Resources for Self-Improvement

Ideas, inspiration and resources to help us all make better live choices.

[solutionsondeck-blog]

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.

James Baldwin’s Advice on Writing

[wellspringcounseling]

How to cope when the world feels overwhelming

“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estés

There’s something in the air lately, you can almost feel it. I started sensing it a few months ago, and my clients are beginning to bring it up in sessions a lot more often, too. Quite simply, we’re feeling overwhelmed—made anxious by the contentious political climate of an election year, saddened beyond words by the mass shooting in Orlando, the violence in Baton Rouge, Minnesota, and Dallas, burned out by a news cycle that continues to both reflect and amplify our fears. If you’re a compassionate person, one who strives to make the world a better, more meaningful place, times like these can feel quite disheartening.

Which is why we need to remember, more than ever, to hold a space for goodness, hope, presence, and gratitude in our daily lives. It can be hard to do with so much noise and negativity all around us— believe me I know. But it’s also one of the best antidotes we have available, a way to balance the scales and reset our perspective. Our brains are quite literally set up to overlearn from negative experiences and feelings, and primed to respond in a fight/flight/freeze way to any perceived threat. Thousands of years ago, this served a distinct evolutionary advantage—the more you feared, and acted out of that fear, the better your chance of survival. However, in our modern cultural moment, the brain’s built-in ‘negativity bias’ actually works against us. It overlearns from the anxiety and fear provoked by images of violence and hatred on the news, or viral videos on social media of tragedies occurring throughout the world, or even just the email your friend forwarded to you yesterday about the upcoming election. And the more of this you consume each day, the more frightened and hopeless your perspective becomes, until eventually a sense of learned helplessness starts to set in.

During times like these, our overworked brains need to be provided with a sense of safety and balance to allow us to keep engaging with life rather than retreating from it out of fear, anxiety, anger, or despair. So how do we do this? Well, here are a few tried and true ways to go about it:

Cultivate Mindfulness & Presence First and foremost, we need to find a way to ground ourselves and accept whatever emotions might be arising in any given moment. The best way to do this is to increase our capacity for mindfulness—“a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment”—and find ways to make this a part of our daily routine. Numerous studies have shown that just a few weeks of mindfulness practice decreases stress and negative emotions, enhances compassion, and even boosts our immune system. If you don’t already practice some form of mindfulness, here are two easy ways to get started.

Headspace: this is the one I most often recommend to clients (and also use myself). It’s a website and phone app which offers a free series of stuctured 10 minute meditations to ease you into developing a daily mindfulness routine.

R.A.I.N.: a simple and powerful mindfulness tool that offers us a way to work with and through difficult and intense emotions. It can be used in most any situation—especially when we are feeling overwhelmed—to help us gently reflect on what is happening inside of us, and learn to accept whatever is.

Limit Your Media Exposure We all have different thresholds when it comes to consuming the barrage of news, media, and images available to us these days, and it’s important to know your own personal limit—and then set up healthy boundaries to keep yourself from feeling overwhelmed. Remember: It’s ok to put down your phone, step away from your computer or television, or unplug from media altogether for a bit   when the news starts to feel overwhelming. In fact, sometimes it’s necessary.

Connect with Others We are social creatures by nature, and the more we connect with others the less isolated, depressed, and anxious we tend to feel. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the world around you, try making more time in your day to talk through it with those around you. Share how you’re feeling with the people in your life and hold space for them to do the same with you.

Take in the Good In the midst of especially troubling times, it’s more important than ever to learn how to consciously “take in the good”. To make a purposeful effort to seek out and appreciate all the daily acts of goodness and kindness taking place throughout the world, as well as to reflect on the small good things that happen in your own life each and every day. Doing so helps us find balance in the middle of all the noise, and enhances our sense of humanity and gratitude. Remember, for every awful thing you hear about in the media, there are scores of amazing and compassionate acts taking place as well. These things won’t often get the same amount of news coverage or attention, but it’s not because they aren’t happening. So, we have to make time to seek them out and to remind ourselves that this world can be a beautiful and awe-inspiring place, too. If we don’t, we will very quickly lose sight of the fact that, our own anxiety to the contrary, this is actually the very best (and safest) time to be alive in human history, by most any metric.

Make Time for Self-Care Create space in your day for the things that bring peace, contentment, relaxation, or laughter into your life. Around the Wellspring office, this takes all kinds of forms. One of my colleagues sets aside time to watch animal videos on YouTube in the midst of a stressful day, another walks around the nearby Botanical Gardens. Personally, I like to put on headphones and lose myself in a good podcast or some music I enjoy, read through a favorite book or poem (currently I’m reading Maggie Smith’s new poem, “Good Bones” several times each day), or find something online that makes me laugh out loud. Engage with nature, with art, with exercise. There’s no wrong way to do this and plenty of reasons to make time for it—even a simple 10 minute break from the stress and routine of ‘real life’ can have a beneficial impact on your overall mood and mental health.

These are difficult and trying days for many of us, and it can certainly feel overwhelming at times. But there’s work to do—to “mend the part of the world that is within our reach”—and in order to do so, we need to find ways to recharge our own batteries and bring our minds back into balance. The better care we take of ourselves, the better able we will be to engage with the world around us. And this world needs all of the love, compassion, kindness, and attention we can give it right about now.

[solutionsondeck-blog]

[solutionsondeck-blog]

The natural state is just itself and nothing else, whether thoughts are arising or not. There is nothing wrong with having thoughts; it is natural for thoughts to arise. They represent the creative potentiality or dynamism of the nature of mind. When we are in the natural state, there are no special thoughts associated with it. The natural state is always there whether thoughts are present or not. The problem is to recognize this natural state without being distracted by thoughts.

Lopön Tenzin Namdak

[just-shower-thoughts]

For the low price of a dollar you can leave a dollar somewhere and instantly make someone’s day better

[solutionsondeck-blog]

The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.

Albert Einstein

[solutionsondeck-blog]

Self-Love | The Book of Life

It can be tempting to suppose that being hard on ourselves, though painful, is in the end quite useful. Self-flagellation can feel like a survival strategy that steers us clear of the many dangers of indulgence and complacency. But there are equal, if not greater, dangers in an ongoing lack of sympathy for our own plight. Despair, depression and suicide are not especially minor risks.

Afflicted by a lack self-love, romantic relationships become almost impossible, for one of the central requirements of a capacity to accept the love of another turns out to be a confident degree of affection for ourselves, built up over the years, largely in childhood. We need a legacy of feeling that we in some basic way deserve love in order not to respond obtusely to affections granted to us by prospective adult partners.

Click photo to read the essay in full. 

[theemotionmachine]

Love, caring, and empathy are limited resources - invest them wisely.

[solutionsondeck-blog]

“[I}rrespective of the financial and status details of our families, we all have another significant legacy to grapple with: each of us is the recipient of an emotional inheritance, largely unknown to us, yet enormously influential in determining our day-to-day behaviour – normally in rather negative or complex directions. The task of emotional maturity is to learn to understand the details of our emotional inheritance a little before we have been able to ruin our own and others’ lives by acting upon its often antiquated and troublesome dynamics...”

-- Emotional Inheritance, The School of Life 

(click the photo to read in full) 

[solutionsondeck-blog]

A recent New York Times article said the brain switches between "mind wandering mode" where we get our best ideas, and "executive function", where we execute and apply our ideas. Learning to master that switch, to be able to open yourself up to creative rhapsodies, but then being able to APPLY those insights into your work is crucial. I split my day up into those two modes of being when possible.

Jason Silva, (the article mentioned) 

[onlinecounsellingcollege]

The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.

Elisabeth Foley 

[solutionsondeck-blog]

Updated Brain Map Identifies Nearly 100 New Regions

The brain looks like a featureless expanse of folds and bulges, but it’s actually carved up into invisible territories. Each is specialized: Some groups of neurons become active when we recognize faces, others when we read, others when we raise our hands.

On Wednesday, in what many experts are calling a milestone in neuroscience, researchers published a spectacular new map of the brain, detailing nearly 100 previously unknown regions — an unprecedented glimpse into the machinery of the human mind.

Scientists will rely on this guide as they attempt to understand virtually every aspect of the brain, from how it develops in children and ages over decades, to how it can be corrupted by diseases like Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia....

The map produced by the computer includes 83 familiar regions, such as Broca’s area, but includes 97 that were unknown — or just forgotten....

In other parts of the cortex, the scientists were able to partition previously identified regions into smaller ones. For example, they discovered that a large region near the front of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, actually is made up of a dozen smaller zones....

“The next big step is seeing what this can do for us in terms of buying more power,” said Emily S. Finn, a graduate student at Yale University who has used Human Connectome Project data to find links between brain activity and intelligence....

Click-through image to read in full!  

[solutionsondeck-blog]

Main takeaways from the book WILLPOWER: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, delivered by Charisma On Command, synopsized and further edited here by Solutions On Deck. 

Understanding Willpower: 

** Willpower is a finite resource. You can conceive of it like a health bar in a video game that says how much you have. Throughout your day it’s being drained by all sorts of things that exert emotional control. One of the biggest things we do not realize is draining our willpower is decision making. The more time you spend making trivial decisions (i.e. what to eat) the more your willpower goes down. 

Replenish willpower by eating and sleeping. Strengthen your willpower by exerting it. (i.e. Get up and go to the gym even when you don’t feel like it. ) 

** People who have mastered their willpower are not those with the deepest reserves, but those that have set up their lives such that they drain their willpower the least. It’s not about fighting inner struggles and conquering, it’s about setting up an environment, a system and a lifestyle that makes it so that you don’t have to fight all these battles, you can conserve your willpower for where it really matters. 

SIX THINGS TO STOP DRAINING YOUR WILLPOWER SO YOU HAVE MORE FOR WHEN IT COUNTS:

1. Make decisions more quickly. The process of being stuck in a decision is costing you willpower. Identify when decisions don’t matter, or when you won’t get enough information to make a good decision and just pick a path. Be decisive, and quickly. 

2. Set up hard and fast rules in your life that cannot be violated. Going back-and-forth in your head costs you willpower. (I.e. “I do not eat sugar. Period.” Both strengthens and conserves your will power better than considering, “Well, I ate well yesterday, and the dessert list here looks really good...”) Hard and fast rules gives you the freedom to spend your brainpower on the things that matter most. 

3. Change your environment so that it supports you. (I.e. the easiest way to not eat junk food is to not have junk food in your house.) Transform your environment to support you in achieving your goals. Try to live with roommates who have the same goals as you (i.e. healthy lifestyles, productive.) 

4.  Prep for the hard situations beforehand. The more time you spend deliberating the more you drain your willpower. Think through common things likely to happen to blow you off course and what you will do to respond. Have a game plan before you end up in that situation. (I.e. “I’m trying to lose weight, when I’m presented with a desert menu I will say, ‘No thank you, I really enjoy how much better my body feels ever since I gave up sugar.’”) (Consider this point with Rule 2 also) 

5. Identity: If your identity says, “I’m the type of person who works on my business every single day” it won’t take willpower to do it because that is who you are. Get a really strong “why” that resonates with you. Connect your values to the activity you want to be doing. If you can connect your preexisting identity to the action that you want to take you will find that complacency and apathy ceases to be an option. 

[solutionsondeck-blog]

What to Do When You Feel Overwhelmed

Identify what emotions you’re actually experiencing to take back control.

The first step is to recognize where to place blame. You have created that negative emotion within your own body. You created that extra muscle tension, those sweaty palms, that pounding heart. Not someone else. You.

Except most people don’t realize they are the architects of their own internal emotional state. Instead they are stuck in a victim or blame position. They claim something is being done to them to make them feel a particular negative emotion or stress. That’s simply because they don’t have control of their emotional state.

Without emotional control, it’s easy for other people to trigger a reaction in you; you will always be at risk of feeling overwhelmed, feeling stressed. But it’s still you producing that reaction. You need to accept the fundamental truth that you created the emotion yourself. You need to learn to stop reacting and control your response—to become “response-able.” That is, able torespond rather simply react.

There are 34,000 distinguishable emotions, which means there are roughly 17,000 negative emotions. But most people cannot accurately identify which of the 17,000 negative emotions they are actually experiencing. So when you claim to be feeling overwhelmed, you might actually be experiencing something else entirely: helplessness, anger, frustration, irritation, a sense of defeat or despair.

If you want to actually change any of these emotions, you need to become more precise in identifying the exact emotion you are experiencing. You need to be able to discriminate what you are feeling right now from similar, related emotions, not from an intellectual perspective but from an experiential perspective. For example, anger is a much more activated emotion with a higher heart rate than overwhelm, and anger might involve greater tension in the shoulders and a clenching of the fists, whereas overwhelm might involve a more slumped shoulder position and open hands.

By considering the experiential differences between specific emotions, you will improve your “emotional literacy.” With improved emotional literacy, you can start to come up with a more effective strategy for dealing with those negative emotions.

[solutionsondeck-blog]

How to Practice Emotional First Aid | Guy Winch | TED Talks

@7:27 “[Y]ou can't treat a psychological wound if you don't even know you're injured. Loneliness isn't the only psychological wound that distorts our perceptions and misleads us. Failure does that as well.

I once visited a day care center, where I saw three toddlers play with identical plastic toys. You had to slide the red button, and a cute doggie would pop out. One little girl tried pulling the purple button, then pushing it, and then she just sat back and looked at the box, with her lower lip trembling. The little boy next to her watched this happen, then turned to his box and and burst into tears without even touching it. Meanwhile, another little girl tried everything she could think of until she slid the red button, the cute doggie popped out, and she squealed with delight. So three toddlers with identical plastic toys, but with very different reactions to failure. The first two toddlers were perfectly capable of sliding a red button. The only thing that prevented them from succeeding was that their mind tricked them into believing they could not. Now, adults get tricked this way as well, all the time. In fact, we all have a default set of feelings and beliefs that gets triggered whenever we encounter frustrations and setbacks.

Are you aware of how your mind reacts to failure? You need to be. Because if your mind tries to convince you you're incapable of something and you believe it, then like those two toddlers, you'll begin to feel helpless and you'll stop trying too soon, or you won't even try at all. And then you'll be even more convinced you can't succeed. You see, that's why so many people function below their actual potential. Because somewhere along the way, sometimes a single failure convinced them that they couldn't succeed, and they believed it. Once we become convinced of something, it's very difficult to change our mind.”

[solutionsondeck-blog]

If most people said what they were thinking, they would be speechless.

Leland Val Van de Wall

[solutionsondeck-blog]

“One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing, etcetera...

We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want, and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.”

-- Alain de Botton