As our parents or other relatives start to get older, they might find it more difficult to look after themselves without help. When this happens, there are a few different options. Some families decide to move their elderly relatives into a retirement community or into their own homes, while others try to find ways for their parents to stay as independent as possible and keep living alone. 

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Medication Management

If your relatives are taking any medication, it’s important that they are able to manage this themselves if they live alone. Are they remembering to take the correct amount at the correct time? If you aren’t sure, there are some signs that you can look for. When you visit them, look in their cabinets for medicines that have gone out of date, or are being kept with no clear organization. Have they become ill after missed or too many doses? 

Meal Preparation

Are your parents still able to cook safely and managing to make balanced meals? Are they able to use their kitchen appliances without help? Look out for them deciding to skip meals, or for kitchen accidents like forgetting to turn the oven off, or forgetting that food has been put in the microwave. 

Safety And Mobility 

Look out for signs that your parents are finding it hard getting around their home. Have they had falls? Do they have a way to get help if there is an emergency? You can fit their home with devices like emergency alarms, grab bars, and other things to make navigating and getting help much easier. Read this guide to make your home handicap accessible. 

Personal Hygiene

It’s important for your elderly relatives to still able to bathe themselves, get dressed, and properly wash their clothes and linens. If you start to notice that they look more unkempt than they used to, or they wear diary clothing or have noticeable body odor then this suggests that they aren’t able to care for themselves anymore. 

Transportation

If your older parents are still driving their car, make sure they are definitely safe enough to get behind the wheel. If they aren’t driving, what kind of access do they have to other forms of transport to get to doctors’ appointments or the grocery store? This could be using public transport, getting taxis, or arranging lifts with friends or family. 

Socialization

For older people who live alone, isolation can be a big worry. Does your parent spend a lot of time by themselves? Do they have many friends nearby? Do they still go out to socialize, or do they get visitors to their homes? Watch out for signs of loneliness. Independent senior living can offer older relatives to stay near any friends they may have, as well as make new ones. 

Home Management

Are they still able to manage their home? When you visit, take a look around to make sure things are being kept clean. Pay special attention to bathrooms and kitchens. Look out for disarray, stains, or spoiled food in the fridge. Check for post-stacking up or late bill notices coming through to make sure they’re coming on top of house admin. 

This is a collaborative post.

Melinda

Cosmopolitan

by JENNIFER SAVIN APR 20, 2021

“It’s emotional for me”

E! ENTERTAINMENTGETTY IMAGES

Actress Hilary Duff recently welcomed her third child, an adorable baby girl named Mae James Blair, into the world and just got super candid about everything from her labour to the anxieties that come with breastfeeding on a new podcast episode.

Speaking on Dr. Elliot Berlin’s Informed Pregnancy, Hilary spoke about her experience of breastfeeding all three of her children, remarking that she sometimes has difficulty producing milk. “All of the babies latch really great; I’m just not a huge milk producer, so it’s emotional for me,” she said, before adding that so far she’s been “exclusively been breastfeeding” Mae.

Hilary continued on to say that feeding is even more of a challenge this time around, because she also has two other children (Luca, who is 9, and Banks, aged 2) to care for this time around too. “Just still painful and it’s hard, and it’s even harder having the other two that I know need me so much, and this takes up such a huge portion of the day,” she said. “It seems like every 20 minutes I’m feeding the baby, and I have to be sitting in one place.”This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.https://www.instagram.com/p/CM7alyzDuP3/embed/captioned/?cr=1&v=13&wp=1316&rd=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cosmopolitan.com&rp=%2Fuk%2Fbody%2Fhealth%2Fa36173475%2Fhilary-duff-breastfeeding%2F#%7B%22ci%22%3A0%2C%22os%22%3A96478.00000000001%7D

The mother-of-three also discussed the tricky conundrum of how her anxiety can affect the amount of milk she produces too, which in turn leads to more anxiety. “Right now, I don’t know that I’m not producing as much as I need, but I think, since I haven’t in the past, I have tons of anxiety that I’m not, and that she’s not getting enough,” she explained. “And then I’m in my head, and then I don’t feel like enough, and then the spiral continues from there.”

She also shared that she’s making an effort to “sit back and chill and trust that [her] body is doing the right thing and [Mae is] gaining weight” in an effort to overcome those worries though.

It wasn’t just breastfeeding that Hilary discussed during the interview either; she also shared that she had both Luca and Banks present during the birth of Mae. “It was kind of important for me [for Luca to be there] because I’m really big on being open and honest with him about how strong women are and what childbirth looks like,” she explained, adding that Banks came into the room “right after the fact”.

We love that Hilary is so honest about her parenting journey! Anything that normalises breastfeeding or birth is totally a-okay with us. 

Cosmopolitan UK’s current issue is out now and you can SUBSCRIBE HERE.

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Apr 22, 2021 / Wendy M. Troxel PhD

There are many ways that sleep problems can set you on a path toward a rocky relationship.

Making sound decisions, being in a good mood most of the time, reining in some of your bad moods or irritability, problem solving, communicating effectively, tolerating frustration, practicing empathy — these are all important skills for cultivating and maintaining a healthy relationship. And these are also all the things that go south when you’re low on sleep.

When these are in short supply, whom do you take it out on? Usually your partner. Chronic sleep loss or otherwise disturbed sleep can trigger a host of emotions that can send you on a spiral of relationship-damaging behaviors.

Sleep plays a powerful role in how we experience and regulate our emotions. When we miss out on sleep, we become more irritable, we have more negative moods, our frustration tolerance is lowered, and we become more emotionally labile, meaning that we are more prone to mood swings, because our capacity to regulate our emotions is impaired.

Studies have shown that when sleep was restricted to five hours per night for a week, participants showed a progressive increase in negative emotions (e.g., anger, sadness, frustration, irritability), with each successive night of sleep restriction. Research has further shown that sleep loss led not only to increases in negative emotion but also decreases in positive emotion.

To the partner of the person deprived of sleep, this activation of negative emotions in concert with the blunting of positive emotions can feel like a double whammy of contempt and criticism. The partner feels lonely, vulnerable, and attacked, which, of course, can then lead to defensiveness or counterattack. Not a great recipe for relationship bliss.

On nights when couples slept worse, they reported more conflict the next day.

Decades of relationship research has confirmed that conflict itself is not necessarily a sign of relationship doom or distress — it is perfectly normal and in fact healthy to have some level of conflict in relationships. It’s about how you engage in conflict with your partner that matters.

Social psychologists Drs. Amie Gordon and Serena Chen have studied couples’ nightly sleep patterns and their daily relationship behaviors. They found that on nights when couples slept worse, they reported more conflict the next day. But it’s not just that sleep loss increases the likelihood of conflict. It’s that once a couple is in conflict, sleep loss triggers the very relationship behaviors and communication styles that we know are most toxic to relationships. As Dr. Gordon explains it, “When one or both partners are not well-rested, minor squabbles can turn into major rifts.”

Researchers at the Ohio State University brought 43 couples into the lab and asked them to engage in a typical relationship conflict. (It turns out that couples are very good at diving right into conflict when instructed to do so, even under the conspicuous conditions of a scientific laboratory, replete with a video camera to record the event.) Couples also reported on their nightly sleep patterns.

After each conflict, the researchers painstakingly coded the conversation using a well-developed relationship coding system that identifies positive versus negative communication styles, including the degree of hostility or constructive responses.

While all couples engaged in conflict, the researchers saw a clear distinction in how they engaged: Couples who reported sleeping less than seven hours per night were more likely to engage in hostile conflict. It’s the difference between saying to your partner “It really makes me mad that you didn’t unload the dishwasher” vs. “Shocker — yet again, you couldn’t do the one thing I asked you to do.”

Couples who reported sleeping less than seven hours per night were more likely to engage in hostile conflict.

A sure-fire way to ratchet up the intensity of a relationship tiff is when one or both partners feel their words and, more importantly, their feelings are not being heard. In many ways, empathy is the glue that binds a relationship together. Being able to gauge your partner’s emotional temperature during a hot-topic discussion is a critically important skill for relationship well-being. Unfortunately, empathic accuracy also takes a hit when relationship partners are sleep-deprived.

Drs. Gordon and Chen found not only that couples were more likely to engage in conflict after sleeping poorly but also that poorly slept people had lower empathic accuracy. Their research showed that the negative effects of one partner’s sleep loss on empathic accuracy spread to the other partner. On nights when one partner slept worse, the other partner also showed reductions in empathic accuracy. This likely reflects a relationship dynamic in which one partner feels dismissed or that their feelings aren’t being heard, leading to increased defensiveness and emotional walls being built up on both sides.

Other research shows that even the words we use to communicate and the sounds of our voices are colored by our sleep or lack thereof. Psychologist Eleanor McGlinchey used computerized text analysis, including analysis of acoustic properties of speech, as well as observer ratings of the emotional expression of speech, before and after sleep deprivation in the laboratory. She wanted to determine the extent to which sleep deprivation affected word choice, including positive and negative emotion words, like “happy” or “excited” or “sad” or “anxious,” as well as the tone, including positive and negative emotion expression.

She found that under sleep-deprived conditions, participants showed a decrease in the use of positive emotion words. Observers rated their speech as being lower in positive emotional expression (less happy or calm) and higher in negative emotional expression (more sad, anxious, or fatigued). Using sophisticated computerized text analysis of the acoustic properties of speech, she also found that sleep-deprived participants’ speech was, as McGlinchey put it, “softer, sharper, and lower energy … and the lower acoustic energy can make it sound like the person is disengaged.”

Sleep-induced loneliness is contagious. Within couples, this can lead to greater emotional distancing and a lack of connection with your partner.

Beyond the sleep-induced relationship blowups and communication shifts, lack of sleep can lead to broader social consequences, including the more existential state of loneliness. Science is showing us that lack of sleep hurts our social brains and can make us feel alone in the world.

In a series of elegant studies published in 2018, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that poor sleep predicted greater feelings of loneliness, as well as greater social withdrawal and anxiety, the next day. At the brain level, the researchers demonstrated that sleep-deprived people showed deactivation in the parts of the brain that are responsible for helping understand other people’s actions and behaviors, and amplification in the parts of the brain that signal threat or fear responses in social contexts.

In other words, sleep-deprived subjects’ brains were less active in the parts of the brain that make you more social and more active in the parts of the brain that make you want to stand in the corner away from people. Researchers also looked at how other people reacted to the sleep-deprived subjects. They found that the observers perceived the sleep-deprived people to be lonelier and less attractive than well-slept people. But the real kicker is that after observing the people who were sleep-deprived, the observers themselves reported feeling lonelier and more socially withdrawn, despite being well-rested. Sleep-induced loneliness, therefore, is contagious. Within couples, this can lead to greater emotional distancing and a lack of connection with your partner.

As you read this, you may be entering a state of increasing anxiety, verging on panic for some, as I describe the relationship harms that could be caused by sleep loss. And frankly, the last thing any of us needs is yet another reason to keep us up at night.

But rather than sweating the consequences of sleep loss, it’s time to start prioritizing sleep as a mutual goal within your relationship.

Excerpted from the new book Sharing the Covers: Every Couple’s Guide to Better Sleep by Wendy M. Troxel PhD. Copyright © 2021. Available from Hachette Go, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Watch the TEDxManhattanBeach Talk from Dr. Wendy Troxel now: 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wendy M. Troxel PhD Wendy Troxel PhD is a senior behavioral and social scientist at the RAND Corporation and an adjunct faculty member in psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and certified behavioral sleep medicine specialist. Dr. Troxel is internationally recognized for her work on sleep in couples, how sleep affects health and the global economy, and how social environments and public policy impact sleep.

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Apr 12, 2021 / Kerry Thomas

Angus Greig

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here. 

Overwhelm. 

That word doesn’t feel very pleasant hanging there, does it? It brings up feelings of failure and isolation. I’m a professional organizer, and it’s the word that I hear the most from new clients.

I have a friend and client who runs a successful business, is very active in the community, and is the most positive person you will ever meet. Yet at our first consultation, she told me that not only did she feel overwhelmed, she felt paralyzed. When I asked her to elaborate, she brought up words like shame, failure, fear and isolation.

I assured her that she is not alone.

In fact, in our homes, businesses and relationships, “overwhelm” is our society’s dirty little secret. We fill everything. We fill our houses, our cars, our storage units, our offices, our phones, our minds and our hearts with more than we can manage.

We think that more will lead us to happiness, but all it does is perpetuate the overwhelm. Because of this, the word “clutter” is everywhere.  But what people don’t realize is clutter is not just our stuff. Yes, it can be the physical things that clog up our homes, but it can also be digital, mental, emotional or even spiritual.

I define clutter as anything that keeps you from living the life that you were meant to lead, anything that keeps you from living the life that you want to lead and anything that stops you from accomplishing your work and enjoying your life.

Physical clutter is the typical stuff we think of — the closets that are overflowing, the garages that can’t hold cars, the storage units that have become a billion-dollar industry in the US alone.

Digital clutter are things like the 10 or 200 or 50,000 emails in inboxes — something I see on a very regular basis. It’s also all the files saved on your computer without naming conventions so you don’t know what they are and you spend a lot of time looking for the ones you want.

Mental clutter could be your fears, your to-do list, what’s going on in the news or anything else that’s filling your head at night.

Emotional clutter can be the negative patterns and beliefs you don’t even realize that you’re carrying around. It can be all those “I can statements that run through your head like “I can’t lose weight” or “I can’t quit my job and own my own business”.

Spiritual clutter can be a lack of forgiveness or a lack of peace.

Those last two — emotional and spiritual clutter — can be very subtle, and they can also be the most paralyzing.

While it may not seem possible, I believe that all the different types of clutter I’ve listed here have one main cause. My wonderful friend, mentor and business coach Barbara Hemphill has trademarked a phrase that sums it up: “Clutter is postponed decisions.”

Think about that for a minute. Take physical clutter, for example. When you look at your closet, perhaps there’s a whole section of clothes that we don’t wear and the postponed decision there is: “Am I really going to
put in the effort or time to lose that last 10 pounds and fit into this whole stuff?” Or maybe the postponed decision is: “Am I going to clean out my storage area so I can take these things, put them into bins, and rotate
them in and out every season?”

Paper is a huge source of the clutter I deal with. We pick up a piece of paper; we put it back down and one pile becomes 10 piles. Then when you have family coming over for dinner, you push them all in a bag and put them in the closet.

And we do the same thing with email that we do with paper. We open it but we’re not making any decisions about it. Sometimes our decisions are easy — we just delete, reply or put it in a folder, but quite often we postpone making a decision until we get to the point where we don’t even want to open up our computer.

I always had a very good handle on the first two: physical and digital clutter. And I understood how the other ones worked with my clients, but I didn’t truly understand how those could affect me in my own life until I got stuck.

In 2012, I had heart surgery. My whole life I’d had a valve defect, and I’d always been told: “You’ll live into your 80s with no medical intervention; you’re fine.”

Well, that year, my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given a very short time to live, and my oldest son was hospitalized for suicidal thoughts. My heart figuratively and then literally broke.

By April 2012, I was in heart failure so I had to have surgery.

I flew through it, and I was the model patient. I was only in the hospital for 48 hours. Afterwards, I was up walking and doing things in record time. I
completed a half marathon 11 months after heart surgery.

My life looked great and I was getting a lot of compliments, but I felt stuck.Why? I had massive amounts of emotional clutter. It consisted of fears, questions like:
“What if the surgery didn’t work?”
“What if my heart breaks again?”
“Why am I having these dizziness spells?”
“Why do I still need a nap every single day a year later?”

And also guilt. I asked myself: “Why am I still here while other people aren’t?”

And — let me tell you — those two combine to make some pretty big spiritual clutter.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that my house is very, very neat and clean almost all the time. At the time, I had a client who was the opposite. She was depressed by her townhouse and hadn’t had people over in years — except for me, to try to work on it. We became very close very quickly.

One day, I was commenting to her that besides this stuff that was dragging her down, she had a vibrant life, was doing fun things, continuing her education, going on trips. I tried to prompt her a bit by saying: “Imagine what you could do without all this stuff weighing you down!”

She zinged me and said, “Look who’s talking. You keep telling me about ideas that you have for your business and things you want to do, and you’re not doing any of them. You are also stuck.”

So we challenged each other, and we both started facing our issues. I stopped postponing my decision to look at my fear and postponing the need to deal with my guilt.

Now I don’t know what your postponed decisions are. Do you have a fear you’re not facing?  Or is there someone you need to give forgiveness to?

To move forward, you need to make a decision.  Some are easy — for instance, you could say, “Two weeks from today and I will clean out this garage!” Some are grand — “I’m going to drop out of school, move to California, and write a novel!” And some are minuscule — “Every week I’m going to unsubscribe from two store emails.” Having clutter does not make you a bad person; it is not a moral sentence. And feeling guilty about your clutter is not going to help you, whether it’s guilt from someone else or from yourself.

There’s a saying I like that goes: “Change is a result of action, and action is the result of a decision.” You have the power — even in the midst of feeling horrible overwhelm to the point of being paralyzed — to create change by making a decision. It all starts with an action.

With the physical clutter, you’ve got to box it up, bag it up, take it to the donation center or the curb or wherever it goes. For the other kinds of clutter, you also need to take an action — it might be talking to a good friend, getting out in nature, meditating or journaling. In other words, do something, move forward, make a decision and take an action, even if it’s tiny. The universe will reward you with momentum.

And yes, some clutter is going to come back; that’s just life. But if you keep making decisions and don’t postpone them, you’ll ultimately move from overwhelm towards something that all of us want — peace.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kerry Thomas is a professional organizer and the owner and founder of Conquer the Chaos. She is passionate about helping business owners and leaders with ADHD organize their environments and clear all forms of clutter from their lives, so they can experience productivity and peace of mind. Thomas is also the author of the soon to be released book Less Clutter, More Peace: A Dog’s Teachings. She is based in Leesburg, Virginia.

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Apr 15, 2021 / Gary W. Lewandowski Jr PhD

Stocksy

Let’s get one simple fact out of the way: All couples argue. 

Whether you see them or not, every couple has disagreements. You may think that happily and unhappily married couples argue about different things, but they don’t.

According to a 2019 study, here are the top three conflict triggers that upset, irritate, hurt, or anger partners. They are:

• Condescension (i.e., you are treated as stupid or inferior; your partner acts like they think they’re better than you)
• Possessiveness, jealousy and/or dependency (i.e., your partner demands too much attention or time or is overly jealous, possessive, or dependent)
• Neglect, rejection and/or unreliability (i.e., your partner ignores your feelings, doesn’t call or text, doesn’t say they love you)

Other high-ranking contenders were inconsiderate partners, self-absorbed partners and moody partners. 

But what about the topics that we routinely avoid? While we sidestep thorny areas such as past partners and our past and present sex life, there is one topic we avoid altogether: The relationship itself.

Couples who believed “arguing should not be tolerated” were less satisfied and more aggressive, and the female partners were more depressed.

Much like parents who avoid the “sex talk” with their kids, partners avoid discussing their relationship because it provokes anxiety. In a study, it was the number-one taboo topic for one out of every three people and among the top topics to avoid for seven out of ten people.

But never have we paid so little attention to something so important — when couples believed that conflict was a bad sign, they had worse relationships. Those who believed “arguing should not be tolerated” were less satisfied and more aggressive, and the female partners were more depressed.

When researchers from the University of Michigan and Penn State University followed more than 1,500 adults for more than a week, they found that while people felt better on the day they avoided an argument, the next day they had diminished psychological well-being and increased cortisol, which can lead to weight gain, mood swings, and trouble sleeping. Short-term gain, long-term pain.

When we avoid conflict, we miss the opportunity to help our relationship improve. Without arguments there is no progress.

Studies have found that avoiding conversations now means making the relationship worse later. A 2017 study found that when partners avoided important relationship topics, they had worse communication, were less happy, and were less dedicated to their relationship seven weeks later.

Not only that, but when we avoid conflict we miss the opportunity to help our relationship improve. Without arguments there is no progress.

So most couples need to argue more, not less. To be clear, we shouldn’t seek friction and intentionally find reasons to fight, but we should willingly embrace naturally arising conflict. With that in mind, we should embrace frequent low-stakes disagreements and occasional arguments and have few, if any, big confrontations.

When we assume the best of our partner, we’re less likely to see malice in their actions, which makes arguments less stressful and more likely to be resolved.

For the good of the relationship, every argument needs to start the same way: Partners need to give each other the benefit of the doubt. Rather than start off assuming your partner is wrong, is hopelessly flawed, has bad intentions or is trying to hurt you, you give them what psychologist Carl Rogers calls “unconditional positive regard,” or the belief that at their core, everyone is a good person.

Research from 2019 backs this up, finding that when we assume the best of our partner, we’re less likely to see malice in their actions, which makes arguments less stressful and more likely to be resolved.

For successful conflict resolution, next you need to know what type of problem you’re dealing with. For serious problems like infidelity or substance abuse, it’s better to be direct by demanding change, taking a nonnegotiable stance, and showing anger, especially if your partner is able to change.

If the problems are more mundane (for ex., divvying up chores), you’re better off taking a cooperative approach by using love, humor, affection, and optimism. This is also the better tack for unsolvable problems (e.g., a meddlesome mother-in-law) or a partner who is hopelessly stubborn.

We are too confident in our ability to understand our partners, and they overestimate how clear they are when speaking to us.

Regardless of the problem, there’s no substitute for listening to your partner. Sounds simple, but we rarely truly listen.

How do we become better listeners? Give a “CRAPO”. Here’s what I mean:

1. Clarify

When your partner talks, you need to be sure that you’re clear about what they’re saying. We are too confident in our ability to understand our partners, and they overestimate how clear they are when speaking to us.

To remove all doubt, ask questions like, “When you say ______, what exactly does that mean?”; “Am I correct that ______ is the key issue?”; and “Can you give an example of ______?” It’s possible you’ll get it wrong, but then your partner can set the record straight and they’ll appreciate that you cared enough to try.

2. Reflect the other person’s feelings

This one should probably be named “empathy,” but I needed the letter R. Of course, the R could also stand for “Really Important” because of the five keys, this one is the most critical to get right.

Mastering empathy starts with a simple realization: Behind everything our partner says, there’s an emotion they’re dying to have us notice.

When you give a CRAPO, your job is to reflect back the deeper feelings that your partner is expressing: hurt, embarrassment, confusion, disappointment, frustration, annoyance, nervousness, bewilderment, apathy, or feeling overwhelmed, undervalued, lost, and inauthentic.

When acknowledging your partner’s feelings, you can hedge a bit with phrases like “You seem.. .,” “It sounds like… ,” or “Are you feeling . . .?” If you’re wrong, your partner knows you’re trying to understand, and empathy research shows your effort is more important for relationship satisfaction than accuracy.

3. Attend

Trying to find the right thing to say is only half the battle. You also need to watch your nonverbal signals, or the ways you communicate that go beyond the words you’re using.

For example, you need to show you’re listening by maintaining eye contact and sitting squarely facing your partner in a relaxed and open position, with just the slightest lean toward them.

Appearing fully engaged and present, without nearby distractions like your phone or other screens, conveys to your partner that the conversation is important. Prioritizing nonverbal signals also helps you pay attention, which is important because you need every ounce of mental bandwidth to master the other four steps to giving a CRAPO.

We need to realize that problems won’t just disappear and that talking things out is our only hope for improvement.

4. Paraphrase

To demonstrate your understanding, you should be able to recap what your partner is saying, using your own words. The process of rephrasing and summarizing has two big benefits: First, it shows your partner that you’re deeply invested in the conversation; second, knowing you need to paraphrase forces you to pay close attention.

5. Open-ended questions 

If we’re being honest, in most conversations we’re waiting to turn the focus back to ourselves. When giving a CRAPO, you keep the spotlight on your partner by giving them the space to talk through how they feel.

To do that, ask open-ended questions that help your partner process their feelings. Lead them toward deeper analysis by asking questions like “What would you suggest to someone else in this same situation?”; “How did you make this decision?”; “What would make things better?”; “Why do you think this happened?”; and “How do you see this turning out?”

Each question focuses the problem, helps our partner gain perspective, and allows greater insight into the issue at hand. Now all you have to do is really listen to your partner’s answers.

Every relationship has flaws. We need to realize that problems won’t just disappear and that talking things out is our only hope for improvement.

We must see those conversations for what they are: difficult but necessary steps that help a strong relationship get stronger.

Excerpted from the new book Stronger Than You Think: The 10 Blind Spots That Undermine Your Relationship and How to See Past Them. Copyright © 2021 by Gary Lewandowski. Used with permission of Little, Brown Spark, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.

Gary W. Lewandowski Jr PhD Gary W. Lewandowski Jr. PhD is the author of the book Stronger Than You Think, a TEDx speaker and a psychology professor at Monmouth University in New Jersey. His writing and research focus on using science to help improve relationships.

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Oct 24, 2017 / Lidia Yuknavitch

Monica Ramos

Suffering is not beautiful, nor is it a state of grace. But you can swim to the wreckage at the bottom and bring something back to the surface that can help others, says writer Lidia Yuknavitch.

The truth is, suffering sucks and it can take you to a place of wanting to kill yourself, and there’s nothing beautiful about that. Suffering is not a state of grace. Suffering, from my point of view, is about a real place in a real body where you face the other side of living. How you choose to understand that story probably determines how you’re going to live the rest of your life.

I feel kindred with fellow sufferers, not because they suffer, and not because of some absurd vortex of victimhood camaraderie, and not because sufferers are in a state of grace, but because they go on, they endure. And because sometimes, the sufferer reinvents themself — and this kind of reinvention is what misfits are so good at. Misfits not only know a great deal about alternate and varied definitions of suffering, but misfits are also capable of alchemizing suffering, changing the energy from one form to another.

Here is the thing I want to say loudest of all: I haven’t transcended anything. No great revelation has come my way. I haven’t “moved on.”

So let me tell you a different suffering story that cannot be corralled by a culture that asks you to process your suffering in ways that make you a good citizen in an ever-churning economy of productive people. My daughter died the day she was born. I am not the only person who has experienced the suffering that comes from such a loss. But I am one of those who is willing to stand up, tell the story out loud, admit that I have carried that profound loss, that birth-death crisis, for more than thirty years now.

Here is the thing I want to say loudest of all: I haven’t transcended anything. No great revelation has come my way. I haven’t ascended into some magical wisdom. I haven’t “moved on.” At least not without her — my daughter I mean. And my suffering is not a state of grace. It’s just a part of me. Like my heart. When her birth-death first happened, here is what I did: I lost my marbles. It did not happen instantly.

At the hospital I could feel myself disintegrating a molecule at a time, but I didn’t say anything. I drank the water they gave me, though I didn’t eat the food. I held my swaddled lifeless daughter several times. I kissed her, I cradled her, I sang to her. I let the nurses give me a hot towel “bath” in the bed the second night, which remains on my list of top five most phenomenal physical experiences of my life. I thought I might be dead, but the heated wet towels reminded my skin that I was in fact alive, even if I was deadened.

It was my sister who brought me back to life, slowly, feeding me bits of saltine crackers to lure me back, and then one day an egg, and eventually, a milkshake. The milkshake made me smile.

By the time they released me and sent me home, I wasn’t speaking at all, to anyone. And I wouldn’t let a single human touch me. I felt . . . mammalian. Back to some animal past of pure instinct and wariness of everything around me. The hair on my legs and arms grew long, like white fur, which sometimes happens when someone stops eating.

It was my sister who brought me back to life, slowly, feeding me bits of saltine crackers to lure me back, and then one day an egg, and eventually, a milkshake. The milkshake made me smile. It was my sister who stepped fully clothed into the shower with me when she would hear me sobbing. She held me tight like a mother would, and her clothes, I began to feel the texture of her clothes against my skin.

It took almost a year. Partway through that first year, I did something unethical. I lied. I lied more than you can imagine. I went back to college, and I had a part-time job at a daycare center, which in retrospect may have been a tragic error. I lied to everyone who asked me about my daughter. I told anyone and everyone that she was alive, she was beautiful, such long eyelashes. I lied about where we were living, I lied about the classes I was barely attending. I’d throw my head back and laugh and say, “Motherhood!”

What I’m telling you is that in the face of people who came toward me with their regular-person questions about my pregnancy and birth story, I broke into fictions because I could not make what happened come out of my mouth. My story didn’t fit the other mothers’ stories. Misfit. My lying started out as me telling people I was staying at a friend’s house, which was a story line that passed quite well. But I wasn’t living with a friend. In the tapestry inside my head and heart a new weaving emerged that made a kind of “sense” given how it felt to be me.

My daughter’s death was so alive in me it felt like we were two people walking around. I mean she felt that present to me — like a second body.

What it felt like to be me was that I was among the walking dead, and I lived at the bottom of a very dark ocean. A ghost person living in some sea wreckage. And so I gravitated toward other ghost people, at night, and I started sleeping under an overpass just at the edge of town, near a bus stop where buses would take me back to the normalcy of a college campus during the day. I read books. I wrote a paper or two. I passed a test here and there.

My daughter’s death was so alive in me it felt like we were two people walking around. I mean she felt that present to me — like a second body. As present as when she swam her days and nights away inside the world of my belly. I “passed” in every sphere of regular life I entered, but I entered those spheres less and less and spent more and more time under the overpass. I was never alone. My daughter was with me.

Some people will understand this kind of ghost life. I had a notebook in which I wrote pages and pages of crazy lady gibberish, or seeming gibberish. I read all kinds of books. Inside the books I again saw stories that I recognized, because, well, literature is filled with characters whose lives are so broken they can barely breathe.

Literature is the land of the misfitted. Inside that notebook filled with what may have looked to an outside observer like strange hieroglyphics, in between the lines, there were glimpses of actual stories. The stories were about strange girls filled with rage or love or art that came shooting out of them, almost violently. And as I stepped back toward the world, I saw that the lies I’d been telling weren’t lies at all. They were precise fictions about living inside a woman’s body and the journey I’d just made to the bottom of an ocean, the journey to death and back. What other people called lies were actually portals to finding my ability to invent stories.

The other side of destruction is always the possibility of self-expression. Creativity. The mistake we make with teens and young adults and broken adults is to forget that.

Ten years later, the quality of my suffering took on a different form. My suffering became hunger. Hunger for ideas, hunger for sex, hunger for danger, hunger for risk. I read every book I could get my hands on, then I’d research the books the author had read and I’d read all of those. I slept with teachers, with students, with drunks and junkies, men and women, with anyone who had a glint of fire or danger in the corner of their eye. There wasn’t a drug I wouldn’t try.

What I no doubt do not need to explain is how dangerous my hunger and subsequent behavior were. That’s a story line we are all trained to understand. What I do want to explain is what my hunger was generative of. What looks from the outside like self-destruction isn’t always so. The other side of destruction is always the possibility of self-expression. Creativity. The mistake we make with teens and young adults and broken adults is to forget that. All creativity has destruction as its other, just like the beyond beautiful dead infant I held in my arms.

What I saw in literary books was a possible path from suffering and self-destruction to self-expression. I went back to the nutso gibberish I wrote down in that notebook under the overpass, and I began to cull the stories. Once I started writing, I never stopped. For this reason I would say that the death of my daughter and entering a real place called psychosis and being homeless were not just tragic. They were generative. Those experiences put writing into my hands.

Twenty years later, the quality of the suffering took shape and form on pages. The girl I lost became the girl I found inside stories where girls nearly die but then don’t, where girls with their hair on fire invent ways to save themselves, where girls who are incarcerated by family or violence or love or social norms break out of culture and into journeys no one has ever imagined before. What I’m saying is, the more I wrote, the more I understood that my so-called traumas — the death of the daughter, the abuse in my childhood, the rage I carried and acted out as a teen and young adult — were places of storytelling. Realms of expression.

In this sense, to be a misfit means to be willing to dive into the waters of one’s life, swim to the wreckage at the bottom, and bring something back to the surface.

Thirty years later the quality of my sadness has changed so radically that I can only understand it as pure creativity. In every book I have ever written there is a girl. And there always will be. My grief and my daughter’s death and my suffering were not something to “get over” or medicate or counsel out of me. They were generative of the most important forms of self-expression I’ll ever create in my lifetime. And that doesn’t just matter for my career as a writer, or even for my mental and emotional health as a woman. It’s also the path I took to learn love, so that when my son came, sun of my life, I was able to give it with abandon and joy.

Death, grief, trauma are alive in our actual bodies. We carry them our whole lives, even if we act like it’s possible to “step out of them.” Writing, making stories, drawing and painting, and making art doesn’t release me from loss or grief or trauma, but it does let me re-story my self and my body. In this sense, to be a misfit means to be willing to dive into the waters of one’s life, swim to the wreckage at the bottom, and bring something back to the surface.

When I tell you that literature and writing have saved my life, perhaps you can believe me when I say they came into my body and lodged in the space that my daughter left open. If you are one of those people who has the ability to make it down to the bottom of the ocean, the ability to swim the dark waters without fear, the astonishing ability to move through life’s worst crucibles and not die, then you also have the ability to bring something back to the surface that helps others in a way that they cannot achieve themselves.

You are not nothing. You are vital to your culture. We misfits are the ones with the ability to enter grief. Death. Trauma. And emerge. But we have to keep telling our stories, giving them to each other, or they will eat us alive. Our suffering is not the Christ story. Our suffering is generative of secular meaning. We put ordinary forms of hope into the world so that others, scruffy or graceful, might go on.

Excerpted from the new book The Misfit’s Manifesto by Lidia Yuknavitch. Reprinted with permission from TED Books/Simon & Schuster. © 2017 Lidia Yuknavitch.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the bestselling novels “The Book of Joan,” “The Small Backs of Children” and “Dora: A Headcase,” as well as the memoir “The Chronology of Water.” She is the recipient of two Oregon Book Awards, a Willamette Writers Award, and she was a finalist for the 2017 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and the 2012 Pen Center Creative Nonfiction Award. She writes, teaches and lives in Portland, Oregon.

IDEAS.TED.COM

Mar 4, 2019 / Daryl Chen

Jenice Kim

Here are three common-sense tips to help you feed your hunger and not your emotions, from dietician Eve Lahijani.

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community. To see all the posts, go here.

Imagine if eating were as simple as, say, refueling a car. You’d fill up only when an indicator nudged towards E, you couldn’t possibly overdo it or else your tank would overflow, and you’d never, ever dream of using it as a treat.

Instead, for many of us, eating is anything but straightforward. What starts out as a biological necessity quickly gets entangled with different emotions, ideas, memories and rituals. Food takes on all kinds of meanings — as solace, punishment, appeasement, celebration, obligation – and depending on the day and our mood, we may end up overeating, undereating or eating unwisely.

It’s time for us to rethink our relationship with food, says Eve Lahijani, a Los Angeles-based dietician and a nutrition health educator at UCLA. She offers three common-sense steps to help get there.

1. Reconnect with your hunger. 

So many things drive us to eat — it’s noon and that means lunchtime, it’s midnight and that means snack time, we’re happy, we’re anxious, we’d rather not bring home leftovers, we’re too polite to say no, we’re bored, and oh, wow, has someone brought in donuts?!?

Similarly, we suppress our appetite for a myriad of reasons — we’re too busy, we’re sad, we’re mad, nobody else is eating, it’s too early, it’s too late, we’re too excited.

Now try doing this: Eat only when you’re hungry; stop when you’re full. “It may seem obvious to you,” concedes Lahijani. Still, think over your past week: How many times did you eat when you weren’t hungry?

She suggests that we think about our hunger and our fullness on a 0-10 scale, with 0-1 being famished and 9-10 being painfully stuffed (as in holiday-dinner stuffed). She says, “You want to begin eating when you first get hungry, and that correlates with the three or a four on the scale and [to stop] … when you first get comfortably full, a six or seven on the scale.”

The reason you shouldn’t wait until you’re starving (or, 0-2 on the scale) is because that’s when people tend to make nutritionally unsound choices. If you’ve ever gone to the supermarket when you were ravenous, you probably didn’t fill up your cart with produce; you gravitated towards the high-calorie, super-filling items.

Lahijani says, “It’s also wise to eat when you first get hungry because you’re more likely to enjoy your food [and] you’re more likely to eat mindfully … When you let yourself get too hungry, chances are, you’re eating really fast and not really paying attention. In fact, one of the biggest predictors of overeating is letting yourself get too hungry in the first place.”

2. Feed your body what it is craving.

When Lahijani was a stressed-out college and graduate student, her eating took one of two forms: she was either dieting or bingeing. As she says: “Whenever I was on a diet, the diet told me what to eat,”; while on a binge, she’d eat whatever was convenient or go all out on foods forbidden by her then-diet. Developing a different relationship with food meant stepping out of those patterns. “Instead of listening to others’ opinions of what I should eat, I became silent and I tuned into my own body,” she says. “I fed my body what it was craving.”

It turns out Lahijani didn’t crave junk food. She says, “I was actually tasting things for the first time, because my mind wasn’t filled with judgment and guilt. I actually found that my body actually craved nurturing, nourishing foods like vegetables and fruits. I actually liked my sister’s kale and quinoa salad.”

3. Try not to use food as a reward or a punishment. 

It’s not surprising that we do this. After all, as children, we quickly learn that rejoicing and parties come with cake, while transgressions result in … no cake. But one of the great things about being an adult is, we can establish our own associations. By all means, let’s continue to mark our birthdays with cake — or with fresh fruit and a stockpot of homemade veggie chili if that’s what you prefer. Or, celebrate in ways that have nothing to do with eating. You can set your own rules now.

When Lahijani’s fraught feelings about food eased, she was surprised to find these effects go beyond eating. “What’s really interesting is to see how making peace with food affected other areas of my life. As I learned how to listen to myself, I became better at listening to others, I became more empathetic,” she says. “As I made a point to trust myself, I became more trusting in my relationships and more vulnerable, and as I became more loving to myself … I learned what it meant to love someone else.”

Watch her TEDxUCLA talk here: https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ssr2UDB9EWQ?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daryl Chen is the Ideas Editor at TED.

In the hustle and bustle of our hectic daily lives, we often don’t find time for ourselves to just be, to de-stress and take some time off for much-needed self-care. But it’s very important we do that – both, for our mental well-being and our physical health – especially in times of lockdown and added anxieties. 

Here are five easy ways you can de-stress, chill and rejuvenate. 

Image Credit: Pixabay

Meditation 

People often associate meditation with religious practice or spirituality; but meditation is a great tool to centre oneself, calm one’s mind and regain focus. You don’t have to meditate for long – sometimes even 10-15 minutes can help you de-stress. Don’t worry about technique either – just find a quiet spot in your house, close your eyes and don’t think about your to-do list or chores. It’s ok if a stream of thoughts keep coming; just let them pass and soon you will get the hang of distilling out unwanted thoughts and focussing on just being. Beginners can also take the aid of guided meditation audios that help you to focus, or just put on some soothing meditation music to set the mood.

Paint

Painting is a great therapeutic tool. Again, you don’t need to be a trained artist or know a particular style of painting. Just put your brush to paper or canvas and let your creativity just flow. The calmness and therapeutic effect comes about through the brush strokes and the creation itself. All you need are a few art supplies, a room or corner to paint and you’re good to go!

Help Other People

Often, the act of altruism or helping other people without any ulterior motive or expecting a reward in return, instills in us a feeling of joy and contentment that aids the overall well-being of our mental, psychological and spiritual state. It’s similar to the ‘feel-good factor’ we all crave. Of course helping others in times of need and impromptu situations is also important, but if you’re looking at helping others as a methodological way to de-stress and regain balance in your life, then joining a charity of your liking and choice is a great way to go about this. Spending an evening a week teaching a child to read, or giving your time and company to a lonely, old person can do wonders for your own well-being too!

Doing Nothing 

Yes, sometimes actually doing nothing accounts for a lot, especially when your diary is packed with places to go and things to do, and your mind is always on auto-pilot. The act of doing nothing – or at least nothing that requires concentration or effort – can be very soothing. Of course I don’t mean you just sit on a sofa and stare into space for an hour! Read a book. Watch a movie. Go for a stroll. Sit in your garden. Let your mind be free of work-related thoughts. 

Have A Positive Mindset

One of the best ways to reduce stress and anxiety is to stop over-thinking and worrying about things not in our control, and to have a positive mindset. 

Personally, I believe having a positive mindset is the most important of the five.

This is a collaborative post.

Melinda

IDEAS.TED.COM

Jul 15, 2019 / Daryl Chen

Justin Tran

Procrastination isn’t shameful or a character flaw. Instead it’s rooted in a very human need: the need to feel competent and worthy, says educator Nic Voge.

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

“It’s 11 o’clock. You’re in your dorm room, and you have a paper due in a day or so. You sit down at your desk, you open up your laptop to get started, and then you think, ‘I’m gonna check my email just for a minute; get that out of the way.’ Forty-five minutes later, you’ve checked a lot of email,” says Nic Voge, senior associate director of Princeton University’s McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning in New Jersey, in a TEDxPrinceton talk. “You’ve done a really good job of that, but now you realize, ‘You know what? I’m pretty tired. I’m kind of exhausted, and that’s not conducive to writing a good paper. What do I need? I need to go to sleep.” And you do — only to wake up and go through the whole cycle of delays-and-excuses the next day.

Is this you? Rather than a college paper, maybe it was a report for work, graduate program application, peer review, or some other important thing that you kept kicking down the road until the road ran out and you had to deliver.

You probably scolded yourself for your behavior. And wondered, “Why am I so lazy /weak-willed /disorganized /unmotivated /hopeless /[fill in other belittling adjective]?”

Well, Voge has good news for you. “Procrastination isn’t shameful. It’s not a sign of weakness. It’s not a flaw,” he says. “It’s actually pretty predictable; it’s something we can really expect if we understand the dynamics of motivation,” At Princeton, Voge develops, designs and directs academic support programs for undergraduates. He’s seen procrastination in all its forms, and he has also, he confesses, “mastered the craft and art of procrastination — the mind games, the rationalizations, the justifications.”

There are many theories about why we procrastinate. Some have said it’s about the inability to cope with difficult emotions; others, that it’s connected to faulty time management or perfectionism. Voge, however, believes it is rooted in our self-worth. He explains, “The paramount psychological need that all of us have is to be seen by ourselves and others as capable and competent and able … and we will actually sacrifice or trade off other needs to meet that need.”

To be clear, the need to be seen as worthy or worthwhile is not the problem. Where things go wrong is that some of us depend heavily on external feedback — in the form of good grades, praise from bosses, parents, in-laws or other authority figures, or the acceptance of prestigious organizations — for those feelings of worthiness. Voge says, “People who procrastinate a lot have a kind of simplistic equation in their mind: their performance is equal or equivalent to their ability, which is equal or equivalent to their self-worth as a person.” Or, as he puts it: performance = ability = self-worth. The reason we’re so terrified about performing poorly on that paper, application, analysis, etc. is because we feel our ability rests on it — and our value as a person.

In the performance = ability = self-worth equation, the only variable we can control is how much effort we put into our performance. When we procrastinate and put in less effort, we’re doing it as a form of self-protection, according to Voge. That way, if we earn a bad result, it doesn’t mean we’re not talented, able or worthy; we were just too busy or distracted to do our best.

Think about the murmurs you inevitably heard before exams in high school or college. Voge asks, “What are people saying? ‘I only studied three hours.’ ‘I only studied two hours; my computer froze.’ Everyone’s explaining how they’re not ready. Why? Because if they don’t achieve, then they have this built-in excuse not only for themselves but for others.”

Anyone who has ever procrastinated has experienced that feeling of stuckness. “Many people describe procrastination as being stuck at or against a wall or an obstacle they can’t get over,” says Voge. “We are often agitated, we can’t sleep — but we [also] can’t work.” At those times, we find ourselves pulled between two equally strong and compelling forces: the drive to achieve and the fear of failure. We come unstuck only when the fear of not getting things done overrides our fear of failure.

How do we break the cycle? Voge highlights three strategies:

1. Be aware of what you’re doing and why.

“We know from the research on procrastination and overcoming it that gaining knowledge and being aware of self-worth theory in these dynamics helps people over these things,” says Voge. “To understand the roots of procrastination helps us weaken it.” Your procrastination is probably not coming from a place of self-loathing or self-sabotage but from a need to protect yourself.

Know when you’re procrastinating. Sometimes it’s obvious; there is absolutely no reason for us to do the laundry before we write that grant application. At other times, it’s more subtle, so you may need to check in with yourself: “Yes, removing old files from my computer desktop will give me a less distracting workspace, but is it essential that I do it right now? Or am I just postponing writing the application?” Pro-tip: If you have to ask yourself whether you’re procrastinating or not, chances are you are.

Get familiar with your “greatest hits” of wasting time. Most of us have specific fall-back activities that we do when we’re playing the delaying game. What’s yours — house-cleaning, napping, shopping, reading email, catching up on Netflix? Learn to recognize it so you can nip it in the bud; it’s much easier to prevent falling down the cleaning /napping /shopping rabbit hole rather than pulling yourself out. Voge says, “The greater awareness we have of our tendencies and our motivations, we’re more likely to overcome them.”

2. Tip the balance.

Our progress towards completing any activity is affected by “approach” motives (reasons why we want to do this thing) and “avoid” motives (reasons we don’t want to do this thing). With activities that we have no hesitations doing — let’s say, eating something that’s delicious and healthy — it’s because we have many “approach” motives and very few “avoid” motives.

Many procrastinators have the mistaken belief that the reason they’re putting off a task is because there’s an underlying reason they don’t want to do it. “Often, that’s not the case. It’s simply that their fears dominate or overwhelm their ‘approach’ motives,” says Voge. When you’re playing solitaire instead of performing a competitive market analysis for your boss, it could be because your “avoid” motives — in particular, you’re avoiding the project because you’re terrified you’ll fail — outweigh your “approach” motives.

When this happens, think of all the reasons why you want to do this activity. It might help to remind yourself of how completing it fits into your larger goals, objectives or mission. Then, if it seems especially big or intimidating, break it down into manageable pieces. When Voge found himself procrastinating writing his TEDx talk because it seemed so daunting, he decided to create an outline so he could write his script section by section. Warning: Just resist turning that outline or to-do list into an invitation to procrastinate further.

3. Challenge your beliefs.

We need to undermine the ideas that brought us to procrastinate in the first place, says Voge. “The equation that we carry around in our head is flawed … your ability is not equivalent to your worth.” He adds, “Our worth derives from our human qualities of kindness and thoughtfulness and our vulnerabilities.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daryl Chen is the Ideas Editor at TED.

IDEAS.TED.COM

Mar 17, 2021 / Morra Aarons-Mele

Krystal Quiles

When I first began working at home, I couldn’t believe I was getting away with such a racket.

No one told me what to do or where to be! I could work in my bed, go to the grocery store in the middle of the day, and my clients were none the wiser. Even though I was a freelancer, I was constantly looking over my shoulder and expecting to be reprimanded by someone.

But my elation wore away when I realized I wasn’t quite alone at home: My anxiety was there, too.

Now, I’m an anxious person, even in the best of times. But these days, it seems like we’re all anxious. And anxiety is another ingredient — like Zoom calls, overloaded wifi or howling children or pets — that needs to be factored into your days, your productivity and your time management.

Some days my anxiety drives me to perform at an Olympic level, with no task undone and no email unanswered even if I have to work until midnight. That is overwork — a common way that many of us anxious people deal with our feelings — and I’ll return to it later.

Other days, anxiety creates a background buzz in the form of intrusive thoughts and fears about the future. It can also make us distracted and unable to focus, so another common way of dealing with anxiety is avoidance (more later on this one too). For example, while I was writing this piece, I baked banana bread, made a half-hearted attempt at the exercise bike, fed the cats their pre-lunch snack and wandered around my house looking for things that needed my attention.

Working from home can be wonderful, but when you’re anxious, it can be difficult to concentrate and stay on task. How do you stay accountable to yourself and get work done without driving yourself to exhaustion?

Here are some tips based on what I have learned from 15 years of managing my anxiety while also working from home:

1. Call off the mental fire drill that occurs whenever you get a Slack or email notification

I know I’m not the only one whose heart rate accelerates when I see a new email in my inbox (or a Slack message). It could be a client, a staffer, my accountant or my mother. My anxiety drives me to want to quickly fix what they’re writing me about so I’ll feel better. But before I do, I often spend time worrying and trying to suss out the “true” meaning of their message (a fool’s errand, since emotional nuance is lost in almost any digital communication). Then I’ll force myself to respond no matter what — even if I’m finally eating lunch at 3PM or doing time-sensitive work.

Don’t blame yourself for leaping to reply to every message — much of modern knowledge work is built on this Pavlovian system of instant feedback and urgent response. With so many of us working from home and without the normal in-person interaction, this past year we’ve gotten trained to crave the feedback of a “ping” or a visual notification.

To start to de-program ourselves from the need to always be on, we need to practice being disconnected for small amounts of time. Begin with a time limit. Pick an after-hours moment when you don’t need to be online, and then turn off or hide your devices for an hour. Gradually work towards doing this during a workday. For that, select an hour when you can purposefully avoid checking updates (set up an “away” or “in a meeting” notification so people won’t wonder why you’re not getting back to them).

See how you feel when you can take a break from checking. When I avoid my phone for an hour, I notice that my neck is looser and so are my shoulders! Immediate benefit.

2. Stop waiting to get permission to log off

When work isn’t a place you leave at the end of the day, it can be incredibly difficult to stop. And let’s face it, when the option is to keep working and feel in control or spend more time on the sofa doom-scrolling or with whining kids, overworking might seem even more attractive. But learning to stop work is a discipline that creates good habits and a necessary step to keeping your energy tank filled.

I am an accomplished professional, but unconsciously I still want someone to tell me, “You did a good job today — you’re done.” Well, you need to learn to give yourself that permission.

Psychologist Alice Boyes changed my life when she suggested setting concrete limits around the amount of time I spend on the tasks that make me anxious and tend to overdo. Such shortcuts and hacks that help calm anxiety are called heuristics.

Here’s how you could come up with a heuristic to set boundaries on your work hours. At the beginning of your day (or the day before), create a reasonable to-do list. The key word is reasonable — no writing up a list based upon an imaginary 240-hour day — and based on experience, you’ll probably know how long most of your tasks will take. And if you have to guess time for any, guess upwards. Structure your day based around this list, and when you’re finished, close your computer. You did good.

3. When you get stuck in a worry spiral, ask: “What’s making me anxious right now?”

The flip side of overwork is avoidance — avoiding deadlines and tasks because you’re anxious. Everyone has their greatest hits of coping mechanisms, from trying to worry the fear away to working it away to diving into a bag of cheese doodles. Our brain does this because it’s trying to help us avoid our bad feelings. To understand the motivations and causes behind your anxiety, it helps to take a pause to feel your feelings and monitor how you react to those feelings.

Start by looking at what’s making you anxious right now and how the anxiety is making you react. Here’s an example from my life. Thinking about money makes me anxious. When the economic news is frightening, I might act out when I’m faced with a work task that has anything to do with money. So if I need to prepare a financial report for my small business, I assume it’s going to reveal negative results, which sends me into a spiral of fear. Cognitive behavioral therapists call this kind of reaction an anxious automatic thought. Consequently, instead of facing the spreadsheet and doing my work, I might avoid it entirely. I might eat that bag of cheese doodles or buy something online that makes me feel good. I’m reacting to my anxiety.

It’s better if I can learn to move from reacting on auto-pilot to knowing what sets me off and then managing how I will respond. I can say to myself: “Looking at my company’s finances is going to set me off right now. Maybe I should ask my business partner to do it. Or maybe I should build in a reward if I face the challenge head on? I could let myself have an extra hour of Netflix if I complete the spreadsheet.” I find that most of the time, doing the work doesn’t feel nearly as bad as what my anxiety anticipates.

4. Follow it up by finding a super-achievable work task and doing it

As you can see from my example above, when you feel anxious, it’s easy to turn a relatively straightforward task into an overwhelming thought exercise that sends your brain into catastrophe mode. When you are mired in anxiety and avoiding your work, the important thing is to do something. Jonathan Baxter, a family therapist, gave me this advice:

“The experience of stress has to do with your body wanting to take action. If there are actions you can take — whether getting some exercise or cleaning the bathroom or teaching your kids something — go ahead and take them. When you take action, give yourself a moment to let yourself feel good about taking a step. Use your mind to give your body the signal that you have agency and are doing what you can. (“There, I did it!”) The goal is to feel active and effective rather than scrambling from one thing to the next.”

I like to take a page from positive psychology and choose a small, meaningful action that will build my motivation for work and to tackle bigger tasks ahead. Have you ever organized a messy spreadsheet and just felt so good? Pick an activity that connects you to your larger purpose and allows you to see yourself as an effective and competent individual, which will ultimately help you move towards doing the thing you’re avoiding.

5. If that seems impossible, pick a non-work task

If tackling work just feels like too much when you’re toiling from home and staring at a messy house or out-of-control kids, pick a non-work action that’s physical and helpful. Since I hunch and clench in my desk chair when I’m stuck, I like to pick a task that gets my body moving and my shoulders open. I might pick a household chore (I like to scrub the bathtub because it’s quick but physically demanding), cook, do some yard work or even run up my stairs a few times. I find that it helps me to get off my screen and into motion.

Notice how you feel after you do your tiny non-work task and whether you’re able to begin the thing you have been avoiding. Then notice: How long can you continue until anxiety hits again? Is there a specific activity that almost always gets you in the mood to tackle a task?

6. Keep adding to your anxiety-taming bag of tricks

Anxiety feels different for everyone. We all have different triggers, and we all react differently. Money, as I mentioned before, is a big anxiety trap for me. When I get unwelcome financial news, my brain immediately goes to a gloomy place: My business will fail, we will go broke, we will lose everything.

As you continue in your career, it’s crucial that you understand specifically what sets you off and how it affects your workday. Once you understand that, you can try to avoid these triggers and — when you can’t avoid them — use specific strategies or tools that can help you move out of anxiety.

Many people I talk to for my podcast “The Anxious Achiever” tell me that they find making to-do lists and detailed schedules helpful, because they help them cut down on ruminating and overwork. Others know that they need to sweat, get outside or run around with their dog to dissolve that knot of anxiety. I like to cook. When I’m anxious and unfocused, I make giant stockpots of broth or chili. Hey … it works for me.

It’s possible for you to create a remote workday that minimizes your anxiety, creates real connection and engagement with your coworkers, allows you to get your work done, and lets you feel OK about unplugging at night. But like all skills, learning how to manage your workday anxiety takes practice, time, and above all compassion for yourself. We all succumb to the cheese doodles at times, and that’s OK too.

Watch her The Way We Work video here: 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Morra Aarons-Mele is a (mostly) happy, successful person. She also identifies as an extremely anxious overachiever. To normalize anxiety and help others manage theirs, Aarons-Mele launched and hosts The Anxious Achiever podcast for HBR Presents, which was a 2020 Webby Awards Honoree and is a top 10 management podcast. She’s passionate about helping people rethink the relationship between their mental health and their leadership. Aarons-Mele is also the founder of the award-winning social impact agency Women Online, which created a database of female influencers, the Mission List. She was named 2020 Entrepreneur of the Year at the Iris Awards, recognizing excellence in digital parenting media. Aarons-Mele is also a prolific writer. Since 2004 she has covered the campaign trail, the White House, the lactation room and the office cubicle. Her book, Hiding in the Bathroom: How To Get Out There (When You’d Rather Stay Home), was published in 2017, and she has written for the New York Times, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Slate, InStyle, O, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and the Guardian. 

IDEAS.TED.COM

May 16, 2019 / Daniella Balarezo

Rose Wong

By examining our actions and attitude, we can start to break the cycle, says psychology researcher Raquel Peel.

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Before she met the love of her life, psychology researcher Raquel Peel says that she was a “romantic self-saboteur.” Her early experiences had affected her attitude and behavior towards love. In her TEDxJCUCairns talk, she recalls, “I assumed that people in my relationships would eventually leave me; I also assumed that all my relationships would fail.” Driven by these feelings of impending doom, Peel — a graduate student at James Cook University in Australia — would invariably “pull the plug” on romances whenever things got the least bit difficult.

Sound familiar?

She knew many other people who acted in deliberately self-destructive ways in relationships, so she decided to learn more about this behavior.She did it in two ways: by interviewing Australian psychologists who specialize in relationship counseling “to understand what self-sabotage looks like in practice” and by surveying more than 600 self-confessed saboteurs worldwide to find out what they did and why they did it.

“My participants varied in age, cultural background, and sexual orientation,” Peel says, “Yet they answered in very similar ways.” They exhibited one or more of what US psychologist and researcher John Gottman (watch his TEDx talk) calls “the four horsemen of the apocalypse,” or what he has identified as the primary behaviors that can lead to the end of a relationship: criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. And while the particular form that these take are as unique as the people surveyed, the people surveyed, according to Peel, “sabotage relationships for one main reason: to protect themselves.”

Of course, while self-protection is the reason given by most of her participants, the actual causes of sabotaging behaviors are complex, varied and deep-rooted. Still, Peel has this advice to share with any self-identified romantic saboteurs out there:

Stop entering relationships that you know are doomed. 

One form of romantic self-sabotage is choosing partners that are just plain wrong for you. “We should not be pursuing every relationship that comes our way,” says Peel. “Pursue those relationships that have the potential to work.”

Get curious about how you act when you’re in a relationship.

Peel suggests: “Take a really good look at yourself and your behaviors in relationships and ask yourself, Are you someone who needs a lot of reassurance from your partner? Are you someone who gets nervous when things get too close?”

Think about those four horsemen — criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. How often do you exhibit any of them? Which are your go-tos? And what are the beliefs you hold about yourself or your partner when you act in these ways? Try to observe your actions — or think back to what you’ve done in the past — and strive to understand the reasons behind them.

View your relationship as a partnership.

“We need to figure out how to collaborate with our partners, and how, even, to be vulnerable together,” says Peel. “Are you and your partner on the same team? Do you talk to your partner about your relationship goals?”

Obviously, this isn’t appropriate in the early days when you’re getting to know each other. But when you’re in a committed relationship, writer Mandy Len Catron (watch her TED talk about the reality of love) says — borrowing from linguists Mark Johnson and George Lakoff — it helps to view it as a “work of art” that you two are co-creating together, in real time. Adopting this attitude can make you more excited about the future you’re both building, rather than seeing love, and therefore your relationship, as something that is happening to you beyond your control or input and likely to end in heartbreak.

Many romantic saboteurs mention the dispiriting sensation they have when they’re in a relationship knowing it’s just a matter of time before it will end. As Peel puts it, “it’s like staring into a crystal ball knowing exactly what’s going to happen.” However, the work-of-art mindset can help counter that pessimistic self-narrative. Instead, “you get to stop thinking about yourself and what you’re gaining or losing in your relationship, and you get to start thinking about what you have to offer,” says Catron.

Be kind to yourself.

Your reasons for developing self-sabotaging behaviors most likely spring from an understandable and human place. “It’s natural to want to protect yourself,” says Peel, “but the way out of it is to have insight into who you are in a relationship … and how best to collaborate with them. After all, if you know who you are in a relationship, your partner will also have a chance to get to know you, and together you can break the pattern to sabotage.” She adds, “Love will never be easy, but without self-sabotage, it is a lot more reachable.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniella Balarezo is a Media Fellow at TEDx. She is also a writer and comedian based in NYC. 

Healthline.com

• A new study recently publishedTrusted Source in JAMA Psychiatry found that a layperson-delivered phone call program could reduce feelings of loneliness, depression, and anxiety.
• These calls also improved the general mental health of study participants within 4 weeks.
• Each caller contacted between 6 and 9 participants daily for the first 5 days.

Over the past year, many of us have struggled through feelings of isolation and loneliness because of COVID-19 restrictions and enforced physical distancing to prevent virus transmission.

This has resulted in accompanying feelings of loneliness and anxiety for many.

A new study recently publishedTrusted Source in JAMA Psychiatry found that a layperson-delivered, empathy-oriented telephone call program could reduce feelings of depression, and anxiety, while improving the general mental health of study participants, within 4 weeks.

“We were partnering with Meals on Wheels of Central Texas already, and when COVID-19 struck we realized the increased mental health concerns of their members,” corresponding author Maninder K. Kahlon, PhD, associate professor in the department of population health at the University of Texas at Austin, told Healthline.

Kahlon said her team quickly designed a program and tested it rigorously to confirm that they could see improvements on “clinically-relevant scales.”

“We needed to prove to ourselves that the intervention had the effects we hypothesized,” she emphasized.

Study included participants who were homebound and faced food insecurity

From July 6 to September 24, 2020, researchers recruited and followed up with 240 adults assigned to receive calls or no calls (the control group). They were between ages 27 to 101, with more than half 65 years or older.

Loneliness, depression, and anxiety were measured at the beginning of the study and then after 4 weeks.

Intention-to-treat analyses were conducted. Participants received calls in their homes or wherever they might be when the call was made.

The study included Meals on Wheels clients in Central Texas who matched their service criteria, which included being homebound and expressing a need for food.

The callers were between 17 and 23 years old and trained in empathetic conversational techniques prior to the study.

Each caller contacted between 6 and 8 participants daily for the first 5 days, after which participants could choose to reduce the frequency, but to no fewer than 2 calls per week.

‘Sunshine calls’

Known as “Sunshine Calls,” the program was a randomized control trial (RCT) developed by Factor Health, a collaborative initiative at the University of Texas at Austin.

About half of participants lived alone, and all reported having one or more chronic health conditions.

According to the findings, compared to those who weren’t called, call recipients reported average improvements of over 1 point on a 7-point standard scale in feelings of loneliness, for a 16 percent difference.

The number of participants who felt at least mildly anxious at the beginning of the study also dropped 37 percent by the end of the study, and those at least mildly depressed dropped by 25 percent.

“We trained callers to prioritize the person at the other end of the phone call. Listen to them, and to listen to the clues they provided in their conversation about their interests,” Kahlon said. “If the person mentioned their aunt in passing, the caller would go back to that and pull on the thread, and usually there’s a story there that they’re just waiting to share!”

Calls are a promising way to improve health

Kahlon said she was surprised by the study’s findings.

“We hypothesized we’d affect loneliness by having people connect, meaningfully, to participants. We were pleased by the degree of improvement,” she said.

“But what we were surprised by were the significant effects on depression and anxiety,” she added.

Kahlon explained that these are two major health concerns, especially considering the effects that both mental states have on “broader mental health scales.”

She also believes this program is a particularly promising way to improve health across the board.

However, according to the study, a major limitation of this research is that it’s unclear whether benefits can be sustained for longer than 4 weeks.

The study also noted that future work should address whether improvements are not only sustainable, but also enhanced with longer implementation.

Reaching out can help relieve anxiety and loneliness 

“I think the relationship between loneliness and health — I think it’s a very complicated relationship and any number of factors… could be involved,” said Dr. David Roane, chair of psychiatry at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.

He pointed out that people who aren’t attached to others have less motivation to take care of themselves, have no one to assist them or look after them to make sure they’re eating or sleeping properly, and “don’t necessarily have standardized routines.”

Roane explained that isolation itself can have a direct effect on physiology, and can affect aspects of medical health directly.

Kahlon thinks programs like ‘Sunshine Calls’ can remedy a shortage of mental health professionals.

“We can address mental health, at scale,” she said. “Loneliness need not remain unaddressed, and depression and anxiety can be tackled without being constrained by our lack of mental health professionals.”

She concluded that, “The health system should pay for whatever delivers results, including programs such as this one.”

Reaching out can be rewarding

“Well, I think the study here is really focused on some interesting ideas,” said Roane. “The focus on reaching out to people through technology through the phone, through Zoom, and reuniting with friends and relatives that you haven’t been in touch with recently.”

He emphasized that people are very open to hearing from others, “so reaching out can often be very rewarding.”

Roane added that long distance contact must be regular for the most benefit.

“So if you have a friend or relative who is particularly isolated it might actually be a great idea to have a regular scheduled call,” he said. “That might not be every single day, it might be on a Saturday or Sunday or whatever works for the person who’s trying to reach out.”

According to Roane, setting and maintaining a routine of scheduled calls is key.

“I think that for the isolated individual to know that they can expect social contact could be very helpful,” he said.

The bottom line

New research finds that making regularly scheduled ‘empathetic calls’ to isolated individuals can significantly reduce loneliness and anxiety — and possibly improve overall health.

Experts agree that reaching out electronically to friends and relatives isolated by physical distancing measures is a good idea, but contact should be regular for the greatest benefit. 

Experts also say that calling programs can help address a shortage of mental health providers to help people experiencing loneliness and anxiety in their homes.

Popculture.com

By DANIEL S. LEVINE – March 8, 2021 

Former America’s Got Talent judge Gabrielle Union opened up about her mental health struggles during an interview with Gwyneth Paltrow at the In Goop Health virtual summit on Sunday. The 48-year-old said she has faced “so many rock bottom moments” throughout her life, from her experience with sexual assault to divorce to career setbacks. She felt like she was “losing my mind” at one point last fall and has short “depressive episodes.” She also discussed a shocking moment when she considered suicide.

“I’ve had so many rock bottom moments as an adult, starting with being raped at 19 at gunpoint at my job,” the Bring It On star told Paltrow via video conferencing, reports E! News. “It just felt like every so many years, there was some major catastrophic event that was happening in my life. You know, divorce, career setbacks, relationship issues. There’s always something that just lands you on your a— and you’re like ‘There’s no way I can move on from this, I’ll never recover, I’ll never be the same.'”

Union said each challenge she faced has helped her grow as a person. She called them “mini deaths” and you have to “grieve the person” you were before each of them. “There have been times I’ve felt like I had to be reborn out of success because that comes with its own challenges,” she said. The L.A.’s Finest star then explained her latest challenge, perimenopause. This marks the end of a woman’s reproductive years before menopause. The symptoms “reached a fever pitch” in September 2020, she said.

“I thought I was losing my mind,” Union said. “I thought I had early-onset dementia, Alzheimer’s. I gained 20 pounds overnight of water retention, inflammation, bizarre. I couldn’t think. Now, when I have to public speak in the last few months, I’m so anxious, because I’m like, ‘Am I going to remember words?'” The scariest symptom was a suicidal thought that came during a “stupid argument” with her husband, retired NBA star, Dwyane Wade. “Only because I’ve been in therapy for half my life that I was like ‘No, I don’t know who is talking now, it’s not my intuition,'” she said, adding that the thought was “fleeting.”

“I was able to get through it with talk therapy and diving into how I can regulate my hormones,” Union said. “Luckily I was at home and I alerted everyone.” She later added, “Separating the symptoms from who you really are…to say that it’s a challenge, I don’t think I really have the words, or I lost them, to describe what these last few months have been.”0COMMENTS

Union has spoken out about her mental health in the past. In 2018, she said she was diagnosed with PTSD after she was raped as a teenager. “I’m here to tell you that I am PTSD survivor, thriver, bada— motherf— I was diagnosed with PTSD at 19 after I was raped at gunpoint — and I didn’t let it stop me,” Union said in a video for The Child Mind Institute, reports PEOPLE. “I didn’t want it to define my whole life, and it doesn’t have to. Asking for help, needing help doesn’t make you weak or less worthy of love or support or success.”

If you or someone you know are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741-741.

There’s a lot you can do, in the day-to-day alone, to try and make yourself feel better. For both your mental and physical health’s sake, knowing you can keep your house clean and tidy is a big thing. As a result, you can feel happier, and you can feel healthier (or even alleviate your pain symptoms), and that can really improve your quality of life. But why does a clean house make you feel so much better? Well, here are the main reasons. 

Pexels Image – CC0 Licence

A Light Form of Exercise

Cleaning can help to keep you on your feet, and make sure you’re moving on a daily basis – even if you don’t consider it a form of exercise, it’s definitely a good way to keep your legs and arms moving, and your muscles supple, if you’re someone who can’t exercise in a traditional manner. 

Being active in a manner like this is also very productive; you’ll be killing two birds with one stone! You could burn almost 200 calories per hour while cleaning, and also make your space look a lot more organized, which is good for your mental health too. 

Better Air Quality

The air quality in your home needs to be of good quality, to make sure you’re not coughing on a daily basis, and you’re not feeling stuffy in your nose or your throat. Poor air quality can make any and all chronic conditions you’re already living with worse, especially if you have a respiratory issue. 

When the house is clean and tidy, there are far fewer dust particles in the air. Even getting a proper airflow through your home, by opening windows and turning on the AC, is a great idea. Fresh air is very good for you! 

Indeed, if your central air and heating systems don’t seem to be able to crank it up to high enough levels, it’s a good idea to look into HVAC Repair for your home. There’s a good chance you have a blockage or a breakage somewhere, and that’s going to be hard to fix on your own. 

You’ll Sleep Much Better

For anyone who lives with insomnia, or has a lot of trouble falling asleep thanks to chronic pain, even just making your bed in the morning can mean you get some much better sleep during the night. 

Regularly changing your bedding, and making sure you have a new mattress every 8 years at the least, can help to lower your pain levels and make you feel more comfortable when you climb into bed at night. 

And sleeping better makes taking care of yourself a lot easier too. If you’re rested, and you’re not feeling tired on a permanent basis, you’ll feel a lot more secure and comfortable in yourself. Getting more, better sleep really is a life-changer, and a lot of it is due to a clean house. 

A clean house really can make you feel better, in a variety of ways! 

This is a collaborative post.

Melinda

I was kindly gifted The Joy of Selfish by Michelle Elman from WelBeck Publishing Group for an honest review. The book was released earlier this month and the timing is perfect. This is a must-read for everyone.

When I saw the press release for the book I knew this book was going to be a great seller. Most people know that taking care of themselves is important but they don’t look at it as critical to their health. Well, it is. If you keep putting yourself behind others and the daily task you have, you’ll never get around to yourself. You have to plan and make yourself a priority, and most importantly is you have to buy in 100%.

It doesn’t matter if you’re chronically ill, a mother of five, just retired or a college student you need this book. It’s never too late to set boudoirs for your life and create the life you want and envision.

About the Author

Michelle Elman is a five-board accredited life coach, award-winning activist, author and podcaster. In 2020 she was named one of the Top 50 most inspirational women in the UK and is respected globally for her work as a body positivity influencer, best known for her ‘Scarred not Scared’ campaign.

Michelle has over 300k followers across Instagram and Tik Tok and has been a guest on media outlets including Sky News, Channel 5 News, Loose Women and BBC Radio London. She’s written for publications including HuffPost, Grazia, Metro and Stylist. Recently she coached Emily Atack on her series ‘Adulting’ and appeared on Geordie OGs to discuss online bullying and its impact on mental health. She also featured in the BBC3 documentary Being East Asian which aired earlier this year. Michelle’s podcast, In All Honesty, is available on Acast. Her first book, Am I Ugly?, was published in 2018.

Blurb

The Joy of Being Selfish redefines selfishness as a positive act, allowing us to love ourselves and those around us authentically without apology, It explores the different types of boundaries, offers tip on how to start setting them, and helps with the quilt of felt after boundaries are put into place.

Learn how to deal with her of being disliked, common responses to boundaries, dealing invitations, block/mute/delete-how to limit information, learning to express yourself-and most importantly using you inane power to start a new life.

My Thoughts

The idea of taking care of ourselves is being selfish is outdated and ridiculous. If we do nothing but give until we are depleted who is going to take care of us let alone our loved ones. I can’t agree with Michelle more on this message. Self-care is not selfish and if so then get selfish. 

In 2015 Michelle was a Life Coach at crossroads in the direction of her career focus. She decided to see a Business Coach. Little did she know this chance meeting would make her future very clear and she set out on a mission to accomplish her new goals.

The Joy of Selfish is a tool for anyone who needs guidance in setting boundaries. dealing with guilt, self-sabotage, and help with dealing with the outside influences that try to throw you off track.

The Joy of Selfish is a book for everyone, every age, every gender. We can’t be our best selves for others if we don’t take care of ourselves first.

WelBeck Publishing Group

We are Welbeck Publishing Group – a globally recognized, independent publisher based in London. Our mission is to deliver talent-driven publishing with leading authors and brands worldwide. Our books and products span a variety of categories including, fiction, non-fiction and stationery and gift. We are renowned for our innovative ideas, production values, and developing long-lasting content.

Welbeck’s amazing product comes to life for adults, children, and families in over 30 languages in more than 60 countries around the world. We have collaborated with many of the world’s leading institutions and licensors including – Disney, Universal, Paramount, HBO, Queen Productions, FIFA, International Mensa, Roald Dahl Literary Estate, the Science, Natural History and Imperial War Museums, and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Melinda Sandor

www.lookingforthelight.blog

The Columbian

By JUWON PARK, Associated PressPublished: February 16, 2021, 6:11am

They work to raise awareness about mental health issues

SEOUL — K-pop star Eric Nam was having a meeting in New York when he suddenly felt a pain in his chest.

“I thought I was going to have to call 911,” he said, recounting the experience from 2019. But instead he remained sitting and “had to quietly breathe my way” through the meeting, he said.

Similarly, Jae-hyung Park, better known as Jae from K-pop band Day6, was in a cab returning from a music video shoot in Seoul last year when he experienced what felt like a heart attack.

At first, he put it down to stress, saying that for years he had dealt with “out of place” and “weird” feelings. But he realized he couldn’t ignore the symptoms, and in the “calmest voice” asked the driver to take him to a nearby hospital.

“I’m … feeling like I am going to die, I am going to die, I am going to die,” he recounted.

Park and Nam said they later found out they had suffered panic attacks.

Many recording artists struggle to cope with the trappings of fame. In South Korea, as in many cultures, talking about mental health issues is seen as taboo, causing K-pop stars to grapple with depression and mental illness on their own.

Nam and Park have joined other Korean American K-pop artists in raising awareness about mental health beyond the K-pop community by publicly sharing their personal journeys.

Nam moved from his hometown, Atlanta, to Seoul in 2011 and launched his music career after competing on a Korean music television show. A Boston College graduate, Nam said the racism he endured growing up in suburban Georgia left deep scars on him.

He explains he was bullied and even spat on by a classmate. “It was one of the most degrading, embarrassing, infuriating moments of my life up until that point,” Nam recounts on the first episode of MINDSET, a paid podcast series he’s just launched to promote conversations about mental health and wellness. “And I think still to this day that is a topic that I never feel comfortable speaking out about.”

Nam said he also struggled with an identity crisis as a Korean American, being treated as an outsider in both South Korea and the U.S.

“It felt like I didn’t belong anywhere,” he said.

Park, born and raised in California, said he had difficulty navigating between two vastly different cultures. And the intense competition in the industry also affected his mental health.

“It’s a dog-eat-dog world,” Park said of K-pop.

Park was offered counseling from his record label, but said he found it difficult to connect with his therapist and eventually took a break from his career last year, when his band went on a hiatus.

He took part in Nam’s podcast series as a celebrity speaker.

Nam is hoping the shows can address stereotypes and stigmas surrounding mental illness.

“I never thought that I would need, I would want to talk to somebody about my mental health,” Nam said. “But once you’re in that position, I just didn’t know really how to deal with it. And so I remember those very isolating kinds of moments that I had had earlier on in my career.”

Dec 8, 2015 / Guy Winch

IDEAS.TED.COM

Psychologist Guy Winch shares some practical tips for soothing the sting of rejection.

Rejections are the most common emotional wound we sustain in daily life. Our risk of rejection used to be limited by the size of our immediate social circle or dating pools. Today, thanks to electronic communications, social media platforms and dating apps, each of us is connected to thousands of people, any of whom might ignore our posts, chats, texts, or dating profiles and leave us feeling rejected as a result.

In addition to these kinds of minor rejections, we are still vulnerable to serious and more devastating rejections as well. When our spouse leaves us, when we get fired from our jobs, snubbed by our friends, or ostracized by our families and communities for our lifestyle choices, the pain we feel can be absolutely paralyzing.

Whether the rejection we experience is large or small, one thing remains constant — it always hurts, and it usually hurts more than we expect it to.

The question is, why? Why are we so bothered by a good friend failing to “like” the family holiday picture we posted on Facebook? Why does it ruin our mood? Why would something so seemingly insignificant make us feel angry at our friend, moody, and bad about ourselves?

The greatest damage rejection causes is usually self-inflicted. Just when our self-esteem is hurting most, we go and damage it even further.

The answer is — our brains are wired to respond that way. When scientists placed people in functional MRI machines and asked them to recall a recent rejection, they discovered something amazing. The same areas of our brain become activated when we experience rejection as when we experience physical pain. That’s why even small rejections hurt more than we think they should, because they elicit literal (albeit, emotional) pain.

But why is our brain wired this way?

Evolutionary psychologists believe it all started when we were hunter gatherers who lived in tribes. Since we could not survive alone, being ostracized from our tribe was basically a death sentence. As a result, we developed an early warning mechanism to alert us when we were at danger of being “kicked off the island” by our tribemates — and that was rejection. People who experienced rejection as more painful were more likely to change their behavior, remain in the tribe, and pass along their genes.

Of course, emotional pain is only one of the ways rejections impact our well-being. Rejections also damage our mood and our self-esteem, they elicit swells of anger and aggression, and they destabilize our need to “belong.”

Unfortunately, the greatest damage rejection causes is usually self-inflicted. Indeed, our natural response to being dumped by a dating partner or getting picked last for a team is not just to lick our wounds but to become intensely self-critical. We call ourselves names, lament our shortcomings, and feel disgusted with ourselves. In other words, just when our self-esteem is hurting most, we go and damage it even further. Doing so is emotionally unhealthy and psychologically self-destructive yet every single one of us has done it at one time or another.

The good news is there are better and healthier ways to respond to rejection, things we can do to curb the unhealthy responses, soothe our emotional pain and rebuild our self-esteem. Here are just some of them:

Have zero tolerance for self-criticism

Tempting as it might be to list all your faults in the aftermath of a rejection, and natural as it might seem to chastise yourself for what you did “wrong” — don’t! By all means, review what happened and consider what you should do differently in the future but there is absolutely no good reason to be punitive and self-critical while doing so. Thinking “I should probably avoid talking about my ex on my next first date” is fine. Thinking “I’m such a loser!” is not.

Another common mistake we make is to assume a rejection is personal when it’s not. Most rejections, whether romantic, professional, and even social, are due to “fit” and circumstance. Going through an exhaustive search of your own deficiencies in an effort to understand why it didn’t “work out” is not only unnecessarily but misleading.

Revive your self-worth

When your self-esteem takes a hit it’s important to remind yourself of what you have to offer (as opposed to listing your shortcomings). The best way to boost feelings of self-worth after a rejection is to affirm aspects of yourself you know are valuable.

Make a list of five qualities you have that are important or meaningful — things that make you a good relationship prospect (e.g., you are supportive or emotionally available), a good friend (e.g., you are loyal or a good listener), or a good employee (e.g., you are responsible or have a strong work ethic).

Then choose one of them and write a quick paragraph or two (write, don’t just do it in your head) about why the quality matters to others, and how you would express it in the relevant situation. Applying emotional first aid in this way will boost your self-esteem, reduce your emotional pain and build your confidence going forward.

Boost feelings of connection

As social animals, we need to feel wanted and valued by the various social groups with which we are affiliated. Rejection destabilizes our need to belong, leaving us feeling unsettled and socially untethered.

Therefore, we need to remind ourselves that we’re appreciated and loved so we can feel more connected and grounded. If your work colleagues didn’t invite you to lunch, grab a drink with members of your softball team instead. If your kid gets rejected by a friend, make a plan for them to meet a different friend instead and as soon as possible. And when a first date doesn’t return your texts, call your grandparents and remind yourself that your voice alone brings joy to others.

Rejection is never easy but knowing how to limit the psychological damage it inflicts, and how to rebuild your self-esteem when it happens, will help you recover sooner and move on with confidence when it is time for your next date or social event.

Illustration by Dawn Kim for TED.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Guy Winch is a licensed psychologist who is a leading advocate for integrating the science of emotional health into our daily lives. His three TED Talks have been viewed over 20 million times, and his science-based self-help books have been translated into 26 languages. He also writes the Squeaky Wheel blog for PsychologyToday.com and has a private practice in New York City.

Writing Prompts For The February Link-Up Party

Each month Sheryl from A Chronic Voice does a link-up party and this month’s writing prompts are Defining, Saving, Allocating, Educating, and Uniting. I choose three of the five writing prompts, Defining, Saving, and Allocating. This is my first link-up party and I look forward to joining in more often during 2021.

The purpose of the Link Up Party is for people with chronic illnesses to use writing prompts to share aspects of their life that may help or motivate others to live their best lives. A Chronic Voice has been doing the monthly writing prompts since 2017 and the post contributed each month are very interesting, educational, and motivating, and sometimes very funny.

Defining

I’m defining who I want o to be, what I want each day to look like, and most importantly, how I want to act. It’s so easy to go with the flow when you chronically ill, we have every reason too. What I want to do is define what my life is going to look like for all the days I can control. I know there will be days I won’t live up to my expectations and that’s okay, it’s not a failure, it’s reality. I need to clear my head and get back to what my goals are and what am I working for in the way of self-improvement. It only takes a small amount of effort to be nice, and I want to work harder at taking that extra step to help people and not be the naysayer.

Saving

This month I’m saving my energy for my health by getting enough rest and sleep. I’m saving a ton of energy by staying away from negativity, and also being more aware of how much time I spend on social media. I already limit my news watching to one hour a day but there are many headlines thrown at you while you’re on the Internet that can be very distracting. I’m working harder to not look at the headlines, for all I know its fake news. Staying clear and focused on my goals will save energy. If I’m doing the actions to support my goals every day then there isn’t time to waste on energy drainers.

Allocating

I’m allocating time to expand the types of posts I write, one way is by reading books that have been gifted for reviews. I’ve worked hard to transition my blog, Looking For The Light to a Health and Lifestyle blog, not one focused solely on my chronic illnesses. Another way I’m allocating is thru time spent on reading, researching, and taking more time to write each post. Not worrying about a schedule as much. On the health front, my hips are causing me tremendous pain and have even disrupted my sleep for months now. The doctor has increased my meds and has me scheduled for a CT Scan of both hips next week. This is on top of the everyday Fibromyalgia pain I have. I have to allocate time for rest, pain is very draining. Taking time out several times a day to rest or do nothing is important, I’m working on making myself number one more often.

How are you Defining, Saving, and Allocating this month?  

Melinda