Why Do You Have Your Hair Like That?

Every single action you take throughout your life can either be a move towards your values or a move to avoid painful thoughts or feelings.

The place that this choice (and all the other small choices we make) comes from, makes a big difference to the quality of our life. Choices that are mainly about expressing our heart's desire about who we want to be in the world and what we want our lives to stand for, will tend to lead us in the direction of vitality and emotional well being. Choices that are mainly about avoiding social disapproval will tend to lead us towards a narrow and constricted life.

From the outside it can be hard to tell which it is. Take these two very different women:

  Kim Kardashian and Martine Batchelor 

 

Just looking at photos of them, we have no way of knowing whether they are expressing their values through the choices they have made about their hair or whether they are just trying to avoid social disapproval from the very different communities that they inhabit.

So if I can't tell which I am doing just by looking at my behaviour, how do I choose?  Well, I can ask myself this question:

If everyone important to me approved of....(insert area of your life here - from your haircut to your choice of career) ...whatever I chose to do, what would I choose?

To explore this further, I recommend the personal values questionnaire.

9 Reasons Why People Get Rejected for Being Too Nice

Sometimes people tell me that they seem to be repeatedly rejected by potential partners because they are 'too nice'. 

This is confusing and leaves the recipient of this feedback wondering whether they need to become less nice if they are to attract a partner.

I think that it is actually rare that the problem is that the person is too nice.


Instead, if this happens to you, it might be helpful to consider the following questions:

• You might have a tendency to choose damaged people who are uncomfortable when they are treated well. If this happens recurrently then you might need to pause and get some help to develop a more workable approach to relationships.
• Perhaps you are creating an unpleasant feeling of obligation in the other person because you always do more for them than they do for you? This is called a reciprocation debt.
• Are you inadvertently communicating a sense that you are nice because you lack confidence in yourself? You don't think you are worthy of love unless you are being nice all the time.
• Are you avoiding expressing your needs and wants? This means that the other person has to do a lot of work guessing what you really want and never gets the opportunity to be generous to you. (for example: If you are assertive and tell me that you want to watch a different TV show to the one I want to watch, then I can say 'Let's watch your show' and feel good about my generosity - giving tends to make us happier than getting) .
• Do you avoid making decisions? It is tiring for your partner to always be the one making the decision. 
• Are you too passive? Do you ever make the first move? If you don't take this risk, is it because you want to avoid being rejected?
• Do you avoid expressing passion and tend to stay safe? (read this poem!)
• Do you use 'being nice' as a way of avoiding authenticity? Perhaps you aren't willing to be vulnerable?

I think that a lot of these behaviours are about trying to avoid the risk of rejection. Sadly, when our focus is on avoiding emotional pain rather than on genuine, authentic connection we actually often seem to make it more likely we will be rejected.

My suggestion here is to get some clarity about who you want to be in a relationship. Decide on your relationship values. Then work out how 'being nice' fits with those values. When we are being kind, generous and compassionate as an expression of who we truly want to be in the world it feels quite different to when we are 'being nice' to try to avoid rejection or risk.

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

Taking A Risk to Be Real

Christian Bale in a recent interview with  Esquire Magazine:

BALE: No. All I knew was that there was a whole lot more there that I'd never seen and there was some extreme in the interpretation that should be taken. So I just said, "I just gotta hope that they're gonna go with that, and if they don't, that's not the version I'd like to be involved with anyway." And it's that perverse thing in life, where when you're able to achieve a certain recklessness, you actually end up getting good results. You have to throw everything aside and say, "What the hell, I'm gonna do it this way, and if they don't like it, I wanna do it anyway." It avoids that anxiety of "How do I manipulate this and fake it so that people believe me?" That's never gonna work. So that's the kind of abandonment you gotta have.

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.

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!

Trying to Avoid Stress is Counter Productive

A paper by H. Harrington Cleveland and Kitty S. Harris exploring  the processes that trigger cravings and prevent some addicts from building a sustained recovery. They found that recovering addicts who deal with stressful social experiences (such as ' hostility, insensitivity, interference, and ridicule' from others) by trying to avoid those experiences, have 'twice the number of cravings in a stressful day compared to persons who use problem solving strategies to understand and deal with the stress.' 


 'According to Cleveland, the findings suggest the impulse to avoid stress is never going to help recovering addicts because stressful experiences cannot be avoided.  "If your basic life strategy is to avoid stress, then your problems will probably end up multiplying and causing you more problems."

Mindfulness and acceptance are associated with exercise maintenance

Mindfulness and acceptance are associated with exe... [Behav Res Ther. 2010] - PubMed result

How many of us start an exercise program and then...give it up?  A lot of us!
This paper makes the stunning suggestion that the reason we give up is because exercise is often uncomfortable.  But then they discuss an interesting finding - there is an association between mindfulness, acceptance and exercising more regularly. When people are able to non-judgementally notice the sensations produced by exercise and accept the discomfort as part of the price to be paid for the many benefits of regular exercise; they tend to miss fewer exercise sessions and feel more positive about achieving their fitness goals.

I have been pondering this finding. I think acceptance of discomfort, in the service of values around being healthy, is important in maintaining an exercise regime. However I also think that mindfulness transforms the experience of exercise. Instead of rushing to get to the end of each set of reps, if I observe with curiosity the sensations that arise as I repeat a movement, it becomes fascinating and also utterly joyful. And I feel so grateful that I have a body that does what I ask it to.

But I don't think that lack of acceptance is actually the major reason that most of us (including me!) aren't exercising enough. I think it is more about competing values. If I am to exercise more, then I need to do less of something else that I value - hanging out with my loved ones chatting and laughing? Focussing on my work?          Writing this blog? What do I give up?

I think that this is actually a genuinely difficult dilemma. The most recent pieces of research that have helped me with this are

• Mindfully doing housework increases the fitness benefits
• Gardening is good for children's self esteem - just wish I could get the kids on board with this one!
• Self compassion is a really good idea

And IMHO by far the best book on time management is 'Do it Tomorrow'

Forster recommends a 'Closed List Day Planner'  - each day write a list of what you need to get done, but only include what you can realistically get done in a day.  Then just do what is on the list. When you have finished the list - STOP and go and play!

Being Single

When you are single, you get a lot of well meaning people telling you what you should do.  A common piece of advice is – 'You need to get comfortable being alone before you start dating again'.   

When I am single, I completely ignore this advice. I do a lot of dating. I fall in and out of lust and love. I am on an emotional roller coaster.  I love the opportunity to test drive lots of different potential partners. And I know that, for some people, that approach would be neither helpful nor healthy.

What I have come to is this – you can do the same activity for completely different reasons. Rather than relying on others to tell you if it is right or wrong (assuming it is legal!) instead ask yourself the question:

Is doing this moving me towards the life I want, a life that is rich and meaningful, or, am I running away from painful thoughts and feelings?

On 22 August I am running a workshop (with the wonderful Joan Wilson-Jones) at The Relaxation Centre of Queensland titled 'Life, Love and Laughter when Single and Over 40'. If you are interested in coming along, call them on 07 3856 3733.  

Trying Not to Think About Smoking Leads to Increased Smoking

Unbound MEDLINE | I Suppress, Therefore I Smoke: Effects of Thought Suppression on Smoking Behavior. Journal article abstract

We know that trying not to think about something actually makes us think about it more.  Try not to think about a pink elephant.....how are you going?  You might notice that it takes effort to not think about something and that, in order to check how you are going in not thinking about the pink elephant, you have to keep asking yourself the question 'Have I thought about a pink elephant recently - D'oh!'


This study explored this concept of thought suppression with a group of smokers - some were asked to try to suppress thoughts of smoking and others were asked to express thoughts about smoking.  The thought suppression group initially smoked less but after a week they ended up smoking more. It is this initial success that leads us to believe that suppressing thoughts works in controlling our behaviour.


Even more importantly the more a smoker has a general tendency to suppress thoughts, the more times they have unsuccessfully tried to quit smoking.


Trying to control our thoughts takes emotional energy that could be better used to direct our behaviour towards our valued goals.   If we are able to let go of the idea that our thoughts are in charge of our actions, then we can let our thoughts do what they want.  We can choose which thoughts we are going to respond to with actions that will, step by step, create the life we truly want. Other thoughts we can just notice with compassion.

Three Questions That Could Change Your Life

Russ Harris, author of The Happiness Trap, teaches his clients to repeatedly check in with themselves using three questions.

Am I:

1. Moving towards my values or away from my values (doing what matters – or not?)

2. Allowing private experience (thoughts, memories, emotions) or avoiding private experience (opening up – or not?)

3. Connected with the ‘here and now’ or disconnected from the ‘here and now’ (being present – or not?)

These questions are based on ACT, an evidence based approach that helps people to build rich and meaningful lives.

Research has found that: 

• Identifying and living by our values has a whole host of benefits
• Trying to control our thoughts and emotions is often counter-productive and can lessen meaning and joy
• Being present and 'mindful' builds well being

Russ's three questions are a simple and helpful way to check in on ourselves throughout the day - if you did it regularly every day, it might just change your life!

Psychological Health

Recent work in the area of psychological health suggests that 2 things are key to psychological health

• A willingness to experience unpleasant internal stuff (thoughts, memories, urges, emotions etc) in the service of doing what is important (the opposite of this is called experiential avoidance) and having the skills to not getting hooked by those experiences – Just letting them play in the background rather than focussing energy on them. 
• Psychological flexibility – having a range of possible responses to a situation and being able to choose your response rather than doing the same thing over and over again.