Lynne S. Gots, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist
Why I Don’t Teach Relaxation Anymore
By Lynne Gots, posted on October 6th, 2014.
If you’re a worrier, you’ve probably heard more times than you can count, “You need to relax.” And you’ve probably given yourself a mental smack on the forehead and thought, “Duh.”
Relaxation exercises in which you alternately tense and relax each muscle group in the body or breathe from the diaphragm to create a calming response used to be standard components of my clinical repertoire. But these days I almost never recommend them except to manage chronic pain (which is aggravated by muscle tension) or, on rare occasions, hyperventilation (which can be controlled with belly breathing).
Although using relaxation to counteract anxiety and stress may seem intuitively to make sense, it almost always backfires. You can’t force yourself to relax, no matter how hard you try. In fact, trying to relax makes most people—especially those prone to tension—more stressed when they can’t achieve the mental calmness they’re seeking. Not only is it hard to summon relaxation on demand; it’s also a particular challenge for tightly wound people to let go because the sensations of relaxation can feel alien and even unpleasant to someone who values feeling in control.
And there’s another reason I don’t teach relaxation. Learning to tolerate negative emotions like anxiety is much more beneficial in the long run than trying to eliminate them.
So the next time some well-meaning friend or family member advises you to relax, you can respond with an enigmatic smile and say, “Actually, I’m trying to get more anxious.”
In my next post, I’ll tell you how.
Tags: anxiety, relaxation exercises
Posted in Anxiety, Behavior Change, Cognitive-behavior Therapy, Techniques |
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Week 2: Finding the Time
By Lynne Gots, posted on April 22nd, 2014.
I signed up for an MBSR group because I wanted to deepen my personal meditation practice and enhance my professional use of mindfulness. I’m finding it eye-opening on both fronts.
Every week we leave with exercises for “home practice”—a term I, too, adopted some time ago to replace the traditional CBT “homework” assignments. It’s hard enough to do the exercises without adding the negative associations and guilt (when the assignments don’t get done) attached to the concept of homework.
But as Shakespeare said, what’s in a name? That which we call homework by any other name would still be homework.
And so it is with home practice. The biggest challenge so far for me has been finding the time, especially since the demands have been expanding exponentially. And it’s only the second week.
After the first session, we were instructed to practice a Body Scan meditation for 30 minutes a day. Piece of cake! For someone new to meditation, starting with 30 minutes would be hard. But I’d already extended my practice to 20-30 minutes each day, so I didn’t have any trouble working in the Body Scan.
I shouldn’t have felt so smug. Because this week our assignment was to continue with the Body Scan daily along with adding a 15-minute Mindfulness of the Breath meditation and a 15-minute Loving Kindness meditation. You can do the math. That’s an hour of meditating each day.
Along with the formal meditations, we’re also practicing mindfulness informally by being fully attentive while engaging in one ordinary activity—such as washing the dishes, showering, brushing teeth, cleaning—each day. And we’re noting one pleasant event daily.
I’ve used all these exercises in the mindfulness groups I’ve conducted, with one variation. I suggest the participants ease into the meditation practice by committing to only five minutes a day. My rationale (and other CBT practitioners would concur) is that consistency is more important than duration when trying to develop a new habit.
There’s something to be said, though, for the total immersion approach. If you sign up for an MBSR program, you know up front you’ll be making an extensive time commitment, at least for the duration of the group sessions. And, although even five minutes a day of meditation can be beneficial, extra time on the cushion can produce even more immediate and dramatic effects.
Finding the time in a tight schedule for any valued pursuit isn’t as hard as it might seem. But it does take a certain mindset, as I’ve discovered. You need to be highly invested in the activity, you need to plan ahead, and you need to be flexible.
It can be challenging, as it was for me today when I had appointments from 8 am to 7 pm booked back to back. But I planned ahead and reminded myself I didn’t need to stick rigidly to the prescribed 30-minutes, which allowed me to work in an abbreviated (20-minute) Body Scan before starting the day.
You don’t have to be a super hero to fit a valued activity into your life. Take the marathoner I know who manages to put in his miles despite being a full-time grad student with a three-hour, round trip commute from his apartment in Brooklyn to his program at Rutgers. Or my neighbor who sets out at four am for an hour’s drive hour to a farm in Leesburg, Virginia to train her four Border Collies for sheepherding competitions before going to her job in Maryland. Or the law firm partner who gets home at 6 pm and starts cooking a full dinner from scratch because it’s important for her to feed her kids right, then logs back onto her work computer after the kids are in bed to finish a brief.
Those people get tired, just like the rest of us. But their strong investment in the actions they’re pursuing keeps them going in spite of how they might be feeling in the moment.
We all have the same number of hours available to us in a day. Being mindful about how we choose to use them is the most critical step in finding the time for what’s important to us.
Tags: body scan meditation, loving kindness meditation, mindfulness of the breath meditation, mindfulness-based stress reduction
Posted in Acceptance and Mindfulness, Motivation |
The Power of Paradox: to Change Negative Thinking, Say “Yes” When You Want to Say “No”
By Lynne Gots, posted on March 23rd, 2014.
Much of the advice I dispense daily in my clinical practice involves guiding people beset by negative thoughts and feelings to respond to emotional discomfort in counterintuitive ways. Anxious? Approach your fears. Depressed? Get moving. Impulsive? Ride out your urges.
It all sounds rather simplistic. Yet changing behaviors in this fashion can improve your mood relatively quickly. Even more important, moving towards what feels scary or hard can help you build a protective core of confidence, making it easier to cope with the difficult times you’ll inevitably have to face in the future.
I won’t ask my patients to do anything I wouldn’t agree to do myself. Some of the “approach behaviors” I work on with them—touching a public toilet seat, say, or limiting themselves to only one glass of wine—don’t present personal challenges. But I certainly generate enough of my own worries to give me ample opportunity to practice what I preach.
Here’s an example: I just signed up for an eight-week course on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).
Silly that a program designed to reduce stress should significantly increase mine, right? But just thinking about it makes my mouth dry up and my heart beat faster.
I’d been looking for an opportunity to deepen my meditation practice for some time now. Periodically I’d google “Mindfulness Meditation in DC.” The Insight Meditation Community of Washington (IMCW) always came up. I’d pore over the course offerings and then reject them because the timing wasn’t right or the center’s Buddhist orientation made me uncomfortable.
I had many of the same automatic thoughts and a few new ones yesterday when I found the listing for an MBSR course given through the Insight Meditation Community starting in just two weeks. “Maybe everyone will be a Buddhist. I hope they don’t expect me to practice Buddhism.” “I won’t know what to do.” “Will there be chairs or cushions? Should I bring my own cushion?” “Seven to nine-thirty on a Thursday night . . . I’ll be so tired after work, I won’t feel like going.” “I won’t have time to eat dinner and I’ll be starving.” “I won’t get home until after 10 and I’ll be so wound up I won’t be able to sleep.” “It might be lame, like that last mindfulness course I took.” “I might not be able to find parking.” “I won’t be able to walk the dogs or exercise on Thursdays.” “I don’t know what to wear. Should I wear yoga pants?” “I’’ll have to bring a change of clothes to work.” And even, embarrassing though it is to admit, “We’ll have to take off our shoes. I hope we can wear socks because I won’t have time to get a pedicure in the next two weeks.”
In the end, I recognized my reservations for what they were—excuses designed to avoid an unfamiliar situation causing me trepidation. I don’t like being a newbie, and this class raises all those old first-day-of-school insecurities (probably dating back to the start of kindergarten, when I wet my pants because I was too shy to ask my scary new teacher where the bathroom was and, humiliated, ran to hide in the coatroom when she asked the class who was responsible for the puddle on the floor).
So I did what I’d tell anyone else to do. I signed up.
To be continued . . .
Tags: anxiety, CBT, depression, MBSR, mindfulness
Posted in Acceptance and Mindfulness, Anxiety, Behavior Change, Cognitive-behavior Therapy, Depression, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Self-help, Techniques |
