Stop Thinking and Enjoy a Moment

If you suffer from racing thoughts, thoughts of past mistakes or bad experiences, or worries about the future, and especially if you get stuck on those thoughts and can’t break away from them, then mindfulness is something you want to learn.

Out-of-control thinking can keep you from sleeping and can make you anxious. It can cause you to avoid being alone or avoid having quiet times. It can lead you to be dependent on always needing someone to be with you or lead to your attachment to having a TV on all of the time. The out-of-control thinking controls you and keeps you from being able to relax.

Mindfulness is directing your focus to the experience of the present moment without judgment. It can be a meditation, or it can be a way to fully enjoy a moment, or it can be a way to manage thoughts and emotions. It is a way to experience reality just as it is without influence from past experience or worries about the future.

Mindfulness is a skill.

It takes ongoing practice or consistently increasing exercise like working out to build muscle. To make effective use of mindfulness, you have to train your brain. This is what is taking place in the Karate Kid movie scene of “wax on, wax off” or the time in Star Wars when Luke is in the swamp training with Yoda. It takes time and practice to develop automatic focus and concentration.

The basic way to do mindfulness is to observe with your five senses the things around you as well as your feelings and physical sensations. As you observe these things, you do so without judgment. This means you don’t think about if you are doing it right. You do not criticize what you are doing. You do not think about if you like or don’t like something or if it is good or bad. 

During mindfulness, you leave opinions out. You only observe what you see, what you hear, what you smell, what you touch, and what you taste - the five senses. This is not easy to do because our brains are constantly categorizing which is a type of judgment. So, you cannot be mindful all of the time because a functioning brain needs to make judgments. You practice mindfulness for a minute or two and try to build up to longer amounts of time so that you can be mindful when you choose.

Use mindfulness to cope or to improve experiences.

You can choose to use the skill of mindfulness at important times, like when you want to sleep, or you want to calm your mind from distressing thoughts. You can choose to fully experience an enjoyable moment which helps you enjoy living. And let me emphasize again that you have to practice regularly for it to work when you want it to!

Let's talk about using mindfulness for sleep as an example. What needs to take place is the body relaxing and the thinking brain to slow down and let thoughts go. The practice of deep, slow breathing is usually combined with mindfulness. With practice, this form of breathing signals the brain to shift into relaxation.

A typical mindfulness practice session starts with a few slow, deep breaths and then continuing the breathing and focusing attention on the breath coming in through the nose and out through the mouth. The senses notice the coolness of the breath coming in and the warmth of the breath being exhaled. It is possible to feel the breath in the back of the nose and on the top of the tongue, for example. And there is the sound of breathing. There might be a scent picked up. Usually, people close their eyes to reduce incoming stimulation.

To counter a stream of thinking, you can give the brain enough to do to keep it busy but not enough to prevent mindfulness. This can be done by counting each breath, or counting the seconds of inhaling and exhaling, and a simple word can be added to the exhale, such as thinking “relax.” 

Mindfulness helps to fully experience an enjoyable moment.

The combination of practicing gratitude and fully enjoying pleasurable moments is what leads to enjoying life. 

I am on my computer a lot, as most people are for work or scanning social media or watching videos, and so forth. How much does this keep me from enjoying my life? I tend to eat lunch or dinner while looking at my computer screen. Lately, I have been consciously choosing to turn away from the computer and be mindful when I take a bite of food. I am always eating something I like; why not give it my full attention?

Another thing I have been attending to is my time with my pet. I have a cat because I like petting the soft fur and hearing the appreciative purring that cats produce. In the morning as I am waking up, my cat generally hops up on my bed and lies near me purring his deep, rumbling purr. How often do I go down the road of streaming thoughts without noticing my cat? I have been consciously choosing to be mindful in these moments. I focus on the feel of his fur, the sound of the purring, the warmth of his body, the small vibrations his purring creates. This is a simple moment of joy. Why would I deprive myself from experiencing this moment?

Summary

Mindfulness is a skill which you must practice regularly to train your brain to focus when you want it to. You can use it for important moments to fully experience something good or to put a stop to endless thinking or to break free from worries or guilt by focusing on the now without judgment. Use mindfulness to increase your joy in living. Try to be mindful for short moments of time on a regular basis and build up to more.

Take a moment to check out my website at www.ldonreed.com 

Develop Hope and Desire

 

I often see people who have given up. They do not see a better future and they do not have the desire or the will to do the work to improve things. Those, of course, are some of the main symptoms in depression: hopelessness and lack of motivation.

Let's consider hope and desire. What do those words mean?

Hope is an expectation or even a dream that something good could happen.

Desire is a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen.

Hope and desire together are fuel for motivation. You take action in the belief that it could lead to something desirable.

Positive people have hope.

I never thought of myself as a positive person. I thought of myself as being realistic and practical. But one day, I realized that I went through college and grad school because of my hope that it would lead to a career that I would like and that could support me. There were no guarantees, and I invested a lot of hard work, stress, and money! I worked hard and stuck with it. I would not have done all of that without hope and desire and a belief that it could be. 

The way to develop hope and desire is to allow yourself to dream.

While I was growing up, my family didn’t have much money. Money was tight enough that I learned to not want anything because I couldn’t have it anyway. Well, not wanting means you are not dreaming. If you are not dreaming, what reason would you have to try? 

You need to dream to develop a vision and then work toward making it happen. 

As an exercise in developing hope and desire:

1. Practice daydreaming as if there were no limits, then 
2. Go beyond and dream up the ideal. From there, 
3. Identify your actual wants. 
4. Use the wants to decide on a goal. Then, 
5. Start taking steps to learn and do what it takes to reach the goal.

There is a saying:

A dream written down becomes a goal.

A goal broken down into steps becomes a plan.

And a plan backed by action becomes reality.

Hope and desire are about wanting and expecting something good. If you are lacking hope and desire, you can develop and nurture those traits. 

Allow yourself to daydream without restrictions. Let the ideas flow. Give yourself permission. 

Once you can envision it, you can go after it!

How People Struggling with Emotional Dysregulation Can Regain Control

This article is about overwhelming emotion or, more professionally called, emotional dysregulation. A lot of people have overwhelming emotion. It takes over, they feel like they can't stop it, and it terrorizes them. It makes life very difficult. People describe it as: I'm losing it. I'm freaking out. I'm having one of my episodes. I'm having a panic attack. I can't stop crying. I can't breathe. It may be described as: I have no motivation. I'm overwhelmed. I don't care about anything. I just want to sleep. I can't get out of bed. I haven't showered for a few days. There are many more; you can probably think of some for yourself. 

Emotional dysregulation is emotion, which is experienced as more intense, more frequent, and it lasts longer than average emotions. It really stands out as something significant, maybe even extreme.

The scary thing is that it can come on without warning or apparent reason. This is because our brains build associations which happens on an unconscious level. Something like a scent or a sound or a particular gesture or an environment that is similar to something that has happened before during a moment in time where the person was really, really upset or had a strong emotional reaction becomes associated. And then in the future, when these similar experiences come along, it brings on that same intense emotion and the person has no idea why it's happening. 

One of the frightening things about it is it just comes on and the person feels out of control because they don't know when it's going to happen next. The person feels very much not in control. Many people describe it as being ruled by their own emotions. 

Types: There are several kinds of categories or diagnoses that various types of emotional dysregulation can fall within. Many people are familiar with major depression, anxiety, which can include panic attacks, rages of anger, PTSD, which stands for post-traumatic stress disorder. It results from an extremely frightening situation that made the person feel like their life was at risk. In any case, it leaves them with a combination of symptoms which include strong emotions that come on and they don't know what they're reacting to. 

Identify: Okay. What do you do with this? Looking for, recognizing, and identifying triggers that bring on the emotion is a place to start. Triggers are those subtle things that bring on the emotion unexpectedly. The key to working on it is to keep track of what was happening right before the strong emotion started. That starts to give you a clue to what the trigger might be. 

Learn skills to cope: Now, what do you do with this? It does not mean that you avoid the trigger. And it certainly doesn't mean that other people have to be careful not to trigger you. They might not even know what your trigger is. What needs to happen is to identify the trigger, develop very good skills at coping, both with the mental and emotional response, as well as the physical response to the trigger. This involves gaining skills and practicing them until it is second nature.

You want to get really, really good at it. And it's those things that are going to help you feel more in control and like the emotion doesn't rule you. It takes time. It takes practice. There can be a lot of different triggers, so it can be frustrating, and it can feel like it's impossible. But it really is not impossible. It just takes a lot of practice and awareness. If the triggers remain, many areas of life can be affected. Obviously, relationships with family and friends can be chaotic. It can be difficult. They don't know what is going on with you. You might look crazy to them. You certainly might look out of control. And they don't know what to do about it, especially if you don't know what to do about it.

Of course, strong emotional reactions can affect performance at work or at school. At the very least, it can be distracting. It can keep you from getting work done. It can cause you to miss work. It can cause you to have to run off somewhere and hide while you have the emotional reaction and you wait for it to subside. Socially, it might be difficult to make plans especially to go out in public and around people because you don't know when an emotional episode might come on. That could be embarrassing as well as frightening. Now, internally, this can affect a person's self-esteem and their confidence levels.

It also adds to stress and can affect a person's physical health. It can affect sleep. It can affect the heart, heart rate, blood pressure, immunity. People become more susceptible to colds and become fatigued. 

Ways to manage:

So again, what do you do about it? There are skills and knowledge that can put a person in better control of emotions. These include skills for managing the physical and emotional response and being able to calm oneself. There is a form of meditation in which you stay in the here and the now, instead of everything coming in upon you. 

There's a great deal of thinking that contributes to strong emotions. Many people suffer from extreme worry about what might happen in the future and this contributes to anxiety. A lot of people suffer from unhappy memories of the past, maybe regrets, maybe guilt. Bad memories come into the present and create strong emotions that really don't fit the current moment. Learning how to take a look at your own thinking and alter it so that it doesn't bring on the strong emotion is definitely within a person's control. 

How do you learn about these things? Well, you can Google it. You can find books and other reading material that explains it to you and gives you techniques that you can learn and practice. A lot of people find it very helpful to go to counseling where not only do you learn skills, but you also talk to someone and process the emotions. When you can understand the emotions, they have less control over you. For some people, it can be helpful to take a prescribed medication especially for anxiety or for major depression. Sometimes that is needed while the person goes to counseling so that they can have the energy and the mental space to actually the work that needs to be done.

Another option is my signature program, the Get on Top of Your Emotions System. People can work through the 12-week course, learn all the skills that are needed, interact with and have support from me as well as others going through the program. Having a roadmap that covers all of the components along with support and accountability in an online format can be the key to success in gaining confidence in managing emotion.

I would encourage you to not feel like you're stuck and nothing can be done. It doesn't have to be that way. There are options and choices for managing dysregulated emotion.

If you would like more information about my services, see my website here.

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© 2022 Lucretia Donahue-Reed M.S.