Archive for year: 2014

Worrying is a habit, being happy is a habit. If you are a worrier, or if you are happy, where did you learn it? These, like all habits, are the results of consistent persistent practice over time. Most habits are learned at an early age through observation. We observe behaviours, usually from our parents or siblings and then we practice.

What you feed grows and what you starve dies

Habits can be either cognitive or affective (emotional); they are what we think or what we feel. Some psychology suggests that we learn the thinking part first and that leads to the negative feelings of worry. Others would suggest that the feelings lead to the negative thoughts. For me, it can be either, though it is usually a mixture of both.

Often we just feel lousy, anxious or concerned but we don’t know what about. Carl Jung described this as ‘something within us yet outside of our control’. When we just feel bad we can search for a reason and attach a negative thought process to make sense of it. Once we have attached the thought to the feeling, to that feeling, they are forever connected so that when we feel it we think it and when we think it we feel it.

Odd as it may seem we can make these associations with the strangest of things it may be a banana or the colour blue, a sound, smell or the tone of someone’s voice. Once we have linked thought and feeling together they have a symbiotic relationship that is there forever until we wake up to what we are doing and uncouple them.

The first step in developing mindfulness to overcome worrying is to become the observer of yourself, so that ‘I’ can observe ‘me’ thinking, feeling or doing. When we observe, we can begin to see the distortions of thinking feeling and doing that create anxiety, worry and stress. Often these are unconscious distortions, that through mindfulness become conscious and then we can deal with them.

So, the first step is learn to observe your distortions…

Common Distortions

Read all about it!

All-or-nothing thinking – black-or-white – Life or death

Where are the shades of grey? Life is never black and white, there will always be a compromise, a third point of view, another way of doing it. It is only by standing back and observing our thinking and feeling that we can move beyond this fixation.

Over generalisation

“It will always be like this…I’ll never be able to…it always happens to me…” I call this scripting. The habit of thinking this way leads to repeated behaviours. Life becomes a done deal. As soon as I make these statements I am ensuring that they will come true and that my life will be forever blighted.

Negative focus

The magic of perception is that we tune it so that we only see what we expect to see. This can be the glass half full or half empty. A clean car, with a patch of dirt, can be seen as filthy, a good person who make a simple mistake can be seen as bad and so on. When you tread in a cow pat do you see that as a good opportunity to grow or do you get angry and beat yourself up? When we focus positively all and every experience teaches us about our self and life. When life is faced positively there is no negative focus.

Discount the positive

This is magical because when we discount the positive we ensure that nothing will ever be any good. We either come up with reasons why positive events don’t count. “I did well, but that was just dumb luck.” or ” I hate it when good things happen because that means that something negative is just around the corner”. Stand back, reframe your thoughts and feeling, create a new script for the situation and say it out loud so that your ears can hear it.

Jumping to conclusions

Even when what is happening is plainly positive we can make negative interpretations without any actual evidence. We can act like a mind reader, “I can tell she secretly hates me.” Or like a fortune teller, “I just know something terrible is going to happen.” “I just know we are going to miss the plane.” Ask yourself the question why? Why should these bad things happen to you and not other people? Most importantly what evidence do you have of things working well?

Catastrophizing

It is easy to make a drama out of a crisis. Expecting the worst-case scenario to happen. “The pilot said we’re in for some turbulence. The plane’s going to crash!” A classic is a medical diagnosis when we convince ourselve of the worst outcome. In life difficult things will always happen. However, evolution has equipped us with some pretty good creative skills that enable us to solve problems.

Emotional reasoning

This is when the feeling clearly comes before the thought and we seek to make a connection and association between the feeling and the thought. Just like believing that the way we feel reflects reality. “I feel frightened right now. That must mean I’m in real physical danger.” It might even be “he just told me I am a bad person therefore it must be true.” Just because you feel something or someone says something it does not mean that it is true. Being able to observe your feelings and thought associations and questioning them rather than accepting them can lead to new levels of understanding.

‘Should’s and should-nots’

In my consulting room there are certain words that are banned. These are ‘ought, should, must and can’t, together with ought not, should not, must not’. Holding yourself to a strict list of what you should and shouldn’t do is beating yourself up. Often these things are related to what other people want or need and may have little to do with meeting our own needs. It good to look at why you believe these things, what is going on? This is a good time to look at reframing your thoughts and feelings, update them so that they serve you better.

Labelling

I hate giving people a diagnoses. A diagnosis is a label and once we become labelled we become limited by that label, both in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. My father labelled me as an ‘idiot’ and for many years I believed him. Later, in therapy, I realised that is was his issue and not mine and I relabelled myself to positive ones. Labelling yourself based on mistakes and perceived shortcomings. “I’m a failure; an idiot; a loser,” just creates negative scripts that you will play out in everyday life.

Personalisation

This may also be described as taking other people’s stuff on board so that it becomes ‘my’ issue when it is not. It is when we assume responsibility for things that are outside your control. “It’s my fault my son got in an accident. I should have warned him to drive carefully in the rain.” “It’s my fault he got lung cancer I should have stopped him smoking.”

Worrying

Worrying comes in many shapes and sizes. Importantly all of the versions described above are all habitual behaviours and like all habits they can be changed. If you follow these blogs or the podcast you will realise that to change a habit permanently normally involves a ninety day programme. All habits can be changed.

When you are a worrier it is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD. Rumination on anything will make it bigger and bigger. It follows that rumination on positive things will lead to positive feelings and happiness. So…

Don’t worry, be happy.

Take care,
Sean x

Are you spiritual or religious?

I hear people talking about religion and I hear people talking about spirituality. I am not comfortable with religion as it can often be sectarian and dogmatic. I like the idea of spirituality, but what is it? Well, I am not what you call religious though I did have a religious upbringing. As a child I began to realise that of the hundreds of people who attended ‘The Holy Trinity Church’ each Sunday many were religious though only a few were spiritual. I could feel it but it took me a while to understand it.

I began to experience the spiritual people as those who lived the religious dogma in their everyday lives rather than just reciting it each Sunday in Church. Rather like ‘walking the walk and not just talking the talk’. The spiritual people I saw as the good ones. They had compassion and empathy, they were genuinely concerned and where doing their best to get it right with and for other people.

As I travelled and met people from different faiths I discovered that the concept of living the right way, being righteous, doing the right thing, and what I have come to understand as Dharma, is the act of living spiritually in everyday life. The spiritual people are those that are seeking to make the world a better place. We each have the ability to do this every minute of everyday by simply thinking, feeling and acting positively.

I have met people who are practitioners, teachers, gurus and so on who are self obsessed and are doing what they are doing for their own personal aggrandisement and enjoyment of power. They see themselves as more important than their message and are seeking glory, status and position.

I have learned to define spirituality as the attempt to get ‘it’ right through compassion, empathy, forethought and sensitivity, through giving rather than taking, loving rather than hating and doing rather than watching. Spiritual people do it rather than talk about it.

So, for me if you attempt to live by doing the right thing without hurting others, if your interactions with people leave them better than when you arrived, if you do what you can to help others get it right, if you act with compassion, love and empathy to all the beings that you meet, including yourself, and if you do all this without personal gain and without expecting anything in return you are living spiritually in everyday life. In my Ayurvedic training this was known as Bhakti.

To be Bhakti and live spiritually you do not need to be poor, you do not need to be chaste, and you do not need to be abstemious. All it requires is that you live with awareness, and take into account the results of your actions and do your best to be the best version of you that you could possibly be.

My definition of a good person, be it teacher, doctor, shop worker, labourer, actor. Whatever, is simply someone who is getting better at it. If we are always getting better at who we are, even it is only a little bit at a time we will, in the end, be pretty good at it. So I would put it both ways, those that are living spiritually in their everyday live are those who are getting better at being who they are, and those who are getting better at who the are, are living spiritually in their everyday lives.

The point being that if we did all look after each other with compassion and empathy, we could have heaven on Earth right now, end wars, famine and strife with the blink of an eye.

Todays task might just be to get up from wherever you are right now and live your day with compassion and empathy and see how you feel at the end of the day, I suspect you might feel pretty good.

Take care and be happy,

Sean x

Some addictions are unconscious habits while others are avoidance habits. It can be easy to slip into habits of behaviour through family and friends etc. You may even have a genetic propensity towards certain behaviours. However, some habits are the results of displacing your energy so that you avoid solving your problems in favour of enacting the addiction. This could be as simple as having another cup of coffee or a cigarette. Either which way you avoid attending to the task that you ought to.

With the birth of neuropsychology, a magical science that returns western psychology to its older Ayurvedic roots, we can begin to make the connection between chemical markers in the brain and emotional states of feeling and motivation. The one chemical or endorphin that we all know about is serotonin. This is described as the “happy endorphin” and is concerned with mood. Anti-depressants work by, maintaining a useful level of serotonin in the brain. Depression is either caused by, or causes, a drop in serotonin.

The carb habit

With our increased understanding we now know that the levels of serotonin are promoted by eating carbohydrates. That means that biscuits, crisps, pasta, chips, and so on really are comfort foods. When we eat carbs the increase in serotonin production makes us feel good. This can become an addiction.

In psychology we now talk about the ‘carbohydrate cycle’. If someone is feeling down or depressed they will often eat carbs to make them-selves feel better. This is really a form of self-medication. The cycle works like this. I feel down so I eat the carbs to make me feel better. As I put on weight I see my body in the mirror and feel bad. So, I then go and eat the carbs again to make me feel better.

We are told that the population, in the affluent west, is getting progressively fatter. We are told that this is the fault of food companies and fast food outlets. However, the attraction that the population has developed to carbs just might be an indication of a more generalised depressive malaise that leads us all to self medicate on comfort foods in an attempt to feel better.

When I was kid I was told that fat people were always jolly. Well, I guess that if your system is awash with serotonin, after over indulging on carbs, you might well come over as pretty jolly. The point is that if we are getting bigger it might just be a mask hiding an incipient depressive malaise. It stands to reason that such a depressive state is destructive to both family and society, not good at all.

I am reminded that agricultural, village based societies, have very low levels of psychiatric and emotional disorders and that we only see the development of significant emotional disorders when societies industrialise and urbanise.

It leads me suspect that our generalised increase in weight is not so much an expression of affluence, more an indication of dissatisfaction and low mood. If we are to repair the emotional fractures in ourselves and society at large, we need to focus mindfully on creating a happy world to live in. Essentially in mindfulness we do not turn away from what is in front of us, rather we deal with whatever life throws at us acknowledging the lessons that we each need to learn. It can be too easy to turn away from our life path into alcohol, nicotine, caffeine and carbs etc rather than dealing ‘with’ and ‘living life’.

So what is an addiction?

When we are born we have a basic internal chemical environment. This is partly genetic, partly due to what our mother has been eating, or imbibing throughout pregnancy, plus what we have eaten or inhaled from the moment of birth. This is our baseline internal chemistry. As we grow and develop a liking for food this environment changes. It will also be effected by experiences and our moods and so on. In the end we have a sense of self, a sense of what feels right or normal, we have created our own addiction.

What is your poison?

We are all addicted to something. So, what is your addiction? Let’s say that you have taught your body to tolerate nicotine, or sugar or caffeine, or heroine, then you have created an internal chemical environment that is now your normal. If the level of these chemicals drops you will not feel right and go into withdrawal. The natural behaviour is to seek out the substance that will make you feel normal again.

Some substances that we are addicted to maybe more subtle. If we focus on being miserable or angry and that becomes our normal chemical environment and we have nothing to be miserable or angry about then, we will seek out situations that will return us to normality. The same is true of happy chemical states, of anxiety, depression and so on. Once the habit is established and is accepted as normal we will do what we can to maintain that chemical environment.

Some habitual addictive behaviours become displacements. Do you use it to avoid something, if so what? For example, someone who smokes may opt to nip out for a cigarette as a response to things that are emotionally difficult rather than face and deal with the problem. The same might be true of alcohol or just having another cup of coffee.

The magic is that if we do not like the way that we are, the habits that we have developed, we have the capacity to change them. Within 90 days anyone can change any habit.

What would you like to change?

Take care and develop happy habits,

Sean x

Feedback is either a blessing or a curse depending on whether you want it or, the intention of the person giving it to you. Feedback can be positive or negative, useful or critical. However, even critical feedback is useful when it is well intended and given from the point of care or love.

Since Ed and I started and developed the self-help podcast the feedback has been constant, for which we both thank you, please keep it coming. We take all feedback seriously and attempt, wherever possible, to adapt and change and take your concerns on board.

Overall the feedback has been extremely positive and it would seem from the download figures, as well as the email feedback, that we are getting it about right, though two themes have cropped up, that I think we will need to address in this weeks podcast. Ed’s apparent flippancy and my apparent arrogance!

Anyway, what is feedback? Should we do it and is it useful?

The unseen function of feedback

Well, actually we are all doing it all the time both seeking it and giving it. That’s is, we each present things and ourselves consciously or unconsciously, that we expect other people to respond to. When we dress to go out we are presenting ourselves to the world. Some of us will be happy to dress in scruffs while others may dress to impress. If the latter is the case a compliment, ‘wow, you look good to day’ or, ‘that colour really suits you’, can make all the effort worthwhile.

Social stroking

Often positive feedback will make us feel good and increase our sense of self worth and that is a powerful function. This sort of social acceptance feedback greases and oils the wheels of society, be it in the office or in more informal settings allowing it all to run smoothly. Sometimes such feedback has a frisson of flirtatiousness that can make us feel good about ourselves. Though the line between a frisson and perceived inappropriateness may be in the eye of the beholder, it depends on your PC threshold.

Deliberate feedback

Sometimes feedback can be used as a communication tool especially by management, certainly if they are awake to the emotional needs of the workforce. Simply thanking your team at the end of the day, or the end of the project, can raise esteem and morale and increase productivity, reduce absence and staff turnover, we all need to feel that we have a value. The same is true in the home or in relationships.

Giving or receiving positive feedback is essential to our wellbeing. When did you last thank your partner, kids or parents for doing the simple tasks that can be assumed as ‘it’s just your job’ (Alain de Botton has written an article on this topic alone). Being thankful for food, washing, ironing or, cutting the grass makes it all that much more worthwhile and makes us feel happier about doing it again.

Negative feedback

I need to distinguish between feedback that may be critical and positive and straight negative feedback. Once there was an experiment where two classes of children from different schools, though matched for age, gender and ability were treated in two opposite ways. In one class the feedback was always positive whatever the children did in the other it was reversed so that all the feedback the children ever got was negative. At the end of the experiment the class that had been praised had increased in marks and results with increased enthusiasm and motivation. The class that had been continually criticised had got progressively worse and demotivated.

There are a lot of lessons in this for management, for parents and partners. It runs with the idea that ‘what you feed grows and what you starve dies’. When we accentuate the positive with good feedback that is what we get in return.

Self-feedback

The same is true within each of us. We all have an inner voice, the bit that can be parental, that we can use to be self-critical or self-supportive. It can be hard to feel good if you are continually beating yourself up. We all make mistakes; if we learn and grow from them they become challenges and not problems. In that sense, everything that you experience will give you feedback and teach you. To the ‘awake’ mind everything and everybody is a Guru.

Giving critical feedback

We all have to do it at some point and when it is given with love and care it can be the most powerful gift that you can ever give to anyone. Before you do, there is something that you should ask yourself, how much of what you are experiencing or feeling is your stiff and how much belongs to the person who you are feeding back to?

My teacher explained to me, when I was angry with a fellow monk, that it might just be my problem and not his. The way he described it was that it was as though we were connected by a piece of elastic that was taught and full of tension. The more that energy belonged to me the greater would be my sense of arousal. It is the difference between being able to be objective about an issue when we are being subjectively angry or aroused by something. The difference being when we are calm and objective about something we are likely to be more accurate and appropriate in our feedback. Equally the more aroused we become the more we are likely to be clouded by our own unresolved emotional issues and be less objective in our experience. That does not mean that our feedback is not valid just that we also need to look at our self.

Projection

When we give feedback subjectively, as above, we are often projecting an experience from one person onto another person. Perhaps someone talks with the same accent, looks similar or, does similar things to someone from our past that we have net yet got over, we are likely to project this unresolved emotion onto them. When this happens they get the full force of our emotions they may, in reality, have nothing to do with them at all.

Receiving negative feedback

The same is true when we are told something that makes us angry. Perhaps someone tells us that we are mean, or negative or whatever, and we feel our self beginning to react, well they have probably just stepped on our emotional corns, they have hit on something within us that is real and unresolved that perhaps we are denying. When this happens a reaction can feel like a sudden intake of breath, heart rate goes up, and the reaction begins. When this happens the ideal is not to react but to stop and consider what is being said, think, process and analyse and, perhaps get feedback from other people.

The balance or probabilities

My experience of me is biased. I see myself from my own point of view. Your view of me may be more accurate than my own view of me.

On our Self Discovery Course there is a feedback session every ten weeks. This involves every person on the course giving every other member of the course a piece of paper that starts with “[name]…the way I experience you is…” plus one for my own experience of myself. The first sheets are usually superficial and get deeper over the year of the course.

What happens if the experience of the other twenty people on the program agree with each other, yet are very different to my own experience of myself? The chances are that they are right and I am wrong, or they are more objective and my subjective view is blurred.

I am about five foot six and small build. I use the example on the course that if I see myself as six fort six bronzed and muscular does that equate to other people’s experience of me? Well, the answer is no. In the balance of probabilities people see me as small build, they are probably right and I am wrong.

So for me all feedback is good, it is a useful tool and can be life changing and enlightening. However, you need to remain aware of your own subjectivity and the subjectivity of the person giving you the feedback.

If you are game for a laugh get twenty pieces of paper write your name followed by ‘the way I experience you is…. and give them to people who know you fairly well. You should also write one for yourself. You may learn a lot about yourself.

Take care,
Sean x

Why Retirement? Forget it!

When I was a child, we had fireworks every November 5th. On the box were written the instruction “light the blue touch paper and retire”. Later this was developed to “stand well back”. Now, I think that is what people do when they embrace the idea of retirement, they stand well back from life and for many this is the beginning of the end. Life is about learning; learning is living and for most of us living and learning is working. It is engagement.

The other day the children laughed at me when I referred to a spider as a person. The spider, female in this case, from my point of view, had rights just like you and I. Some people become spider phobic but all she was doing was living her life and doing her work.

All beings on the planet from ants to elephants do work they are all productive. However there are two types of work. Primary work, that is getting up in the morning and going about the business of finding food, creating shelter and safety and raising the next generation and, secondary work, that is when we allow, or expect other people to do the primary work for us. To allow this to happen human beings invented money.

With money we no longer all need to undertake primary work like all the other species do. We are able to do abstract things with our time and collect tokens (money) for doing it. We can then exchange money for food and shelter and safety.

There are less and less people undertaking primary work. The majority of people undertake secondary work and use the money they earn to pay other people to do the primary work for them. This means that we can be unproductive all our lives, paying other people to do the production for us. This makes us unlike any other species on earth. In any other species, when an individual ceases to undertake primary work they die. They have no food or shelter and no money to get others to do it for them.

Question: When did you last undertake anything that could be considered primary work? By that I mean that you actively created shelter, food or safety? It would seem to me that when we lose touch with primary work, and the majority of us have, we have already retired from the primary work of life. It is as though we become detached from the essential energy of life.

There is a strong case for not retiring at all at any point in life. I suspect that true primary workers never really do, they remain physically active throughout their lives. When secondary workers officially retire many of them go into decline. I see many clients who retired early at 55 or 60 who, by the time they are 75 have lost the meaning of life and are slipping into depression.

If you are a primary worker the evidence is that you will live a longer and happier life if you carry on working for as long as possible. If you are a secondary worker I strongly recommend that when you officially retire that you undertake some primary or, better still, consider not retiring at all.

Reason not to retire

1. We know that it is in the process of engagement and life long learning that creates new brain cells and that people remain younger.
2. When people become physically less active and more sedentary they develop more diseases.
3. Those that maintain a working function maintain and develop social relationships and maintain a sense of belonging.
4. Most productive people have a stronger sense of self and self-esteem.

I could go on, and on. I guess one big one that has hit the western industrial world is that supporting retired people costs much more money than anyone ever expected and we can’t afford it. This is where the money token idea begins to breakdown.

At what point do we stand back from life, do we retire? For some people this begins at fifty and for others it never happens. My definition of success and happiness is waking up with a smile on your face, feeling that you have something that you truly want to get out of bed for something to go and do that is both meaningful and fulfilling. For many this is called primary work.

Whether you do it for money, or for the love of it, don’t stand back, remain involved and engaged in the process of life and living. I promise you that you will be happier.

Take care

Sean x