Lynne S. Gots, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Weeks 3 and 4: Everyday Pleasures and Pains
By Lynne Gots, posted on May 4th, 2014.
Formal meditation is only one part of mindfulness training. If you want to become more aware and present during the ordinary moments of life, you have to practice noticing.
Our assignment in the third week of MBSR was to keep a daily log of pleasant events, noting our physical sensations, feelings, and thoughts. We also paid attention to how we were “relating” to each experience. Were we pushing it away or hurrying through it? Holding onto it? Or just “being with” it—that is, staying in the moment and observing, not judging.
Most of us rush through our days oblivious to our moment-to-moment experience. When you start looking, you might discover, as I did, how many opportunities for pleasure slip by.
My week of recording pleasant experiences was perfectly ordinary. I wasn’t on vacation in an exotic locale. There were no birthdays to celebrate or parties to attend. I drove to work every day on the Beltway. I came home after work and cooked dinner. I packed lunch for the next day. I paid bills, booked dental appointments, scheduled household repairs, and vacuumed up the dirt the dogs tracked onto the living room rug. Sometimes the weather was dreary and unseasonably cold.
But I was able to discover pleasure in small, everyday events. I enjoyed drinking my coffee on Saturday morning, noticing the aroma of the freshly ground beans and feeling content to have some time to myself. I relished my Sunday ritual of completing the NY Times Crossword (in ink), feeling focused, engaged, and proud to be continuing my father’s tradition. I took in the bright yellow forsythia when I walked out onto the deck one day before work and appreciated the coming of spring. I even observed, while sitting in traffic one morning on the route taking me into the city, the sun glistening on the Potomac, the rowers gliding through the water in their skulls, and the greenery budding on either side of the road. Not a bad way to start the day.
The following week’s home practice was to observe unpleasant experiences in the same way, recording physical sensations, thoughts, and feelings, as well as how we related to the events. Not surprisingly, the predominant way of relating to unpleasant events is to push them away.
But here’s where it gets tricky. If you want to cultivate mindfulness and acceptance—attitudes helpful in dealing with pain, stress, and other aversive emotional and physical states—you need to allow yourself to “be with” the unpleasant experiences rather than avoiding them, bracing yourself against them, or actively pushing them away.
Why, you might ask, would you want to let yourself feel bad? Because, counterintuitive as it might seem, allowing the full range of internal reactions to unfold and observing them without piling on the negative interpretations we usually make can lessen the distress.
My unpleasant events for the week were mundane. They mostly involved driving: sitting in rush hour traffic on the way to work when I was running late, having the driver next to me speed up and cut me off when I was trying to merge into his lane, seeing another car beat me to the parking space I’d had my eye on.
So I noticed my chest tightening and my jaw clenching. My hand balled into a fist and pounded on the steering wheel. I heard myself cursing out loud once or twice. And I tried just to observe.
I can’t say I ever achieved a total Zen state of calm during my commute. But practicing being mindful made the experience a little more interesting and maybe even a touch less frustrating.
In my next dispatch from the mindfulness front, I’ll talk about another challenge: how to keep up with all the mindfulness exercises.
Tags: acceptance, MBSR, mindfulness
Posted in Acceptance and Mindfulness |
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 |
Why New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Work
By Lynne Gots, posted on January 6th, 2014.
Not even a week into 2014 and already I’ve broken my resolutions. I should have known better.
Most of the promises made on the eve of January 1st are doomed to fail. Yet we continue to make them year after year, doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Isn’t that the definition of insanity?
My first resolution didn’t even last through New Year’s Day. Feeling pleased with the meditation practice I’d cultivated over the last year by setting myself the modest goal of sitting and focusing on my breath for at least five minutes daily, I’d decided to raise the bar. I would meditate for thirty minutes every day!
As it turned out, on the first of January I got involved in preparing a complicated meal, puttering around the house, and sharing the fruits of my labor with my family. When I finally remembered I hadn’t yet meditated, it was 11:00 pm, and I was sleepy. Normally I’d put in my five minutes and call it a night. But instead, I set my timer for 20 minutes and struggled to stay awake while I concentrated on my inhalations and exhalations until the bell chimed.
You’d think, having just quadrupled the length of a typical late-night meditation session while managing not to fall asleep during it, I’d congratulate myself. But no. I felt disappointed.
I kept my second resolution until January 3. I’d decided I would accrue 10,000 steps a day on my activity-monitoring wristband. Despite my sedentary job, I often do get in at least 10,000 steps by taking the stairs instead of the elevator to my seventh floor office, walking the dogs for nearly an hour, and catching up with my favorite TV shows on the elliptical trainer instead of the couch.
Usually, in spite of my aversion to the cold, I manage with a Teutonic-like resolve to drag the dogs (both wimps when it comes to weather extremes) and myself out the door every day for a walk. But with the wind chills hovering in the single digits on January 3 and the sidewalks iced over, none of us could endure more than fifteen minutes around the block, giving me a paltry 5700 steps for the day.
Maybe you’re sticking to your resolutions a little longer than I did. But unless you’re endowed with an ironclad will—and, if so, probably not in need of making vows to improve yourself—you’ll abandon them sooner or later.
Why don’t New Year’s resolutions work? In my experience, both personal and professional, most people fail to stick to their resolutions because they set their sights on inflexible goals. Both my resolutions were too rigid and unrealistic, failing to take into account variability in daily responsibilities and interference from outside forces (like the weather).
Before making my resolutions for 2014, I’d already been meditating regularly and getting more active by aiming for consistency over quantity. This tactic motivated me because even one minute of meditation “counted.” And when I increased the length of a practice, I did it out of choice rather than obligation. But as soon as I changed the rules, demanding of myself 100% adherence to an arbitrary numerical standard, I set myself up to fail.
Fortunately, I recognized my distorted thinking right away and have gone back to striving for consistency. I’ll still try to practice longer when I can carve out the time but I accept that it’s not always possible.
Many people get frustrated and give up altogether when they fall short of their goals. If you’re an “all-or-nothing” thinker, you may believe you blew it if you slipped up even just a little. Then, bye bye, resolutions.
One reason making New Year’s resolutions is so appealing, according to social scientists, is “the fresh start effect.” Researchers found an increased interest in dieting, inferred from the frequency of Google searches for the term “diet,” around the beginnings of new weeks, months, years, semesters, birthdays, and holidays.
Viewing change from the perspective of a fresh start mentality can backfire, as anyone who’s fallen off the diet wagon on a Wednesday knows all too well. Your waistline won’t shrink if you tell yourself, “Oh, well. I guess I can eat whatever I want and start the diet again on Monday.”
But if you must give yourself a mental clean slate to recommit to change, there’s a better way. You can take a page from Zen Buddhism and the concept of Shoshin, or “Beginner’s Mind,” where every moment can be a fresh start. Even the same action repeated over and over is different every time.
So forget about the New Year’s resolutions and just begin again—not tomorrow or next week, but right now.
Tags: beginner's mind, meditation, mindfulness, New Year's resolutions
Posted in Acceptance and Mindfulness, Behavior Change, Motivation, Techniques |
