Falling Well: Finding your ability to Cope under pressure

Who are you when the going gets rough?  And are you prepared if life gets even rougher?  How will you handle it?  What will you discover about yourself?

We actually have no idea what version of ourselves we will discover in a given situation until we are actually in it.  Will we be brave?  Or run like hell?  And will we be able to tell if and when either one of those responses is or was the right one for us personally.

Catastrophic Thinking is one of the ways we walk ourselves right into a mental corner and become convinced that under certain circumstances we won't be able to cope with a given situation if it were to occur.  We say to ourselves, "I won't be able to handle it."  "That will be too much for me."  "I'm sure that would be the point of no return."  "I can't do it."

One method for countering this kind of thinking is to "decatastrophize" the situation by using a few thought experiments in which you walk a little farther into the situation in your mind and imagine that instead of being paralyzed into inaction, you find your way out.  In other words, rather than allowing your mind to just shut down at the thought of imagining the worse-case scenario, to instead visualize seeing yourself handling the situation to the best of your ability.  Even if it means hardship.

With Catastrophic Thinking we tend to overestimate danger, and underestimate our ability to cope with it.  For instance, as we age we might become fearful of falling.  This can lead to an overestimation of how bad a fall would be, how much damage might come from such a fall, and an underestimation of our ability to handle both the fall and any injuries that might come from the fall.  But a thought experiment, including information about the ways athletes fall and martial artists learn to roll or prevent injury during falls, can give us material to come back to our thinking and imagine a way in which we might cope much better during a fall than we ever imagined.  The Catastrophic thought can be decatastrophized and you create a way in your mind's-eye to see yourself "falling well".  And not only falling well, but recovering from any fall injury, well.

Decatastrophizing includes avoiding the overestimation of danger by looking at our fears more realistically.  This can be used in any number of situations in life where we can reinterpret the situation and see a more realistic view with possibilities and better outcomes.  It also means a more realistic look at our ability to cope in life, based on our history, skills, advanced reasoning, and a better estimation of our ability to stay in the game and cope well in many situations.

Take a look at your most frequent recurring fears and ask yourself if you are overestimating the danger and underestimating your ability to cope.  Rather than continuing to fall into the Catastrophic trap of believing you cannot ever allow bad things to happen because you wouldn't be able to handle it, try on the thought experiment of decatastrophizing the situation in your mind.  It makes all of the difference in the world between becoming paralyzed with fear, and pushing your comfort zone.  

You can read more about Catastrophic Thinking and Faulty Thinking Styles from my March, 2018 blog entry here

"You must do the thing you think you cannot do"     ~Eleanor Roosevelt

Thanks to Lisa Ann Yount for the great image, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en

Gratitude: Practicing Thankfulness Year-Round

Thanksgiving is a time for gathering, feasting, and giving thanks, but giving thanks is a helpful exercise to get in the habit of year-round.  Recognizing what we are grateful for can help us move our awareness from the many forms of faulty thinking that tend to lead to depression and anxiety, and shift us toward a more consistent habit of thankfulness for what we have right now. 

In any given situation we have the option to focus on what we already have before us and in our lives.  Because our brains are geared to watch for dangers, we sometimes forget how wonderful and miraculous our lives are, including the things we have in them, and the situations we experience.

Has someone helped you recently?  Did you catch a break on some discount, deadline, or deal?  Are you glad the roof doesn't leak, and the car runs, or that the kids or pets are healthy this month?  Did something finally get solved or resolved?  Maybe some problem, glitch, or issue that was annoying and irritating?  And what about the most mundane things we forget to acknowledge as "good today" or "good this very moment".  

What we don't notice is that our monkey mind tends to wander off to the past and the future, ruminating about how things should have been, should be now, and about how terrible they can end up in the future unless we worry hard enough to prevent bad things from happening (which of course is not possible).  So gratefulness is a great Mindfulness exercise.  We can ask ourselves, "What am I thankful for right at this very moment?"  

The next time you are sitting at a traffic light with nothing much to do but wait for the light to change, ask yourself in that moment, "What are three things I am grateful for right now?"  Maybe you are grateful that the roads are clear and it's a sunny day.  Or maybe you are grateful the traffic is not too bad at the moment.  It can be anything at all.  

You can make a new habit of giving thanks at key times throughout your day.  Maybe think of three things you are grateful for while waking in the morning and preparing for your day.  Or maybe finding thankfulness in the evening before going to bed.  You can build these moments of gratitude into any part of your day and make them habit forming, just like brushing your teeth or taking a shower.  It takes practice at first, but repetition makes the behavior.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, and enjoy all you feel grateful for.  Then spread that Thankfulness throughout the year, making every day a day of thanks.

"Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more.  If you concentrate on what you don't have, you'll never, ever have enough."  ~Oprah Winfrey

Thanks to Faith Goble for the great festive image

Intuition: An Old Trusted Friend when facing Anxiety and Depression

Intuition...defined as "the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning."  In other words, intuition is when we just somehow know something and don't know why we know it.  We just do.  

Intuition might have been misrepresented by Bruce Kasanoff when he wrote about it in his article for Forbes magazine in 2017 and used the title "Intuition is the Highest form of Intelligence", but what he might have been trying to say to his readers was that one thing we learned from the very intelligent Einstein--who by the way existed before IQ tests were developed in 1905, but has an estimated IQ somewhere between 160 and 190--is that Einstein tried to tell us that intuition is no insignificant part of most intelligent decisions and discoveries ever made in human history, and that actually some of the most intelligent decisions could not have been made without acknowledging intuition and its part in our human perception and decision making processes. 

To bring intuition down off the pedestal Kasanoff put it on in his title, and carry it along with the rest of the human skills we possess, we might more accurately say that intuition is considered to be something all people use to help them make decisions, along with the reasoning mind, which can sometimes either miss things or go off in the wrong direction, especially if intuition is ignored.  It would be as equally fair to say that intuition can sometimes go off in the wrong direction as well, but in reality, if we have wandered off into delusional thinking, then that is no longer intuition.  So let's keep this real.  Intuition is that "gut feeling", it's a knowing something without knowing how you know it.  It can "also" be inaccurate, just as logic can miss the mark, but it is not the same thing as delusion or illusion, and it doesn't follow the typical scientific rational methods of reaching conclusions by use of reason.  So we need a balance of reason and intuition.  Intuition is something knowable that has been experienced by many, but is outside the reach of knowing "how" we know, and can't always be explained in any form of logic or reason. 

Giger Gigerenzer, author of The Intelligence of Intuition, which will be released soon in September 2023, refers to intuition as a form of heuristics.  By that he means that it's a way humans "fill in the gap" where knowledge isn't actually there, in order to come to a quick conclusion about something.  In his earlier book from 2008 titled Gut Feeling:  The Intelligence of the Unconscious, this same author writes about "neurologically based behavior that evolved to ensure that we humans respond quickly when faced with a dilemma."  Unfortunately, because human thinking is also prone to flawed and delusional explanation or interpretation (mostly because we are using too much information and logic), we then frequently place artificial explanations to these events such as creating what seems like a clearer picture for ourselves by explaining them away with references to telepathy, magic, the hand of a god or goddess, spirit-guides, and so on.  In reality, Gigerenzer is trying to say that it is still a knowing in which we have no idea how we know it, but that it's all happening quickly and without our conscious awareness of its happening.  This is what psychologists call adaptive unconscious, which is thought to be in an old part of the brain, but which plays an ongoing present-day role still in our every day perceptions and decision making.

The reason realizing these differences is so important when facing the human emotions and feelings of anxiety and depression is that it's important for each individual to know when it's okay to override either logic or intuition.  In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, we use techniques which enable us to override various beliefs and ways of thinking that surface from the newest and oldest parts of our brain.  In other words, when do we go against what seems logical and rational, and when do we go against a strong gut feeling that screams some unexplainable awareness to every fiber of our being?  But just as equally important, when do we choose to follow these?

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is about "challenging" beliefs of fear and doom (which can be both real or faulty in themselves).  In fact, the field has developed a list of 15 Styles of Faulty Thinking which are used to help clients question the way they use logic to talk themselves into or out of things that can be based on fear and anxiety (or hopelessness and depression), and which surfaces due to present misperceptions, or old styles of faulty unexplainable gut feelings that come from the adaptive unconscious.  

An individual that is very self aware can come to know the difference between hair standing on end because there is static electricity present, and hair standing on end because the fight or flight response has been triggered (either consciously or unconsciously) by we-know-not-what.  Someone that is a good thinker includes intuition in their work (i.e., listening to that gut feeling regardless of logic), but does not put either logic or intuition above the other.  In the spirit of yin and yang, we should work to to welcome both known and unexplainable "knowing" in a balanced perception of ourselves and the world, but do so without silencing one or the other.

"At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason."  ~Albert Einstein

Thanks to Chris Hayes for his artistic digital work  https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/

Self Talk: The Key to Changing How we Feel

There are a lot of stressors we all face on a daily basis, but there is also an ongoing stress that doesn't necessarily come from the environment.  It comes from inside our minds and the internal pressure we put on ourselves with expectations, poor self-talk and lack of self-compassion.  But we can work on this problem and change the way the internal dialogue plays out from hour to hour.

Self-talk is the internal messages we give ourselves (or say to ourselves) throughout the day.  These messages can be internalized from many sources.  We get them from parents, teachers, friends, and just about anywhere there has been an interaction and information taken inside and felt deeply enough to be held in our memory.

If the messages were negative, abusive, inappropriate, or just misinformed, they are still there regardless of their poor content and they can rise up and repeat at any time.  Many people have a running self-dialogue throughout the day that is quite abusive and unsupportive.  When asked, many of my clients will let me know that their internal self-belief system is one of self-hatred, self-beratement, and self-judgment.  These kinds of internalized messages can trigger anxiety and depression, as well as self-hatred unless the thoughts are stopped and replaced with kinder and more compassionate ideas of self-acceptance.

The way we talk to ourselves can be changed and identifying the internal beliefs about ourselves, intercepting them with strong disputation and logical reasoning, and replacing them with supportive, loving, and self-soothing internal dialogue can result in new feelings that are positive and encouraging.  But it takes practice, repetition, devoted work, and conscious awareness to do this.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is designed to help with this process.  First, by recognizing the beliefs you use to interpret events.  Then, by rationalizing your way through these beliefs to see if they hold any sense of truth, connection to reality, or even form logical conclusions in the end.  By disputing false beliefs, you can begin to snuff them out and return to a more realistic way of looking at the world and yourself.  Where the false beliefs might have been leading to anxiety and depression, the new and more realistic beliefs alter the outcome of how you feel.

Here is a link to a list of 15 styles of distorted thinking (or beliefs) psychcentral most of us use to convince ourselves we're just no good, incapable, or somehow unworthy.  Find the ones that you use the most, and begin the journey of challenging the false beliefs that have tripped you up the most.  Using the ABCDE Model developed by Albert Ellis Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy , you can practice every day to unravel some of this cognitive training that has convinced you that you deserve to be spoken to poorly (by yourself and others). 

"A" is the Activating Event, or what happened in any given situation, "B" is the false belief you are using to process or filter that event in your mind, "C" is the Consequence or Feeling you end up with by doing that (typically anxiety or depression), "D" is the use of Disputations to begin arguing against these false beliefs in your head, and "E" is the new and more positive Emotion you will feel by using more realistic and logic-oriented beliefs to process events in your life.

The way we speak to ourselves makes a big difference in how we feel on an ongoing basis.  Talk to yourself as if you were your own best friend.  No one wants a best friend that berates them and criticizes all day and has very little belief in them.  We want a best friend that is supportive, loving, and wants the best for us.  Be your own best friend!

Thanks to bm for the great abstract art piece, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Filling in the Gaps: When the Brain Guesses about what Reality is.

We humans are instinctually wired to monitor our surroundings for survival.  It's what brings us right into the present moment and leads us to search for food and water as well as seek shelter and safety.  But we've also developed some amazing brains that tend to be very curious as well, and so we have discovered many things and have developed advanced knowledge and capability surrounding things within, and even outside of, our perception.

Recently the human race sent an extended "eye" out into space in the form of the James Webb Space Telescope and now the images that eye can see are being transmitted back to earth, allowing our species to see farther than we've ever seen before, and what a sight it is.  With all of this it's easy to feel like a speck in the immense state of things and yet the human brain continues to piece things together as best it can.

One thing we know about the brain is that it fills in gaps so that things at least feel like they make sense to us.  That's how we get through our days, our years and even our whole lives.  In this wonderful TED talk by Dan Dennett he gives a great example of how our brain fills in the gaps of perception (and knowledge) and allows us to (in a sense) "keep going", since we might otherwise get stuck wondering a lot of the time what is "real".  

In the talk and demo, Dennett explains why consciousness itself is not necessarily all that we have become convinced it is.  Instead, our human brain "fills in the gaps" where things make no sense.  We put in place-markers where understanding is missing and as Dennett puts it, "our brain just makes us think we know" something.  We insert many ideas, from religions to other metaphysical beliefs which we have used to fill in what some call the God of the gap, and in other areas we use the filling-in of spaces of perception and knowledge (that may not really be there) in order to have a whole picture.

Dennett explains that our brain might make a suggestion about what might be in gaps of missing knowledge or perception and that we either take the suggestion or we don't.  Our brains can take a suggestion that we then turn into a belief and then we decide that belief is fact.  In other words, and in Dennett's words, your brain just makes you "think" you have the truth, and believe me... you then believe it.

When it comes to beliefs, and especially with beliefs about anxiety, sometimes we have to question what the brain has used to fill in a gap where knowledge or perception is unclear.  When we feel uncertain, as many do these days regarding the pandemic and political upheaval around the world, our brains continue on doing what they do, (i.e., filling in the gaps about what we think is going to happen and what we should then do in order to plan for our safety and futures).

One way to address daily anxiety is to take a closer look at what "suggestion" your brain has been taking about your life, the world, and your future.  When it comes to safety, we are prone to listen to the brain's old instinct that it's a lion in the bushes, not a kitten.  It's danger and not "nothing".  It will be very bad and not bearable.  Your life will be threatened and not savable, and so on.  

Anxiety and depression are when we create stories and belief systems that can take us farther and farther from the truth, but that give us a filler for the gaps where the unknown and uncertainty linger.  Many times our anxiety is rooted in the fear of death, and there is nothing wrong with acknowledging that the human body will die one day.  What is a hinderance, is the creation of either a delusional belief system that suggests that your human life will not end even though evidence tells you it will, or the creating of meaninglessness and the convincing of oneself that the time between now and that end should not be fully lived.  These are falsely created fillers that the brain takes as a suggestion to convince you it's not worth living.

None of this should suggest that we not leave our mind open to more possibility, nor risk believing some of the other suggestions made by our amazing brains to fill in the gaps of life.  It simply means that we should watch carefully what it is we have taken as fact.  Our beliefs shape our reality.  How you see the images that the James Webb Space Telescope has sent back to the eye of human-kind... matters.  What the images suggest to your brain is significant because it will shape your entire definition of reality.  Your brain might make a thousand different suggestions about what the vastness of these images mean.  Which one you buy into deciphers how you see the painting of your life.

"Real magic - refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic".  ~Lee Siegel 

The Stress and Anxiety of Uncertainty

Throughout the duration of COVID-19 a common expressed worry is one of "uncertainty".  Many people feel unease at the reality that the future is pretty much unknown.  We're not really sure how this will pan out, mainly because none of us who are alive have ever lived through anything like this before.  Those who have kids may have never had to home school or worry about their kids exposed to COVID in a school setting before.  Those of us out working in the world have never had to wonder when we will go back to the office, or if we will go back to the office, or if --in the end--employers will even keep the office we all once worked in.  We now all carry with us a sense of uncertainty about how long this will last, as well as uncertainty about what to believe in the mass of information that is not always what it seems. 

This chronic state of uncertainty leads to stress and anxiety that can fill us with irrational kinds of faulty thinking.  In other words, where there are no answers, we might make the mistake of filling in the unknown gap with what seems like a plausible answer.  However, if we are using faulty thinking styles, we can make cognitive errors and fill in those gaps with inaccurate and even mythological information.  

In addition, there is a difference between anticipatory anxiety and uncertainty.  With anticipatory anxiety we at least have a general idea of what it is we are afraid of and what might be coming.  We can anticipate a scenario in our mind of that feared thing and then prepare for it the best we can.  But when it comes to uncertainty, the mind draws a blank.  The new anxiety and stress is in not knowing what to even envision or prepare for.  In that case, an instinctual human system can become hypervigilant and become filled with a general sense of unease in trying to always be ready for it knows not what.

The best way to handle this general sense of uncertainty is to practice relaxation techniques as frequently as possible so that the body counters the chronic tendency to want to be tense all the time.  We can try to train our bodies to be mostly relaxed as frequently as possible, which in the end also prepares us for the best overall reaction to any stressor that eventually comes along.

Another way to cope with uncertainty is to not create expectations about how uncertainty "should" be or how we "wish" it to be in the end.  All that does is create a readiness for disappointment, which can be expressed in stressful emotions like anger, sadness, and more worry.  There is a difference between having a positive attitude--which aims for "hoping" for good outcomes--and the other option of setting oneself up for disappointment by expecting in advance that the outcome one wants or prefers will be the outcome that happens.

When you get right down to it, uncertainty means we don't know the answer.  When we don't know the answer to something our brains start searching for a way to fill in that uncomfortable gap.  We can put all kinds of things in that gap, but that does not mean that whatever we put in that gap is the correct answer.  If instead, we look at the reality of the uncertainty, we can act appropriately and decipher the most rational way to cope.  When the body is uncertain if it needs to prepare for danger, we can intervene and help it instead to feel a general sense of peace and relaxation, which also prepares it in the long run for any need to ready for danger, if necessary.

Thanks to Nguyen Thanh Lam for the great photo

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/