Lynne S. Gots, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist
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 |
More Ideas about Setting Realistic Goals
By Lynne Gots, posted on January 4th, 2012.
As I promised in my last post about SparkPeople, I’m going to share my reservations about one of their motivational techniques: streaking. I’m not talking about college students or sports fans dashing naked in front of large crowds in public venues. In fitness circles, streaking means exercising every single day.
There’s actually an association for running buffs (as opposed to runners in the buff) called the US National Running Streak Association. It keeps records for the numbers of consecutive days and years its members have run. Former Olympic marathoner Ron Hill, 73, has maintained one of the most famous running streaks in the organization’s history. He hasn’t missed one day of running since 1964. He even jogged a mile the day after he fractured his sternum in a head-on collision, and he kept his streak going while in a plaster cast after bunion surgery by hobbling a mile on crutches every day for six weeks. Granted, he defines running pretty loosely. But, still, his accomplishment is mind-boggling. Most of us average mortals who aren’t made of Olympic material wouldn’t be capable of pulling it off.
Which is why I have my reservations about streaking. You might find it motivating to see the days and weeks add up. But what if you’re derailed by illness, injury, or just plain life and, unlike Ron Hill, end up missing a day or a week of exercise? You might just throw in the towel, especially if you have any perfectionistic tendencies. The concept of a streak lends itself too easily to all-or-nothing thinking.
Instead of aiming for a streak, I recommend shooting for consistency, making sure to allow for occasional lapses. Because life happens.
Tags: fitness, motivation, perfectionism
Posted in Behavior Change, Goals, Perfectionism |
Let’s Get Digital: Setting Goals and Tracking Progress
By Lynne Gots, posted on December 31st, 2011.
If you’re like a lot of people I know, finding the perfect system for keeping track of the changes you’re trying to make can get in the way of monitoring your progress. Some of my patients spend weeks researching apps for logging behavior or combing office supply stores for just the right calendar. And guess what? Their quest for the best prevents them from ever actually getting started.
No method will magically transform you. Remember, it’s just a tool. Don’t get bogged down. Just find one and try it.
Say you want to lose weight or get fit. The array of on-line options for tracking nutritional data, creating food plans, measuring exercise, and boosting motivation can be overwhelming. I road tested a few programs. I hated one of them; I can endorse another with only a minor reservation.
The one I hated, which I won’t name but will say is highly popular, requires the purchase of very expensive exercise DVDs and vitamin-enriched smoothies. You can also buy additional measurement tools, such as meal trackers. In fact, every component of the program costs extra. It smacks both of commercialism and evangelism, which bugs me. Plus, the smoothies look and taste like something the dogs would cough up after eating grass. So I returned it all and went back to my research.
I didn’t have to search very hard because several magazines I subscribe to did the work for me. I found one site mentioned frequently. The Great and Powerful Dr. Oz even recommended it! So I signed up.
It’s called SparkPeople.com. You can keep track of fitness and nutritional data online or through a mobile app, and it’s free. You can customize it to set other health- and well-being-related goals, such as sleeping seven or more hours, drinking water, and getting out of bed without hitting the snooze button on your alarm (which I’ve personally been working on).
What I like about it: It encourages you to use solid behavioral principles to set manageable goals. Even very small steps can earn you rewards. You can accrue points and win virtual trophies for reading articles and making positive choices. If you’re competitive, you might be motivated seeing the numbers add up. You can personalize the nutrition tracker and enter foods without specifying calorie counts, an option I’d recommend for those who get overly obsessive. It contains a library of fitness videos—free!—so you can easily add variety to your workouts. And if you need an extra boost, you can join in message boards and group forums tailored to your particular interests, where other members will cheer you on.
Overall, I’d give this site a five-star rating. I have one small criticism, which I’ll share in my next post.
Tags: behavior change, self-monitoring, setting goals
Posted in Behavior Change, Goals |
