Managing emotions – Little Challenges

Another 5 challenges

In each episode of the Adventures in Behaviour Change podcast, our guest suggests a Little Challenge for others to try. Here are five favourites from the last few months:

Bruce Anderson

Ask the ‘second why’.

“When I’m going to do something that matters to me I always ask myself why I’m doing it – and then I ask myself why I am doing that. Everyone can do the ‘second why’ and it helps you to be grounded when you enter a situation because you know why you’re there. When people really feel grounded they tend to have more courage, they speak more strongly, they sit up in their chair taller, all kinds of things happen… I really dread the idea of public speaking and it takes quite a bit for me to to fly somewhere and do that. I end up quite frequently talking to large rooms of people and I’m just really terrified of doing it. So I really have to do the ‘second why’ right before I walk out on the stage – and I notice when I do that I start breathing slower, I can remember what I need to say, all kinds of things happen to who I am. So it is an immensely simple thing. You could think of it as some kind of pop psychology trick, but it really grounds you in optimism and a hopeful view of yourself in any situation.”

Ghilaine Chan

Close down your day and set an intention for tomorrow.

“End your day and really think about what you’re going to do tomorrow. So reflect back and say, “Have I done everything I wanted to do? No, I haven’t. Right, what am I going to do tomorrow?” And keep that list very short, maybe one, two, three things. But really have a sense of stopping today and having an intention for tomorrow.”

Nir Eyal

‘Surf the urge’ using the 10-minute rule.

“There’s a technique I use all the time called the ’10 minute rule’. Let’s say I want to write and I’m tempted to check email or look at Google or maybe I want to eat something unhealthy that I know is tempting me. So instead of giving in to that temptation right away, I give myself this 10 minute rule of – I can give into that temptation in 10 minutes, but in those 10 minutes I have to write down the distraction. I have to write down the internal trigger (what I’m feeling), and I just have to kind of feel that sensation for just a few minutes. 90% of the time, that sensation just washes over you like a wave. It’s called ‘surfing the urge’.”

Amanda Blainey

Practise ‘memento mori‘.

Imagine – if you had one year left to live, what would you do? What would you change in your life? What would you say to the people that you love? What would be important to you? And it might make you think, “Okay… I’m going to do that”. They don’t have to be big things. It might be saying something to someone: “Oh, I’d better ring my sister and tell her I really love her and I really appreciate her and I’m really proud of her.” People save that stuff and that seems really sad to me. There’s this idea that if you’re terminally ill or you’ve been given a diagnosis that things aren’t looking good and you haven’t got long, people start doing those things. And I always think, why does it take that? Why can’t we say that now? What’s stopping us from saying those really nice things to people? You know what – it makes you feel good too.”

Kristian Brodie

Write ‘morning pages’.

“The challenge that I set myself is to do this exercise that I read about in a book called ‘The Artist’s Way‘. It’s called ‘morning pages’ and literally the very, very first thing you do in the morning before you’ve had breakfast, before you’ve woken up, is to take yourself off somewhere quiet and sit with a notebook and write for just 10 minutes whatever it is that is in your head. It doesn’t have to be good. It’s not meant to be re-read or seen by anybody else. It’s just to get things out of your sleepy brain and into the world. I’ve found that to be hugely, hugely helpful and the most creatively sparking thing I’ve done in recent years, for sure.”

So now I’m curious… If you were to suggest a Little Challenge of your own – what would it be?

Strange wisdom

Lately I’ve been noticing lots of things that seem to be true – and at the same time, completely counterintuitive.

Here are some examples:

Being kind to yourself sometimes involves doing things you don’t want to do.
When changing your behaviour, it helps to start by accepting yourself exactly as you are right now.
In order to have a productive day, there are times when the best thing you can do in the moment is – absolutely nothing.
If you want someone to listen to you, the most powerful thing you can do is listen to them.
When you’re struggling to solve a problem, the solution often appears when you give up and pay attention to something else instead.
Sometimes the best way to help another person is to stop trying to help them.

Having previously had a very rigid way of making sense of the world, I’ve found that the more my psychological health improves, the more I am able to tolerate paradoxes, both-this-and-that-ness, not-knowing.

Perhaps my new-found willingness to be in the presence of confusing and apparently contradictory ideas without demanding that one is right and the other wrong has come from learning about Dialectical Behavioural Therapy. DBT is an approach which can be helpful for people who find it difficult to regulate their emotions, thinking and behaviour (particularly those diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, eating disorders or addictions, or at risk of suicide or self-harm).

The dialectic at the heart of DBT is this: we can accept ourselves exactly as we are right now, whilst also committing to doing things differently from this point onwards. It invites us to be gentle with ourselves for the things we are not able to control (for example, what happened to us when we were younger, how we behaved in the past when we didn’t know better) and to step up and take responsibility for improving things in the future (by learning to do things in new and healthier ways).

In life (as in DBT) it seems there is a constant balancing to be done, a strangeness to be embraced, a middle path to be found which is neither-this-nor-that.

Increasingly, what I find to be wise and true cannot be expressed directly in language. It shows up in the spaces between words – an oddly beautiful, indescribable thing.

Thinking in colour

It has many names:

Black and white thinking
Absolutist thinking
Dichotomous thinking
All-or-nothing thinking
Splitting

Whichever one you choose, the tendency to see things as being all good or all bad, all right or all wrong, all this or all that, is a common type of cognitive distortion.

A cognitive distortion is ‘an exaggerated or irrational thought pattern involved in the onset and perpetuation of psychopathological states’. In other words, an unrealistic way of thinking that interferes with our happiness and psychological health.

We routinely use thought patterns to conserve time and energy and help us to make sense of the world. We use them to help us predict what will happen, how people will behave, how we will feel – and they often serve us well. But when these patterns are over-simplified, or skewed towards a negative interpretation, we can start to have problems.

A 2018 study found that people who are experiencing anxiety, depression or suicidal thinking are significantly more likely to use ‘absolutist’ language than people who aren’t. Here’s a list of the kind of words the researchers were looking for:

Absolutely – All – Always – Complete – Completely – Constant – Constantly – Definitely – Entire – Ever – Every – Everyone – Everything – Full – Must – Never – Nothing – Totally – Whole

As someone who previously qualified for a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder and experienced decades of anxiety and depression (conditions which are strongly associated with this kind of language use), I can remember all too well what it felt like to think in these terms. Until a few years ago, if you had climbed inside my head and listened to the inner monologue there, you would have heard a lot of things like:

“It will always be like this.”

“You’ll never get better.”

“They all think so.”

“Everything’s gone wrong.”

“Nothing helps.”

In fact, at the point when I reached rock bottom, this was all there was to hear. I felt sure I knew how things were and how they always would be. It seems inconceivable now – but at that moment in time, and at many others like it, it felt completely and utterly believable.

So for me, the process of learning to be well has involved learning to think differently. I’ve come to understand that things are rarely as black and white as I used to imagine them to be. I’ve learned to see not just shades of grey, but a whole range of colours that simply weren’t visible before. I’ve found that it takes conscious effort and repeated reinforcement, but little by little, those old patterns of thinking can change.

Occasionally an old pattern will surface – most often when I’m tired or hungry or under a little more pressure than usual – but they rarely hang around for long. Because, as time goes by, I notice that life is infinitely more complex, more changeable, more subtle, more paradoxical, than seemed conceivable before – which makes concepts like ‘always’ and ‘never’ a bit harder to take seriously.

So if you sometimes find yourself imagining that everything is completely, absolutely, entirely and totally a certain way, if you fear that everyone, everywhere is doing something, or that you never, ever will – take a moment, if you can. A moment to stop and breathe and search for some colour in the situation. For some inbetweenness. For some not-quite-this and not-quite-that-ness.

Because somewhere, amidst the messiness and the blurred distinctions, there is relief, I think. The relief of discovering that things are often so much more than we allow them to be.

Time travelling (part 2)

I’m gathering some thoughts, a few at a time. Thoughts about some of the many things I wish I’d known when I was 18.

Last week I published the first few. Here are some more…

HAPPINESS

Out in my garden lives a robin. Every time I try to get close to him he flies away. When I give up and start digging, there he is beside me.

Happiness isn’t something we can ‘have’. The more we try, the more it eludes us.

In the words of Viktor Frankl, happiness is “the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself”. Like my robin friend, it shows up most often when we’re busy getting on with something else.

COMPANY

We are shaped by the people we choose to spend time with. Their words and actions influence our behaviour, health and happiness.

It’s worth taking the time to find the people that make your heart sing, the people who remind you of what is possible, the people who love you for being you. They will help you to grow into the person you want to be.

KINDNESS

If we want to be kind to others, the most useful thing we can learn to do is to practise kindness towards ourselves.

It can be tempting to imagine that we can bully ourselves and neglect our needs whilst showing compassion to those around us. For a short while we might just about get away with it – but as a long-term strategy it simply doesn’t work.

Sooner or later, unkindness on the inside starts showing up on the outside, whether in words or sighs or thinly-veiled resentments or flashes of anger.

By contrast, the greater our self-compassion, the more resilient, happy and resourceful we are likely to be. And in turn, the more we will have to give to others.

So be nice on the inside first. It’s the kindest thing to do for all concerned.

ATTACHMENT

Feelings and thoughts change constantly. Our view of the world is sensitive to hunger, fatigue, time of day and countless other things besides.

It’s easy to forget this, particularly in the moments when it would be most helpful to remember. In the grip of uncomfortable emotions or persistent thoughts, we can be tempted to imagine that we will always feel as we do right now. We won’t. On the flip side – wonderful feelings won’t stick around either.

Learning to recognise thoughts and feelings for the flighty things they are and not get too attached to them (whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’) makes life easier. Worth practising.

More to follow. In the meantime, I’m curious…

What do you wish you’d known at 18?

Time travelling

In just a few days my eldest son will turn 18.

It’s got me wondering…

If I could go back in time and talk to my 18 year old self, what would I want to say?

I’m gathering some thoughts, a few at a time. Things I think I ‘know’. Things I wish I’d known.

Not so much for him, because I know that his experience will be different from mine. But for me – a little reminder of things that can help.

Here are the first few…

ENTITLEMENT

There is no rule that things ought to be a certain way. If you find yourself feeling cross or indignant, ask yourself what you think should be different. I’m willing to bet you’ll find a ‘should’ in there somewhere – a sense of entitlement to something, a sense that things should be other than they actually are. That ‘should’ is the source of the discomfort, not the situation itself. Life is messy and unpredictable. There are no ‘shoulds’.

CONTROL

Some things you can control, others you can’t.

What you say, what you do, what you make things mean – you get to control those. Other people’s behaviour, the weather, sports results – those aren’t yours, sorry.

Learning to focus on the things you can control and let go of the ones you can’t saves a lot of time, energy and suffering. Sounds simple. Takes practice.

NORMALITY

That normal life, normal appearance, normal experience you may be imagining – it doesn’t exist. Generally speaking, people are a bit odd. Most of us feel like outsiders sometimes. We can all imagine that everyone else knows what they’re doing. It’s all smoke and mirrors. Forget trying to be normal. Go do something fun instead.

LEARNING

Figuring out how to do new things is messy. You will end up feeling (and looking) silly sometimes. There will be a lot of mistakes. This is ok. That old saying about omelettes and eggs is true. Things will break from time to time. You will break from time to time. That’s just how it works. Keep going. On the other side of all the brokenness is something worth having. You may just not be able to see it quite yet.

STORIES

Human beings are natural storytellers. We tell stories in our minds all the time. Learning to recognise the difference between facts and stories is really helpful. When we get them confused we can cause ourselves and others a lot of heartache. Watch out for the word ‘because’. It’s often a helpful indicator that a story is about to begin.

More to follow. In the meantime, I’m curious…

What do you wish you’d known at 18?

Little Challenges 6 to 10

Following on from the first five Little Challenges shared by guests on the Adventures in Behaviour Change podcast which I featured here a couple of weeks ago, here are the next five…

Episode 6: Emma J Bell

Ask yourself, what single habit would I like to create in my daily routine? Now ask, why?

“If you want to be calmer, if you want to be able to respond rather than react, meditation’s a great habit. If you want to get fitter, then your habit might be to walk for half an hour three or four times a week, the same time of day on designated days during the week. Or it could be reading poetry or it could be having a phone call with someone who makes you feel good regularly; reaching out in some way. Whatever the habit is, start today, but be clear on your why. What’s it going to give you? How will it improve your life? How will it create better, deeper connections? Because it’s the why that is instrumental in motivating us towards the behaviour we want to create every day… So many people want to change half a dozen things, which is overwhelming so they don’t start. Don’t worry, just choose one. That’s it.”

Episode 7: Hilary Gallo

Look at people you pass in the street and silently wish them well.

“I look people in the face and wish them well for their day. Just in my own mind and my own thoughts, I wish them well – I don’t voice it. Wishing good on other people, particularly people who look troubled, I find incredibly powerful and energising. It helps me. I mean I kind of believe that we’re more connected than we believe we are, that we’re not all just these separate individuals. And if you think of it like that, if we’re connected, it’s kind of wishing well upon the system of which we are a part. And ultimately by doing good to others, you’re doing good for yourself. So I just have this practice that I find really helpful of ‘wishing well’. In a kind, gentle way, just doing that to 5 or 10 people as you walk along the street, I find really powerful.”

Episode 8: Aline Holzwarth

Take a few moments during your lunch break to practise yoga.

“Lunch yoga is the Little Challenge that I’d like to offer you. Not eating lunch while doing yoga (although maybe I shouldn’t knock it until I’ve tried it). Lunch yoga is simply doing yoga during your lunch break. There are a million videos on YouTube iff you want to just follow along with someone, One thing that I’ve done, not that I’m brand loyal or anything, but I’ve used the Nike Training Club App. They have a lot of exercises. You can just filter by yoga, pick one that fits the amount of time that you have and you’re good to go.”

Episode 9: Andy Smallman

Choose a small object that has meaning for you that you haven’t thought about for a while. Put it somewhere obvious. Each time you notice it, pause and notice the thoughts that come up.

‘Three Simple Steps To Find Meaning From A Personal Object’.

“Here’s what you do. Find something wherever you live that’s kind of small, something you’ve had it in some place for so long that you’ve really stopped noticing it, but it’s important to you. It might be something you picked up on a vacation or a gift that you were given at some point, but you put it initially in a spot and it had meaning for you, but now it’s been there so long that you’ve kind of lost track of that meaning. Take it and put it somewhere else. A conspicuous spot where you’re going to see it and then, each day, when you come across it, just pause for a split second and see what comes up in your mind. Pay attention to what happens and just take note of that. It could be, now you’re thinking of this person who gave this to you. Or you’re thinking of the vacation that you got it or whatever the case may be. That could be enough right there, but if you really want to extend it, take a minute to jot that down. Write down what feelings, emotions, people that this is evoking and then act on one thing if you want to go a little bit further. You could jot someone a little note and say, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about you”. If it’s a memory that that triggers, maybe you’ve got a photo or two that you want to share or maybe you were on that trip with somebody and you want to talk to them about it.”

Episode 10: Silja Litvin

When you’re in a stressful situation, pause for a moment and think of three things you’re grateful for.

“When you get really anxious or mad or unhappy with something – let’s say you’re in traffic jam and you’re getting really riled up and you can feel your heart beating and your temperature rising – you’re locked in an emotion, a stress reaction that is really hard to get out of. And that’s kind of like the lizard brain has taken over, and that can be quite harmful because you’re producing a lot of stress hormones. When you’re in a situation like that, find three things you’re grateful for. Because two things are happening. First of all, you are forcing your brain to use a different part of the brain. So it’s interrupting the stress response because you’re having to think for things that you’re grateful for. And the second thing is that you’re rewiring your brain to become more sensitive to positive things. And it can be something really silly like, “The sun’s shining”, “The car smells good”, or, “I like the way my hair looks today”! Whatever it is, every time you feel yourself getting into that spot of darkness, just come up with three things you’re grateful for and you will see yourself immediately calm down. Over a period of time, within two weeks, you can actually find yourself being a happier person.”

Find out more about the line-up of guests for Series 2 of Adventures in Behaviour Change HERE.

“Too sensitive”

Ever been told you’re “too sensitive”?

Sensitive. It’s a funny word, with a muddle of meanings – some positive, others not so much. Here are a few from the Merriam Webster Dictionary:

receptive to sense impressions
delicately aware of the attitudes and feelings of others
excessively or abnormally susceptible
easily hurt or damaged

If you’re someone who is often told that you’re “too sensitive”, you may have come to see sensitivity as a weakness, something to be overcome.

Over the years, I’ve talked with so many people who have learned to see themselves as flawed, simply because they feel too much. I’ve certainly felt that way for most of my own life.

It’s true that if you’re someone who is acutely tuned in to your senses – which is all the word means, at its root – life can feel like a bombardment at times. So many signals to read and interpret. So much complexity to make sense of. So many sensory stimuli.

It can be exhausting.

Dealing with people can be particularly challenging, not least because – as demonstrated by the word ‘sensitive’ itself – words can mean so many different things. Trying to balance non-verbal perceptions (of body language, expression, tone of voice) with a guess at what the words might be being used to convey, is an extraordinarily complex job.

That we understand one another at all is hard to believe.

Yet for people with heightened sensitivity, there can be an extra layer of confusion. Our sensitivity is sometimes the legacy of life experiences which have left us feeling less-than-safe; a hypervigilance, a watchfulness designed to protect us. Often we have learned to read situations well, yet may not have any real insight into how we do so – which can lead to those awkward moments of absolutely knowing something to be true, whilst having no rational-sounding way of explaining to others how it is that we do.

From a sanity point of view, here be dragons…

The world needs people who feel. Our presence, our listening, our caring, our creativity – these things are precious beyond measure.

And at the same time, we have a responsibility to learn how to take good care of ourselves in order to be able to contribute those things. We need resilience. To learn how to switch off and recharge. To thrive.

For a long time I flinched when the words “too sensitive” appeared in conversation, as sooner or later they inevitably did. I taught myself to respond to them by feeling less-than, by becoming silent. I knew I wasn’t easy to be around and felt ashamed to be the way I was. I didn’t realise that I could be that person and be ok.

I see a different possibility now.

To be sensitive and fully present in the world and, at the same time, grounded, healthy and well-resourced – how can we learn to do that?

It’s time to find out.

Music lessons

Years ago, whilst working as piano teacher, I noticed that many beginner students seemed to struggle with one particular thing. Focusing so hard on playing the notes on the page, they would rush from one to the next without allowing them to last their full length, often ignoring the rests altogether. It was as if the notes were all that mattered. It generally took a little while of learning and a bit more confidence for the person to become as comfortable about not-playing as playing. For a recognition to emerge that it was only through allowing everything to take the exact amount of time it needed – even if that meant waiting in silence* – that the piece of music could come alive.

Over the years I’ve noticed a similar tendency showing up in all sorts of other places. The sneaking suspicion that if we’re not doing something, we should be. The inclination to rush from one event from the next, as if it is only when conscious effort is involved that progress is being made.

Through playing eQuoo – The Emotional Fitness Game (created by recent podcast guest, Silja Litvin), I discovered that there’s a name for this tendency to think that doing something is better than doing nothing: the Action Bias.

Whether the pressure to act comes from within ourselves – as an attempt to escape uncomfortable feelings of uncertainty – or from others – like the goalkeeper who chooses to jump right or left in the face of a penalty shoot-out (despite the fact that statistically-speaking it would be better to stand still) simply because ‘doing something’ is expected – it can be hard to resist. And yet, it is so often from times of not-doing that good things emerge.

So here’s to allowing. To silence. To patience. To a willingness to tolerate uncertainty. Here’s to sitting through discomfort. To trusting the process. To planting a seed and allowing it to grow (without feeling the need to dig it up repeatedly, just to check that something’s happening). Not that I’ve ever done that, of course…

*Oh go on then. I can’t help resist linking to this. The ultimate in musical silence. (Some of the YouTube comments are pretty entertaining too…)

From inside a cloud…

Looking out of the window this morning, it would appear that the entire town of Wotton-under-Edge is inside a cloud.

This has happened twice this week and many times over the years I’ve lived here. For a little while everything disappears into a damp white blur, making it impossible to see more than a short distance in any direction.

It always makes me smile, because it feels uncannily similar to something that occurs inside my head from time to time.

Some days I find it’s just not possible to see clearly. My beautiful long-distance views of life get obscured for a while and I become disorientated and lost. I lose all certainty about what I’m doing and why it matters and who and what I might be in the first place. Everything disappears into an existentially-bewildering cloud.

This can be a disconcerting experience in a world that seems to place a high value on ‘knowing’ and ‘being right about things’. We can imagine that we are supposed to have answers and be acting on them now.

On these days I have adopted a policy of one-foot-in-front-of-the-other-ness: of taking whatever seems to be a reasonable, useful step in a direction that looks just about right and then seeing how things look once I get there. I find that each step seems to reveal slightly more of the path ahead. Sooner or later I’m not in the cloud any more.

There can be relief in embracing the not-knowingness of these days. In realising that it isn’t actually very important to understand and feel in control of everything – that what matters is showing up and doing the best one can, whatever that looks like.

Little by little, I’m learning that the world seems to keep turning even when I don’t quite understand how. (Phew.) Life feels a lot gentler and less overwhelming as a result.

So I’m curious…do you have cloudy days too?

If so, how do you find your way through them?

On silliness (and tea cosies)

“Never trust a man who, when left alone with a tea cosy, doesn’t try it on.” Billy Connolly

I don’t know if this is a universal thing, but from time to time* I find myself being what can only be described as….silly.

Not silly in an endearing way. Not in an ‘I’m wearing a teacosy on my head in an attempt to make you smile’ kind of a way. Not that at all. (Though on good days I can do that too…)

Silly in an ‘I really don’t know what I’m doing and everything feels a bit wrong and important and I don’t like this very much’ kind of a way.

I notice that it takes just a short hop from this kind of silliness to finding myself in the middle of arguments and self-righteousness and storming about. And just another short hop from there to staring gloomily into a future that looks terrible and must be avoided at all costs.

It’s very easy to take this kind of silliness really seriously. It seems to demand it of me. It can feel impolite to refuse.

But in the midst of the taking-seriously, I find there is relief in seeing that it’s really just silliness underneath.

Instead of coming up with explanations and blaming and flouncing, I’m learning that I can simply say – to myself and those around me – “Please bear with me, I don’t know what I’m doing today. I’m going to try again tomorrow.”

And very often, when tomorrow arrives, I’ve forgotten what I was getting all flouncy about anyway.

So I’m curious…do you do ‘silly’ too?

If so, how do you handle it?

*Ok, so when I say ‘from time to time’, what I actually mean is, ‘quite often’.