Try this 1 min tip next time you notice yourself procrastinating about something important.

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Read Another Post About: Anxiety, Avoidant Coping, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Procrastination

Something you can easily try today…..

When you kiss your partner goodbye at the start of the day, or kiss them hello at the end of the day, linger a little bit longer with the kiss. Kiss them for 1-2 seconds longer than usual.

Read Another Post About: Positive Psychology, Relationships

Rumination = the tendency to respond to distress by repetitively (and passively) focusing on the causes and consequences of your problems, without moving to active problem solving.

Here’s two questions I find help me:

When I notice myself ruminating, in a very gentle & kind tone, I ask myself

“Is it time to move to active problem solving?”

I then ask myself

“What’s a skillful action here?” also in a very gentle and kind tone.

If it’s something I’m feeling very scared about taking action on, I ask myself these questions in almost a whisper. (Try it and see if it works for you too!)

Here’s how I used this today (non-scary example).

I had ordered some sneakers over the weekend. They haven’t shipped yet and I was concerned they wouldn’t arrive before I leave the States and head back to NZ next week, and I would have no way of getting them. I was having visual images of my shoes sitting, undeliverable at my local NYC post office and having no way of getting the shoes or my money back, since once I leave, there will be no one at my current apartment address until the end of the month. This was the rumination part – the image was swirling around in my mind and I felt a sick feeling in my stomach when I thought it. I was also criticizing myself for not ordering them earlier, also rumination. Can you see how I was doing both the focusing on the “causes” and the “consequences” parts of rumination – ordering later than I should’ve (cause) and being upset if I didn’t get the shoes and blew the money (consequence)?

Its a company I’ve never ordered from before, and I tried phoning and emailing yesterday to see if I needed to upgrade to a faster shipping option, and didn’t get a response after 24 hours.

This morning when I woke up to no email reply, after asking myself the above questions, I went online and found the number of their retail store and talked to the brother of the guy who handles the shipping of internet orders. Apparently he’s been off work the last couple of days due to “some problems” and his brother is going to ask him to call me back this afternoon. So, we’ll see how it goes.

Why did I give this example?

I gave the above example to show how an overcoming rumination strategy works for everyday rumination, not just the big stuff. Its often easier to get started with overcoming rumination strategies by using them for small examples of rumination like this.

I included rumination as one of the “use only sparingly” strategies on the Healthy Emotion Regulation Strategies Pyramid

Read Another Post About: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Worry

Almost all of you reading this will have had an experience of having been in a romantic relationship that got less happy as time went on.

What goes wrong?

“When marriages fail, it is not increasing conflict that is the cause. It is decreasing affection and emotional responsiveness, according to a landmark study by Ted Huston of the University of Texas. Indeed the lack of emotional responsiveness, rather than the level of conflict, is the best predictor of how solid a marriage will be 5 years into it. The demise of marriages begins with a growing absence of responsive intimate interactions. The conflict comes later.” This quote comes from the book Hold Me Tight by Professor Sue Johnson, who co-created one of the most successful forms of couple’s therapy.

There’s a study I particularly like that provides further insight into how to keep the lovin’ feeling.

The researchers studied “approach” and “avoidance” motivations in couples.

Approach motivations were measured using questions like:

Over the course of the next semester

- “I will be trying to deepen my relationship with my
romantic partner”
- “I will be trying to move toward growth and
development in my romantic relationship”.

Avoidance motivations were measured by questions like

- “I will be trying to avoid disagreements
and conflicts with my romantic partner”
- “I will be trying to make sure that nothing bad happens in my romantic
relationship”

Questions were asked using 7-point scales ranging from 1
strongly disagree to 7
strongly agree.

The reseachers found that relationship quality improved over time when both partners were high in approach motivations, but people got less happy over time if they were in a relationship with a partner who was mostly motivated by avoidance goals.

Not only were approach goals associated with higher relationship satisfaction, they were also associated with the people in the relationship experiencing more positive emotions, and greater relationship responsiveness (understanding, validating, and caring). It wasn’t just the people in the relationship that rated their relationship better. The resarchers also had couples come into the lab and have a videotaped discussion, and had independent observers code how satisfied and responsive the couple behaved. Couples in which the partners had approach goals were rated by these outsiders as more satisfied and responsive.

Take Home Message

When you have interactions with your partner, even if you’re talking about a difficult conversation topic, focus on “approach goals” like trying to deepen your relationship with your partner or trying to move toward growth and development in your romantic relationship, rather than your main motivation being trying to avoid disagreement.

Read Another Post About: Positive Psychology, Relationships

I thought I’d do something I haven’t done before – open a post up for comments.

This is my version of an exercise from Dr Kristin Neff’s book.

The exercise is for helping you reduce the extent to which your feelings of self worth are contingent on being superior to others. Or, as Kristin puts it, helping you “Opt out of the self esteem game.”

If, to have self-worth, we have to be better than average in all important domains, then our feelings of self-worth will be shaky and we’re likely to be defensive.

There are 3 questions.
- What are 5 important skills you’re better than average at?
- What are 5 important skills you’re average at?
- What are 5 important skills you’re worse than average at?

Your answers for all 3 questions should be skills that are generally considered important in our society and that are important to you personally. In other words, you’d really like to be better than average at the skill.

This shouldn’t be like when people go to a job interview and get asked their worst quality and they say they’re a perfectionist because they think it will help them get hired.

I’m going to share my examples and if you want to share your examples, chime in in the comments. You might find that sharing publicly (even just using your first name), might help reduce your feelings of shame about the important skills you’re average or worse than average at, and correspondingly help with defensiveness and avoidance. This is the principle of Opposite Action.

My examples

What are 5 things you’re better than average at?

1. Finding information.
2. Synthesizing vast quantities of information.
3. Incorporating new information into my ways of working (e.g., when I read new studies, new technologies emerge, or clients say “Could we do more of this and less of that?”) (provided the information is presented clearly).
4. Nutting out difficult problems (from how to do something on the computer, to how to help clients overcome their problems).
5. Being a romantic partner.

What are 5 things you’re average at?

1. Being a family member.
2. Writing.
3. Being organized.
4. Self-discipline.
5. Cooking.

What are 5 things you worse than average at?

1. Networking.
2. Sharing.
3. Being a friend.
4. Being in a group.
5. Driving.

If you want to contribute your examples, I would LOVE that. This was a hard exercise to share without giving into the temptation to be self-presentational rather than honest, so you might find that this aspect is hard for you too.

Tips: keep your focus on skills rather than traits, and keep the comments to sharing your own information. I like my back and forth conversations to be in person, so I don’t get into back and forth discussions on the internet, and if you want personal help…. people pay me for that ;-)

Can you see the flaw in self worth being contingent on being better than average?
It means that, in any domain, at least half of people are either going to be very defended against admitting being average/less than average, or feel bad.

If you don’t see the existing comments followed by a comment box, click on the blog post title “Self Worth” to go to the permalink page. Its there.

Read Another Post About: Anxiety, Depression, Self Esteem, Self-Compassion