Lynne S. Gots, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist
Holiday Madness
By Lynne Gots, posted on November 17th, 2011.
It’s that time of year again. Thanksgiving is barreling towards us like a runaway train, and the December holidays and New Year celebrations aren’t far behind. If you’re like most people, you have mixed feelings about the seasonal festivities, especially the self-imposed and media fueled pressures surrounding them.
The year after I completed my PhD and was starting to build a practice, several local news stations invited me to share my advice about coping with holiday stress. I’d done my dissertation research on stress and was working in the field of behavioral medicine, focusing on the mind-body connection, so I knew a little about the subject. But my knowledge was more academic than practical. So it was with some trepidation that I agreed to be interviewed on the air as an “expert.”
Thankfully the spots were short, and I managed to come up with some pithy sound bites. “Make time for yourself.” “Don’t overschedule.” “Keep it simple.” Good, common sense, right? Even today, with many more years of clinical practice and life experience under my belt, I’d offer the same tips. But I’d add one more: try to be flexible about your expectations.
Expecting yourself and everyone around you to live up to your idea of the perfect Thanksgiving feast, family gathering, or New Year’s Eve blowout is a surefire recipe for disaster. If you rigidly cling to an idealized vision of a Martha Stuart holiday, you’re setting yourself up to feel disappointed, or worse. So try to let go of your rules and image of how it all “should” turn out. You’ll cope better when your mother-in-law complains that the turkey is undercooked or your newly vegan daughter and gluten-sensitive sister don’t eat a bite of the family favorites you worked so hard to prepare. Who knows? Today’s holiday disasters may even become tomorrow’s memories.
I speak from personal experience. One New Year’s Eve, in preparation for a dinner party we were hosting, I went to great effort to make an elaborate chocolate torte for dessert, hoping to dazzle our guests. I left it to cool on the kitchen counter. When I came back to finish decorating it, I found an incriminating trail of crumbs on the floor leading to a chocolate-covered Golden Retriever. A huge chunk was missing from the cake. It was too late to make another, so I had to improvise. I cut it into slices and arranged them artfully on a plate. Nobody was the wiser, and the dog’s chocolate binge—which should have made him very sick but had no adverse effects whatsoever—became a family legend.
So be prepared to roll with the punches, and with a little luck, you’ll create stories of your own.
Tags: acceptance, expectations, holiday stress
Posted in Acceptance and Mindfulness |
Comfort Food
By Lynne Gots, posted on November 10th, 2011.
I’ve been thinking a lot about food lately. Maybe it’s the shorter days and chillier weather triggering a primal instinct to fatten up for hibernation. Or maybe it’s all the glistening Thanksgiving turkeys and pumpkin pies on the covers of the magazines arriving in the mail. Either way, I find myself collecting recipes for hearty casseroles, stews, and soups featuring potatoes, squash, and root vegetables.
Most of the time, eating is routine—mechanical, even. If you’re like me, you inhale breakfast before rushing out the door in the morning and grab a quick bite to sustain you through the afternoon. By dinner, you’re famished, and you wolf down your food so quickly you barely taste it. Hardly the mindful eating recommended both for weight control and optimal satisfaction.
Contrast the way most of us eat on a daily basis with a recent meal I experienced at a highly touted new restaurant. Each dish contained a sensory rush of contrasting tastes and textures. There were subtle sauces and foams that delivered a distilled essence of pure flavor before vanishing on the tongue. I ate slowly and savored every mouthful. By the last forkful of dessert, I was sated but not stuffed.
The dinner was one of my most memorable. But I wouldn’t want to eat that kind of fare every day. In fact, the next night, still out of town and looking for a good place to eat, I opted for pizza. Crusty and smoky from the wood-fired oven, it was anything but evanescent, the antithesis of the previous night’s foamy confections. Delicious. It was exactly what I wanted and left me perfectly satisfied without having eaten too much.
Different foods for different moods. That’s what truly mindful eating is all about. And why rigid diets—which proscribe whole categories of nutrients such as carbs, or sugar, or fats—don’t work over the long haul.
You don’t have to indulge in rich sauces or exotic ingredients to enjoy eating mindfully without breaking the calorie bank. Yes, it’s possible to take as much pleasure in crisp vegetables and nourishing whole grains as in a take-out burger and fries—more, even, if you think about the tastes and textures you’re craving. Sweet or salty? Crispy or creamy? Hot or cold?
But sometimes only the burger and fries will do. So go for it. But be mindful, and you may find less is more.
Tags: mindful eating
Posted in Acceptance and Mindfulness |
Daylight Savings
By Lynne Gots, posted on November 7th, 2011.
Have you ever noticed that the more time you have, the less you get done? When the unscheduled hours are scarce, I’m much more efficient in using them. But give me an open weekend, or the extra hour gained with turning back the clocks, and I start wasting time like there’s no tomorrow.
In my practice, I treat many people who are organizationally challenged. They typically underestimate how long it takes to complete a task and get sidetracked along the way by other activities. Having a poor sense of time makes managing it difficult.
So does having too much time. The extra hour yesterday fooled me. “No hurry to start the day,” I thought. “Plenty of time for everything.” Until there wasn’t. How did it get to be dark so fast? Where did the time go?
I think it’s healthy to forget about the clock on occasion. A day with no plans and no agenda can be like a mini spa retreat in our hectic lives. But allowing time to slip away from you can be frustrating. And losing track of the hours can create problems if you can’t accomplish what’s necessary or if you’re chronically late for work.
Here are some suggestions for better time-management: take stock of your To Do list and keep it to the two or three most pressing items you can realistically check off in the time you have. Then give yourself permission to do whatever you want when you’re done without feeling guilty about not using every minute productively.
As for me, I’m already planning how I’ll spend the Sunday when Daylight Savings Time returns and we lose an hour. I won’t waste a minute.
Tags: organization, time management
Posted in General |
