Tips to Improve your Well-being in 2016

Posted on by doctorsuzana

Here are some worthwile ideas for practicing better self-care.

Excerpt from PsychCentral.com: 3 Jan 2016

For 2016: Stop Neglecting Yourself by Jonice Webb, Ph.D.

….We almost all neglect ourselves in one way or another, at one time or another. One could argue that the damage we do by neglecting ourselves is far more substantial than whatever neglect we experience from others.

Read through the common areas of self-neglect below, and see if any ring true in your life.

Common Examples of Self-Neglect

  • Not pursuing an activity that you know you would enjoy
  • Settling for a job that’s under-challenging or isn’t stimulating
  • Unhealthy eating
  • Not getting enough sleep or rest
  • Not developing a talent that you know you have
  • Engaging excessively in an activity that harms your body and detracts from your emotional health, like pot-smoking or using other drugs….
  • Generally over-focusing on other people’s needs while leaving your own unmet
  • Not exercising enough
  • Not speaking up for your opinions
  • Over-scheduling yourself so that you don’t have enough free time
  • Settling for too little joy or fun in your life
  • Neglecting to address sources of unhappiness
  • Spending too little time, effort or money on your appearance, a potential source of self-esteem
  • Depriving yourself of the freedom and pleasure brought by spending time in nature

Have you been neglecting yourself in these, or other ways? If so, rest assured that you are in good company, along with much of the human race.

Take a moment and try to imagine treating a child the way you are treating yourself/your body right now. Would you deprive a child of joy? Vegetables and fruits? Fun? Nice clothing? An opinion? Fresh air and exercise? Then why do you treat yourself or your body this way?

Now, at the very start of 2016, is a great time to stop the neglect and start giving yourself the time, attention, and effort that you need and deserve.

Five Steps to Cure Your Self-Neglect in 2016

  • Identify the area or areas in which your self-neglect has arises.
  • Write each one down. Seeing it in writing will make it more vivid and real and will also serve as a record to consult throughout the year.
  • Choose one item (working on one at a time will optimize your success) from your list, and promise yourself to improve on it in 2016.
  • Focus on that goal. Pay attention to when you fail to do what’s best for you or your body.
  • Track your success on paper or using your smartphone.

…The deep roots of self-neglect often spring from a lack of self-worth. Somewhere, somehow, maybe you don’t feel you are worth the effort of self-care…

… You can take charge of your own self-neglect with enough motivation, dedication, and perseverance throughout 2016.

Understanding Mental Abuse: Gaslighting

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PsychCentral: Understanding Mental Abuse: Gaslighting

By

Gas Light Movie

Mental abuse is difficult to assess. Unlike physical abuse where there are visible marks, mental abuse leaves no marks but its effect is just as damaging. One of the tactics of mental abuse is a term coined gaslighting. Understanding this scheme better can help prevent more victims and heal those who have already been victimized.

History: The term gaslighting originates from a 1944 movie called Gas Light. In the movie, the husband convinces his wife that she is insane through intentional manipulation. When the wife notices a dimming in the gas lights of their home, she addresses it with her husband. He, wanting his attic search to remain a secret from her, insists instead that she is imagining the difference and subsequently persuades her that she is instead going insane. Psychologists have used the term ever since.

Basic Tactic: Gaslighters lie about the past making a person doubt their memory, perception, and sanity. They are talented in taking a miniscule about of truth and surrounding it with lies. They claim and give evidence of past wrong behavior further causing doubt and insecurity. This paves the way for portraying themselves as the reasonable and logical party. Sometimes they go to the extreme of staging false events or proof to validate their deception….

Personal Implication: Gaslighting can be done on a small or large scale to an individual. It can be as simple as the Gaslighter claiming they have a relationship with an influential person when in actuality they have only met them once. Then they use that “claim” to further a career or agenda. Or, in a marital situation, the Gaslighter could allege they have one career when it is actually a cover for another. In either case, any attempts to assert the truth would be met with “you are the crazy one.”

What to do:

  • Relive the past. Look at past gaslighting events and pick them apart. Try to spot the moment the lying started around the sliver of truth. Recall any emotional reaction, insecurity, or feelings of guilt. Gasllighters tend to use the same tactic over and over. Studying the past is good preparation for the future.
  • Just the facts. Remember Joe Friday from the 1950’s TV show Dragnet? He was famous for saying, “just the facts.” Stick to factual information that can be confirmed and verified. Do not rely on data or corroboration that is dependent on the Gaslighter. When there is no valid way to confirm the evidence outside of the Gaslighter, don’t believe them. Since Gaslighters are natural liars, it is better to assume they are being dishonest.
  • Don’t react emotionally. Gaslighters feed off emotions to sway a person. While it can be frustrating in the moment to deal with the tactic, an emotional response will add fuel to the fire. Instead, be as impassive as Mr. Spock from the 1960’s TV showStar Trek. This will aggravate the Gaslighter and steal their control.
  • Go slow. Generally speaking, Gaslighters try to elicit a snap decision immediately following the tactic. Slow things down by saying, “I’ll have to think about that,” or “I need more time.” Distracting the Gaslighter or walking away can also have the same effect. This extra time allows a person to reflect on the logic being presented before making a decision.

While these methods are no guarantee that the gaslighting will stop, trying something is better than ignoring the issue and hoping it will disappear.

 

Can You Learn Self-Control?

Posted on by doctorsuzana

NYT.com: OpTalk

Can You Learn Self-Control?

By

October 14, 2014

Walter Mischel conducted one of the most famous experiments in 20th-century psychology. In the late 1960s, he oversaw a test at Stanford University using a group of preschoolers. These studies gave him access to children whom he subsequently tracked for decades, collecting data on each child’s education, health and other factors. Now, more than 40 years later, he’s published a book, “The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self Control,” about the experiments.

In the marshmallow test, Mr. Mischel asked a preschool child to choose between receiving one small reward now (say, one marshmallow or one cookie) and waiting a short amount of time — about 10 minutes — to receive two rewards (two marshmallows or two cookies)….

…The test was designed to measure a child’s ability to delay gratification. The major problem at the heart of the test is the concept of intertemporal choice; that is, how we compare a larger delayed reward against a smaller immediate one. In study after study it’s been shown that our brains tend to undervalue a bigger payoff in the long-run, no matter what the objective calculation is.

In Mr. Mischel’s view, this is a test of willpower: the ability to use the brain’s executive, rational functions to overcome the immediacy — and emotional potency — of desire. In subsequent studies of his original subjects, Mr. Mischel found that children that were able to withstand temptation and wait for another treat were likely to have higher SAT scores, achieve higher educational degrees, earn more money and have a lower body mass index, an indication of healthy weight.

As Pamela Druckerman revealed in an Op-Ed for The New York Times last month, many parents (Ms. Druckerman included) subject their own children to the test, hoping to ascertain some glimpse of their child’s future. Mr. Mischel explains to her, however, that the results of the test are not destiny. On the contrary, self-control can be taught, and not only in childhood.

Mr. Mischel tells Ms. Druckerman that adults can learn from the children’s spontaneous attempts to resist temptation. Children were most successful when they tried to occupy their attention with something else — make up a song, say, or turn their back on the marshmallow — or transformed the object of desire in their mind, perhaps by imagining it as a piece of cotton or pretending it was smelly or dirty.

…Likewise, adults are better at avoiding temptation when they employ methods of distraction or distancing….

…Those habits can help us achieve what Mr. Mischel calls “a burning goal”: a long-term objective that requires consistent and often arduous work and attention….

…The key, all of these writers say, is to counter something that is emotionally “hot” — desire, temptation, emotion — with something “cool” — the brain’s executive function….

David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, however, sees it differently. He argues in a detailed, fascinating piece in Pacific Standard that learning to deal with impulses isn’t so much about building up self-control as it is training yourself to appeal to certain emotions — that is, not countering “hot” with “cool” so much as tapping into the correct “hot” response. Mr. DeSteno argues that emotions that have a moral valence and prize a greater social good — responses like gratitude, compassion, pride — can also help us control our behavior in favor of a delayed payoff. These qualities have been selected for historically because they are more likely to benefit a larger social structure.

In fact, an emotional response might be more effective and less draining in helping us resist temptation, especially over the long term. John Tierney wrote in 2011 in The New York Times Magazine that making decisions is depleting and that we each have only a finite amount of energy for making choices in a given time period. Mr. DeSteno refers to similar research, writing that even small decisions like whether to wear a blue or a white shirt wear down our willpower. And our executive function can be used to twist any decision to our advantage…For that reason, “any strategy based solely on forcing adherence to a set of virtues through a bunch of cool-headed, cognitive strategies and a list of ‘thou shall nots’ is a fragile one….”