Keep Going Until You Stop

This is really, really good - on lots of levels.

Changing Emotions by Changing Behaviour

In 1996 Neil Jacobson found that, in the treatment of depression, 'adding cognitive techniques to behavioural activation does nothing to improve outcomes at the end of acute treatment and at two-year follow-up' (Gortner, Gollan,Dobson & Jacobson, 1998) quoted in Kanter et al (2010).

What that means is, during periods of depression, just getting help to get moving again, re-engaging with the world step by step, is a highly effective approach and it isn't actually necessary to change your thinking.  That the feelings can follow the behaviour. 


'The shortest, most reliable way to change how you're feeling is to change what you're doing. When you feel bad, don't wait to feel good to do what you love. Start doing what you love. Good feelings will likely follow.'
If I had known this a few years ago it would have saved me a lot of time and effort trying to get my thoughts 'right'.

The Near Enemy of Psychological Flexibility

I recently presented an ACT workshop with NeLi Martin and she spoke about the concept of the 'near enemy'.
In our attempts to become better people the near enemy can actually be more dangerous than the far enemy.  For example, the far enemy of compassion is hatred but the near enemy is pity. It is easy to differentiate compassion from hatred but much more difficult to spot the more subtle differences between pity and compassion.
In this blog, I often mention psychological flexibility because it is associated with well being.  Steve Hayes defines psychological flexibility as:

The ability to contact the present moment

fully and without defence

as a conscious human being

engaged in life as it is – not as your mind says it is –

and, based on what the situation affords,

changing or persisting in behaviour

in the service of chosen values.

The far enemy of psychological flexibility is 'experiential avoidance' - making inflexible choices that aren't aligned with values and that have the core aim of avoiding painful thoughts, feelings or memories.  Experiential avoidance is associated with all sorts of poor outcomes.

But the near enemy is to turn the choice to live a value laden life into a harsh, 'fake it 'til you make it'; 'suck it up'; 'carry on regardless' approach.  I think if we want to avoid this near enemy, we need to have a stance of self-compassion when we are doing our best to live our values.

When I am 80

I recently went to a 'Happiness Trap' workshop run by Russ Harris.  One of the exercises we did that has stayed with me was this:
Imagine it is your 80th birthday and three people who are important to you come to see you.  You have a special mind reading machine and can tune in to their thoughts and hear what they really think about you - what you meant to them, how you have influenced them, what are their strongest memories of you. What would you want them to think?
Give yourself a moment to drop into those thoughts - who do you really want to be when you grow up?

When I think of my grandmother I think of how easily she laughed; how gentle she was when she told people if they had upset her; how she was still learning to play the violin when she was in her 70's; how she was very quick to give praise; how she didn't sweat the small stuff (she thought ironing and tidying up were a complete waste of time); how she showed us all how very much she loved us.

That seems like a life well lived to me.

If you want to be happy, become more extroverted

People who score highly for extroversion are more likely to have increases in life satisfaction over time.  People who score highly for neuroticism are more likely to have decreases in life satisfaction over time (Headey,2009).

People who are extroverted have a tendency towards: warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness, enthusiasm and feeling energised in company. Whereas people with high Neuroticism scores have a tendency to experience more feelings of anxiety, anger, depression and guilt than those low in neuroticism. People high in neuroticism tend to feel overwhelmed in stressful circumstances; interpret ordinary situations as threatening and have difficulty not acting on urges.

Headey suggests that these differences in life satisfaction as life progresses are because extroverted personality traits are associated with experiencing more positive life events and neurotic personality traits with more adverse life events. Extroverted people tend to build relationships.  Being part of a supportive network of people is strongly associated with happiness, so extroverted behaviour makes life better. Whereas, neurotic people tend to get overwhelmed by their painful emotions and often start to avoid challenging situations. Their lives becomes progressively more narrow.

Our personality may not be as fixed as we thought, on average we tend to become less neurotic and less extroverted with age.

So, assuming we want to be happy with our lives, what might this suggest we should do?  Here are my suggestions:

1. Take the free IPIP Neo test to see how you currently score
2. If you are low in extroversion - accept that you do need time alone to recharge but don't hide away from the world.  Introverts who push themselves to become more social become happier. Work out what your values are around relationships with others. Then try to say 'yes' more often to experiences with others that align with those values. 
3. If you are high in neuroticism - practice mindfulness, get good at noticing what is really happening in the world rather than what your mind is telling you is happening.  Get good at noticing urges to act in 'neurotic' ways and see if you can sit with the urge and instead act in line with your values.  
4. Show yourself compassion - this stuff is harder for you than for happy-go-lucky, bubbly extroverts. 

My personal experience with this?  I have been practising ACT (the approach that much of this blog rests on) for several years now and my neuroticism scores have fallen. This is anecdotal - but I am pretty pleased!

If You Want to Improve Your Life Satisfaction

A large German prospective study, lasting 15 years, suggests that if we want to increase our life satisfaction then we need to:

1. Focus on becoming more extroverted and less neurotic  - more on that in another post
2. Pursue goals relating to
• Family life: building a happy marriage, developing good relationships with our children, and,
• Altruism: building friendships, helping others, social and political activism.

Whereas pursuing 'success' goals (career success and material gains) actually leads to decreasing life satisfaction.

It isn't rocket science is it?  But there is a lot of cultural pressure encouraging us to put energy into 'success goals' so it is good to keep being reminded that it really doesn't lead to more happiness. However, my instinct is that balance is the key here. I think that we can assume that most of the study participants were working, which actually means that the study found that adding goals around relationships and altruism increased well being.

When all else has been stripped away this remains

'Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after -- lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again.'- Louise Erdrich

In my twenties I was a junior hospital doctor. The nature of that work is that you spend a lot of time with people who are close to death. And the experience taught me two things - firstly, to cherish life, as you never know when it will end, and secondly, that those who had loved well and put effort into something that they were passionate about seemed to face death with more ease than those who had focussed on gathering wealth and status.

There was a beautiful show on Radio 4 some years ago called 'Advice to the Living' which was advice from people with terminal disease. I still remember one of the people saying:

'Am I loved?  Am I loving well?  When all else has been stripped away this will still remain'

Advice to live by.

Loneliness makes us more vulnerable to exploitation

In a game of negotiation, lonely people were more like to accept unfair offers than non-lonely people.
Anita E. Kelly draws the following insight from this study:

'Perhaps we all look back at times in our lives when we put up with abusive behaviors from family, friends, or lovers that we would never tolerate now. We scratch our heads and wonder why we did. Well, maybe it was because we were lonely. And maybe we can forgive ourselves now that we're not.'

 This makes a lot of sense to me. Loneliness is very painful for primates.

Many psychologists tell recently single people that they must get used to being alone before they start dating. I have given my take on this in another post. I think that much wiser advice is to put effort into building and maintaining a supportive network of friends and family so that you aren't entering into dating relationships from a place of vulnerability.