Surfing Emotions

'Emotions have a natural life span. like a wave, they surge, crest, and then recede.

If you have a tendency to avoid painful feelings, trying to numb out or somehow shut off the hurt, you may not appreciate that painful emotions have a limited life span. As pain wells up, you may cut it off before seeing that there is a crest, and beyond it a downward slope. You may not know that even the worst emotions subside - naturally and spontaneously.
Try sticking with an emotion and watching it to see how this works. With time you will learn something about how long they last, and how they morph and soften over time.' from p153 'Your Life on Purpose

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!

What to do when you walk into a crowded room and discover you don't know anyone

Look for the person who looks most lonely, shy or anxious and go over and focus on doing what you can to make them feel more comfortable.

I read this years ago and have no idea of the source but it is a real humdinger of a tip

Building Confidence Through Doing Rather Than Thinking

My 18 year old son, Patrick, just sent me this email:

Best way to combat feelings of lack of confidence/anxiety? - Get Stuff Done

He had been feeling anxious about achieving his goal of being an amazing (and commercially viable) portrait photographer and then decided to take some actions to move bit by bit towards his goal - and he noticed that as he took each action he felt a little more confident.

Many of us respond to anxiety by avoiding the anxiety provoking situation.  We can get caught into waiting until we feel confident before we take action. That is fine if the situation that scares us is bungy jumping - but what if it is the situation is actually important to us? It could be that we need to take a risk in order to develop our career; ask someone on a date; or build a new friendship.

Research on self-efficacy suggests that Patrick is right.  We build confidence through experiences of being successful (either at that task or something similar).

So if you want to build your confidence - focus less on controlling what you think and feel and more on structuring the task so that you are likely to be successful.  Breaking the task into manageable steps that are each a little harder than the last but not so hard that you are unlikely to succeed.

Now I want to stress here that even when you have done something successfully in the past, you will have times when your mind seems intent on knocking your confidence.  'It was a fluke last time, this time you will stuff it up'.   Unfortunately this is a natural human tendency - hold these thoughts lightly and:

Get Stuff Done