TSHP264: How to Deal with Disappointment (A World Cup Special)

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What’s Coming This Episode?

The World Cup is on as we record this episode. 32 nations come together. 31 will leave disappointed. Or will they? Do you have to be unhappy in defeat? Can we avoid disappointment or learn to swat it aside?

Enjoy the show and take care, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

Show Notes and Links

Resource of the Week

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Dealing with Disappointment

Being disappointed in life goes along with the theme of

‘do we have a problem or a learning opportunity?’.

Disappointment assumes that we have some sort of failure which is often based in unrealistic expectation. Because these assumptions of an expected outcome involve projecting into the future, it usually means that the feelings of disappointment are usually on the anxiety spectrum. We have an expectation of what will happen, what will be the outcome, in the future. We then live that expectation in the present and then feel the disappointment when it does not come to pass as we expected it to. These expectations may be within or below our awareness. But when it does not happen or fails we then register disappointment, we didn’t get what we wanted or what we expected.

Because of the relationship between expectation and disappointment it is always true that…

You can’t be disappointed without your permission.

We have to buy into the concept. So often we simply set ourselves up to be disappointed. You first have to buy into the concept of wining and losing, of gain and loss, achievement and failure. These concepts involve the separation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ or ‘you’ and ‘me’. For ‘me’ to win or succeed ‘you’ have to lose or fail’. If ‘we’ win ‘they’ lose. Though the disappointment is if ‘they’ win then ‘we’ lose

In the personal sense for ‘me’ to succeed at the interview and get the job ‘you’ will be disappointed. On the other hand ‘you’ get the job then ‘I’ will be disappointed. Unless we begin to see this process of winning and losing in a different way. Perhaps these things that I identify as disappointments are actually good things.

My own assumption is that the universe is not out to get me and that the things that I am presented with are for my own growth and development. I am not a fatalist I believe in free will but I do get and understand the law of attraction and see that the things that happen to me do so because they are meaningful to me and my level of development. I see the same things as true for you also. When you can see it this way nothing is ever bad. It is my response to what happens that labels it good or bad.

What if I didn’t get the job because, in the greater scheme of things, it would have been damaging to me or the wrong direction for me, held me back and not allowed me to develop to even greater things? If this were the case the fact that I didn’t get the job should be a focus of celebration and thanks not of disappointment and loss.

To be disappointed assumes…

1: Expectation. This is craving, my demand for the outcome that my ego seeks. When we project forward in expectation of outcomes, be they good or bad, we are firing up our anxiety circuits. When we learn to see the things that happen in life not as problems but as learning opportunities anxiety dissolves. If you consider that the human race has survived because we each have this amazing problem solving ability that, should we need it, will come to our aid and solve whatever the issue is that we are faced with.

We don’t have problems we have learning opportunities.

2: Loss. This is attachment, my inability to let go of my feelings of possession for things, people, events or the belief of what I saw as ‘mine’ creates disappointment. It could be that I saw the job as ‘mine’ before I went to the interview. This attachment to the past creates depression. When we feel the loss or bereavement for what was, or for what might have been we often ruminate. When this happens the rumination keeps the disappointment alive, so that even many years after an event it may still feel like it is live action as though it has just happened.

When we learn to let go we overcome depression and stop projecting into the future we can live in the present and not be disappointed about our experience. In the present, in the now there can never be any disappointment because there is no attachment to the past and there is no carving for the future. The trick to living in the present is gratitude. The following is attributed to Buddha.

Let us rise up and be thankful,

for if we didn’t learn a lot today,

at least we learned a little,

and if we didn’t learn a little,

at least we didn’t get sick,

and if we got sick,

at least we didn’t die;

so, let us rise up and be thankful.

At the end of each line of the above is the option to be disappointed or grateful. It is a choice. A choice not of what happens it is the way that we see it.

We are not effected by events but by our response to those events.

In a very real sense being disappointed is a choice. What do you choose?

Take care

Sean X

TSHP263: Help! I’m Addicted to Gaming

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What’s Coming This Episode?

Gaming addiction is officially a thing – the WHO say so, so there. Addiction of any kind can be a serious issue though, so it’s worth getting on top of it before it becomes an unhealthy obsession.

Enjoy the show and take care, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

Show Notes and Links

Resource of the Week

Ed thinks you should give Zelda: Breath of the Wild a go – an incredible, relaxing gaming experience

Stay in Touch

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Gaming Addiction

Did you catch the news this week? The world health organisation, ‘WHO’, has now classified internet game addiction as a recognised disease. Is it right? What is an addiction?

We use the word ‘addiction’ to indicate an illness which is based on the behaviour of a person who is compulsively or habitually ‘addicted’ to a substance or a set of behaviours. Most behaviours that are described as addictions are seen as negative. We think of drugs or alcohol. We might even consider the workaholic. Which ever way we view it addiction is seen as a negative.

Perhaps we are all addicts

I would like to suggest another way of looking at it, we are all addicted, we are all addicts, it is just that we are often unaware of what we are addicted to. So my question is…

What is your addiction?

An addiction is simply a chemical state, that is in both our brain and our body. We become addicted when we have learned to accept this chemistry as our ‘normal’ state of being. The chemistry comes from the habit that we practice. We know that when someone exercises regularly their brain responds by releasing powerful endorphins. We also know that once this chemistry has been established as their normal they can become addicted to this exercise. Once this habit has been established we find that if they are unable to exercise, perhaps because of an injury, they go into withdrawal just like any drug addict. All the symptoms of drug withdrawal are played out through their brain and body until they either can restore the exercise and the chemistry or undergo the ‘cold turkey’ of drug withdrawal.

Any behaviour from meditation to sex, from knitting to hill walking, from laughing to crying, will have a chemical effect on our mind body system. Once these are established in our mind, brain they become our habit and our chemical normal. The issues of anxiety, anger, depression, love and happiness may also be our addictions.

So what is your addiction?

Your chemical normal is the one that makes you feel just right. It comes from you habits that you have established throughout your life. If something happens to alter your ‘normal’ you will adopt behaviours that will return your chemistry to recreate your normal. My normal involves meditation, cooking, often running, definitely playing music, mainly guitar, certainly working with other people and always my lovely Rie and holidays away. When I am deprived of my addictions I feel withdrawal and need to act to bring my chemistry back to my normal.

Some addictions are good, as in they do not harm us or others. Bad addictions do harm us or other people. We have a choice. Once we mindfully examine our behaviours we can decide which addictions we will feed and which ones we will starve and allow to wither.

We may decide that allowing our children to develop the habit of internet gaming is a good or a bad addiction. Current evidence would suggest this is a bad addiction.

Be happy and check your addictions.

Take care

Sean x

 

TSHP262: Mindfulness and Mental Health

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What’s Coming This Episode?

Mindfulness is the key to happiness right? Wrong! Well… maybe. Sean and Ed dig in to the darker side of mindfulness and learn that, if not approached correctly, it can actually be a harmful tool. Let us know what you think in the comments…

Enjoy the show and take care, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

Show Notes and Links

Resource of the Week

Sean and Ed both suggested the same resource – What’s That in My Attic?

Stay in Touch

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Mindfulness and Mental Health

In most cases the press around mindfulness is all good and positive. We know that the use of mindfulness practises, such as meditation and learning to live in the present, reduce stress and can alleviate both depression and anxiety. However, there are a few people who, by using mindfulness techniques, disturb deep held emotions they can be disturbing or distressing.

This week I was reading around some negative attitudes and ideas around the practice of mindfulness. There have been several cases when people have reported having negative experience as a result of practising mediation. So, what is this?

When you attend a mindfulness course, such as MBSR or a meditation course such as the Vipassana ten day retreat, there will be some form of vetting, some sort of assessment, to limit any participant who may have a negative experience as a result of practising mindfulness meditation. I should say that people in this situation represent a minute percentage of the population. Although this is something that we should be aware of.

The key often is the person running the course. Some people will set them selves up as a teacher without being appropriately trained and experienced? Any intervention into another persons headspace should only be undertaken responsibly and indeed mindfully. The MBSR register lists suitable qualified teachers who have undergone considerable and in-depth training, have experience in mindful practice, adhere to a code of ethics and so on.

We all have memory. Some of those memories will be good and some bad. In our cognitive mind we store this information and we use the mechanism of recall to access it. However some memories may be too difficult for the consciousness mind to deal with. When this happens the mind has a mechanism to lock those unwanted memories away in boxes in the attic of our mind. This is called repression or sometimes lost memories. There are a variety of mechanisms that can pull these memories out. The first is trauma when an event with a similar feeing releases a lost memory. The second is association that might be a smell, a sound, a colour and so on that resonates with memory and brings it back to the surface. Techniques such as hypnotherapy will release memory and so can meditation.

For most of us our meditation releases memory in bite sized chunks that we process and resolve and then move on. For those with psychiatric or cognitive disorders the chunks may be too big or our ability to process them diminished. It is this last case that leads people to question the effects of mindful meditation.

So, the things to look out for are first does your teacher have the experience and the knowledge to assist you as you memories release? Second, and perhaps most importantly, if you are meditating independently and you have deep, distressing or meaningful memory release that you cannot, or find it difficult to, process do something about it. See a psychotherapist, a counsellor, refer to your meditation teacher. Do whatever you need to do to process and not ruminate on unresolved past emotional memory. This is the seat of depression that can in turn lead to anxiety.

It is not enough to practice mindfulness we must also process the results of our practice mindfully.

Take care and be happy

Sean x

TSHP261: What do you regret?

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What’s Coming This Episode?

Life. So many things to see and do. Places to visit, experiences to experience. So what happens when we miss out on things or when opportunities pass us by? Regret, that’s what. So how can we tame our regret and stop them from bogging us down?

Enjoy the show and take care, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

Show Notes and Links

Resource of the Week

Stay in Touch

We’re all over the web, so feel free to stay in touch:

Leave us an Honest Review on iTunes

We’d be amazingly grateful if you could leave us a review on iTunes. It will really help us to build our audience. So, if your like what you hear (and would like to hear more great free content) then visit our iTunes page and leave us an honest review (all feedback gratefully received!).

Regret

This topic has come up several times and each time we have approached it in a different way. We were steered in this direction by an article that was looking at the conflict between what we might see as our ideal self set against how we actually see what we have achieved. Are we good enough? Did we achieve what we set out to? Or, did we achieve what other’s expected of us?

I have often spoken on the podcast about the problems that many of us have at the point of change. This might include deaths, redundancy, divorce, retirement and so on. I guess that the issues of regret, in most cases, do begin with the idea that “I got it’ wrong” and that can so often takes us right back to “am I good enough”.

Why isn’t my life perfect?
Pity the poor perfectionist who can never find happiness and lives in a world of ‘if only’ and nagging regret. If, as a perfectionist, you expect to get a first class honours degree and only get a second then you have failed. The none perfectionist will be happy with a second or even a two-two and after all a third is a still a pass. The perfectionist can descend into the regret of not having studied more. Over all the perfectionist will always live in a world of never having been good enough because, guess what, perfection does not exist.

If only I had!
In my work this is the most common form of regret. It often comes from us not living in the moment and life being the thing that passes us by while we are worrying about other things. Then suddenly we are old, retiring or even dying and we realise that we have run out of time, money, energy, whatever it is, that would enable us to now do what we wanted. It is now too late. The only route out of this one will often be self-forgiveness.

If only I hadn’t!
When we regret the things that we did do we might still be able to do something about it. Seeking forgiveness or forgiving others often takes us through this sort of regret. The extreme of this type of regret could be that our actions killed or damaged other people. It could be that we put our self in a position where we were damaged in some way. Over all we now wish that we had not done ‘it’. This is ‘Step One’ material from the live in the present book, it is now time to let go of what was and live in the present.

The beautiful you!
I know that you are beautiful because you are alive and have a body and life and bodies are beautiful. I have seen too many people damaging their body with cosmetic procedures or surgery only to regret their actions and decisions later. Perhaps when the breast implant burst or leaks or the over tightened skin begins to bag and hang. Or when someone ends up looking quite ugly having lost their natural beauty.

Distressing the body
I guess that when people punch holes in their bodies and have studs, rings and so on fitted that can be removed if we regret doing it. The one that is the most difficult is when the earlobe has become distended from having a large object piercing it. The one that does create regret and has led to a massive laser industry is the tattoo. The inks are very hard to remove and the chances of scaring are great. I have seen so many people who had the name of their lover tattooed on their body only for that relationship to come to an end. It is hard to date Gloria when you have ‘I love you Nellie’ tattooed on your forearm.

Mistakes are normal and it can be easy to face them with the emotions of fault and blame that may lead to regret. It is only when we can see the things that happen in life not as mistakes, problems, or issues of blame and begin to see them as the learning opportunities that give us the chance to grow, develop and become better people.

My resource for the podcast was that you get a piece of paper and make a list of all the things that you would like to achieve before you die and then get as many of them done as soon as you can. If you do this you will not find yourself in the misery of regret later in life.

Take care be happy and fulfill your dreams

Sean x