Lynne S. Gots, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist
How to Get Motivated in One Second or Less
By Lynne Gots, posted on March 9th, 2012.
Have you ever noticed how many self-improvement plans involve numbers? Here’s what I mean:
- The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
- The One Minute Manager
- The 4-Hour Workweek
- The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous
- 8 Steps to Happiness
- 8 Weeks to Optimum Health
- The Eight Essential Steps to Conflict Resolution
- Get a Grip: Your Two Week Mental Makeover
- Fit Soul, Fit Body: 9 Keys to a Healthier, Happier You
- The Great Fitness Experiment: One Year of Trying Everything
- 21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart
- 21 Days to Improve Your Job Search
- 7 Steps to a Pain-Free Life
- The 8-Week Cholesterol Cure
- Now What?: 90 Days to a New Life Direction
- Love in 90 Days: The Essential Guide to Finding Your Own True Love
- How to Get a Great Job in 90 Days or Less
- I Don’t Want a Divorce: A 90 Day Guide to Saving Your Marriage
- 100 Things to Do Before You Die
- 101 Things to Do Before You Die
- 1,000 Places to See Before You Die
These are all real books. Some have been blockbuster bestsellers; others, well . . .
Now I’ll offer my own temporal tip. You can get motivated and make up for the hour lost to the return of Daylight Savings Time this weekend in ONE SECOND OR LESS by following my One-Second Plan A or my No-Seconds Plan B. Both are effective, but Plan B is faster.
Plan A: Turn off the computer.
Plan B: Don’t turn on the computer.
Sound too good to be true? If you doubt me, test it out for yourself. I tried Plan B a few weeks ago when I had company coming and needed to get the house cleaned in a hurry. Instead of letting emails and Facebook status updates swallow up the morning, I dashed around throwing out newspapers, vacuuming up dog hair, fluffing towels, spritzing bathroom fixtures and Swiffering floors. I was done before noon and still had plenty of time to take the dogs out for a long walk and relax with the Sunday crossword before the guests arrived.
In the interest of submitting my technique to rigorous scientific scrutiny, I did a second experiment the following week. I controlled for treatment variables, using Plan A this time. But the results weren’t as favorable due to one critical flaw in my methodology: my directions were ambiguous.
Instead of instructing myself to turn off the computer, I said: Don’t sit down at the computer.
And I didn’t. Instead I stood, hunched over the laptop on the kitchen counter, while I answered “just one” email, then another, then read “just one” blog, then another . . . Until, an hour later, I tore myself away to go fold the pile of clothes on my closet floor. But my back was in such a spasm from my contortions over the keyboard that I couldn’t bend down.
This Sunday I’ll be following the revised version of Plan A.
Tags: motivation
Posted in Behavior Change, Motivation, Self-help |
Feel the Burn: Building Mental Muscle with Exposure Exercises
By Lynne Gots, posted on March 7th, 2012.
I’ve written about exposure as a cognitive-behavioral strategy for anxiety in previous posts. Today I’m going to suggest another way to think about it.
If you were training for a marathon, you’d need to put in the miles. You might have to endure shin splints and muscle soreness, but that’s what you’d expect. No pain, no gain. Just do it.
The same goes for practicing exposure exercises. Living with anxiety is an endurance event, and getting in shape mentally to withstand it involves discomfort. You have to be willing to make yourself anxious to build anxiety-tolerance muscle.
No matter how often I repeat this message in the beginning phase of treatment, there always comes a point, usually two or three sessions after starting exposure practice, when a patient says, “It didn’t go so well. I felt anxious.”
The idea of making yourself feel worse to get better is a hard one to embrace. I understand why people don’t want to do it. But there’s no easy way around it. So instead of feeling defeated when you become anxious during exposures, look at each exercise as a strength training session. Would you get upset if you were drenched in sweat after lifting heavy weights for an hour? Probably not. In fact, you might even brag about how hard you pushed yourself. So try viewing the anxiety as the result, like sweat, of a really strenuous workout and, in time, you might even come to wear it as a badge of honor.
In my next post, I’ll share some exposure exercises for social anxiety that you can do without leaving home.
Tags: anxiety, exposure therapy
Posted in Techniques |
