Lisa Find Love

Self-care. Hard Work. We don’t normally think of them together.

We think of self-care as passive and sensitive: relaxing, taking “us” time, listening to our bodies.

Hard work, we associate with action and strength: digging deep, never losing focus, going for the goal. Compared to hard work, self-care feels “soft.”

Yet many of history’s most accomplished people considered self-care an integral part of their success. Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule designated time for reading, music, conversation, and diversion. Oprah starts each morning with twenty minutes of meditation. During his time in the White House, Barak Obama woke up 2 hours early to exercise. These people exemplify those who see self-care as a necessary piece of their lives. So why do so many of us think self-care is a luxury?

First, we think self-care is optional.

Self-care has become associated with R&R, rest and relaxation. We picture spas, long walks, and cups of tea. Indulgence. Something for people who have time to relax, time to “be happy.”

Second, we think hard work means sacrifice.  

We believe in order to work hard, we must deprioritize our happiness. By abandoning self-care, we show the world that we value our goal(s) more than we value self-indulgence. We see people who prioritize self-care as lazy, unwilling to put in the sacrifice it takes to be successful.  

It’s time to change that thinking.

What is Self-Care Really?

Begin with the definition of self-care: “the practice of taking an active role in protecting one’s own well-being and happiness.” The key word is active. Self-care is not a passive practice. It is actively identifying and fulfilling our needs.

What are needs? Needs are the things our bodies and minds request to operate at the level of well-being we desire. When your blood sugar is low, your need is to raise it. When you’re tired, your need may be to rest, or to engage in energy-raising activity.

When we do not address our needs, they weigh on us. We can ignore them for a while, but it takes energy. Energy we would rather use for hard work.

Self-care occurs anytime we recognize a need and address it. If you need to raise your blood sugar, your self-care is to eat. If you’re tired, your self-care might be a nap, going to the gym, or any activity that makes you less tired. Self-care is a tool. It allows us to maintain our well-being and focus our attention where we want it. Self-care is hard work’s wingman.

Sometimes self-care isn’t as effective as we want. Humans are complicated. We misidentify a need, or the self-care we think will work simply doesn’t, or we just have a low day. But like any tool, the more we use it, the more effective it becomes.

The Two Types of Self-Care

One way we can break down self-care is to divide it into two categories: growth and recovery.

• Growth Self-Care: This is self-care we perform with the intention of self-improvement: exercise, taking a class, seeing friends, making something, etc. These tend to involve some level of energetic output.
• Recovery Self-Care: When we have used a lot of energy, recovery self-care is how we recharge. Taking a shower, playing video games, changing into comfortable clothing, a nap… often times recovery self-care includes more traditional R&R practices.  

Some activities fit both categories. To one person, playing an instrument might be growth self-care, if he or she focuses on improvement. To another, there’s no desire to improve but playing provides recovery self-care that helps them unwind. 

When our needs change, our self-care changes. After a boring day at the office, growth self-care may give us energy. After a busy day, a stay-at-home parent may require recovery self-care, a chance to rest and recharge. On the other hand, an exhausting day at the office may call for recovery self-care, and a slow day at home may result in a craving for growth.

We often believe that growth self-care is “better,” which makes sense–our society values dedication and effort. It is more in our nature to tell ourselves “I worked hard at the gym today” than “I worked hard lying on the couch watching TV today.” There’s nothing wrong with preferring one type over the other, as long as we acknowledge each has a time and place.

Choosing the Right Self-Care

The trick to self-care is learning to identify the self-care practices that work for us. This is harder than it sounds — is wearing your favorite sweater self-care? Petting a neighborhood cat? Ignoring a text? Taking a taxi instead of the subway?

We can explore our self-care using 3 steps: collecting data, categorizing, and reflecting.

• Collecting Data: Start a log of 3-5 things you enjoyed throughout the day. Some people call this a gratitude journal, but it doesn’t require any journaling, a simple list will do. This is a concrete way to begin acquiring an understanding of a very basic thing–what makes you feel good? It doesn’t need to be activities- it can be something as simple as a thought (“I enjoyed thinking about what I’m going to wear during my vacation next month”) or an experience (“I enjoyed the taste of my chocolate chip cookie.”) For many of us, we think well-being is abstract, and we have no idea about the small, day-to-day things that bring us enjoyment. Yes, a spa day is a lovely occasion, but for many of us a hot shower is a reality we can experience every day.
• Categorizing: After keeping a journal for a few weeks, sit down and categorize it into growth or recovery self-care. Reorganizing your closet? Probably growth. Coming home and changing into pajamas? Perhaps recovery. Some things may fall into both categories, which is fine. This isn’t black and white, just a way to see how we use the tool of self-care.
• Reflecting: Once you’ve categorized your self-care, explore it. This is the fun part! Are there repetitions? Is growth or recovery more common? If so, can you guess why? Was it hard to make a list every day? Are there self-care practices that feel more potent than others?

When we do this, we begin to explore whether our current self-care strategies meet our needs. For example: you feel lonely and decide to spend time with friends, but afterwards feel exhausted. Perhaps you need a different form of self-care, or additional self-practices to address this feeling.      

Take It Slow

We do best when we don’t jump into any big changes, but start looking at self-care with curiosity. The worst thing we can do is attempt a “self-care makeover,” declaring 10+ new things we will do every day. Like any extreme lifestyle change, it often fails. Instead, we can begin by asking three simple questions:

1. What is my hard work today?
2. What are my needs today?
3. What self-care could fulfill them?

When we explore these concepts gradually, we begin to see how they work (and don’t work) for us. Each of us is different, with our own needs and self-care practices.

Finally, do self-care and hard work HAVE to co-exist?

The answer is… maybe. It depends on how we define hard work, and how we identify our needs. For one person, spending 15 hours focused on a task may leave them perfectly happy. For others, it may leave them needing to address several needs.

When we start to understand the relationship between self-care and hard work, we see the value in letting them work together. Self-care is not an obstacle to hard work; our needs are the obstacles. Self-care is the way we clear the path.

Most importantly, recognize that self-care is not indulgent; it is a tool. Don’t leave it in the corner. Pull it out, learn to use it, and build.  

Perhaps this scenario sounds familiar: You decide to change a behavior that isn’t serving you (like quitting smoking or spending less time on electronics) or you want to add a behavior into your daily life that you know would be good for you (eating healthier, going to the gym regularly). You set goals for yourself, you have the best of intentions, and maybe you even get off to a good start. But somewhere along the way you become impatient and frustrated with your slow progress, or you take a step backwards, and you start to berate yourself for not being able to make the change “yet again!” Before you know it, your inner critic has sabotaged your progress and you are back where you started, feeling deeply disappointed and discouraged.

How do we make changes in the face of these familiar challenges, when it feels like we are continually self-sabotaging our efforts or simply getting stuck along the way by the negativity in our own head?

1. First, you can remind yourself that this is a common struggle. 

Most of us have an inner critic, giving us a running commentary about our lives that is often negative, exaggerated, self-critical, distorted, inaccurate, or unhelpful. In my new book Dancing on the Tightrope: Transcending the Habits of Your Mind and Awakening to Your Fullest Life, I refer to this voice as the “Noisy Person in the Movie Theater.” 

It’s like sitting down in a movie theater, just trying to enjoy your movie, and having some noisy person sit next to you and start to give you a running commentary throughout the movie (e.g., “Can you believe she just did that? That is so stupid! This is terrible… I can see where this is going and it’s not going to end well!” — etc.).

Our own inner voice often attaches a narrative or story to the experiences in our lives that can more often than not have a negative or self-critical tone (especially when we face difficulties). It can help to remind ourselves that we are not alone in this internal struggle, and there is nothing “wrong” with us that our minds default to this kind of narrative. That being said, we can learn to do some things to help!

2. Become more aware of this voice in your head and try to catch it when it first starts to talk to you.  

Often this voice skirts underneath the surface of our conscious awareness. We “talk” to ourselves all day long, but often we aren’t paying attention. Mindful awareness is a wonderful tool! I often teach that mindful awareness is like carrying around a flashlight as we go through our day, so we can see clearly what is there. It involves paying attention to what is arising with a quality of compassionate and kind attention, in an intentional and non-judgmental way. From this place we can observe thoughts and emotions without getting as swept away by them.

As soon as you recognize you are saying negative thoughts to yourself, you might experiment with writing the thoughts down on a piece of paper. Seeing them in front of us in this way often shifts the way we view them. It creates a little distance and helps us to realize that these thoughts in our head are not necessarily “absolute truth” — but instead are mental constructs of our own creation.

3. Once you have written the thoughts down, look for any distortions or inaccuracies. 

You now have the opportunity to make your thoughts more accurate, and specific to the situation at hand. Ask yourself: Is this really true? What evidence do I have for or against this?  

What happens in my body when I believe these thoughts?  

Especially be wary of words like “always” and “never.” Even if some part of your thinking is true, are you making faulty generalizations that may not be completely accurate? 

Notice the difference between 

Version 1: 

“I can never stick with anything. I have failed every time I have tried to diet. I am a loser!” 

and Version 2:

“Sticking to my diet has been really challenging. I seem to actually do really well for a while, and then I stop following it. This pattern has repeated itself several times. I have a lot of determination at first, and then I lose my motivation.”  

The first version would likely stop you in your tracks and make you give up. You have generalized this difficulty into an inescapable character flaw (I am a loser!). The second version might make you become more curious about what derails you. It is more accurate and specific to the situation. It leaves room to make some changes, because it addresses specific behaviors, not you as a person.

4. Look at the situation through the eyes of a friend, or imagine that your friend is going through something similar.

It is likely that you would not criticize and berate your friend, or see only the negatives in their situation. Instead of telling your friend “you are surely going to fail the way you did last time” you might acknowledge that changes of this sort are hard for most people. You might ask them “what part of your plan has worked for you, and where do you think you tend to get pulled astray?”  

You might ask them how you can best support them. Imagine if we talked to ourselves in this way! When we change our language and thoughts to be more self-compassionate, it gives us greater motivation to pursue and stick to our goals.¹

5. Ask yourself what discomfort you are likely to experience in an effort to reach your goals, and whether you are willing to turn toward it with open curiosity rather than resist it and run the other way.

If you are trying to eat healthier, chances are you will need to say no to certain foods that you might crave in the moment. Resisting something that is pleasurable, but that isn’t so good for you, can be uncomfortable. Likewise, having to go to the gym when you would rather sit on the couch and watch Netflix might also involve experiencing some discomfort. Research shows that when we turn toward our emotional discomfort (e.g., our food cravings, or our desire to play on our phones rather than go to the gym) with mindful curiosity rather than try to push the discomfort away, this can help us step out of the automatic reactivity of bad habits and make choices more aligned with our long-term goals.²

6. Focus on WHY you want to reach your goals. Researcher and health psychologist Kelly McGonigal suggests going deeply into the question of “why is this important to me?” by asking it three times to yourself in a row.³ When we focus on the value that is at the core of our goals, it helps us to stay committed to it. If your goal is to go to the gym three times a week this might be important to you because you want to be healthier. Why is it important for you to be healthy? Perhaps because you want to be able to have the energy to run around with your kids and be active in their lives. Why is that important to you? Perhaps because your own parents were unable to do this with you and you value that kind of connection and presence.  

7. Come up with specific actions for handling setbacks.  

Psychologist and author Dr. Robert Brooks writes about the importance of making a plan for handling setbacks in order to make important lifestyle and behavioral changes.⁴ This is often the place I see people struggle the most, when they hit a setback and don’t have a plan for how to handle it.  Once the person strays from their diet for a day or two and “blows it”, instead of seeing this as a setback from which they can recover, many people view this as a failure.  

Instead, it can be helpful to expect setbacks, and build them into your plan. 

For example: When I hit a setback I am going to see this an opportunity to practice being kind to myself. I am going to write myself a letter now that I can read when I come across a setback, to remind myself of my strengths, and my humanness. It is quite OK not to be perfect. This path to change is not linear. “Obstacles do not block the path. They are the path.” [Zen Proverb]

On a similar note, it can be very helpful to build in action plans for handling plateaus.  When change is not as fast as we hope, it can be disheartening.  We can think that we will NEVER get there.  We certainly won’t if we abandon our plan all together.  

Instead, we need to plan for these inevitable discouragements and come up with ways to bring rational thought and perspective to our long-term goals, in order to see a big picture.  Re-assessing our progress in short and long-term increments can be helpful.  Using all of the above strategies can also help to work through plateaus.

Want an even better chance of success?

Be specific about how you will implement a plan to help when you run up against a setback or challenge. Using implementation intentions (e.g., saying when situation X arises I will respond by doing Y) have been found to help people more effectively realize their goals.⁵

For example: When I start to crave the candy that is sitting in my work office today, I will go over and talk with my friend Cheryl, who always encourages me — or  I will go to my computer and read that article about how sugar may spike my insulin in unhealthy ways. I will also keep a notecard with me on hand, where I can write down and re-read why being healthy is so important to me, and read encouraging quotes about perseverance.

8. Think about something you have succeeded at, that may at first have been challenging.  

What did you do to make that happen? Maybe it was completing school and getting a degree, even though school may have been difficult. Maybe it was learning how to play a sport, or teaching yourself a new computer program or other skill. Maybe it was giving a talk, or going up and introducing yourself to new people. Make note of what helped you to achieve that goal.  

What steps did you take to help you succeed? What mindset did you have? What did you do when you felt like giving up? Write these things down on a piece of paper so you can get a good look at them.  

Chances are, you already have a lot of inner resources to help you that you can now apply to this new situation!  

When your inner critic starts yelling at you, remind yourself of these previous successes and the steps you took to achieve them. Kindly tell your inner critic that you know he or she is anxious and deep down really just wants you to succeed — and in fact, you already know how to do this. Just ask your inner critic to sit in the back seat, like you might lovingly place a small child, while you step back into the driver’s seat and take the next helpful step forward.

Adapted from in interview published on Mind Mastery Lab. 

Footnotes:

1. Breines, J.G., & Chen, S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality and Psychology Bulletin, 38(9),1133-1143. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2AkZGoI
2. Brewer, J. (2017, November 10). A simple way to break a bad habit. Mindful. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2yqYA7z
3. Goodman, N. (2014, December 9). The science of setting goals [blog post]. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2AonpnY
4. Brooks, R. (2011, December 15). Realistic Lifestyle Changes: A Positive Approach to Nurturing Our Health [blog post]. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2Ss6CHD
5. Gollwitzer, P.M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7): 493-503). Retrieved from http://bit.ly/15cJYSA

How do you raise an emotionally healthy child in a world that seems focused on selfies, immediate gratification, and constant stimulation?

It is a question that has likely troubled many parents, teachers, and caregivers. The answer, says Maureen Healy, begins with three simple words: stop, calm, and make a smarter choice. She writes, “Emotional health is based on the ability to make better choices, even when feeling anger or another big emotion.”

In her new book, The Emotionally Healthy Child: Helping Children Calm, Center, and Make Smarter Choices Healy draws on her vast experience, both as an overactive child and a leader in the field of children’s emotional health, to offer the knowledge, skills, and strategies parents need to raise children who can respond mindfully — even in the face of emotional challenges.

“One of the challenges of emotions is that the tricky or challenging ones usually have speed, and to stop requires skill and practice. Just saying, “Stop that” isn’t enough to slow a fast moving car; one needs to know how to apply the emotional brakes, come to a stop and then move in another direction,” writes Healy.

One large part of what children (and adults) need to learn is to experience uncomfortable emotions and constructively express them. Emotional intelligence begins with first identifying emotions, expressing them constructively, applying self-control, responding instead of reacting, and making smarter choices, even when challenged.

Healy quotes David Caruso, who says, “Emotional intelligence is not the opposite of intelligence, it is not the triumph of heart over head — it is the unique intersection of both.”

Often, parents fail to recognize that their children are responding from their right brain, which carries their emotional needs, and asking them to apply logic simply won’t work.

Healy writes, “Helping our emotional (right-brain) children bring their reason and logic (left-brain) into the decision-making equation earlier is central to raising emotionally healthy children.”

The goal, however, is not to achieve a constant state of positive emotion. Rather, emotional health exists along a spectrum where at one end we harbor negative emotions, respond quickly and thoughtlessly, and make careless choices, and at the other we exhibit healthy choices, use self-awareness and an awareness of others, and actively cultivate positive emotions.

“The path toward positive emotional health is one of increasing a child’s awareness of self and others while building skills, gaining understanding (knowledge turned into wisdom) and making smarter choices (good for them and good for others),” writes Healy.

And this path is the first step toward happiness, which, Healy tell us, comes from facing challenges. The role of parents and professionals then, is to help children see their challenges not as final outcomes, but rather experiences that can be used to spur growth.

Because happiness, emotional balance, compassion, and altruism are all skills, they need to be actively developed and practiced, which is where education comes in. To begin, parents first have to create a strong emotional connection with their children.

“Children must feel like their feelings matter, that you appreciate their perspective, (although you may not agree with them) and want them to be happy. Said simply, they must feel you are on their emotional team versus against them,” writes Healy.

Children also need to learn that while emotions can be strong and overwhelming at times, they are temporary, and their natural state is that of joy. All emotions, however, can be useful. Healy writes, “Helping children realize that emotions are neither good nor bad but simply signals is essential to their positive emotional development.”

One of the first tools parents can use is to recognize their own emotional balance. By becoming aware of the triggers, cues, and events that lead to their own emotional imbalance, parents can learn how to regain their emotional footing and, in the process, demonstrate this to their children.

While children’s behavior can be frustrating for parents, all behavior is a signal for the underlying emotions. “Most of the time children aren’t being difficult on purpose — they merely don’t have the skills yet to handle their overwhelming and fast-moving emotions,” writes Healy.

Learning to slow down also opens the door for children to begin to experience and practice mindfulness, which, when learned early in life, leads to the behaviors and habits that support a happy and peaceful life.

Healy quotes the National Research Council, “The attentive, caring, and wise voice of a supportive adult gets internalized and becomes part of the youth’s own voice.”

Parents give children a lifelong gift when they teaching children to center themselves, think, see, and feel mindfully. These children gain the ability to use positive emotions, emotional balance, and self-regulation to cultivate growth — even in the face of challenges.

Filled with the wisdom, real-life scenarios, immediately accessible tools and strategies, The Emotionally Healthy Child is an indispensable guide that is transformative not just for the child but for the relationship between a parent and child.

The Emotionally Healthy Child: Helping Children Calm, Center, and Make Smarter Choices
New World Library, October 2018
Paperback, 232 pages

Compassionate, loving relationships seem to be the crucible of our lives. We desperately want to feel loved, needed, and close to another, and yet at the same time, quite often the experience terrifies us.

Moreover, coming from challenged or even dysfunctional patterns of intimacy, we are often not equipped to create what we want in relationships — or what we think we want.

In their new book, Relationship Sanity: Creating and Maintaining Healthy Relationships, Mark B. Borg, Grant H. Brenner, and Daniel Berry provide the experience, knowledge, and tools to help us understand and navigate what is often the most complicated and confusing part of our lives and, in the process, develop the compassion, empowerment and mutuality that define resilient relationships.

“We have found in our work that there is a common but seldom-articulated reality for many people: frightened as we may be of rejection and loneliness, many of us are even more frightened of what may happen if we’ve discovered and accepted ourselves as we really are,” Borg, Brenner, and Berry write.

“An invitation to accept care is also an invitation to empathize with our own history of love and loss,” the authors write.

While giving reveals our potency and aliveness, accepting care exposes our vulnerability and the anxiety that comes with it. And yet as much as we may be consciously aware of the energy expenditure of our actions in the relationship, we rarely consider the ways in which declining the caretaking and giving efforts of our partner deprive them of a feeling of value.

The authors write, “When we do not accept, when we reject what others offer, we do not acknowledge or affirm the value of what it is they have to give.”

In what is known as an irrelationship — also the title of the authors’ first book — people develop dysfunctional patterns based on their primary relationships and then carry these patterns into their adult relationships.

“Children who grow up in households that discourage spontaneity and reciprocity are likely to grow into adults who demand carefully scripted romantic relationships,” write the authors.

The investment that partners in irrelationships make is essentially to avoid having a relationship that includes spontaneity, passion, and authentic vulnerability.

What often emerges are caretaking patterns characterized by implicit agreements: I diligently provide for you but feel resentful about it; I accept your caretaking but feel unheard and unable to express what I really need.

However, emotions, regardless of how systematically we attempt to extinguish them, do not vanish.

“Sooner or later,” the authors write, “some experience apparently unrelated to our denied feelings will trigger an overwhelming emotional response that seems to come out of nowhere.”

Yet these experiences can also open the door for change. By allowing compassionate empathy to disable our avoidance of vulnerability — and the patterns that define it — and exploring our old ideas, feelings, and needs about relationships, we can develop what is known as an “earned secure attachment.”

Here, the authors offer several techniques, such as GRAFTS, which uses the descriptors good, right, absent, funny, tense, and smart to help reveal characteristic roles and rules that we may have inherited from childhood.

“It is the process of giving and receiving care that forms the foundation of relationship sanity, which is the best way to work through irrelationship and the key to building and maintaining healthy relationships in our life,” write the authors.

While irrelationship may be an attempt to protect us from vulnerability with those close to us, we can learn to practice compassionate empathy.

“Compassionate empathy,” write the authors, “opens us up to intimacy — genuinely knowing, experiencing, and caring for other human beings to whom we are drawn and vice versa. It’s a reciprocal process that makes the co-ownership of a relationship possible.”

This co-ownership is also understood as what the authors call self-other help. In self-other help, we learn healthy interdependence and the shared awareness of how individual tendencies join to create either an irrelationship pattern or relationship sanity.

Also known as the 40-20-40 rule, where 20 percent represents what partners create together and 40 percent represents what they individually contribute, we learn to accept our partner as they are without undermining their individuality or failing to take responsibility for our own.

Nurturing this middle ground in relationships is not just the foundation of healthy interdependence and relationship sanity, but also how we together discover unhealthy patterns, repair what is broken, empower ourselves and our partners, find alternative patterns that bring us more connection, joy, and growth, and cultivate mutuality and togetherness.

Drawing on their extensive experience, Borg, Brenner, and Berry offer a roadmap — complete with exercises, techniques, and assessment charts — to help us better understand how to define, create, and cultivate a deep and authentic connection with our partners, and in the process overcome our own barriers to intimacy.

Relationship Sanity: Creating and Maintaining Healthy Relationships
Central Recovery Press, October 2018
Paperback, 264 pages

Most adults are familiar with the topic of Alzheimer’s disease, but how many of us have had the opportunity to sit down with someone with Alzheimer’s and learn about their personal experience with the disease?

Wendy Mitchell set about changing the narrative around Alzheimer’s with her memoir, Somebody I Used to Know. At fifty-eight, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She was working full-time and mothering her two twenty-something daughters, and as soon as she got the diagnosis, she began documenting her experiences with the disease through a blog called “Which Me Am I Today?”

Her memoir is a summary of her experiences that starts with her diagnosis in July 2014. The book is written from two perspectives: First, Mitchell details her day-to-day life from a first-person perspective, then she juxtaposes her memories against a second-person narrative of her present experiences. The differing views provide an intricate and amplified perspective of what it’s like to live with Alzheimer’s.

Mitchell’s story slowly unfurls by describing the initial symptoms that appeared — tripping while running, losing words periodically. As things progressed and more tests are run, she is finally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Mitchell’s true character is revealed when she begins volunteering and getting involved with Alzheimer’s support groups and research. Not only does this provide insight into who she is with or without Alzheimer’s, but also provides further insight into some of the gaping holes in research, support and care for Alzheimer’s patients.

One of the most helpful points in Mitchell’s memoir is her description of Alzheimer’s. She asks readers to visualize an individual’s memories as books on bookshelves. The books are in a particular order on each shelf, and each shelf is in order with the rest of the shelves, similar to what you would see in a library.

Now imagine that Alzheimer’s is like an earthquake that causes all of the bookshelves to shake. Once the shaking is done, the books have fallen onto other shelves, have mixed their order, or fallen off the shelves completely. When we consider this description, perhaps it is easier to understand why a patient’s ability to remember and function vary wildly from one day to the next.

For those who have little exposure to patients with Alzheimer’s, Mitchell’s memoir provides a wealth of education. For instance, Mitchell describes how her new home became a frightening environment where closed doors suddenly held perilous mysteries behind them. To combat this fear, Mitchell removed doors that were not necessary or labeled them so she knew what was behind them. I was also surprised by how her hearing became more sensitive. The noise of the world outside her home became overwhelming and painful. But Mitchell thought creatively about the situation and purchased bright pink earplugs that allowed her to hear but blunted the noise to a survivable degree.

Mitchell’s memoir was unabashedly honest about her struggles but also humbly descriptive of unending creativity to solve or mitigate some of the issues caused by her condition. In almost every circumstance where her disease caused a new, unexpected issue, Mitchell would quickly develop a new approach to handle the situation.

In one instance, she was preparing to email a friend when she realized she could not remember how to type words. The letters on the keyboard suddenly lost meaning, but she was still able to read her friend’s email. Mitchell responded to her friend’s email with random letters. After some back and forth, her friend started coaching her through email to copy the letters she was seeing and practice typing until her brain recognized the letters and remembered how to type.

The one thing that struck me the most was the overwhelming emotional burden Alzheimer’s seemed to bring. It was not just the grief of losing a life she knew, but also the guilt she felt about becoming a burden to anyone. With adult daughters who were only just starting their independent lives, Mitchell was keenly aware of the burden she could become. She described several interactions she witnessed between patients and their caregivers and mentioned more than once the guilt that was visibly apparent on the patient’s face.

Somebody I Used to Know is an in-depth memoir that draws a reader in quickly. Wendy Mitchell is a natural storyteller with integrity and vulnerability, and her description of her experience is more than thorough; it is poignant and touching.

Somebody I Used to Know
Ballantine Books, January 2018
Paperback, 272 pages

“Self-awareness leads us to question who we are and why we exist,” writes Eric R. Kandel.

Seeking answers to questions like this is what makes us human, but how do we explain how our consciousness arises from the physical matter that is our brain?

In his new groundbreaking book, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves, acclaimed neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel looks not at the brain in function, but rather conditions such as schizophrenia, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, Parkinson’s and addiction to help us uncover what it means to be human.

While disruptions of brain function can be traumatic and frightening, they can also give us tremendous insight into how the brain functions.

Just one example is the remarkable instances of creativity seen with schrizophrenia and bipolar disorder — which arise from the same connections between brain, mind, and behavior seen in everyone.

Kandel writes, “As research into the brain and mind advances, it appears increasingly likely that there are actually no profound differences between neurological and psychiatric illnesses and that as we understand them better, more and more similarities will emerge.”

Research with autistics has uncovered that integral to grasping the theory of mind is understanding both behavioral intention and facial expression — two abilities that are challenging for those with autism.

Insights such as this have led us to also understand the purpose of social interaction more completely.

Kandel describes the work of Leslie Brothers of UCLA School of Medicine, who argued that “social interaction requires a network of interconnected brain regions that process social information and together give rise to a theory of mind; she coined the term social brain to describe this network.”

Exploring the brains of autistics and schizophrenics through the lens of synaptic pruning has also given rise to new insights. In adolescents with autism, Kandel tells us, synaptic pruning, which begins in childhood and peaks in adolescence and early adulthood, is underactive, resulting in too many synapses in the brains of autistics. Interestingly, the opposite is true for schizophrenics, whose brains have too few synapses.

Synaptic connections, we also know, are vulnerable to stress. Kandel writes, “Excessive concentrations of cortisol destroy synaptic connections between neurons and the hippocampus, the region of the brain that is important in memory storage, and neurons in the prefrontal cortex, which regulates a person’s will to live and influences a person’s decision making and memory storage.”

Prolonged stress, which is implicated in the development of depression, also changes the functioning of the brain such that people with depression often present with an enlarged and overactive amygdala, which help may account for feelings of hopelessness, mental anguish, and sadness.

Interestingly, in patients with schizophrenia, exploring how antipsychotic medications work — and especially their undesired side effects — has helped to give some clues into the etiology of schizophrenia.

Kandel writes, “Since these drugs produced the same effects on movement as Parkinson’s disease, which is caused by a deficiency in the modulatory neurotransmitter dopamine, scientists reasoned that the drugs might act by reducing dopamine in the brain. They also reasoned, by extension, that schizophrenia might result in part from excessive action of dopamine.”

For autism, mood disorders, and schizophrenia alike, brain imaging has given way to incredible advances in our understanding, particularly of how psychotherapy might be effective.

“Imaging has also confirmed that psychotherapy is a biological treatment — that it physically changes the brain, as drugs do,” write Kandel.

Work on memory loss has uncovered just how exercise may preserve not just the body but the mind. Bone, we now know, is an endocrine organ that releases a hormone called osteocalcin, which acts on many organs and as Kandel writes, “also gets into the brain, where it promotes spatial memory and learning by influencing the production of serotonin, dopamine, GABA, and other neurotransmitters.”

“We know that aging is associated with a decrease in bone mass and that the resulting decrease of osteocalcin contributes to age related memory loss in mice, and possibly in us as well,” writes Kandel.

Much like how exploring the brain activity that explains some kinds of memory loss has uncovered new insights, epidemiological study into addictions has helped us understand just how some addictive drugs may pave the way for using other addictive drugs.

Kandel writes, “Exposing animals to nicotine modifies their dopamine-receiving neurons in such a way that they respond more powerfully to cocaine.”

Studies on creativity have also helped us understand the conscious and unconscious process that lead to aha moments.

Kandel describes how creative people experience moments where communication between the conscious and unconscious becomes possible. He writes, “Because unconscious thinking is freer and more likely to be associative — it is characterized by images as opposed to abstract concepts — it facilitates the emergence of aha moments that promote new combinations or permutations of ideas.”

Kandel’s insights have elevated the biological study of the mind to center stage and in doing so, changed the way we understand a host of psychiatric conditions, as well as how we view ourselves, others, and what it means to be human.

The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2018
Hardcover, 304 pages

Stan and the Four Fantastic Powers is a richly dynamic book with a powerful and inspiring message, and it is the first book to be written based on the concepts, practice, and research behind Appreciative Inquiry (AI), a system of intervention shown to have a direct impact on well-being. It was written by children for children with input from Appreciative Inquiry expert Marge Schiller, her two grandchildren, Sarah and Max Schiller, school psychologist and positive psychology practitioner Shira Levy, and artist Stefanie Rudolph.

The book weaves together traditional storytelling and reader engagement by first creating a strong, clear problem and protagonist: Lincoln Elementary School’s swing set has crashed and can’t be used. A shy student and unlikely hero gets the nod to figure out how to mobilize social capital and resources to get the thing rebuilt.

It’s a simple enough story, but with a twist that delivers a dynamically powerful message. The book offers the reader a way of understanding what is possible when we combine our strengths with the strengths of others. Stan not only learns how to work with the unique powers (strengths) of others, he learns how to discover his own (natural) powers in the combined effort to get this swing set back. Stan’s grandmother, wise and wonderful Nonna, helps reveal the secrets to him of:

• ME Power: discovering strengths
• SEE Power: dreaming future possibilities
• WE Power: working as a team to develop goals and a plan
• DO Power: delivering the plan

The net result here is a book (and a beautifully illustrated and helpful workbook called The Great Question Guide) that invites discussion, understanding, and a touch of wonderment for students. By using the principles of Appreciative Inquiry, this book provides proven methods to facilitate positive and productive changes. AI is an award-winning method used to help improve productivity in businesses and schools, often resulting in increased curiosity, creativity, questioning, collaboration, empowerment, self-esteem, confidence, sense of identity, and hope. It does all this by fostering better relationships, social skills, and community connectedness. Stan and the Four Fantastic Powers takes the principles behind this success methodology and creates a story and workbook that brings to life AI’s core principles. For more information from the publisher, check here.

But can a children’s book provide transformational inspiration that will last a lifetime?

As I write this I can see over my right shoulder my favorite children’s book: Doctor Dan: The Bandage Man (Western Publishing Company, Inc., Racine, Wisconsin). This 20-page Golden Book was issued in 1950, and it was the very first children’s book I owned. I carried it around with me as a child, asked my parents to read it to me repeatedly, and saw it as a sort of compass, although I didn’t know it at the time. That was more than six decades ago. The inspiration, no doubt, came from the fact it had my name in the title. But, like the protagonist in the story, I too wanted to be called “Dr. Dan.” I wanted to help people and make things better. Although I didn’t become a medical doctor, I did become a psychologist, and the nickname came along with it.

Did that one book early on provide such a serious push in my life? I don’t know. But I do know that the story, the title, and the resonance with some yet unformed desire sparked me in a way that I am not sure would have happened otherwise.

We need stories of hope and transformation for young people to relate to, learn from, and be inspired by. Stan and the Four Fantastic Powers is such a book, and I highly recommend this for parents, educators, coaches, counselors, and therapist who work with children. It is based on solid research about how people can best tap into their strengths and the strengths of others and is accompanied by a thoughtful workbook that helps to guide engagement and instruction. You would be hard-pressed to find something so well put together, so timely, and so necessary.

Stan and the Four Fantastic Powers: The First Ever Appreciative Inquiry Book for Kids
Tao Institute Publications, June 2018
Paperback, 40 pages

Even for seasoned therapists, child therapy can be challenging. Children often do not want to talk about difficult feelings, can be hesitant to open up, and may be in the role of the “identified patient.” Moreover, parents often present with their own desires and requests for the therapist and may not see their role in improving the psychological functioning of their child. In some cases, they may even refuse to be involved in treatment.

And while many therapeutic modalities target some component of the child’s needs — such as CBT appraisals to help them better manage their responses to distressing feelings — no approach is complete.

Better, says Kenneth Barish, to consider the emotional needs of the child and the painful, infectious family patterns that lead to poor psychological functioning for the family and the child.

In his new book, How to Be a Better Child Therapist: An Integrative Model for Therapeutic Change, Barish offers a clear, thoughtful way to understand the emotional and behavioral problems of childhood, a powerful overarching therapeutic goal, and ten effective and practical principles to help any therapist improve the way they treat children and their families.

“Even as we increasingly recognize the importance of emotion awareness and emotional regulation (or more broadly emotional intelligence) in child development, theories of child psychopathology and clinical interventions frequently fail to consider specific emotions and the causal role of emotions in determining children’s behavior,” writes Barish.

The search for positive emotions is a fundamental motivation for us all, and in children, this motivation emerges as what is known as the SEEKING system. As Barish explains, SEEKING is not a separate emotion but rather what underpins all emotional experience.

Citing neuropsychologist Douglas Watts, Barish explains that damage to this neural pathway not only results in diminished interest and curiosity, but a shutdown of emotional experience, and “virtually any motivated behavior disappears.”

An extreme example of this emotional pain is a core affective state, which Edwin Schneidman describes as “unbearable, intolerable, and unacceptable” and helps us understand suicide. For children, when the SEEKING system shuts down, the result is a shift in their expectations of what is possible.

Barish writes, “When bad feelings remain active, when children spend too much time feeling angry, discouraged, or alone, the consequences are widespread and profound. These children and adolescents anticipate criticism and misunderstanding instead of encouragement and support. Over time, the encouraging inner voice all children need to bounce back becomes eroded. They are therefore likely to withdraw or give up when presented with challenges, or make urgent and unreasonable demands, or find self-destructive way of coping with emotional pain.”

Bad feelings that do not go away not only are characteristic in depression but also lead to a central feeling of demoralization in children. These troubled children, Barish writes, “for complex reasons of temperament and life experience have become discouraged… They do not expect well.”

At the core of emotional health is positive expectations. In good health, children learn that bad feelings are a part of life and although they are painful, they do not last. Further, they can look to their parents to help them mitigate these bad feelings and find ways to cope with them.

Barish writes, “At every stage of life, we all need an encouraging and comforting inner voice, someone who appreciates our strengths, recognizes our potential, has confidence in us, and is proud of us.”

A fundamental component of successful child therapy then is to help children learn that bad feelings do not last forever and to help build and strengthen positive expectations for the future.

Successful child therapy also causes a shift in the functioning of the child’s family.

“Our most successful interventions then set in motion positive cycles of healthy emotional and interpersonal experiences: increased confidence and engagement in life and affirming interactions between parents and children,” write Barish.

How we turn vicious cycles into positive ones, Barish tells us, relies on the therapeutic principles of interest, empathy, repair, problem solving, emotional regulation, encouragement, play, sleep, helping others, and limits and discipline.

To help children effectively, therapists must also go beyond diagnosis. They must conceptualize the case in such a way that allows them to understand the child’s emotional needs, identify ongoing malignant patterns and pathogenic influences, and recognize and support the child’s strengths.

Showing interest helps to engage children in therapy and when performed by parents, helps to strengthen parent-child interactions.

Successful therapy, with a child or adult, is also not possible without empathy. Empathy is essential to mitigate suffering and is the lifeblood of social bonding.

“Each expression of a therapist’s empathy – in any form whether spoken or unspoken, consciously formulated or unconsciously enacted – arrests the spread of potentially malignant psychological events in the mind of the child,” writes Barish.

Play is also a critical component of children’s lives and one that, when done between parents and children, helps children improve both their emotional health and behavioral adjustment.

Through promoting frequent affirming interactions between parents and children, repairing moments of criticism, anger and misunderstanding, and engaging children in proactive solutions to family problems, therapists can play a pivotal role in changing the trajectory of children’s lives, and strengthening the family systems that nurture them.

Beginning with a conceptual understanding of children’s emotional needs, Barish integrates a wide range of therapeutic modalities into an approach that is clear, practical, and eminently useful. This book should be required reading for any therapist working with children.

How to Be a Better Child Therapist: An Integrative Model for Therapeutic Change
W.W. Norton & Company, August 2018
Hardcover, 218 pages

At a time when we are relentlessly urged to do better, be better, improve ourselves, be happy, and display our happiness for all to see, what a relief it would be to take seriously the message of Heather Havrilesky’s new book: Maybe what we already have and who we already are — flaws included — is enough.

In What If This Were Enough?, a series of 19 loosely connected essays, Havrilesky explores the products, gurus, and experiences that promise to deliver to us the happiness and success that we crave.

Ultimately, though, even if we accomplish what we wished for, it is not enough. We still feel anxious and unhappy. “Many of us learn to construct a clear and precise vision of what we want,” Havrilesky notes, “but we’re never taught how to enjoy what we actually have.” She urges us to savor our everyday life “without looking ahead to what we’ll post on Facebook about it.”

In What If This Were Enough?, refreshing insights are intermixed with observations that, while true enough, sound like a rehash of points we have already heard many times before. Among the latter: There is too much pressure to be happy, or at least act that way. (Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided already nailed that.)

Even when they are enjoying unprecedented levels of wealth and resources, Americans can be quite anxious (so we’ve heard). We’re too obsessed with numbers (number of likes, number of retweets) when we should care more about real interactions with other people. Foodies are full of themselves, and in the big picture, the food revolution is not nearly as virtuous as it claims. Disneyland is supposed to be “the happiest place on earth,” but visitors are often miserable. Conversations with adults who have a wealth of fascinating life experiences can be boring.

Maybe, though, one of the reasons these kinds of arguments sound familiar is that Havrilesky has made them so. Some of the essays are revised versions of articles that were previously published as far back as 2010.

Heather Havrilesky wrote the “Ask Polly” advice column for New York Magazine for several years, and among the most engaging sections of the book are her discussions of the kinds of struggles readers wrote about most often. Her previous book, How to Be a Person in the World, a collection of some of her columns, was riveting.

Some of Havrilesky’s observations seem to tell part of the story of our time, while missing out on other relevant pieces. For example, she notes that the young people who wrote “Dear Polly” letters to her have “learned that no one should ever publicly reveal one’s doubts, anxieties, and ambivalence.”

At the same time, though, the current media landscape is teeming with personal essays; doubts, anxieties, and ambivalence are at the very heart of most of them. Similarly, she notes that we experience our anger as a personal failing. Though undoubtedly true for many, the claim sounds more like a half-truth at a time when several books about the transformative power of anger are selling briskly.

Havrilesky was the TV critic for Salon for seven years. Her brilliance as a cultural critic shines through on page after page of What If This Were Enough?. Whether the topic is “Mad Men,” “The Sopranos,” “Billions,” “Fifty Shades of Grey,” “Girls,” or “The Pioneer Woman,” Havrilesky has something smart to offer. Consider, for instance, what she has to say about how bright, competent women with personal deficiencies are portrayed (on shows such as “Homeland,” “Nurse Jackie,” and “Veep”), compared to similar men: “Their personality flaws or mental health issues were something they needed to be cured of or freed from — unlike, say, Monk, whose psychological tics were always portrayed as the adorable kernel of his genius.”

Another example of her wisdom is her take on Marie Kondo’s, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. “The question isn’t whether or not your stuff sparks joy,” Havrilesky notes. “The question is: ‘Can you spark joy all by yourself?’” About the fitness craze, she says, “The ‘extreme’ version of anything is now widely assumed to be an improvement on the original, rather than a perverse amplification of it.”

Heather Havrilesky is old enough to have experienced one of the most jolting before-and-after cultural experiences of recent history. Before the internet and iPhones and the whole panoply of communication technologies and new media, everyday life was dramatically different than it is now. In What If This Were Enough?, Havrilesky joins a whole cadre of similarly-situated authors and thinkers who are all trying to figure out what it all means. What is on offer to us in our lives sometimes seems infinite. In asking whether what we already have is enough, Havrilesky has taken on a profoundly important part of the puzzle. We need What If This Were Enough? and much more.

What if This Were Enough?
Doubleday, October 2018
Hardcover, 240 pages

While social workers have long espoused the importance of relationships and their impact on our psychological functioning, truly understanding those relationships requires understanding the brain as a social organ.

As Louis Cozolino, one of the nation’s leading authorities on neuroscience, says, “Each generation of mental health practitioners needs to be taught that although we look like separate beings, we are connected in deep and profound ways we are still coming to understand.”

In their latest edition of Neurobiology for Clinical Social Work: Theory and Practice, Janet R. Shapiro and Jeffrey S. Applegate dive into this new world to offer a foundational understanding of how neuroscience can inform not just a more sensitive and empathic practice, but one that is highly attuned to the physiological implications of trauma.

Human development is both complex and dynamic, intertwined with environmental factors, and changing in ways that are often not linear.

Shapiro and Applegate write, “As applied to the study of brain development, a nonlinear dynamic systems approach considers brain and nervous system development as a fluid process,” that is equally affected by innate individual factors and the relational and external environment.

Because of the complex interplay of environmental and person-specific factors, neurobiology has become an important part of understanding many psychological and behavioral phenomena, especially trauma.

We now know there are sensitive developmental periods when the brain is particularly effected by experience. Experiences during these periods determine brain plasticity and support the development of a “stability landscape.”

One example is the development of the orbitofrontal cortex, which develops between 6 months and 1 year of age.

Shapiro and Applegate write, “In order for the wiring of this area of the cortex to proceed normally, the infant must be engaged in exciting, intensely pleasurable, face-to-face interactions with a caregiver.”

Neuroscience has also opened the door to better understanding how gene expression may be influenced by environmental factors — what is known as epigenetics.

“From a social work perspective, the field of epigenetics provides an important framework for understanding the biological mechanisms by which environmental influences, both positive and negative, have an impact on a host of health and mental health conditions, including autoimmune disorders, heart disease, and cancer,” write the authors.

Understanding how emotions move between people further informs the relationship that develops between the social worker and the client. Memories, both conscious and unconscious, are stored in neural networks which activate physiological patterns.

As these neuronal firing patterns are activated more frequently, they become strengthened, increasing the probability that the network “remembers”.

In the case of traumatic experience, the person may only be aware of the physiological and emotional sensations and not necessarily the explicit memory of the experience.

However, trauma can overwhelm a person’s emotional capacity, leading to disruptions in cognition, learning, memory and relationships.

Shapiro and Applegate write, “For children who experience affective dysregulation in the context of caregiving experiences, what may be learned is a strategy of withdrawal to the self that, in turn, limits ongoing opportunities for learning in the context of dyadic interaction.”

Withdrawing may be one form of an “emotional command system” that offers a categorical understanding of affect driven responses. The authors point to the work of Panskeep, who described four emotional command systems: seeking and reward; rage; fear; and panic or separation-distress.

As experience generates associations between environmental experiences and internal states, what is often left behind are somatic markers that become part of our embodied knowledge about how we feel.

In interacting dyads, like that of the mother and child or the therapist and client, each partner affects the other’s self-regulation and together, they each achieve greater coherence and complexity.

However, in cases of severe emotional child abuse and neglect, these experiences can have physiological effects, such as reduced volume in the orbitofrontal cortex.

At-risk parents and children can often be characterized by atypical patterns of interaction, which, the authors write, “precipitate change in the early wiring of the brain in neurobiological and neurochemical processes that have import for the experience and regulation of affect.”

One dysfunctional pattern Shapiro and Applegate describe is that of scapegoating, where one family member is induced into either internalizing or externalizing anxiety, depression, or other distressing affects in order to reduce them in other family members — a process which jeopardizes all of the family members’ capacities for affect regulation.

“This dysfunctional pattern, over time, becomes encoded into the neural architecture of all family members, who sustain it in order to experience a sense of safety,” write the authors.

Disabling dysfunctional patterns and their neural residue begin with helping family members to become aware of how these warded-off affects shape family dynamics. Through psychoeducation and an exploration of family histories, high levels of distress can be diminished and the family can learn more cooperative, empathically-based communication that fosters neural and psychosocial integration.

Translating complex research into useful practice, Neurobiology for Clinical Social Work: Theory and Practice offers a foundational understanding of how attachment, memory, trauma, and relationships can influence client physiology, affect, and functioning, and offers clinicians powerful strategies to help clients shift from neuroadversity to neuroprotection.

Neurobiology for Clinical Social Work: Theory and Practice, 2nd Edition
W.W. Norton & Company, August 2018
Hardcover, 245 pages

Have you ever gotten into a Facebook argument about politics or religion or science? Have you ever been unfriended after those disagreements? This book can help you to understand why that happens, and how to change it.

Author Tali Sharot is a professor of cognitive neuroscience in the department of Experimental Psychology and the director of the Affective Brain Lab at University College London. In The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others, Sharot examines why people believe what they do and how we can use an understanding of neuroscience to encourage positive outcomes.

What do you think is the average compliance rate for restaurant workers washing their hands after going to the bathroom? It must be high, right? After all, there are those ubiquitous “Employees must wash hands before returning to work” signs in every bathroom.

I’ll give you a hint. It is about the same as the compliance rate for hospital workers.

I had my first trip to an emergency room the week before reading this part of the book, and I remembered the “Ask your nurse if s/he washed his/her hands” sign by the entry door, plainly visible from where I lay. At the time I didn’t ask the nurse, the doctor, or anyone else. Then a week later, I read that the compliance rate is 38% and I thought, maybe I should have asked. And then I thought, maybe I won’t go out to eat again, or maybe I should get a hepatitis A vaccination first.

As Sharot discussed in her previous work on optimism, we tend to underestimate the bad things that can happen to us. We won’t get ptomaine from the restaurant, and even if we do, surely we won’t get a hospital-acquired infection when we go for treatment. So what is the best way to get hospital workers to wash their hands?

I asked folks in a class of mine, and the one who actually worked in a hospital was for using the stick rather than the carrot — “observe the sinks and see who washed up.” Turns out, direct observation doesn’t work. Sharot writes about a project at a New York hospital ICU which had live video feeds with observers checking and recording the hand sanitation rate. Staff compliance was one out of ten.

What did work was an electronic board with immediate feedback on the compliance rate — current staff numbers, what percent of workers were currently washing their hands, and what the weekly rate was. Compliance immediately went up to 90%. As another student said, “They used clicker training on doctors.” It is a method also used to improve team performance in sports psychology. Rather than punishment and threat, the approach was a positive one.

Why does that positive approach work? Sharot says that we have a built-in bias to move toward rewards and away from pain. A fear of loss may bring no action. These are evolutionary short cuts wired into us because, overall, they have worked.

Sharot looks at not just how to change others, but ourselves. For example, our beliefs are very hard to change. She opens with a story about the September 16, 2015 Republican primary debate between Ben Carson and Donald Trump. The moderator asked Carson if Trump should stop stating there is a link between vaccines and autism.

Carson responded by saying there is no research supporting a link, and since Trump is intelligent, he would make the correct decision based on the facts. Trump chose to respond with a story about the out-of-control epidemic of autism, using an example of a beautiful child who was given a vaccine with a hypodermic that looked like it was made for a horse. A week later, the child got sick with a fever and became autistic.

Sharot, who is a scientist, said she felt panic and her emotions convinced her (for the moment) to believe the story of the giant hypodermic and the link that Carson clearly said was not supported by peer reviewed studies. Emotions overruled fact, and the story played into her need “for control and fear of losing it.” She felt Carson missed a chance to make a difference. But how do you respond to emotions that hijack your brain?

We are driven to give information. She writes that every day “four million new blogs are written; eighty million new Instagram photos are uploaded, and 616 million new Tweets are released into cyberspace.” She describes Twitter as the amygdala of the Internet because of its effect on emotional arousal, and that contagious arousal spreads. Messages are “fast, short, and transferred broadly.”

She discusses approach and avoidance, confirmation bias, the effects of threats and intimidation, how we are influenced by others, and more. I liked her alternative explanation to the classic marshmallow test. A child was given a marshmallow and told they could eat it now or wait a set length of time before eating it, and they would be given a second. The standard interpretation says that those who wait have self-control, and those are able to delay gratification inevitably do better over the course of a lifetime than those who are instant gratifiers.

But what if, maybe based on life experience, the kid just doesn’t trust that the researcher will come back with the second marshmallow? What if the child believes they may not even get to eat the marshmallow in hand if he or she waits? This may actually be a measure of trust and optimism rather than delayed gratification. In the same way, our cultural biases may affect what we see and how we interpret research if we aren’t careful.

One study she mentioned really struck me. There is a long waitlist for organs, and many people die every year waiting for a suitable organ. I did not know that every year “ten percent of donated kidneys in the United States go unused.” If someone chooses not to take a donated kidney because of religious or other reasons, the next person on the list is told that the organ was declined by the one ahead of them on the list, but not the person’s reason for choosing to take a pass. “That patient assumes that the organ is faulty and passes up a potentially lifesaving operation — as will the next patient and the next.”

Sharot’s underlying assumption is that our brains make us who we are. Obviously, the shortcuts our brains take are not always for the best. Her aim in this book is to give us a map of factors that affect our behavior and our influence on others’ behavior or decision making, and to give us more effective and positive ways to be. She does an excellent job.

The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others
Picador reprint edition, September 2018
Paperback, 256 pages

At this time of year, we’re surrounded by images and suggestions for gifts. A flat screen TV is a gift. So is a box of assorted chocolates. It’s understandable to have presents on the brain.

But it’s not just stuff that’s a gift, especially around the holidays. People often talk about the gift of family, of those special little moments with loved ones. It’s enough to make the single (or grieving, or displaced, the list goes on) among us want to scream. Because if all of those things are a gift, picked out, wrapped, and chosen specially, why didn’t we get one?

Don’t get me wrong—I think that family, love, and connection are wonderful. Over the years, the holidays have looked all different ways. Sometimes I’ve felt completely fulfilled by my community, other times I’ve been frustrated with family, sometimes I’ve been very lonely. There are moments I look back on as particularly meaningful or precious, parties I’d return to in a minute, or even presents I’d love to open again. I have this feeling that nearly everyone feels this way. The holidays are a mixed bag, it never goes just the way you want it to, all of your gifts aren’t just the perfect thing.

Maybe you’ve heard people talking about their significant others as gifts. I see where they’re coming from. They love this person and feel lucky that they managed to find them. Maybe it was a surprise, like many gifts are. But if you listen too hard to that kind of talk, it can start making you feel like the person without a secret Santa at the party. Did your gift get lost in the shuffle?

Love is like anything else in life: it’s a circumstance. You meet someone, or you don’t. You create and nurture love, or it isn’t the right time yet. But boiling down something as complex as a relationship into the same language we use for TVs and boxes of chocolates erases the very really challenges, sacrifices and difficulties of relationships. If a relationship is a gift, it’s one that requires a lot more than batteries. To call it a gift under a sprig of mistletoe not only diminishes what the relationship actually is, but also places an unrealistic patina on it for everyone watching. Just because you want something and you get it doesn’t mean it’s a gift.

Maybe you run in the sort of circles where people tell you that singleness is a gift, something to be savored and held onto. I’m convinced that these are the same people who go around telling exhausted young mothers that these are the most precious moments of their lives. In both of those situations, there might be moments of beauty, but most of the time I’m guessing it doesn’t feel like a gift. When I’ve been unhappy about being single, the last thing I’ve been able to do is “savor the moment.” Life is not a box of chocolates, and neither is singleness. It’s not a spa weekend or a trip to Paris. It’s just a life circumstance, and for many of us, it’s one that we’d rather not be in.

Not that I want to suggest that some of the best things in life aren’t the sorts of things you can wrap up in a box. Your favorite part of this holiday season might be something unexpected like a particularly good laugh with friends, a game night with your family, or watching your nephew fall asleep under the Christmas tree. Those things are precious, something to cherish and remember, but they aren’t so emotionally charged as gifts. You don’t have to write a thank you note, and you don’t have to return it if it isn’t it your size.

When you start feeling that everyone else got the gift of couple or parenthood, remember that it isn’t about who’s naughty or nice. We’re all just people moving through our lives, doing the best we can.

And if there are things on your wish list, why not let people know? And don’t forget to give yourself a gift or two, you deserve it.

Cara Strickland writes about food and drink, mental health, faith and being single from her home in the Pacific Northwest. She enjoys hot tea, good wine, and deep conversations. She will always want to play with your dog. Connect with her on Twitter @anxiouscook.

The post Singleness Isn’t a Gift (and maybe a partner isn’t either) appeared first on eharmony Advice.

Under the best circumstances, the holidays can make a person crazy. There are so many expectations—those other people have—and those you have. In a lot of places, it’s cold and dark, which really doesn’t help. What’s a person, especially a single person, to do?

Here are some ideas for moving through the holidays with a minimum of stress.

Plan a Couple of Dates With Yourself

One of the messages I struggle with at this time of year is that everyone in couples is out there doing romantic things, usually in the snow or by candlelight. While most of the couples I know are just as stressed as I am, the jealousy is real.

Why not plan a holiday date or two with yourself? Do something that makes you feel special and festive (if that’s your jam). Go to a classic Christmas movie at a local theater. Get a massage. Drive around and look at the lights. Sip hot cocoa in your favorite cafe. Once, I took myself ice skating—such fun.

Whatever you do, make it meaningful and just for you, that’s the best part about dating yourself, you know yourself better than anyone. If you carve out these moments to care for yourself, you’ll be better equipped for the rest of the season.

Be Present

You probably have a few plans this year. Maybe a party here or there, a family gathering, something at work. It’s easy to be annoyed that you don’t have a partner to take along to these events, and even easier to spend that whole event thinking about that fact. This time around, try to be present to what’s actually happening. Maybe it’s an opportunity to connect with an acquaintance or family member you haven’t seen in a while. Maybe your favorite cheese ball will be there. Whatever happens, it’s the only version that exists right now. Try to honor the experience for what it is.

Pace Yourself

Although you may want to eat or drink your feelings away, try to make your consumption about true celebration. Go ahead and enjoy that soft cheese, those buttery cookies, that glass of sparkling wine, but be intentional. It’s easy to cross that threshold from treat to coping mechanism. I don’t know about you, but that always leaves me with a tummy ache.

Don’t Forget Self Care

Self care looks so different depending on the person, sometimes depending on the day. You might find that getting dressed up and going to a party is the right choice for one night and that staying in and having a bath or watching a movie in your pajamas is the right choice for another. Try to listen to what you’re asking yourself for. Are you tired? Lonely? Is your skin dry? All of your other interactions will benefit from you taking good care of yourself.

Spend According to Your Budget

It’s easy to feel like you need to buy gifts and decorate and in general behave like your coupled friends. Don’t listen to that voice. Most people don’t have great expectations of you, so don’t put that pressure on yourself. Give and celebrate to the level that makes you most comfortable.

Call in Your Support Group

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re not alone. Call up your single friends and schedule a date (or chat on the phone). Offer support where you can, and don’t be afraid to ask for it in return.

This isn’t just limited to single friends, either. Lots of people struggle with the holidays for so many reasons, reach out to married friends, too. You never know what you might have in common.

This isn’t the time to slack off on therapy either, keep that appointment, you’ll thank yourself later.

Give Yourself Permission to Date (or not)

This season can feel difficult for dating. You’re already busy, do you really want to try to meet someone new? If the answer is yes, go ahead, make the time. It’s your life, and engaging in it the way you want to is your gift to you.

If, on the other hand, you’re wanting a break, give yourself a pass. The right person won’t pass you by because you gave dating a break for two weeks. Sip your eggnog and return to the dating world refreshed in the new year.

Cara Strickland writes about food and drink, mental health, faith and being single from her home in the Pacific Northwest. She enjoys hot tea, good wine, and deep conversations. She will always want to play with your dog. Connect with her on Twitter @anxiouscook.

The post How to Celebrate the Holidays Without Losing Your Mind appeared first on eharmony Advice.

Contrary to what people who lack self-confidence might believe, the trait is not inborn. Nor is it a constant; even self-confident people suffer bouts of self-doubt. And if obstacles to self-confidence were constructed in you by clumsy or even malevolent parenting, these are surmountable.

Although, as the authors of The Self-Confidence Workbook concede, between 25 and 50 percent of personality traits may be inherited, even that does not doom anyone to life as a shrinking violet. Co-author Barbara Markway’s previous books were for people struggling with shyness and social anxiety, both of which can be can be alleviated, and which could be considered correlates of low self-confidence.

Self-confidence is, “the willingness to take steps toward valued goals, even if you’re anxious and the outcome is unknown,” the authors write. “True self-confidence is part courage, part competence, with a healthy dose of self-compassion mixed in.”

There is no hocus-pocus in this book, no groundbreaking thoughts or startling innovations. Instead, the authors assemble a toolkit of solid, empirically tested approaches: cognitive-behavioral therapy; acceptance and commitment therapy (learning to live with unpleasant thoughts without letting them control you); self-compassion training; mindfulness-based therapy; and exposure therapy.

Followers of pop psychology will recognize many of the experts drawn from here — Kristin Neff, who studies the power of self-compassion; Carol Dweck, who described the set versus growth mind-sets; Amy Cuddy and her power poses; Jon Kabat-Zinn, who popularized mindfulness. Markway and Ampel take all these powerful and proven approaches and tune them towards the kind of issues and situations people lacking self-confidence might struggle with — returning to school as an adult, going to a movie alone, taking a promotion at work.

The book is broken into short, easy-to-digest chunks, with spaces to fill in your own personal insights. Even the graphic design is soothing, with ample white space and calming colors like turquoise, lavender and yellow.

You’ll start your self-confidence project by identifying your values and setting goals, figuring out what it is you would do if you had the self-confidence you need. What would your relationships look like if they were in line with your personal values? How would you enjoy yourself more in life if you weren’t held back by a lack of self-confidence? What would your career be? Setting these goals and making them concrete is the underpinning of the book, the reason for working through the self-assessments and exercises that follow.

In the chapter “Practice Acceptance,” you identify your strengths and boldly list them (the authors explain why this is not boastful or arrogant), and list qualities in yourself you perceive as weaknesses, identify what makes you give up, and what keeps you from moving forward. And, fear not, you can be loved, accepted and successful despite these flaws. “Vulnerability is how you connect to others,” the authors writer. “When people see that you’re worried, scared, messy, or flawed, they tend to feel great relief and let you know that they are, too.”

In “Work With Your Thoughts,” you’ll identify the cognitive distortions that impede you — negative assumptions, unhelpful “should” thoughts, all-or-nothing thoughts and catastrophizing thoughts — and reframe them by looking for the evidence (or lack thereof) behind them.

“Work With Your Beliefs,” entails finding common themes in your automatic negative thoughts and following the path from the thought to the core belief it represents. And near the end of the book, you’ll “Face Your Fears” and start conditioning yourself, one small step at a time, to face that which frightens you — with self-compassion and patience.

Each chapter ends with concrete “Action Items” to try, from turning off social media for a week to watching enlightening TED talks and looking at old journals or letters to identify self-limiting beliefs you once held but have since proven to be untrue.

Will all this help? As with any such book, individual results will vary, of course. You’ll get out of this what you put in. But the clarity of writing, encouraging tone, specific and targeted exercises, and proven approaches make The Self-Confidence Workbook a good way to start identifying and overcoming the thoughts, actions and mind-sets that are holding you back from the things you want for your life.

The Self Confidence Workbook: A Guide to Overcoming Self-Doubt and Improving Self-Esteem
Althea Press, October 2018
Paperback, 178 pages