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 |
Get SMARTer: Set Goals You Can Live With
By Lynne Gots, posted on December 28th, 2011.
While I was driving into work this morning, I heard an ad on the radio for a weight-loss product “guaranteed to help you achieve your New Year’s resolution to lost 20 pounds or more.” It made me cringe.
If you read my last post about setting SMART goals, you may be wondering what’s wrong with resolving to lose a specific amount of weight. After all, a numerical target meets most, if not all, the criteria I talked about: it’s specific, measurable, and timely; and it might even be achievable and realistic, as long as you’re using medically established weight ranges rather than your own ideal of what you’d like to weigh. Even so, it doesn’t pass muster with me.
Call me picky. But I don’t like evaluating success by outcome alone. When you’re focusing only on the end result, you can lose sight of your progress along the way and miss out on valuable opportunities to feel good about the steps you’re taking to chip away at bad habits.
Consider one of my patients, who’d lost thirty pounds in five months. His pants actually fell down in the supermarket when he bent over to pull a box of cereal off a bottom shelf. Yet he persisted in thinking his dramatic weight loss was “no big deal” because he still had twenty more pounds to go.
Rather than measuring your progress by pounds lost, use behavior change as your yardstick instead. Here are just a few examples of SMART goals you could strive for if you want to lose weight:
- Eat fruit instead of ice cream for dessert three times a week.
- Prepare a meatless meal once a week.
- Sit down at the table to eat.
- Plan to eat at regular intervals with three structured meals and one or two snacks.
- Add one serving of vegetables to lunch and dinner.
Did you notice I didn’t use any “don’ts” in my goals? When we’re trying to eliminate counterproductive behaviors, we often create rigid rules for ourselves. The internal wagging finger usually has the unintended effect of propelling us right into a petulant rebellion. Word your goals in terms of positive changes you can make rather than negative behaviors to avoid.
Get the idea? Record your eating habits for a week and use the information you’ve gathered to identify your personal problem areas. Be creative and have fun. The possibilities are endless. And remember, what’s important is the journey, not the destination.
Tags: behavior change, setting goals, weight loss
Posted in Behavior Change, Goals, Motivation, Techniques |
