each task separately because of the efficiency we lose. It also decreases the quality of our work. The only exception to this is when one of the tasks is so ingrained as to be an "autopilot" task for you
- As much as we'd like to think that we can work at full attention all day, studies show that we only get a certain amount of highly effective thinking time per day. This makes it essential to be smart about how we prioritize the most important tasks so they can be addressed during our most energized moments
I hope you're noticing the through-line that when we try to work against our physical needs, we make the likelihood of our success in creating new habits much harder than it has to be. I think there's a reason why so many people find that exercising or adding a daily practice to their lives works better first thing in the morning. Not only do scheduling surprises tend to get in the way less, but we tend to have the most physical/mental resources available to us before the day's onslaught of requests and requirements starts to bombard us and use them up.
How can you start to be more strategic about moving your most important and most demanding tasks to your highest-energy times of day? (Maybe these aren't typically morning for you—we're all different, and you should absolutely notice what works for you most consistently and leverage it for yourself as you continue to learn.) How can you protect these times from random interruptions so that easier tasks only land outside of them? Maybe that means turning off your phone during these periods of more intense work. Maybe that means putting a Do Not Disturb sign on your door so that everyone in your house knows that this is private time. Maybe you'll decide to get up a little earlier so that you can get started on your day when the world is quieter, or wait until after coffee and a healthy breakfast before attempting deep concentration. I encourage you to start thinking about this and experiment with how these principles can help you move more quickly, and with less friction, toward your most exciting goals. Life is busy, but with some intentional planning, we can often carve out more ways to be productive than it might seem if we just blunder through our days putting out fires. And when you find a scheduling pattern that helps, celebrate it! Small victories add up to bigger ones over time.
Can People Change?
“Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the furthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness: a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say ‘no.’ But saying ‘yes’ begins things. Saying ‘yes’ is how things grow.”
I don't know if you've noticed, but change is often frightening for humans, in part because we're wired for self-protection, and opening to change requires uncertainty; also, it's difficult to envision exactly who we will be on the other side of change, and that's a threat to one's current life and personality—and can be interpreted as a threat to others in the immediate vicinity depending on their beliefs. I think it's out of these concerns that the "This is just who I am/how things are" excuse arises, and it's a goal killer. If you want to achieve anything on your bucket list, avoid giving yourself this "out" at all costs.
Now, I don't mean that you should feel bad about it if this is your first reaction to the idea of change. We all fall back on habitual defenses sometimes, and again, this is a survival mechanism that evolved for the sake of keeping the species alive. But if you hear this coming out of your mouth, just notice. In order to reach your aspirations, you'll need to address this attitude, and your reasons for digging in your heels in the face of the unknown. Fear can be incredibly potent, causing us to freeze even when doing so makes no logical sense, and even sometimes contradicting our deepest values. Yet it isn't totally in control overall. We retain conscious choice over the direction of our lives even when fear seems very big and loud.
When you feel stuck in your current position, fear is calling you to work through your objections because moving forward seems unsafe, and guess what's an amazing tool for helping you to gently calm your jitters about change? Tapping! But you knew that already! Through Tapping, we can much more easily allow the reasons for our fears (usually adverse experiences from the past) to raise their hands and be heard. When we allow these old truths to come to the fore, be expressed, and allowed to dissipate in intensity while we Tap, it's truly amazing how we can suddenly see things quite differently; stepping forward into position to grab new opportunities is not as big a deal as we thought it was just minutes before. Uncertainty feels more manageable, excitement for the new often surges, and we feel a renewed sense of possibility that allows enthusiasm to carry us forward. Once you're in this state, making plans that are both optimistic and reasonably balanced with appropriate self-protection is much easier. Your chances of success skyrocket, particularly when you're practiced enough in this process to repeat it whenever you find it necessary to get unstuck again. When you're your own one-person fear triage team, it's pretty hard to keep you down!
Nobody who has ever wowed the world with a game-changing invention, artistic vision, physical achievement, or other advance has just sat back down and allowed things to stay as they were instead of following their inspiration. Sometimes the road to success is long and strewn with frightening thoughts and symbols that need to be navigated under, over, or around. Nevertheless, growth is almost always possible. Make excuses now and then if they slip out, but then decide again when you've had a chance to think and take action to surface your fears. Fighting them takes a lot more energy than acknowledging, allowing, and transforming them before you swing into action. What have you been fearing and resisting? Maybe it's time to let yourself acknowledge the reasons why so you can address them start the process of forward motion.
How about Some Good News?
“I am in the world feeling my way to light ‘amid the encircling gloom.’”
There are always so many voices trying to tell us that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Some people are addicted to external drama that can prevent them from noticing and dealing with their own back yards. Business interests recognize that fear is a powerful motivator that can increase their profits when it's leveraged to make them seem absolutely necessary. Some people just want to be seen as a savior, someone who has the answers so that others will follow and validate him/her. Whatever the motivations behind them, dealing with all the messages we encounter daily that are filled with bad news can be a real bummer. One of the ways you can regain some of your vitality and enthusiasm is by dialing down or tuning out the volume of those doom-and-gloom messages and finding opportunities to be aware of the ways in which life is good.
Life will always be a mix of dark and light, happy and sad. It's smart to take prudent, practical steps to make ourselves safer and to think ahead about what will be needed in the future, but excessive worrying and stress destroys our happiness. Eventually, it erodes our health too. How about finding a few sources of news stories that make you feel good about your fellow humans and being alive in general? Here's one, for instance, but there are many others. There are also many people out there filling social media feeds with posts that will inspire and energize you. Why not spend a few moments this week searching out a few sources of small joys that you can add to your every day? This week's blog is short. I suggest that you use the extra minutes you might normally have spent reading a longer one to go find some inspiration!