Forget FOMO, Fear MOON-Missing out on NOW
Amanda Johnson
Physical Therapist and Wellness Coach obsessed with using research and snark to help people be phenomenally well
I have known many great troubles, but most have never happened. Mark Twain
Regardless of who we are, what we do for a living, or if we stay at home managing the craziness, we often live life in the woulda, shoulda, coulda mindset. I work with people in the last years of their lives and regularly receive all kinds of unsolicited life advice. A general theme tends to permeate throughout all the voices and faces I have had the ability to get to know. Spend quality time with family and friends. Not a single one of us plans to ignore our friends, kids, or parents. Our days are full of doing if regardless of if you have kids or not, manage a home, work, or are retired. I see people who are busy with ‘tasks’ irrespective of their age.?
If you are reading these words, are you thinking about what you are reading, or have you wandered off to a task you need to get done? If so, you are not alone. An article in Science magazine found that our minds wander about 50% of our day, and when we allow our minds to wander, we are less happy. We easily enter the catastrophic mind space where the worst-case scenario is the only scenario. Sure there are happy daydreams, but those are not as common as hell in a handbasket daydreams.?
Charles Schultz once said, "in life, we are given a ten-speed bike. Most of us have gears we never use." We frequently miss on what’s happening right now as the nonstop thoughts keep us out of the present moment. The gear that everyone wishes they used at the end of their lives was the first one that we all tend to bypass in favor of the middle gear and high gears to get ahead. So how do we spend more time in the here and now? Presence.?
What is interesting about Presence is that I can be in the same room as someone with awesome boots but they might be mentally far away. The Presence I am talking about is letting your mind be where your body actually exists more often than we do right now. Phones, tablets and computers make it much easier for us to ignore the here and now in favor of mindless wandering from one site to the next.?
The result is that you are generally not happy once you snap back to reality as you face all of your to do list once again. We can’t always be focused, but we can be mindful about bringing our thoughts back to the here and now. Presence can be interchangeable with mindfulness, a term that we hear more and more often. Jon Cabot-Zinn describes mindfulness as “...living on purpose in the moment as if your life depends on it.”?
Presence or mindfulness is a state that allows you to pay attention to what is happening right now. That doesn’t mean you block out the bad to stay in the present. It means that you view the information in a manner that allows you to think about it before you go down the spiral of the worst-case scenarios. It means taking a step back to wonder if this is really a bad day or just a bad 5 minutes. When you take that mental step back you are using a different part of your brain to override your emotional centers. In a movie back in the Adam Sandler days called ‘Waterboy” the main character Bobby was in a class where his teacher stated that alligators were mean and aggressive because they have a large amygdala. Of course, Bobby (Adam Sandler) states that his mama said it was because they “Had all them teeth and no toothbrush.” How does this relate? Well, we have an amygdala too. You can choose to live in a state where your amygdala/your emotions can control you like an alligator, or you can use the part of the brain that allows you to take a step back.?
Mentally stepping back allows us to be with the people who are important to us when we are on the phone or in-person with them. Often many of us have FOMO-fear of missing out on a social gathering or events they aren’t able to attend. However, we need to be concerned about MOON-missing out on now by our lack of ability to listen to our spouse instead of scrolling through Facebook when they get home. People can tell when you are not there mentally, or at least my husband can tell when I am doing something else while talking to him even on the phone. It is challenging to stay focused on the here and now unless we have done the hard work of helping our brain to stay present. Will we always succeed? Nope. But the goal is to have little successes which will turn into big wins in the future. Living a life with Presence will help us to slow down outside of the day to day grind and be with our friends and family body and soul.
Action Steps: Leave your phone in another room and start your day quietly making breakfast. As you open up your bag of tea or coffee, smell it and listen to the sound of the water boiling or the coffee beans grinding. The goal is to quiet the mind wandering we are prone to and keep us in the here and now for just a few minutes at the start of each day. Want more suggestions? Check out next week.
1 Minute of Mindfulness Daily will Make You A Parent with Superpowers
Okay, ten minutes of mindfulness daily would go further, but almost everything will work better if you restart it, even for just one minute, including you. One minute could be the difference between raising your voice and dealing out consequences you realize later were inappropriate. Trust me. I get you. I have a child that makes me want to take away all her things and make her go to community college instead of the excellent University I have been saving for monthly. She is seven, so obviously, I am over-reacting, but that is what my emotional brain wants to do when she throws a perfect eye roll at me with her hip cocked off to the side during an argument she is trying to have with me. I love her dearly, but she can sometimes be one of my life stressors.
We can’t control our stressors, but we can control our response to them. Stress can be like the weather. It is something we can’t predict or control. When it pours down on us like a hurricane, it seems like there is no escaping or stopping it. Although it may feel like stress is an uncontrollable force that shapes our lives, we have more control over it than we realize.
The more we learn about the brain, the more we understand how our brain changes. The brain has plasticity, meaning connections can be made, unmade, and remade. The brain is moldable, and you can strengthen areas or make them weaker. Mindfulness is a way to strengthen areas that decrease your fear and stress response. We don’t typically hesitate when installing a new software update on our phones but resetting our brain with Mindfulness is not something we reach for when life stressors come knocking. This is because resetting your brain has to become a habit. It needs to become part of how we run our daily lives to take charge of the windstorm of life.?
Calming the Hurricane Inside
Mindfulness can also be called Meditation, which is just observing the breath and passively ignoring the emotional thoughts trying to hijack you. I don’t use the term meditation typically as people have a lot of preconceived notions around Meditation, like that it is only practiced by Buddhists or hippies or both etc. Mindfulness or Meditation is just about focusing on a breath and allowing your mind to reset. If you are of a particular religion, you can pray as well. The Rosary that Catholics use can be a form of Meditation as it is a repeated phrase or mantra that helps them focus.?
Research has shown that focused breathing is one technique that induces physiological changes termed the relaxation response. Harvard neurologist Sara Lazar compared the brain structures of those who meditate to those who don’t to find what changes occur. The results show that individuals who meditate have more gray matter in their frontal cortex. This means that the part of their brain that controls memory and decision-making has stronger connections than the emotional centers. The frontal cortex can help reign in emotions when it is stronger before you yell at your five-year-old for using her hand instead of toilet paper.?
This ability to reign in your emotions is HUGE because about half of what we do daily is automatic, a habit you have created on purpose or by accident. When you are on autopilot, you do not think or question. You are a servant to your unconscious, and your unconscious can be cruel. 80% of the time, when our mind wanders, we think about something more stressful than what we are doing right now.?
Mindfulness is a different way to approach what you face day in and day out and feel less anxious about what is coming. Mindfulness is an invitation to approach your stressors with curiosity and kindness. We have spent a lifetime categorizing and judging the actions of others and ourselves. Mindfulness is a request of yourself for you to listen to your feelings without judging them or telling yourself you shouldn’t be feeling them. AND your brain changes when you do this regularly. THAT IS SO COOL! HOW NEATO IS YOUR BRAIN!?
How is Mindfulness going to fit into my life? The short answer isn't going to fit. Nothing magically starts happening in life, or I would have a six-pack, and my clothes would instantly be put away when they make the journey up my stairs. Mindfulness is a habit, and creating a pattern that becomes a habit is hard. However, this might be the habit that allows you to be calm and collected despite what life, your kids, and what work throws at you. That way, when the poo hits the fan, you can close your eyes, take a deep breath, and state calmly that you have smelled worse, so you got this.?
Action Steps: Try taking five deep breathes before you get out of bed three days a week. Set a little reminder to go off as an alarm to remind you of your mindfulness breathing, so it is easier to remember. DO NOT JUDGE YOURSELF when you forget. Don’t use that as an excuse to say Mindfulness doesn't work for you. Reach out if you want more personalized Mindfulness advice, and I will help you find something that will stick.
Mind Your Mindset: How self-talk can unlock your full potential
Through many years of working in the health care field, I have learned that educating people on their poor lifestyle choices doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because health education often is given in a way that makes the person being educated feel criticized or stupid. Most of us already criticize ourselves. Someone who has a degree telling us we suck is just icing on the cake that we will eat tonight because we already ate Sonic for lunch.?
Self-criticism doesn’t work to help to motivate us to change. However, it can be our autopilot setting. Highly self-critical people have feelings of inferiority, guilt, and worthlessness. They have been measured by themselves, and they don’t measure up to standards. People that continue to ride the autopilot of self-criticism are at a higher risk for depression. The more you judge yourself, the more likely you will continue to make that rut you are stuck in bigger and deeper. Changing behaviors is not easy, but there is a way to make your path easier—Self-Talk.?
Sports psychologists use Self-Talk regularly to help athletes mentally prepare for an event. There can be a keyword or phrase that helps athletes mentally shift into a different place during a grueling part of their race. Self-talk can also be used by the people more likely to watch the race on TV instead of participating. Self-talk is a strategy to improve focus and attention to a task when the going gets tough.
While we don’t think about it, all athletes get to a point where they want to stop working so hard and give in. But those that make it learn how to bolster their fatiguing willpower. You can use the same tactics. Here’s how you can start to apply self-talk to gain some mental toughness that will get you through the urge to quit.
Interestingly mental toughness has been studied and is described as a key set of attributes for optimizing performance. Athletes improve their performance by having personal resources that allow them to maintain effort and motivation. This personal resource is the use of self-talk to improve their mental toughness. What they do is physically stressful. Self-talk used by athletes are individualized statements that cue the athlete to combat the competing thoughts, which are probably along the lines of “this sucks” or “it’s 5 o’clock somewhere." In a study of three 800 meter runners use of self talk, one of the runner used “Smooth & Fast,” “There you are!” and “You got this” as her coached phrases for pushing herself and improving her personal record.
You can also use self-talk to pre-battle your struggles and decrease the mental fatigue it takes to continue pushing yourself for a lifestyle change. Let’s take cutting down on extra sugar as an example. You sit down at a business meeting and what is put out for food is donuts, or maybe you get lunch with a friend, and they are getting a dessert. What are you going to do? Have you visualized that situation and thought about how you will respond? This approach only works if you do it full-ass versus half-ass, meaning kind of sort of thinking your way through it will not work. Outloud ask yourself, "What should (your name) do in this situation?" Talk to yourself like you would if your friend asked you for advice. What do you want her/him to do when this problem comes up? Find the phrase that will trigger you to push through.
In the absence of pre-planning with self-talk, you will eventually run into a situation or time when you don’t have the willpower to sustain the change you want. You do better when you have leadership from the person who knows why you want that change. You. Grab the self-leadership microphone for your current challenge and self-talk your way to a better way to achieve your goals.
Action Steps: Go full ass. What goal are you struggling with? Maybe it is scheduling daily meditation or getting in your steps. Talk outloud to yourself and find a phrase you can use to shift your mindset when you feel your willpower giving out. Want help? Check out local counselors to do a deep dive into getting some specific self talk for your goals.
Stress or Challenge: Trick question...You decide how your body responds
I remember it very distinctly. I was performing an across-the-floor routine, and the instructor had the whole class stop while I did the sequence repeatedly until I did it exactly how she wanted it. There was a point when I decided that I would accept this challenge instead of feeling singled out. I was going to do it the right. I don’t remember how many times it took me, but I do remember the point at which I changed my mindset from “she is singling me out, and I don’t like it” to “she is going to teach me something, and I am going to get this.” While the event was not even close to the most stressful I have had in my life, it is one where I clearly remember changing my mindset. It is also a good demonstration of taking a situation as a challenge instead of a threat.
What Makes a Challenge vs. Threat State
We are all faced with potentially stressful situations day in and day out. But what makes one situation stressful instead of a challenge to be tackled? Well, to a point, we each make that decision for ourselves. This decision process is the transactional model of stress and coping described in that complete page-turner we all have in our libraries, undoubtedly known as Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. This 1984 classic was written by Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman, some brilliant humans who probably had minimal fashion sense but kicked ass in academic circles. Lazarus and Folkman found that how we think of a situation determines our body's response. It is not the actual event that causes stress but the way we subconsciously think about it that determines how the body and brain react.?
Lazarus and Folkman describe a challenge as an event or situation, known as a stressor, that we feel we can handle. When we think of a circumstance as a challenge, we focus on what good can come from the situation. We believe there will be rewards or personal growth we’ll attain when we successfully overcome this event. It is not that we think it will be easy, but we instead focus on the possible benefit. Compare that to a threat which could be the same event or situation for a different person. However, they view this stressor as something they cannot handle in this instance. When they see a situation as a threat, they’re focused on the negative. They are focused on the potential damage to their mental outlook or self-esteem because they are not sure they will succeed. Clear as mud? Here is a story that brings it all together as told in Frontiers of Psychology, modified by me for improved quirky humor.?
Challenge vs. Threat Example
Jessica is standing at the start of a critical road race. She wants to make it to the Boston Marathon this year and get a sponsor so she can get free running shoes to match her hair. She has a hilly course ahead of her, and hills have been her Achilles heel. The race is close to starting, and the pressure is mounting. She feels like her heart is beating in her throat. She knows that the race will be physically and mentally demanding. Jessica has trained hard for this. Jessica believes that she can pace herself and feels ready to tackle the hilly course. She strides off rhythmically, able to follow her pre-race plan, deal with unforeseen events, and achieve a personal best. In this example, we consider Jessica to be in a challenge state.
Back to the start of the race, gazing just over to Jessica’s left, we see Sarah standing at the beginning of the same race. She would also like to qualify for Boston this year. Like Jessica, Sarah feels her heart rate increase, and she knows that the race will be demanding but has also trained for this. However, in contrast to Jessica, Sarah questions whether or not she can pace herself. Hills have been historically hard for her growing up in Louisiana, where the tallest ‘mountain’ is 535 feet above sea level #ahillnotamountain . Despite specifically training for hills, she feels worried about tackling the hilly course during a race situation. She strides off enthusiastically but cannot find her rhythm and cannot follow her pre-race plan. She deals with unforeseen events poorly, gets distracted, and completes the race outside of her expected time. In this example, we consider that Sarah is in a threat state.
How Challenge and Threat States Apply to You
Challenge and threat states or CAT states have been associated with different performance outcomes in athletes. Quite a bit of research has been done on CAT states in athletes so that professional sports teams and Olympic athletes can dominate their sport. Understanding an individual's response to stress is key for optimizing performance. Stressful events also occur in business, medicine, education, and sports. As it turns out, challenge and threat states are applicable for regular unathletic plebs like the rest of us because of how our brain modifies our bodies’ responses.?
The Body’s Response
The mental outlook that Jessica and Sarah had affected how their bodies responded during the race. In Jessica’s case, she is experiencing increased heart rate due to the release of epinephrine (adrenaline) and several other hormone-driven changes in how her heart and blood vessels are working. These changes allow her to use energy more efficiently. Jessica also has increased blood flow to her brain, which will help her with improved decision-making and self-regulation. Why? Because to use your brain well, it needs more blood to get more of the energy it needs. Her body is setting her up for an increased likelihood of success.
Sarah’s body is not responding the same way in a threat state. Sarah has the same epinephrine release in a threat state, but her body also releases cortisol. The release of cortisol stops several of the other effects of the epinephrine, so her body does not change how her heart and blood vessels are working as it did for Jessica. Her body has to work harder during the race for this reason. She also does not have increased blood flow to her brain, so she is more likely to have ineffective decision-making and self-regulation. Both decision-making and self-regulation require mental focus, and without the extra blood and energy, her brain was at a disadvantage. This is important as she could not follow her pre-race plan and got distracted easily. Her brain did not cause the release of helpful hormones in a threat state. This ultimately prevented her from achieving her goals despite training. She probably still kicked my rear because my idea of a fast pace is a nine-minute mile, but I doubt that will matter to her since I am finishing with her grandma.??
Challenge Application
Now let’s discuss how this can apply to people who do not enjoy running, which is about 79.67% of the US *authors note-I have no research to back this stat up, but I am really good at wildly guessing as I discuss exercise all the time with my patient’s.?
Research indicates that challenge and threat states occur in life, such as during a job interview. Ideally, we all want to be able to answer questions well during an interview. We will want extra blood and energy heading up to the brain to come up with unique answers and witty banter, thus sealing the deal on that new job. The stress that results in a challenge or threat state does not have to come from a significant life-changing event like getting a new job. It can also come from weekly recurring stress like coming up with what we will have for dinner this week.?
Challenge state stress is good for us and for kids too. Research shows an improved ability to deal with stress later in life if children experience moderate types of stressful events in childhood. Moderate stressors were not having enough money for activities, working under pressure (athletic or academic), and mild teasing by other children. We don’t need to protect ourselves or our children from mild stress. Instead, we need to change how we respond to it.
We can’t control our stressors, but we can control our responses. Stress can feel like the weather, something we can’t predict or control. When it pours down on us like a hurricane, it seems like there is no escaping or stopping it. Although it may feel like stress is an uncontrollable force that shapes our lives, it isn’t. We can choose to live without power over our circumstances. We can choose to live the life of a red shirt on Star Trek (You know, the ones that always die on away missions, eaten by the borgovian land worms). Or we can choose to have a life where we are on the bridge of the Enterprise, deciding how and where the spaceship is flown.
Change Your Brain = Change the Result
The more we learn about the brain, the more we understand how our brain changes the entire game. The brain has plasticity, meaning connections can be made, unmade, and remade. The brain is moldable, and you can strengthen connections or make them weaker. We can change the brain when we take the challenge. We can change our brains when we see a situation as surmountable with training. To do this, we need to accept our own agency. We need to move the locus of control outside of ourselves, where the situation controls us, to inside ourselves, where our actions control the situation. Sometimes to do that, we need help which can come in the form of a xenobiologist who can educate us on all the things that are likely to eat us if we join a space exploration team. Or it could come from a counselor who can give us tools to switch our mindset from this is impossible to what would I need to do to make this possible. So what will you decide? Is it stress, or is it a challenge?
Struggling with Goals? Try Getting Mentally Tough
In every race, something within each athlete poses a simple question: ‘How bad do you want it?’ To realize your potential as an athlete, you must respond with some version of this answer: More. And then you have to prove it
Matt Fitzgerald-How Bad Do You Want It??
Grit and resilience garner much attention in organizations, books, and the popular press. They are valuable attributes that help make a thriving adult, so they should garner attention. However, the focus for grit and resilience is on the future and the past.
Resilience in a broad-brush sense is about overcoming or learning from the past instead of being the victim. It’s what you bring to the table due to what you have overcome. Based on Angela Duckworth’s research and book, grit is about the future. It’s about keeping that long-term perspective on where you’re heading and staying on that path.?
Those concepts can help us frame where we have been and what mental outlook we need to get where we want but often, where we come up short is in the here and now. What is helping you stay committed right now is your mental toughness.?
Mental toughness is “a state-like psychological resource that is purposeful, flexible, and efficient in nature to initiate and maintain goal-directed pursuits.” In less scientific words, mental toughness is the personal capacity we use in the moment to pursue a goal. It can account for up to 25% of performance differences in research.?
What is Mental Toughness
In research, mental toughness is not a predetermined trait according to the majority of the researchers. It is a learned ability to draw a little more from your potential capacity when you need to enhance your ability to achieve a goal. You can develop the necessary elements to become mentally tough no matter who you are. Mental toughness is not a dominant male trait. It is not just putting your head down and going for it. We can all learn to tap into that mental toughness because it is how you get your brain set to deal with wanting to quit. How do you develop your mental toughness? Thrive, prepare and activate.?
Mental Toughness Component One: Thrive
Thrive is well-being in both mind and body. The goal is to have the energy to think about how you are thinking. Living in the moment is appropriate at times but we need to have the respect to give our brain the best condition to work. the best conditions come from managing stress, eating well most of the time, and getting enough sleep. These aspects of your life make it so you have increased mental reserves. Think about it. Are there times when you are just tired or mentally drained? What kind of decisions do you make when you get in a spot where you are living off fumes?
We only have so much mental energy to give. If you are giving all your mental energy to just trying to get through your morning, there isn’t much to tap into by the time you see the Oreo package as you grab something at the grocery store after work. Your mental drive to say no to your inner sugar craving was gone by noon, and there goes another new years resolution.?
If you are having issues with your ability to push through and stay on your goal path, one of the best things to do is GET MORE SLEEP. Go to bed earlier and do all those things you have to get done at night in the morning by getting up an hour earlier. Meditate for five minutes in your car when you get to work to decrease your stress and anxiety. Figure out what needs to happen to thrive and get out of the emotional drought that poor sleep, nutrition, and stress have helped you get into. Chat with a mental health provider. Depression and anxiety will hold you back from tapping into your mental toughness. I have used mental health providers, and all I can say is that I wish I had used one earlier.?
Mental Toughness Component Two: Prepare
Prepare is thinking about and mentally preparing for the goal you are pursuing right now. The presentation, the race, and the new year’s resolution are all different events we can choose to take on. You need to set up small, bite-sized goals for that large goal that you are attempting get through. If your goal is to lose 10 pounds, maybe your preparation is to eat a fist full of veggies at every meal this week. Preparing is strategic. It is thinking about what will hold you back. Maybe you know 1:30 pm is your time to reach for something sweet. Plan now what to do in situations that will be challenging.
Creating specifically tailored Self talk be huge in assisting you through your mental preparations to tap into that mental toughness when you are reaching the end of your mental resolve. You get lunch with a friend, and they are getting a dessert, but you gave up dessert for this month. What are you going to do? Have you visualized that situation and thought about how you will respond? Outloud, ask yourself, "What should (your name) do in this situation?" Talk to yourself like you would if your friend asked you for advice. What do you want them to do when this problem comes up? Find the phrase that will trigger you to stay committed, so you don’t have to use your mental energy each time you face temptation. Prepare for it.?
Mental Toughness Component Three: Activate
There will be difficult times where it is harder and harder to quiet the voice telling us to quit. While I sit here writing this, I would instead like to check out my google feed, watch a video on breaking down dance choreography, or just about anything to keep from staying focused on writing. When I start these posts, it is all daisies and roses because I nerd out on reading research articles and checking out podcasts. However, sitting down and writing after researching all morning is a mind game.?
In order to stay in the activate phase, I set a timer on Alexa. I can get up and use the bathroom or get some water. I have five minutes to take a break to avoid getting distracted. Specifying a time for my break is a big deal as I love to get distracted. Just ask my husband. I would love to be organizing my closet and watching Home Edit to find new organization containers I should probably order. My first grader came home with a practice sentence where she wrote, “My mom is a neat freak.” As you set foot into my house, you will realize that this is not completely the case, but I do love getting containers and labeling them.?
I prepare for the ability to activate by having an ideal week. Right now is my writing time. It is not my scheduled time to go through my closets or clean the car. I mentally have set myself up for this time on Tuesday and Friday to be my writing time. The self-talk you used in the prepare phase can come into play in the activate phase. Here is how one research subject in the article by Cooper, Wilson, and Jones used self talk to get her through race days:
“During my breast cancer battle, I had the phrase ‘Be brave. Be strong. Be badass.’ And it stuck with me, and when things get really hard in a race, I am just repeating that mantra again and again”.
The Whole Package
Your body and mind will benefit from you focusing on thrive, prepare and activate individually. It is not possible to combine them all together if you are starting from scratch. It is just too much to ask of yourself with everything else that is going on in life. Functional mental toughness is possible for all of us but not without effort. Often when you see someone pull off something spectacular that does not start with, “dude, hold my beer” you just think they are born that way. You didn’t see behind the curtain. You didn’t see the early mornings followed by early to bed. You didn’t see the preparation so that the easiest choice was the one they planned for so it actually was easier. Not sure where to start? Check out this post on habits.
Action Steps
Pick out one of the components of mental toughness. Find five minutes a day, maybe while your morning coffee is brewing, and work on something that will improve your ability to thrive. Meditate. Research a counselor and make an appointment. Make a tiny habit that works into your day so you can slowly chip away at that big dream goal.
Want Positive Change? Train Your Brain to Hope
Hope is passion for the possible- S?ren Kierkegaard
Scholars have debated whether hope is a process or an outcome; they have discussed whether hope is an emotion or a state of being. The more important question is, why is a Physical Therapist, exercise enthusiast, and Wellness Coach writing about it. The answer is that I think it is key to those who continually meet and achieve their goals.
I have been working in the wellness field for 20 years and in healthcare for 15 years. I have had the chance to work with inspiring patients/clients. Mostly, I work with people full of wishes and unvoiced fears that are holding them back from trying to work toward what they want. But what pushes some of them to walk on a path that might lead to failure or to embrace the possibility of failure again to make those wishes a reality? I believe it is learning to hope.?
Hope and the Brain
Researcher C.R. Snyder correctly asserted that hope is a process that occurs in the brain and can be learned, as opposed to coming preinstalled. Hope comes from telling yourself where you want to go and that you have what it takes to succeed. You can make the light at the end of the tunnel appear closer or brighter. But often, we don’t. Hope is risky because failure comes at a personal cost. The longer we have been on this planet, the more difficult and more painful it will be for us.?
Research notes that when a person has a history of unsuccessful goals, they often experience reluctance, hopelessness, and apathy when faced with working on a goal. Isn’t that just peachy? If you have already achieved goals, you are likely to have hope that you can succeed at another one, and if you have failed, you are more likely to sit on the couch with your sea salt chocolate caramels while looking to see if there is something on Netflix. Why hope for a goal when failure hurts, and chocolate just loves you back?
Altruistic Hope vs. Hope for Yourself
I have seen individuals pour unbelievable amounts of hope into organizations or their kids, but those same people have very little hope for themselves. They are great at what I will define as Altruistic Hope. They act to promote someone else's welfare or some other group’s welfare at a cost to themselves. They hope, plan, and advocate for their kids, their spouse, and the organization they support, but the tank is empty when it comes to hope for themselves.?
Often these people have had a hope go wrong in the past. A hope that was painful to lose. There is fear when they are faced with the prospect of hoping again to the point that they would prefer not to try so they don’t have to experience the failure again. This is a form of Loss Aversion, the idea that losses generally have a much larger psychological impact than gains of the same mental or physical importance. This is because we DO NOT do a good job of celebrating our wins, but we do an AMAZING job of beating ourselves up if we lose/fail.?
Hope should not be something we only dole out to those we love. It is something we need to learn or relearn for ourselves. Hope has many benefits across a lifetime, but for it to happen, we have to let go of perfectionism which is all so hard to do in today’s Instagram society.?
How A Perfectionist Kills Hope
We want to be perfect. Keep a house like Joanna Gains, bake unique yet healthy treats, and have toilets that never look like someone puts poop in them regularly, all while maintaining that beach-ready body. Brene Brown notes in her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, that perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system. Perfectionism leads us to believe that if we look perfect, work perfect, or parent perfect, we can avoid or decrease the feelings of shame, judgment, and blame. She has a helpful definition of shame vs. guilt, which I resonate with as a recovering perfectionist.?
Guilt = I did something bad
Shame = I am bad
Shame is about who we are, and guilt is about our behaviors. Guilt can be a motivator, and its effects as a motivator are often positive, while shame is destructive. When we see people apologize or replace negative behaviors, guilt is often the motivator. Shame corrodes the part of us that believes we can change and do better. Shame takes away our autonomy and agency. Hope gives it back. So let’s learn how to teach your brain to hope again.?
Ingredients for Hope
C.R. Snyder was the first psychologist to dedicate himself to researching Hope. He also probably had to overcome parental disappointment when he said he would get his Ph.D. and specialize in defining Hope. Luckily for us, he stuck with it even if his parents felt he was wasting his excellent education. They weren’t on Facebook, so we shall never know. Snyder found that hope has three primary components:? a goal, thoughts about how to achieve that goal, and the motivation or agency to achieve the goal. He also found that high-hope people (because, yes, he created a hope scale) embrace self-talk agency phrases such as "I can do this" and "I am not going to be stopped."
How Self-Talk Empowers Hope
I never really had that much trust in self-talk in the past, as I was a believer that everything has to suck to get to a good place type gal. But I also had a period of life where just repeating the suck daily with a plastered smile led to discussions of divorce and contemplating single parenting. After counseling and SO much reading and research, I believe, and science believes self-talk is real and can be a game-changer. Let’s have an example as those tend to help me, and really all of these posts are notes to myself that I wish I would have known years ago.?
Hopelessness based self-talk: I’m fat. I look like crap. I am the only one with a muffin top. I am the only one with a messy house.?
Hope based self-talk: I want this for me. I want to feel better and be healthier. The scale doesn’t get to decide if I am loved and accepted. I can do this.
Hope-based self-talk leads to steady, small increments of change because you change out of love for the person you could be. Hopelessness-based self-talk leads to depression and ice cream and then more depression because of the ice cream. If you don’t have hope you don’t have a way of combating difficult emotions and are drawn to numbing activities. However, when we numb ourselves, we numb the good and bad feelings. We do not need to hustle for hope. We need to claim it. When stress happens, and it threatens to throw you off of your goals, take a breath. Is there another path to make that goal happen? Does the goal need to be retooled instead of abandoned? Do you need to call a friend and problem solve with them? Maybe that stress is not a threat to achieving your goal and is just a challenge you can overcome.?
People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
I think this quote by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross beautifully illustrates that there is beauty in the dark places when we can get in there and work through them. There is no three-step process to getting hope and achieving your goals. You can’t skip over the hard emotional stuff if that is holding you back. You have to look at the past failures that have kept you from hoping you can ever change. Right now, your past failures might own you and your future. They have gotten in the way and will continue to get in your way until you lovingly address them instead of berating yourself again.?
I have failed so many times in big ways. I have been fired.? I was rejected two years in a row for graduate school. I failed a specialty exam which meant I failed a piece of my fellowship program and couldn’t complete it on time. I have absolutely beaten myself up and numbed myself via blended caffeine and sugar, EBay, extra work, and YouTube (k-pop music videos are my guilty pleasure) to ignore the emotions I didn’t want to acknowledge. Neither beating myself up mentally nor numbing actually helped me, as during free time, my mind would recycle images of my failure over and over.?
I started small and picked one thing I could change with tiny adjustments in my day-to-day life. That slow change helped me have wins, but I had to lean into the discomfort and have several chats with a counselor. Strong emotions are very sharp and when they poke at us it is normal to shy away. Living a hope-filled life requires risks, but they are worth it. You can’t have extraordinary days if you live every day ordinary.?
Action Steps
Taking a note yet again out of Brene Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection, your action step with this post is to DIG deep. Brene discusses changing how we see the concept of digging deep in a new way to avoid exhaustion and overwhelm.?
Get Deliberate: Try this exercise during the day as a way to focus when you are slogging your way through a difficult day where it seems easier to just grab a donut and browse your feed for an hour than to do the hard work of staying on track.?
A = Have I been Abstinent today? (sweets, soda, email at the dinner table, define the tool you use to numb and distract yourself)
E = Have I Exercised today? (walking 5 min counts, watching Cheer on Netflix where others exercise doesn’t count)
I = What have I done for myself today?
O = What have I done for Others today?
U = Am I holding on to Unexpressed emotions today?
Y = Yeah! What is something good that’s happened today?
Get Inspired: Find a quote on hope that you resonate with and print it out. Hang it up in your bathroom or somewhere you can see it all the time. Write why that quote motivates you to continue hoping for yourself. I have the following quote on my wall in my office where I sit and write:
“We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope.” Martin Luther King Jr.
Whenever I see those words, it put my bad day in perspective. If he can hope while being belittled and hated for the color of his skin then I can hope despite what has gone on in my day or my week.
Get Going: Try a guided relaxation on YouTube, Reflect: Christian Mindfulness, the free version of Headspace, Ten Percent Happier, or prayer. The best way for me to decrease all the voices in my head is to get quiet so that I can get collected.
Use Gratitude to Snuff out Fear & Live with more Joy
“When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too." — The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
I have been reading a lot about joy, fun, and happiness. It is because I am a nerd and know that cultivating these emotions is powerful for change and partly because I have found my kids to be somewhat frustrating recently. It seems like their only language right now is whine. My seven-year-old has also been telling me I need to be giving her more of whatever she seems to think she needs: sugar, screen time, more time before bedtime, etc. I have gotten frustrated with debating long-established rules with her and her younger sister. I have been losing my patience and yelling more than I would prefer.
I also find myself complaining about them, which puts my mind in a space where I prepped for their poor behavior, so I see it faster and react faster in a negative way. I can see my frustration coming, and sometimes I can breathe and control it, but lately, I want them to do what I asked them to do so we can get to the next to-do item (eating, reading, showering, etc.). In the effort to learn how to reverse my downward trend, I have been focusing on learning about joy and patience so those can occur more often in my life.?
Brene Brown notes in The Gifts of Imperfection that when she found three powerful patterns when collecting data about joy and gratitude:
Gratitude is strongly related to well-being in research. The reasons why gratitude would affect us physically are still cloudy. Researchers know that those who are regularly practicing gratitude cope better with stress, sleep better, and have better relationships. The keyword in the last sentence is PRACTICE.?
The Attitude Practice of Gratitude
You can’t be filled up once with gratitude and done. Regularly experiencing joy and gratitude will require some work as they will drain out of us like water through a strainer, whereas fear tends to be just large enough to clog the holes and swirl around until our emotions overflow. Overflowing emotions is something I can definitely relate to lately. We have to do the work to pull the fear out because it blocks the joy.?
I think that it is important to point out that regardless of how good we get at filling ourselves up, we will not consistently experience joy and happiness all the time. Instead, the goal is to give ourselves tools to avoid personal overflow and splashing unregulated emotions all over those we love. Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project discusses her year-long journey to be happier more often instead of living in a place where she was not particularly unhappy but not as happy or joyful as she wanted to be. The Happiness Project and The Gift of Imperfection discuss that joy and happiness are cultivated habits that do not appear overnight. It is the result of tenacious hope combined with tiny actions on a regular basis that pushes us into the space where joy and happiness exist more often than fear and depression.?
“Mankind’s greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear.” – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Practice for Joy vs. Dress Rehearsing Tragedy
One aspect of life that I can point to and say, “Yep, there is my anxiety right there,” is the anticipated fear I experience for my children. Often I lay down in bed, especially if I had a good day, and instead of thinking about what went on in the day or to-do lists for tomorrow, my brain switches to catastrophizing something horrible. Seriously my imagination is exceptionally vivid. I believe it would be in contention for an Oscar for special effects. In an article in Science magazine, a study found that our minds wander about 50% of our day, and when we allow our minds to wander, we are less happy. We easily enter the catastrophic mind space where the worst-case scenario is the only scenario. Brene Brown calls this dress rehearsing tragedy and that the main way to combat this is to (cue broken record) practice gratitude.?
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It is so easy to spiral into the space that we will never be good enough or diligent enough or ____enough to get out of dress rehearsing tragedy or our anxiety. We are insufficient for the task of being happier. But we’re wrong. If we’re not practicing gratitude and allowing ourselves to experience joy, we are missing out on the things that can sustain us through the hard times. Lynne Twist wrote in The Soul of Money:
For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of.… We don’t have enough exercise. We don’t have enough work…We don’t have enough weekends. Of course, we don’t have enough money—ever. We’re not thin enough, we’re not smart enough, we’re not pretty enough or fit enough or educated or successful enough, or rich enough—ever. Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds race with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to the reverie of lack.… What begins as a simple expression of the hurried life, or even the challenged life, grows into the great justification for an unfulfilled life.
This is Your Brain on Fear…Any Questions?
You can be shaped by the belief that you are insufficient every day you step out of bed and that dress rehearsing various tragedies in your head is ordinary. Or you can be shaped by joy and gratitude. When storms hit, what you have habitually turned to, insufficiency, fear, or gratitude, will shape how you respond. Your example can also shape how those you love respond as well. It turns out that high school students who regularly practice gratitude have a higher grade point average, life satisfaction, social integration, and a lower risk of depression.?
The more we learn about the brain, the more we understand how our brain changes the entire game. The brain has plasticity, meaning connections can be made, unmade, and remade. The brain is moldable, and you can strengthen connections or make them weaker. You can learn to be grateful regularly, and it will start to become automatic, but first, you have to make it a habit.?
All of the journals that I have used over the past three years since I have started attempting to make journaling a part of my daily life have a line for “What are you grateful for today?” Based on everything that you have just read, you should understand why this item has been included. Even before I started trying to journal, I have sporadically had the habit of starting my day or ending my day by thinking about 3-5 things I was grateful for in my life.? Notice how I used the words ‘try’ and ‘sporadically,’ so this week's action step is as much for me as anyone else.
Action Steps
I am going to use family time at the end of the day, along with a spare chalkboard I have for each of us to write down what we are grateful for in our lives. I will also use Brene Brown’s suggestion of combating dress rehearsing tragedy by saying out loud, “I am enough and I am so grateful for ________” in order to increase my joy for tomorrow AND get to sleep with good thoughts dancing through my head. Let’s hold each other accountable shall we?
Want more suggestions on Gratitude Habit Ideas? Check out this link
Have more anxiety and depression than can be tackled with instilling a gratitude habit? Look for a local counselor. They can be some of the best coaches/accountability partners for getting out of a bad spot and into a place where you can steadily work towards a joyful life with these techniques.
Overwhelmed? Turn off your phone and go to lunch with a friend
I was at work a shift as an on-call Physical Therapist when inspiration struck. I stopped at the nurses' station to grab a marker, so I could write how to get a patient out of bed safely (i.e., how much help they would need). While digging through a drawer, another therapist walked up to ask about something for a particular patient. Without skipping a beat, the nurse next to him grabbed a urine collection cup, shoved it into his hand, and said she couldn’t take care of that or anything else because she was overwhelmed. Then she pulled out her phone and started scrolling through ‘the gram.’ While multiple parts of this interaction were frustrating for my co-worker (and I felt for him as he struggled to maintain his composure), I was struck by the nurse's comment.
We all know what it is like to be overwhelmed at work and home but does scrolling through our phones decrease our mental overwhelm? And like any good Wellness and Healthcare professional who is invested in reducing overwhelm and promoting true wellness, I started researching. #hardcorenerd
I don’t expect to change the nurse at work. I don’t believe that educating someone about health and wellness works. In the book, Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg, he notes that educating someone to change is a common mistake, especially by professionals. It is a mistake I made when I was right out of school. The assumption is that something like this will happen if we give someone the correct information. “Oh my gosh. Do you mean I need to stop eating these highly processed foods that taste AMAZING and eat stuff like raw brussel spouts to lose weight? Gosh, well-meaning healthcare worker. You have completely changed my life because I had NO idea.”?
There is a difference when someone desires to change, and you give them the information they want to facilitate that change vs. just educating the piss out of them. However, I think that there are many working moms and women out there (maybe even a few guys) who would like to decrease their sense of general overwhelm with their day-to-day lives.?
Your Brain and Your Smartphone
There is a lot of research being conducted regarding our phone use, and truthfully, they have not been around long enough for us to know all the impact they have had and will have. I am a part of a generation that remembers life before the internet. A youth that was made up of compilation cassette tapes that started 3 seconds into a song off of the radio. A big shout out to those of us who remember calling in and requesting a song dedicated to a particular human in our lives.?
Now, if I want to hear that Savage Garden song where all I can remember is “like a chicka cherry cola,” and then the chorus, I can just ask my phone to play it for me. Our smartphones have enabled and encouraged constant connection to all information and entertainment. However, these devices have immense potential to improve welfare because now we can all watch cat videos any time we want. However, all this easy access to endless, often low-quality information is overwhelming our brains. Just as too much sunlight makes it hard to see, too much information makes it hard to think.?
Smartphone owners interact with their phones an average of 85 times a day, including right after waking up, just before going to sleep, and even in the middle of the night. Now being a naturally curious person, I downloaded an app to tell me all the nitty-gritty about my cell phone use so I could compare it to this statistic. As it turns out, I am worse than the average. Over the past week, I have unlocked my phone 50-120 times a day.
I generally have a reason for unlocking my phone to obtain or relate information. IT IS QUESTIONABLE whether I do what I intended to do once I open it because it is SO easy to get sucked into a newly posted dance video by a K-pop band or whatever you find fun to watch. Seeking information comes naturally to us. Information was not so plentiful in the past. The problem is that we get distracted on our way to information, because our brains are tuned to help us catch that a tiger is sneaking up on us. The trouble is that it is no longer a tiger and instead just an ad meant to draw us in farther.
Smartphones also give us little hits of pleasure which validates our distraction. Maybe there was an email that you were waiting for or you got a like on your most recent post. All these little bursts of pleasure can mask that pesky anxiety as they scatter our attention, preventing us from focusing on any one thing for too long.?
Our Phones Mental Overwhelm
The problem with using your smartphone as a way to unplug is that it doesn’t work as you are instead bombarding your brain with random information. It is like saying you are thirsty for water and instead of pouring a glass for yourself, you walk out to the corner and have a fireman open the hydrant on your face. Sure, that water hitting your face and knocking you over will distract you from your thirst. Similarly, our phones distract us from our other sources of mental overwhelm, such as the laundry, paying the bills, or organizing your cassette tapes alphabetically.?
In research done by Ward, Duke, Gneezy, and Bos noted that phones have such as high priority status in our lives that we devote mental energy to them even when they are off and sitting in our pockets. The mere presence of these devices reduces your ability to think and make decisions. Especially the more time you spend on them day in and day out because the more time you spend on them the more dependent you are on them.?
The best way to decrease the mental space your phone is taking up in your life is to leave it in a different room regardless of how dependent you are or not. The old adage ‘out of sight out of mind holds true. This is especially important when we are with our family and friends.?
“Of all the things that wisdom provides for living one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.” — Epicurus
Drive Mental Overwhelm Away with Real-World Connections
I have a finite amount of money in my bank account, and similarly, I have a limited amount of time each day and each week. Imagine this. Luke Skywalker is flying down that gully to fire a blast into the random hole that destroys the whole DeathStar. Yet as he is flying and attempting to focus, he hears a notification from Instagram and then Pinterest. Then another one from his email. His mind is flooded with thoughts. “Was that Leah liking my reel of when I was on Dagobah training with Yoda? I wonder how many likes that has gotten so far?” And then Luke was blown up because there was no way he could focus on flying, evading the enemy, and shooting when his phone was in his pocket.
In this example, Luke used up much of his mental energy on things that didn’t matter, and now he is dead, and George Lucas is poor. Those notifications also cost the Resistance the DeathStar. Likewise, if I use up most of my mental focus on checking my Google newsfeed or Facebook feed, I will sap up my ability to focus on meaningful tasks. I have goals for this year, and none are about getting on Facebook more. Allowing my time, especially at night with my family, to be sucked away by my phone will erode some of the goals I have set for myself. If you say your relationships with your friends and family are the most important things, try to see if you can spend the same amount of time on your social media as you do engaged with your family. Put away distractions when you are together.?
Your focus is your reality. Yoda
No one makes it to the Olympics without significant focus on steady improvement. Where we spend our focus is where we will see improvements in our lives as well. We are daily in a fight between spending time on what is important and the 30-year-old in silicon valley that is getting paid good money to keep you on your social media by programing how to get you to click, scroll and waste hours of your day. Attention works much like a muscle—use it poorly, and it can shrink; use it well, and it will grow.
Adopt a Screen Life Balance
Before SARS-CoV-2, the average adult spent four hours a day on their phone. Four hours a day is 60 workdays a year. And that is just our phones. The lack of screen life balance is hurting who you know you want to be. I have been in several houses where random additions were put on the house throughout its lifetime. The house always feels scattered and like a 5 year old was put in charge of where to install windows.
At one point in my life, I was like those houses. I added on what sounded good at the time. I didn’t think about what I wanted my life to look like overall in the end. I didn’t think about mindfully managing time, so I could build the house I wanted. After almost getting divorced, I have been much more intentional with my time. I try to scan out to the blueprint of my life several times a week to help me understand my choices day to day reflect how I want to build my life. I am nowhere near perfect. I get a message daily about how much time I have spent on my phone and where I have spent it. Time is finite and I need to use it to build instead of watch cat videos. Knowing what I got distracted with yesterday helps me to plan on how I will make tomorrow better and use this device in my hand with intension so I can meet my goals and build the house I planned.
Action Steps
Friendships decrease our stress levels. Constant access to smartphones increases it. Download a digital wellness app or use one preinstalled on your phone. Pick an app or two and set time limits on it. Call a friend, talk to your neighbor, or plan a date night when the time limit has been reached. If you struggle with overwhelm and anxiety, call a mental health provider and make an appointment. They have been overwhelmingly helpful in my life.
Create an Imagination Station for Goal Realization
Hope is a word that causes visions of different scenes to play out in my mind. I picture Martin Luther King Jr. in black and white walking in a demonstration. I picture the firefighters raising the American flag after 9/11. I picture the sailor kissing a nurse in the street in Time Square at the end of World War II. I picture myself at 5:00 a.m. this morning, rolling out of bed to head downstairs and do a workout. While the first several images were more important to humanity, the last one was still important and still required hope.
I have worked to expand my hope bandwidth for the past three years. Hope does not come preinstalled and is not an emotion you can catch like a virus. If it was people run over to ______ house faster than an 80’s mom trying to check chickenpox off of the list of things the kids now have immunity from (* note maybe this was just a Montana thing, but when your friends got chickenpox, you would go play at their house for some old fashioned immunity).
Hope instead is an action. And it is one we all need to hone to live into the person we were meant to be.
C.R. Snyder was the first psychologist to dedicate himself to researching hope. Snyder found that hope has three primary components. I like to think of them as the TRILOGY OF HOPE (*to be said with the voice of Morgan Freeman in your head). The TRILOGY OF HOPE requires a goal, a path to achieve that goal, and the motivation or agency to achieve the goal. Mr. Snyder found that hope is a process that occurs in the brain and can be learned.
Hope comes from telling yourself where you want to go and that you have what it takes to succeed. How to get to where you want to go is where most of us let that voice tell us, “Yeah, you probably won’t make it because you didn’t last time.” The moment you listen to the voice, you lose agency for a different result, and we get into a cycle of ‘same.’ Brene Brown notes in her book Atlas of the Heart
Hope is a function of struggle—we develop hope not during the easy or comfortable times but through adversity and discomfort.
We have lost sight of our role in our stuckness or cycle of ‘same.’ As a result, we relive the same failure until we believe the lie that nothing will change.
The Cycle of Same
Hope for a change might start great. We agree to sign up for ‘the race’ because we had a glimer of hope that something could be different. Then we start to train. It is hard. The results were not immediately great or maybe life conspired against us and we didn’t even make it past the first morning of thinking things will be different. Those results or non-results create thoughts. Thoughts like “Well, that sucked” or maybe “I suck.” Those thoughts lead to the emotions that can follow us around. Those feelings of shame, anxiety, fear, and frustration color your interactions and twist what you think is possible.?
Here is the crux. When we are looking at results, we THINK we are looking at right now, but what you are looking at in the past. The results you are looking at right now are the result of PAST ACTIONS. Each future month’s possibilities should not be dictated by last month, especially if last month drove you to feel shame and frustration.
In the CYCLE OF SAME, you are in a state where you aren’t getting the results you hoped for, which can compound shame and frustration. This is a huge issue for what can be possible. Shame leads us to believe we can’t be different. Frustration makes us quick to anger. The combination is a dastardly duo, like a bumbling super villain from a cartoon. And like the bumbling super villain we repeat the same results over and over.
Instead of looking at your results and letting those color your thoughts the goal is to use your imagination and picture yourself in the results you want. When you imagine that scene where you are successful what are the emotions you feel? Get out a pen and write them down. What if you let your desired results dictate your thoughts for today? Sure this sounds like I am still stuck in cartoon land asking you to use your imagination to set up your day. This technique can be the start of a transformation. If you are not intentional about living a life that is transforming there will be no change and the CYCLE OF SAME will continue. As a super nerd I can also tell you using your imagination to set yourself up for mental success has been a proven technique in Logotherapy and sports psychology.
Logotherapy was created by Viktor Frankl, a neurologist and psychiatrist. Frankl believed that a person’s greatest desire and what keeps them going through hard times was meaning in their life. He formulated his theory prior to and while living in concentation camps in Auschwitz as a Jew in WWII. Frankl would have his patients answer one question at the start of each day.?
“If you were to live this day over, what would you change?”
Obviously, this can be a bit difficult to work through as you have not lived today yet, but you also know yourself, which means you know where you get stuck. You know where you mentally loop in bad places. If you can start your day by asking yourself what you will change it creates a very reachable goal. You aren’t reaching for some lofty goal that is hard to picture. You are reaching for and imaging who you could be in 12 hours. Each day builds upon yesterday by thinking about how you want to change the day before it starts.?
Athletes use a similar concept to prepare for their upcoming race or match. Athletes know just like Frankl did that all of us play ourselves in addition to any opponent. The game is between the connscious and the unconscious mind. The conscious mind judges and instructs the unconscious mind tell it things such as, “I can’t believe you missed that.”?
Often a coach might try to tell players what to do or what to avoid. That is exactly what we all do to ourselves. The problem is the more you focus on what to do and not to do, the less you succeed as you overanalyze and defeat yourself. No one likes to be micromanaged including your unconscious mind. When you micromanage so many choices throughout the day it is mentally exhausting and you will eventually fail. Your unconscious self can do an incredible job when it is set up for total trust with the conscious self by visualizing success.
The best athletes in the world use this exact technique. Think athletes like the Williams sisters, Micheal Phelps, Sunisa Lee, and Niklas Edin, who was a part of the killer Swedish curling team that took gold in the last winter Olympics. These world-class athletes picture the win with all the hard work that comes with it before they set foot on the court, in the water, on the mat, or on the ice. And they also get that confidence that comes with that visualized win before the win has even occurred.?
Realistic Application
In order for visualization and Viktor Frankl’s approach to work, we need to learn how to reality-check our goals and the pathways to them. If the result I want is to become an Olympic gymnast, but I am 40 and can’t do the splits, all the visualization in the world will not change my results. Same goes for loosing 60 pounds in three months or deciding you will give up all carbohydrates for a month. Setting realistic goals and working through the pathways to get there is how to take the shame out of having to start over because realistic goals do not require a huge overhaul of your day to day.
When you set realistic goals there are only micro failures that require tweaking to stay on your path. Example time. Steve wants to cut back on his candy consumption. He normally has three candy bars a day and has been having three candy bars a day for the past several years. A realistic goal for Steve is to cut the candy bars in half and have three halves a day. An unrealistic goal would be for Steve to cut them out completely. He would give in on a bad day and then feel shame and frustration about starting over from day one. How many start over days before Steve gives up completely?
With the realistic goal of cutting the candy bars in half there will be less starting over and more dialing in how to achieve that goal of steadily cutting back to one a week in a year. Giving up half of the candy bars is uncomfortable but realistic. If you set an out-of-reach or delusional goal, shame starts a regular visitation on your schedule. Perfection is not attainable. Setting realistic goals is a skill and a prerequisite for hope.
When we don’t have the skill of setting realistic goals, disappointment and failure can grow into hopelessness and despair. If we didn’t learn hope or realistic goal setting from our parents or home environment, we can still learn it as adults, but it’s going to require skilled help and support- a therapist or maybe even a coach.
Take a minute to imagine and think, “what would I feel like if I got my desired results? What are the thoughts I would have? What are the emotions I would have?” Maybe it could be that you feel confident that you can make it through the day on three halves of a candy bar instead of three candy bars. Changing your outlook and emotions throughout the day could allow the results you have been wanting to flow.
DIG (Get Deliberate, Get Inspired, Get Going) Deep Action Steps:?
Get Deliberate: Pick your goal that you have been thinking about or pursuing. If you are concerned that the goal is too much to bite off, ask a friend if they think it is reasonable. If you hesitate or they hesitate, it is too much and needs to be dropped back to something you will be able to achieve and feel the accomplishment from a personal win. If you are having a hard time coming up with a realistic goal or way to get there, chat with a Nutritionist, Physical Therapist, or Counselor. A coach can also be great but make sure they have training that is more than just a few weekend courses. Get your advice from someone who spent their time digging deep into their learning so they can help others. Check out this article for help on creating realistic goals from my previous posts.
Get Inspired: The next step is to visualize the result you want. Use that result as a beacon to drive your thoughts and emotion so you can push your ship towards the harbor where you land your desired result. There is no limit to amazing stories out there. One group that is always great about showing life-change stories is the CrossFit community. They highlight people who are steadily in the pursuit of goals. Don’t look to shows like “The Biggest Loser” There is a reason why that show didn’t have reunion shows. It is because no one learned lifelong skills. They just did crazy stuff for a few months but didn't look at how to change their results once they left the show.?
Get Going: You imagined your results. You have confidence. You have your goal. You have broken it down into a realistic way to get there. Now find someone to check in with weekly to say, “I did great this week” or “I really struggled this week.” That person should help you stay accountable to yourself and help you tease out if your goal needs tweaking.
Burn Your Belly Fat by Hacking Your Brain
Belly fat. The bane of the modern-day human in the first world. I always think it is interesting to look at how often people are googling a particular term I am researching. Recent top searches for belly fat are: Is ginger oil good for burning belly fat? Is it bad to hold in your belly fat throughout the day? (What is the) Best exercises to lose belly fat for males? (What is the) Best belly fat burner for men? Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas are the three States where people Google belly fat topics the most, which is not exactly surprising given the typical southern diet. So that we are all aware, if any type of oil rubbed on a body part caused your fat to go away, the cost of that oil would be obscene and hard to find everywhere on the planet. I would devote my entire yard to growing ginger roots instead of grass to make such a magical oil.
Belly fat sucks, and I wish I could just tell you that ginger root oil is all you need. However, the truth is that you cannot burn fat just from one part of your body. You burn fat from multiple areas at once. Exercise can help build the stomach muscles, but having improved stomach muscles will not mean you burn more fat from that area. There are ways to decrease the amount of belly fat and fat from the rest of the body, but the only way to get rid of belly fat specifically are expensive medical procedures such as Liposuction and CoolSculpting. Even if you have the Benjamin’s to pay for those, there are only a few ways backed by science to keep off fat, because yep the research shows that in a couple of years all those Benjamins were a waste because the fat is right back where you don’t want it.? Here are the research proven ways to get rid of fat in no specific order:?
Bottomline, to burn more fat, change your lifestyle. Adopt a healthy eating plan and exercise. Super easy stuff. So we can all go about our day now because we all know this stuff. It is not new. You probably have tried incorporating exercise and changing how you eat into your goals once a year or more. And yet here you are reading this article because healthy change is anything but easy.
In all my years as a licensed Doctor of Physical Therapy and work in the fitness industry, I can tell you that handing someone a list of “how to be healthy” has caused a change in exactly zero of my patients and clients. But I have had patients and clients change, lose weight and feel better. It just didn’t happen because I got preachy about eating veggies and fruit.
BJ Fogg notes in his book Tiny Habits that educating someone to change is a common mistake, especially by health professionals. I made that mistake because I just felt that change hadn’t happened yet because something was missing. That missing something was me and my amazing knowhow. After all, they probably didn’t get the ‘how to be healthy’ talk from another super cool nerd who is shockingly down to earth like me. The assumption was that the following scene will play out if I gave someone the correct information. Roll film!?
Entering from stage left someone looking slightly lost and like they just need a health savior. Health savior walks in and dramatically gives information on…wait for it…brussel sprouts. Lost unhealthy soul replies, “Oh my gosh. Do you mean I need to stop eating these highly processed foods that taste AMAZING and eat stuff like raw brussel sprouts to lose weight? Gosh, health savior, you have completely changed my life because I had NO idea I should be eating 4-6 servings of vegetables.”?
The above scene never happens, obviously. So how have I helped people to lose their belly fat? I helped them cast a vision for themselves and create a scene of success. I have helped them hack their brain to create an internal action plan. Lifestyle change happens, and belly fat decreases when people change how they think. Thinking differently steadily changes actions and drives each person towards a different result.?
Creating An Internal Action Plan
Step 1: Tiny Changes
In the book Tiny Habits by B.J. Fogg, he notes that he has only seen three things in his research that will create lasting change: Have an epiphany, change our environment, or change our habits in tiny ways. The idea is to create a tiny change for good. The more often you have success, the more often you want to do that change activity. This will create a feedback loop in your brain that wires in this new habit. Large overhauls of your day-to-day don’t work because they are too mentally taxing day in and day out, so they eventually fail.?
This repeated failure makes us feel that are not enough and never will be enough to create the lasting change we want. I feel that the quote by Lynne Twist in The Soul of Money fantastically captures this:
For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of.… We don’t have enough exercise. We don’t have enough work…We don’t have enough weekends... We’re not thin enough, not smart enough, not pretty enough or fit enough, educated or successful enough... Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds race with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done that day.
Then we unconsciously hit the repeat button for tomorrow, the day after that, and day after day.
Step 2: Delete the Unconscious Repeat
The latest research suggests that 95% of your brain activity is unconscious, and 40% of your actions are habitual. Your behavior and attention are largely driven by your unconscious mechanisms. The challenge of existing habits and ingrained patterns is that they keep your momentum in one direction. When we're trying to go in a different direction, that new direction has resistance because it is new and requires continual mental attention. Your disciplined effort isn’t creating change because no one has ever taught you how to adjust your internal programming for success. How do you do that? Well, prepare yourselves for some movie-worthy life change as we discuss step three.
Step 3: Create your Scene of Success
“If you were to live this day over, what would you change?”
If you were able to read last week’s post you know that this is the question that Viktor Frankl would guide his patient’s through. At first glance, it can be a bit of a different way to approach the start of your day. Let’s face it, we are much more about looking back at the end of the day. Typically in those replay thoughts, we are not kind to ourselves. We replay events that can’t change anything and don’t redirect our momentum for change. What can change the momentum is to harness the power of your own story…with science.
We are all lovers of stories. From books to plays and movies, we love to get lost in a story. I bet if you can close your eyes right now and play scenes from different movies in your head. You could probably tell me what the characters are wearing or maybe even quote a few lines. It is time that you used that replay ability to your advantage. Pre-play a scene of success for yourself before you start your day--not just for today but for the next 90 days and the next few years.?
Athletes use a similar concept to prepare for their upcoming race or match. They use it because it allows them to bypass the emotional centers of the brain. Instead they use the part of the brain that helps you to think through and plan for the hard parts before they even happen. Athletes know, just like Viktor Frankl, that we all play against ourselves more than any opponent. The game is between the conscious and the unconscious mind. We can change the game by imagining the ending of our own movie. But to have more than just one good day we need to look where we are going and play out how we are getting there. Check out the next post for your guide to creating specific scenes of success so you can get on the correct path for tomorrow, next week, 90 day from now and the distant future.
DIG (Get Deliberate, Get Inspired, Get Going) Deep Action Steps:?
Get Deliberate:? Check out this article for help on creating realistic goals (scenes of success) from my previous posts so you can start to work on your scene of success.
Get Inspired: Think of someone who has had success with achieving a goal. It does not have to be weight loss. It could be going for more education or winning the battling with a mood disorder like depression. Call them or message them. Ask them how they started working toward their goal. Ask them how what they learned from the weeks that they didn’t succeed.
Get Going: Did you know if a friend of yours gains weight, you yourself are 45 percent more likely than chance to gain weight over the next two to four years. And that if a friend of your friend becomes obese, your likelihood of gaining weight increases by about 20 percent — even if you don’t know that friend of a friend. So start a message group with a few of your friends who want to work on lifestyle change and start everyone writing their scene of success for 5 years from now. Help each other you stay accountable or hire a coach to work with your group.
4 Steps to Burn Your Belly Fat By Hacking Your Brain
I remember it as any uncool high school kid would. I saw the cool kid from my neighborhood, “Courtney,” the summer after our freshman year of college sporting the ‘freshman fifteen.’ If you are for some reason not familiar with the freshman fifteen, it is what happens when someone who was eating home-cooked meals goes to college and eats crap food and probably some extra liquid calories for a solid nine months—weight gain in the area of 15-20 pounds. In the case of “Courtney'' I might have had some uncharitable thoughts (like a lot), but that was when I was young and didn’t understand the mental weight of weight gain.?
I haven’t seen “Courtney” since that day because her family moved, but I have no doubt that she attempted to lose weight at some point because most of us do. My freshman fifteen came when backpacking through Europe and discovering cheese and gelato. They are both amazing and combined, do not make up a balanced diet.
Lifestyle change is going to be a battle most of the time. There will be losses and wins, but the best generals don’t let one loss determine full retreat for the whole army. The best generals don’t wave the white flag and grab the case of Oreos, Vodka, and cranberry juice because things didn’t go perfectly.
The best generals learn from the loss without drowning their feelings with a quick hit of sugar. They talk to those in the fight to understand what should change in the future. But the biggest thing that the best generals have is the ability to see beyond the small losses. They have their scene of success painted, and they know learning from losses is how to transform the battlefield.?
In my last post, I discussed that the best way to burn fat was to paint yourself a scene of success to keep you steadily on the path towards your goals. It takes significant mental energy to change your lifestyle, so the key is to understand tiny changes (tiny habits) you can make that will keep you on your path to success. These small changes create easy wins and slowly change your habits and patterns that will cement them into your new lifestyle. But how should you start? How do you create your Oscar-worthy movie ending?
4 Scenes of Success
Distant: 3-5 years in the future—Your vision of who you want to be, where you want to be, and what you want to do
Long-term: 90 day
Short term: this week
Immediate: today
Building Your Scenes: How to Start
When you wake up tomorrow, the first thing I want you to do is to lay on your back and close your eyes again—then don’t fall back asleep. You are living today over again before it even starts. Weird? Kind of, but you know how the majority of today will go. What will you be overcoming today? What is the feeling you want at the end of your sales call? How do you want conversations with your kids, spouse, or coworkers to go? How are you going to avoid eating that donut at work today??
Play out the one thing you are changing about how your day runs, your new tiny habit, and picture how you will feel when you are not a failure at the end of the day. Capture the emotion of your personal win and roll out of bed. Pull that emotion out and relive it when you are confronted with a tough part of the day. Use it to energize and change your unconscious actions of going to the break room and grabbing the donut you said you wouldn’t have today. Pre-celebrate your win. Keeping that emotion of winning will help overcome the sense of sacrifice throughout the day.
1% better everyday= 37% better in a year. 1% worse everyday= 97% worse at the end of the year, so not only will each year continue to be bad, but will get much worse as time goes on.
I had my engineer husband check the math and really it is that bad if you continue to just be a little worse every day.
Will pre-playing your scene of success solve all your problems in a day? Nope. Will you completely be a new person immune to living a day on repeat? Nope. But the goal is to reduce some of the mental energy required to make a few small changes that stick. Your scene of success for today will be set up by knowing what your scene of success is for the next five years, this month, and this week. Winning for today is huge, but winning on the regular is how life change occurs.
Building Your Scene: Where to Start
Where do you start? Like in Star Wars, I recommend starting in the middle—your scene 3 months from now. Why? Because picturing yourself more than 3 months from now is hard for your brain to project out. One year is so far in the future that you, 12 months from now, is kind of an imaginary creature. You have so many months to go before a year from now comes around. You have time to eventually get around to making 12-months-from-now you amazing. 3-months-from-now you needs right-now you to start picturing your scene of success. 3-months-from-now you needs right-now you to figure out what is important this week to make the success scene seem real and maybe a little urgent.?
Playing out your scene of success rests on the fact that you take quiet time away from your electronics to picture your scene of success without distractions. Maybe you take yourself out to the library or your favorite coffee house. Go somewhere you can focus with paper and pen and write down the end of the movie for your life 3 months from now.?
Break up the next 12 weeks and write down a thought on what the picture needs to look like for you to progress each week steadily towards that end of the movie. At the beginning of each week, write down the scene of success for that day with your tiny habit. Each day, play the scene with your regular daily tasks. Pre-play a day where your tiny habit fits into normal life operations. By visualizing success as you start the day, your unconscious self can do an incredible job guiding some of your actions. The more you can rehearse your day before it starts, the better you can mentally prep the brain and rewire it for the change needs to achieve your goals.
What Can Kill you Scenes: Unrealistic Scenes
Me imagining myself 5 years from now winning the Tour de France would be a great example of a scene that is just not realistic—mainly because I would look horrible in that bright yellow and would never wear it. Plus, I only ride a bike with my kids for less than a mile once a week.
Many people begin lifestyle change goals with unreasonable expectations for themselves, and when they get frustrated, they settle or give up, making unhappy memories along the way. Setting an unrealistic scene of success for yourself is how disappointment and failure can grow into hopelessness and despair. If you didn’t learn hope or realistic goal setting from your parents or home environment, you can still learn it as an adult, but it will require skilled help and support from friends or family.
Many people go to school for years so that they can help people set lifestyle goals given what is currently going on in their lives. Check out Registered Dietitians, Physical Therapists, and Mental Wellness providers. Interview several because a degree does not mean you are great at what you do. Find someone you click with and get going on some realistic scenes of success.
What Can Kill you Scenes: Value Your Happiness Now AND Later
When reaching for a better future with your scenes of success, don’t forget about your quality of life in the present! This is the biggest problem with living life in the huge annual goal mindset (and that is the reason I don’t have a 12-month scene of success). One year is a really long time to withhold and sacrifice, which is why it typically fails.
You cannot just focus on the feeling you will have 12 months from now because that will not be enough to keep you going. That is why you do the scene of success daily so you can celebrate your wins day in and day out.
Celebrate what you want to see more of. —Tom Peters
If you don’t celebrate your daily or weekly wins, it is hard to keep sight of why you are working so hard. Celebrate your small victories by writing on a post-it note and putting them on your bathroom mirror. Collect them for the month. Check out where you started and where you finished.
DIG (Get Deliberate, Get Inspired, Get Going) Deep Action Steps:?
Get Deliberate:? Set up a time to go somewhere quiet and WRITE DOWN your 5-year vision, 3-month scene of success, and the next four weeks of your scene of success.
Get Inspired: Decide what you should do to celebrate your wins! Have a pair of shoes you have been looking at? Outdoor furniture you want? Short day trip you have been wanting to take? Set that as your goal for realizing your scene of success 90 days from now.
Get Going: Share your scenes of success with a group of friends. See if they want to work on lifestyle change with you. Help each other stay accountable or hire a coach to work with your group.