Mindfulness Archives - Kate Gegg, AM, LCSW

May 22, 2023November 8, 2023

Social Media

Assumptions, envy, mindlessness, comparisons, isolation, inadequacy, guilt, and obligation are at the root of so many of our struggles with social media.
Many of us spend hours every week on these platforms, and for that reason it’s important that we create a relationship with our social media that we feel benefits and serves us.
It may seem silly to think about spending time managing your social media, but the fact is you give your time and your attention to these platforms, and they can effect how you feel about yourself and your relationships. What we view on social media impacts us as we go throughout our lives off social media.
A peaceful relationship with social media is one where you are intentional about which accounts you follow, and one where you give yourself permission to interface with these platforms in a way that works for you, rather than in a way that heightens the problematic dynamics listed in the first bullet point.
While I’ll get into more specifics in today’s post, the answer to addressing many of these problematic dynamics starts with creating a more mindful and intentional relationship with your social media consumption, and a more accepting relationship with yourself and your limits.
First, consider why you use social media. When you log in, is it to take a break? Keep in touch with friends? Celebrity gossip? To learn something? Then look at your actual patterns of usage and the accounts you follow to see if they are in line with your intentions for the platform. If not, you’ll need to reconcile the disconnect.
Next, work to get curious about how social media (and the accounts you follow) impact your mood, energy, feelings about yourself and others, and concentration. For this exercise (and the prior one) to be useful, you will have to accept the conclusions you draw, even if they’re not the conclusions you want.
Ambivalence – i.e. your conflicting but co-occuring feelings about a topic – is a common factor in a struggle with social media. You can love someone and really dislike how they use these platforms. You can want to learn about a topic and feel overwhelmed with information about it from the account(s) you follow.
Ultimately, you have to make a decision about which accounts serve you, and how you want to consume them (if at all). For personal relationships, you’ll need to do this in a way that holds respect for the relationships you have with those people off social media as well. This could mean muting rather than unfollowing, or having a kind conversation.
In this day and age there are many tools to help you moderate your social media consumption including muting accounts you want to keep following (but don’t want to see content from without you deciding when it’s a good time for you to see it) and favoriting accounts that you really value and never want to miss content from.

Social media makes it easy to “fill in the gaps” between what we see and what we don’t with our imagination. Not all of us do this, but when we do, we’re making assumptions, and we can get stuck in traps of envy, comparisons and feelings of inadequacy. We’re more at risk of making assumptions about people or relationships we don’t have direct access to (like celebrities or that high school classmate you don’t actually talk to anymore) because we don’t have actual information (often gathered off social media) about their real lived experiences beyond the picture (aka the positive and negative stuff going on in their life).

Envy, like an assumption, is often more activated when we don’t have a “full sense” of what’s going on in someone’s life. Combine that with how curated social media is, and our envy can run rampant. Envy isn’t necessarily bad (it can help us get in touch with what we want), but it becomes a problem when we’re so fixated on what someone else has that it diminishes our sense of appreciation for what we have. Problematic envy can have a competitive or aggressive element to it (where we want to dominate or take something from someone else).

For many of us, social media is filled with “rules” about when we should post (someone’s birthday? An event?), what the content should be (only happy stuff!), who we should follow (causes you care about? “follow back” / keep following someone?). The challenge with these “rules” is they fill our relationships with social media with obligation and guilt, both of which pull us away from what actually works for us, our limits, and how we want to spend our time.

Even when we follow accounts we “want” to spent our time and attention on, sometimes we’re inundated with information, which can leave us overwhelmed and out of touch with what we actually have capacity for.

There’s not a single solution to managing social media, but any positive relationship with it has to involve being honest with yourself about how it effects you, and setting up your access to it in a way that honors and accepts your limits and priorities.

Comments:

Today’s post tries and help you think beyond the options of “signing off for good” or just living with social media as is, even though you kind of hate it. For many people, staying away and signing off for good is the right path for them, and that’s great. Today’s post is not meant to discourage leaving social media, it’s meant to help you think through the right path for you.
I know I am not the first person to tell you that you can unfollow or mute people, many of us hear this all the time, but still struggle in our relationships with social media nonetheless. I think this happens because we aren’t necessarily giving ourselves permission to accept what works for us, and because we feel limited in what our options are (i.e. “it’s awkward if I unfollow, but I don’t want to see this”). Today’s post is aimed to get you thinking about what works for you, and then get you wondering how you can set up your social media to optimize that.
Managing your social media is not a one-time-event. It’s an ongoing mindfulness exercise where we reflect on what we need, what’s working for us, what’s not working for us, and we make changes accordingly.
Acceptance (of yourself, of your limits, of what works for you, of your actual usage of social media, of the differences between your actual self and your ideal self etc) is a key part to having a successful relationship with social media.
I could (and may) do a whole post on assumptions and how they create problems for us. The entire list of issues assumptions create wouldn’t fit in one post, though there is another notable one to consider if you struggle with social media, and that’s that our assumptions can be a sign to us that we’re feeling disconnected from a person we used to feel closer to. When this happens, we can feel isolated.
James Densley of The Violence Project has a great 10 minute free lecture about social media and how it can effect us. He gave the talk with reference to the links between mass shootings and social media, but much of the content of the talk is applicable beyond violence prevention, and it’s a great sociological perspective on social media and its impact on us.
If you’re not sure how to “mute” or “favorite” in instagram, do a search online for how to do so on your device. Muting silences an account without unfollowing it, meaning it offers a private way to set a boundary therein limiting what you see (without another person knowing).
I will likely do a post about curiosity in the future, but in short – curiosity is another one that gets folks in trouble on social media. We can look “it” up, so we do look “it” up, which doesn’t mean it’s in our best interest (or leaves us feeling good) to look “it” up. This can apply to people currently or formerly in our personal lives, celebrities – etc. If you fall into social media rabbit holes you may need to work on challenging / resisting your curiosity.
If you’re following more accounts than you can keep up with, and that’s stressing you out, you may want to consider the balance between your “Shoulds” and your “Wants”. What you feel pressure to keep up with might be different than what you can keep up with.
I talk about how envy isn’t necessarily bad. It’s true! We have all of our emotions for a reason.

January 13, 2022March 27, 2023

One Mindfully

A simple, but transformative skill: learning how to be fully and wholly present in just one moment at a time.
Learning “one mindfully” (as we call it in the DBT world) can reduce anxiety, improve concentration, increase our ability to handle a crisis, increase our ability to connect to our authentic selves, and increase our efficiency.
The opposite of this concept is “mindlessness” (not fully being present with any activity – i.e. “going on autopilot”) or multi-tasking (attempting to do two activities at the same time).
The most common way many of us “multi-task” is something most of us would not identify as multi-tasking: Thinking about one thing while doing another.
Like the time you were in a meeting but actually preoccupied by the conflict you had the night before. Or, when you were writing an email while thinking about how to prepare for something later in the day.
When we use one-mindfully we work to be present with our whole selves, which means paying attention to the content of the moment while also paying attention to internal cues about our experience of that moment.
We set an intention for what we will focus our attention and energy on, and we work to keep ourselves focused on that intention despite urges to split our attention, or give in to distraction.
This does not mean that we cannot choose to change where spend our energy and attention or that we have to completely finish before shifting our attention; it means that when we change what we are doing (and where we are focusing) we do so with intention and awareness, even if we are right in the middle of something.
This also does not mean we cannot transition quickly between tasks (think about cooking: you are chopping the carrots, then stopping to stir the onions). We can be wholly present with one activity while another in the background does not have our attention.
This skill centers us, and requires that we recommit again and again to what we will spend our energy on in the face of distractions. It also requires that we reassess as time goes on to determine if we want to continue recommitting to that moment, or to changing where our focus will be.

Most of us struggle fairly significantly with “doing” one thing at a time. This is because many of us are “doing” one thing, but thinking about another. In this way, we’ve become accustomed to leaving the present moment for one in the past, one in the future, or one that may never happen. When we do this we reduce our ability to concentrate by dividing our attention. We also decrease the likelihood we will pick up on important cues from the environment around us; when we are distracted we are not able to be as perceptive.

In simple terms this skill is “doing” one thing at a time, but more complexly it is devoting your attention and energy to only one “thing” at a time. As Marsha Linehan says, this means, “When you are thinking, think. When you are worrying, worry. When you are planning, plan. When you are remembering, remember. Do each thing with all of your attention”. Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and Marsha Linehan, would encourage all of us to spend as much time as possible being wholly present with whatever moment we are engaged in.

Many of us are spending large chunks of our time distracted, and not present in both mind and body in whatever moment we are in. To be wholly and fully present means paying attention to your outer world (i.e. the conversation you are in) and your inner world (your internal reactions to that conversation in your thinking, feeling, and sensing). Although it sounds simple enough, it is actually a lot of input to pay attention to at any given point in time and takes some practice straddling both your inner and outer worlds simultaneously.

One-Mindfully can be a powerful grounding and centering tool because it focuses us simply on the moment we are in. A common treatment for trauma, anxiety, and depression is learning how to be in and stay in the present. Like any new skill, I encourage folks to try this first in “low stress” situations (i.e. ones that are not likely to incite a lot of activation in your inner world) before high stress situations (i.e. ones where you expect to have a lot of thoughts, intense feelings, or intense sensations).

See comments for more on this skill including ideas for how to implement it today.

Comments:

Often, I see this struggle to be “one mindful” in the way many of us manage our relationships with our computers during the workday. Does this sound familiar: “You’re writing an email and you get a pop-up notification that you’ve gotten a calendar invite. Without even thinking you stop writing the email, review / accept the calendar invite, and then try to return to your email. But wait, now you lost where you were and so you re-read your last sentence, get back in the mindset of the the response and boom, an instant message comes in asking you if you saw the most recent email from so-and-so about this-thing or that-thing. So you scroll to the top of your inbox and read the email, respond to the instant message but wait now you can’t find that email you just had opened. Ok, you found it. But wait what were you saying, and ok now there is only 5 minutes left before the next thing on your calendar and somehow you haven’t gotten to that response yet. Now you feel this anxious pressure to get it out, but you are also aware this isn’t the quality response you wanted to send out so now you have to decide if it’s more important to get it out quickly or thoughtfully…etc”. Multiply that experience throughout your day and your day ends with you feeling frazzled, unproductive, behind, like you’ve missed a bunch of things and like you’ve been ping-ponging around all day. And that’s because you have! All those notifications are very stimulating and they are prime ways in which we forget to insert that intentionality into our decision about where we spend our time and attention when we are with our devices. One low-stress way to start trying to introduce this skill into your life is by bringing thoughtfulness to what notifications you need on, and how you respond to those notifications when they are on. As Marsha Linehan might say, “When you are writing an email, write the email.” If you find you are tempted to be distracted by your phone turn it over or put it on silence. If you are expecting to hear from someone important while you write, work to make yourself accessible in a way that will not distract you (i.e. ask them to call you, or silence texts from other people except that one person). Setting up a routine that enables a mindful perspective can take some work, but it should help improve concentration and productivity and leave you feeling better at the end of the day.
Back when therapy was always in an office you were forced to take a one-mindful perspective with your session. You didn’t have a screen, or your phone handy and the temptations to engage with something outside the content of the session were much less accessible. If you are doing remote based therapy try and re-create the in-office experience as much as possible by eliminating the possibility of something outside of the session distracting you away from being fully in the session.
If you are someone who commonly multi-tasks or operates in a “mindless” manner, it will take time time and deliberate practice to bring a more “one-mindful” stance to how you spend your time. For tips on how to bring this concept to your life at a pace that works for you, see my post on how to sustainably make long-term changes.
This concept / skill is kind of like living your life in real time meditation, albeit a meditation where you are responsive to your environment. Like our meditative practice, your mission throughout is to regularly bringing your attention back to your chosen focal point. For an introduction to meditation, and this concept of returning to a chosen focal point, see my introduction to meditation post (which has more direct parallels to today’s post), and my post on general meditation.
Sometimes we find that we can’t control our attention. That’s ok. No one is perfect at this. Sometimes we are coping best by accepting what is not within our control, and often times what is out of our control is content of our inner worlds. (If you struggle with this concept this post on acceptance might help). This can mean the thought, feeling, sensation, or external circumstance arising is too distracting or powerful to redirect yourself from (i.e. you just got news of something upsetting and of course you can’t focus on your previous intention). At that time, it can be helpful to view that as a cue that you need to switch your attention over for a period of time, even if you don’t want to. A powerful way in which you can stop ruminating (when you can’t stop thinking about something) is to set a timer for ten minutes, and just be with the worry. After ten minutes, when the timer goes off, you may find it’s easier to redirect your attention back to a different focal point. After ten minutes of really fully devoting yourself to it (instead of having it simmer in the back of your thoughts for hours at a time where you ping pong between thinking about that and all the other things in your day) you may have found a solution, or exhausted all the different ways you can think or worry about something, but either way it’s more likely to feel less pressing. There are other skills to combat intrusive worries for another day.
Regarding the idea of perfection – it is not realistic (or even the goal) to exclusively live in a “one mindfully” stance. Sometimes we do want or need to split our attention and that’s OK. The key is to selectively and with awareness choose to do so, and to use one mindfully with more important tasks.
A little more on identifying and understanding multi-tasking. There are three ways of multi-tasking: attempting to do one activity while you think about another activity (sitting in your meeting and thinking about that conversation you had last night), attempting to think about two things at the same time (going through the grocery list while you try and plan out that email to your boss), or attempting to do two things at the same time (talking to your friend and scrolling on your phone). A one-mindful perspective would encourage you to limit each as much as possible.
If you find yourself regularly tempted to split your attention or “zone out” start trying to pay attention and get curious about it. Sometimes there is a lot we can learn about what we are trying to distance ourselves from when we pull our full attention away in these ways.
Marsha Linehan’s skills, including one-mindfully, are outlined in full in her skills training manual and associated skills training workbooks.

December 9, 2021March 27, 2023

Rethinking “Lazy”

The concept of “laziness” is an inadequate way to think about the dynamics underlying someone’s difficulty with motivation, participation, energy, and engagement.
This is because a person’s “inherent laziness” becomes our explanation for why they disengage from something we believe they “should” be able to engage with. When we use this term we steer ourselves away from curiosity that would help us dig into whatever may be causing someone’s disengagement.
Calling ourselves or others “lazy” is often a tactic we use to elicit shame or express disapproval when we don’t otherwise understand someone’s disengagement from something we (or they) believe would benefit them.
Sometimes we say it in the hopes of stirring up motivation, or in the hopes of giving ourselves permission to give up and accept (with some level of resentment) the disengagement of ourselves or others.
In all my work with my clients over the years I have yet to find a situation where “laziness” was truly an adequate explanation for the complex and addressable dynamics contributing to “laziness”.
Here are a handful of examples of what may actually be happening for someone when they fall into a pattern we might label as “laziness”. There are more possible examples today’s comments, and many more possibilities out there. See the full content of today’s post for further explanation as to why this concept is damaging and unhelpful.
- Fear can shut down motivation and energy. We can disengage with something even if (on some level) we want to participate in it if it intimidates us, or if it has the potential to embarrass us or leave us feeling like a failure. Sometimes we’re not connected to that fear, and finding the fear can take some digging.
- Hopelessness can shut any and all of us down if it gets too powerful. We don’t believe it will make a difference, or there is a point in our participation so we shut down and disengage.
- We over-use coping mechanisms like distraction or avoidance when we are overwhelmed by a topic or activity we (or others) are “supposed” to engage with (i.e. procrastination). This can often happen if we don’t have strong time management skills or realistic expectations of ourselves and our capacities.
- Sometimes we aren’t interested in the things others (or we ourselves) tell us we “should” be interested in. We can build whole lives around expectations without ever really connecting with our genuine and authentic interests and motivation. This is often the case in “extreme” laziness as someone starts to shut down and pull away from a life they don’t really want to be living.

I consider the concept and term “Lazy” to be unproductive, limiting, and damaging. When we use a term like “Laziness” about ourselves or others we attribute “the problem” to someone’s personality, often leaving them feeling helpless, ashamed, and inadequate. This way of thinking about someone’s disengagement often creates an overwhelming and insurmountable barrier to understanding and addressing the underlying dynamics that create the “lazy” behavior.

When we assign “laziness” to a person or behavior I think it’s a sign we’ve hit an empathic wall with ourselves and others; we’ve given up, gotten frustrated, and so we look for a way to say “it’s out of my hands, it’s who I am (or they are)”. In attributing problems in ourselves or others to concepts like “laziness” we inadvertently miss huge opportunities to understand and address underlying issues because we’ve given up and determined its an issue of willpower.

Often when we use this term it’s a reflection on both our struggles with the situation and our inability to understand why we or others have disengaged from something that logically feels like it makes sense to participate in. It is natural to be frustrated and angry when things don’t make sense to us, but we short-change ourselves, others, and the situation when we think of ourselves and other’s in-terms of laziness. When we assign the lack of engagement to a person’s character or “way of being”, we generally stop getting curious about internal and external factors that may be interfering with someone’s participation.

For most of us “lazy” is a wall. It’s a road to nowhere.

In moments when we are tempted to use the word “lazy”, I would instead encourage us to bring as much curiosity as we can to the situation. If we can accept that someone must have a valid reason for not engaging with a topic, then our mission becomes to search, find, understand, and address that reason. Sometimes we must be relentless in that search, and in our faith that there must be something valid underlying something that otherwise doesn’t make sense.

Comments:

I mention character assassination in the post. Read this post on fair fighting to learn more about what it is and why to avoid it.
This post taps into how our lives can be ruled by “shoulds”, To learn more about how to disempower the “shoulds” see my post on acceptance.
I think of terms like “lazy” in the same way I think of a judgment. I have a whole series on understanding the problems with, identifying and deconstructing judgments.
Continued examples to help you start getting curious about what may be under “laziness” in yourself or a loved one in your life:
1. Sometimes we don’t know how to motivate ourselves. What motivates one person may be different from what motivates another, which means even members of the same family may need to find different tactics to get themselves going on something. If you are stuck try a different motivational tactic.
2. Many of us are living day to day with histories of relational trauma that deeply effect motivation and energy. Many people with histories of relational trauma don’t know it.
3. Secondary gains are a real thing. Sometimes we are inert because action would mean making a sacrifice or losing something that we otherwise value .
4. Sometimes we aren’t listening closely enough to our limits (which are often not where we want them to be) or differentiating between our shoulds and wants.
5. Exhaustion and unrealistically high expectations shut us down and interfere with potential. Sometimes the energy or capacity we feel we “should” have is not the energy we actually have. We label ourselves as “lazy” when we don’t meet expectations we hold for ourselves, but sometimes those expectations are the problem themselves. Learn more about how change happens to help with setting realistic expectations for yourself.

November 24, 2021March 27, 2023

Meditation

For us to be happy in our lives, we need to be able to be alone and at peace with our inner world. There are many roads to this place, including the following path.
First, I recommend you master grounding. This helps us learn that we can recenter ourselves when we’ve gotten to an emotional edge.
When we’re confident in our ability to ground, we become confident that we can bring ourselves back from a place of intensity. This makes our thoughts, feelings, and inner world less scary because we know how to reset.
Next, I recommend foundational (sensory based) meditation for 30 seconds to two minutes a day.
The goal with this type of meditation is to begin watching your inner world without reacting to it, or it controlling your attention or behavior.
When we get skilled at this we can better tolerate our feelings, reduce our impulsivity, and more easily think and process before acting and responding.
The final step, which is outlined in today’s post, is to begin meditation without a sensory anchor. Instead, our anchor is our internal world.
Unlike foundational meditation where we come back to noticing a sensory anchor, in this type of meditation your centering point is yourself. You come back to noticing what is in your body, what feelings you feel, what urges you have, what sensations you can notice, and what thoughts flow in and out.
Just like foundational meditation, the goal is to notice what’s there, notice if you’ve drifted off into a thought chain or if you’ve tried to “clear” your mind, and to reset to a state of curiosity and attentiveness to all that is happening in your inner world.
See further explanation about this next stage of meditation, and the benefits of it, in today’s post.

Once you’ve gotten comfortable with grounding and foundational meditation (and there is no right about of time for that), you can start experimenting with free form meditation. This is when we try and be present in our inner world without an identified “anchor” other than ourselves.

In my previous post on meditation I encouraged you to pick a sensory based focal point (like noticing your fingers touching, or a beverage in your mouth), and then set a timer while actively watching your internal world to “see what comes up”. The goal of that exercise is to be present with your mind and body as it goes through each moment, neither trying to “clear” your mind nor holding on to any given internal experience that comes up.

The process for this next stage is nearly identical. Set a timer (so you don’t give in to urges to stop), but instead of picking a sensory anchor to return to, the anchor is simply your internal world itself. Your mind will drift, you may hear a noise, or have a thought or feeling that preoccupies you. That’s ok. Your job, during this exercise, is to notice that you’ve drifted or started engaging with a distraction, and then to return to what you have intentionally chosen to focus on, which is what you notice in your body, and what’s happening with your thoughts, feelings, sensations, and urges moment to moment.

Meditation gives us the ability to insert intentionality into our choices by helping us learn to observe and collect information before acting. Although we “notice” rather than “act” in meditation, we are practicing tolerating the intensity of how inaction feels. The better we get at tolerating that experience in our inner world, the more skilled we become at not feeling pulled to act (before it makes sense to) in our lives.

With time, meditation enables us to better control our attention. Instead of our attention and focus dictated by what’s “loud” (be it a feeling, thought, person, event etc), we notice “what’s happening” and how it effects us. Then, we can choose when to engage with it based on a host of factors including our emotional availability, the true urgency of the issue, and our commitments, values, priorities, and readiness.

Notes:

Want to start the journey? First, see my post on grounding. In it there are lots of tips for skills you can use when you are outside your window of tolerance to help you return. Once you’ve gotten skilled at grounding (and this can take a very long time, so be patient with yourself) move on to foundational meditation .
When I’m teaching this to my clients I tell them the only reason I want them stopping the meditation is if their body is in danger (like a fire alarm goes off, then yes, listen and react to that!). Otherwise, if you realize all of sudden you need to go to the bathroom, ok. Cool. Keep noticing what that feels like while looking out for what else is happening in your internal world. Maybe your leg starts to fall asleep. I don’t want anyone to hurt themselves, so use your judgment, but this exercise would encourage you to notice what that feels like without reacting to it. Maybe you realize you missed an important call. Notice the feeling of panic, and wait the until the timer goes off to handle it. In your real life, of COURSE we want you responding to cues of distress from your body and your world, but we want you to do so in a thoughtful rather than a reactive way. Meditation helps you become skilled at noticing without quickly reacting, and should help you eliminate those hair trigger responses and insert more intentionality into your day to day decisions.
I often share this story when I’m teaching clients how to meditate, because I think it helps illustrate how this is both a simple and yet simultaneously hard skill to build. I took a class in graduate school that provided concrete training on many of the skills in this account, including meditation. Every class my professor would have us do a sensory based meditation. Inevitably, someone would show up late, slam a door, bang a chair around – etc. I would then stop refocusing myself in the meditation and instead think something like: “ugh, they are ruining it! How am I supposed to focus on what I’m thinking or feeling while they are being so disruptive”. I felt annoyed, frustrated, disrespected, angry, and distracted. It took me weeks to get it – that it’s my job to learn how to refocus myself, rather than their job not to distract me. It’s my job to notice what that stirs up in me, and to try and learn from it by reflecting on it after the meditation, rather than to look to them to live their lives in such a way that they don’t create noise in mine. What I experienced was a “thought and feeling” train (outlined more in the foundational meditation post) and it’s my job to notice when I’ve hopped on that, and to return to what I choose to focus on until the time is right for me to understand how and why that train was a tempting distraction for me to engage with.
When we meditate anything that is not what we intend to focus on is considered a distraction for that moment, even if at a later time it will be a focal point of our attention.
What about mindfulness based programs like headspace? My answer would be, it depends on what you are looking for and how you use them. Programs of that nature can be great for relaxation, and, I would imagine (I don’t know the platform inside and out) that there are non guided meditations accessible within it. A guided meditation can be a GREAT starting point as something to do to help quiet an active mind, even before you try the foundational meditation exercise I suggested in my post from July 19th. That being said, focusing your attention on listening to words, and following the direction of those words is ultimately an outside “distraction” that takes you away from being present with your inner world. When you are busy following directions to notice your breath, to count backwards, etc you are not alone with your inner world; you are following a guide through it. Again, this is a GREAT entry point to being present with your inner world, but I’d encourage you to go beyond a guided meditation to work on being with yourself and going at your own pace though your inner world.
Sometimes I think of this exercise like snorkeling or scuba diving. Above the surface of the water you can’t even imagine (without spending some time looking) at how much is happening underneath. While you are in the exercise it is not your job to “touch” the fish (i.e. engage with the thought), it is simply your job to observe this world, and see what crosses the path of your attention without trying to change or alter it. You are just there as an observer to take it all in. Your thoughts, feelings, urges, impulses, and sensations are each individual components of the world for you to observe with detachment and curiosity.
The goal of this particular exercise is not to relax you, instead it is to help you tolerate all of the intensity of your inner world without trying to control it. I’d encourage you to start at moments when you feel more calm, but over time try it out (even for 30 seconds) at a time when you feel something more intensely.
The beauty of meditation is that we gain control over what we pay attention to. Have an intense thought or feeling come up, but need to focus on that project? Did you have an upsetting conversation, but feel like this isn’t the right time to really think or process through it? Meditation helps us gain control over where we place our attention so that we can spend our time and our energy on our chosen focal points, and return to the intrusions at another time. This is how people learn how to walk on coals (I am NOT suggesting this!!), or manage chronic pain, they have a strong ability to move their attention away from that particular stimulus onto a chosen stimulus. Even though we practice for a short amount of time, that “muscle” builds. The strength and skill in meditation is NOT in controlling your thoughts, or never having them drift away, it’s in noticing what’s happening in your internal world and then being able to redirect your attention to your chosen focal point. Sometimes we have to do this many times over the course of a minute, this is successful meditation. The ability to redirect back to the chosen focal point is the skill.
I want to be clear: sometimes the distractions we “refocus away from” in our lives are important for us to act on at some point, rather than continue to refocus away from. Meditation can teach you to disengage, but we want to think of that as “disengage until the right time” for some topics. You will be avoiding or denying in you life if you constantly refocus away from something that needs to be addressed.
I’ve written a handful of other posts that explain the value of meditation. The first explains the value of meditation in further detail, and the second helps us understand more about how our inner world works and how to “control” it.

July 20, 2021March 27, 2023

Foundations of Meditation

A step-by-step guide to the Foundational Meditation for Mental Health
- 1. Make sure you are comfortable enough to not move for the duration of the exercise
- 2. Pick a “Focal Point” using one of your five sense. I recommend starting with touch and waiting to use sight until you are more advanced.
  - Ideas:
    - Try pressing your finger tips together or
    - Put a beverage in your mouth and don’t swallow it
- 3. Set a timer for 30 seconds.
- 4. Close your eyes and work to notice “what comes up”. (I.e. what thoughts enter your mind, what sensations you feel in your body, and what emotional feelings you notice internally). Once you notice something return to the focal point you’ve selected.
- 5. You stop when the timer stops.
- Do this once a day for a month. After a month you can gradually increase to up to two minutes (or longer), though I have found 30 seconds a day can be enough for someone to see significant gains.
- The only time we’d want you breaking the meditation is if you are in danger (i.e. a fire alarm goes off etc), otherwise, it is your job to notice whatever urges arise without acting on them, including urges to move your body, end the meditation, think through something – etc.
- You will drift away many times; this is the whole point of the exercise. You are working on increasing your ability to notice when you drift away and come back to your chosen focal point
- This is not meant to be relaxing, it is a very active process of observing your mind body. What you are doing with this exercise is strengthening your ability to have an internal experience that you don’t react to
- It’s ok if you get irritated, want to stop, find yourself feeling tempted to move, wonder if you’re doing it “right”. These are all just thoughts, feelings, senses, and urges and it is your job to notice them without acting on them.

Regardless of whether or not you have a meditation practice already, I always encourage my clients to start with this foundational exercise. When we meditate in this way we strengthen our ability to cope by working on being present with our thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. We are noticing them, but not letting them dictate our actions or behavior.

When I introduce this skill to my clients I introduce it to empower someone to strengthen their ability to improve their concentration and to be less controlled by their emotional states. I also use it to help them increase their ability to control their attention, which makes them less susceptible to triggers.

The goal is to work on being present with what comes up, to notice it, and then to let it go and be present for the next “thing” (be it a thought, sensation, or feeling).

Many of my clients get stuck in one of two places, so be on the lookout for these traps:

They start “Chaining”, meaning they have a thought and then they react to that thought with another thought, or maybe a feeling, and so on and so forth so the meditation exercise becomes more like a stream of consciousness. This is normally how our minds work, so it will probably start to happen during the exercise. It’s ok, you’re going to get better at catching that and then redirecting yourself. Instead work towards noticing a thought, and then letting it float away while waiting for the next one.
The other common trap is: “Blocking”. This is when you try and “clear your mind” so that you have quiet or stillness. While that can be a great centering or relaxation exercise, it is not the type of meditative exercise we are trying to work towards. We want thoughts, feelings, and sensations to float into awareness so you can strengthen your ability to notice them and then re-direct your attention.

The skill with meditation is not in preventing your mind from wandering, it is in noticing when it wanders and then bringing it back to your chosen focal point.

You should find, after a month, you are less “reactive” and more able to notice your thoughts and feelings without having the urgency to respond to them.

Notes:

The focal point can be anything that uses one of your five sense. I personally find touch is the most accessible, but here are examples from all five senses. The key with any of these is to use it as an anchor, something you return to in-between the internal thoughts, feelings, and sensations you notice throughout the exercise.
1. Taste: Put a candy in your mouth and notice the taste of it. Resist the temptation to move it around / crunch on it.
2. Sound: Just listen to the sounds around you – this works best if you’re not in a completely quiet space, though if it is “quiet” you may find there were more sounds than you had been aware of when you quietly listen.
3. Sight: Watch trees in the wind, watch snow or rain fall.
4. Smell: Sit over a coffee or tea, spray a perfume or cologne.
With step one, I encourage you to sit in a way in which you are comfortable, BUT as you get more and more advanced you might want to try sitting in a way this is slightly uncomfortable. This will give you an opportunity to work on sitting with your physical discomfort and tolerating the sensation of it.
There will be a second post to come covering how to move away from having a focal point. As you get more and more advanced your focal point can get less specific, but phase one meditation is about working on noticing the drift and re-centering back to the established focal point. Eventually just “you” can be your focal point.
If “nothing” happens (i.e. you try this exercise every day for a week and you just have a blank mind) you can try scanning around your body to see what you notice or prompting yourself with questions about what’s happening in different areas of your body).
If this is highly activating (which it might be if you struggle with anxiety, intense feelings, or you have a history of trauma) start with grounding and try decreasing the time to 15 or 20 seconds. Once you get really good at grounding you are likely to feel safer and more able to tolerate the exercise.
Want to learn more about who may benefit from meditation? The post “Why Meditation” covers more details on how meditation can increase our ability to cope. The post “Controlling our Attention” covers how meditation can increase out ability to accept what we cannot control. Meditation can help us increase our ability to release our emotions, as covered in the post “Emotions are Brief“.
I was trained on this in graduate school, and I remember we would start off every class with a two minute exercise. Inevitably someone would arrive late and shuffle around the room, drop a bag, pull out a chair, etc. I remember feeling and thinking “ugh! They’ve disrupted the peace! It’s interfering with the exercise”. Initially, I was not able to step back and recognize that my irritation at being “interrupted” and my thoughts about that were actually just another thought and feeling to notice. The exercise can’t be interrupted, because the whole purpose of it is to notice what comes up (internally or externally), and then come back to your chosen focal point. That noticing can include noticing your own irritability, like in my case, as well as noticing your own experience of distraction. The better we get at noticing and returning our attention to our chosen focal point in the exercise, the better we get with this skill in our day to day lives.
Over time, this exercise will teach you to be more mindful of your internal world and less reactive to it, which means (eventually) you may not need to do it on an ongoing basis. Instead, may find you are more and more used to being connected with your internal world, and this awareness without reactivity will happen more organically and naturally throughout your day.
You may notice there is a focus on “not reacting” or “acting” in this exercise. That’s because we are working to introduce intention to when you act on internal experiences. The goal in life is, of course, to act and respond as is indicated for any given situation, and meditation of this nature helps introduce a pause so that you can increase your ability to notice your internal experiences before reacting to them. In life you won’t always just sit and notice, but that’s exactly what we do when we meditate – we strengthen our ability to resist the urge to act. There will, in life, be times where acting intuitively / quickly makes sense (think about emergency situations), so we are not eliminating the ability or need (at times) for a quick reaction – but we are working to introduce intentionality so we can be more in control of when we act quickly.
Chelsea Handler’s book, “Life will be the death of me” covers how meditation fundamentally changed her life.
Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “Wherever you go there you are” is an excellent instructional book on meditation.

July 5, 2021March 27, 2023

Long Term Vs Short Term Self-Care

Care of the long-term self is just as important as care of the short-term self
When we care for our long-term self we make an investment in the future or prioritize what feels sustainable to us with regard to our energy, our commitments, our values, and our limits. We trade off what might feel comfortable or bring joy in this moment for something that will help life be more full at a later time.
When we care for our short-term self we do something that helps us feel good, relaxed, or at peace in the moment. Often we have fun, are in the present, and aren’t as focused on “what’s coming up”.
You will be at risk for cycles of depression and burnout if you don’t pay enough attention to caring for the long-term self OR the short-term self.
Taking care of your short-term self is essential to happiness and well-being. We can’t be happy in our lives if we’re not experiencing positive emotions on a regular basis.
If we over-invest in our short-term self we are avoiding addressing our future, which can leave us feeling anxious and uneasy as we know, deep down, we are “kicking the can down the road” and not addressing our long-term needs and well being.
If we over-invest in our long-term self we can be cheap, grumpy, or unhappy in our day to day lives. We can miss out on important experiences and opportunities.
We can stretch ourselves too thin when we over-prioritize either self. With over-prioritizing of the long term self we can live life without enough regard for the present, and we can miss out on positive experiences feeling like we’re always reaching never arriving. With over-prioritizing the short-term self we can over-commit, over-schedule and not set ourselves up sustainably leading to cycles of overwhelm and burnout.
Each of us has a different “balance point” between these parts of ourselves, and that balance point changes at different stages in our lives (meaning this is a consideration to revisit again and again).
Takeaway: when you’re trying to engage in “self-care” remember both your long-term and short-term self. If you’re noticing cycles of burnout think about how much you are considering either self in the decisions you make about how you spend your time, money, and energy.

For many, “self-care” routines can feel like a cycle of burnout, rest and repeat. We hear suggestions when we’re at the end of our rope like “get a massage”, “take a day off”, “try a yoga class”, and yes – all of those are absolutely self-care. I would classify them as “self-care of the short-term self”.

Having a special / positive experiences can make a day better, but ultimately if our version of “self-care” only cares for our short-term self we can neglect the needs of our long-term self. If we don’t care for both aspects of ourselves we will struggle with satisfaction, happiness, and leading a sustainable life.

Caring for the long-term self is about taking control (where you can) to set life up with regard to what feels sustainable, manageable, and not overwhelming to you. It’s also about making some decisions with respect to your future and prioritizing the experience of your future self. Caring for the short-term self is much more about what will be fun or feel good in the moment.

When we have a history of trauma, or when we are in survival mode we are more inclined to not consider the long-term self, as it can take a sense of safety in the world around you to believe that you can invest in yourself and your future; the more safety we feel in our lives the more able we are to consider both our long-term and short-term selves.

Many of us are inclined to lean towards caring for the short-term self or the long term self, and for each of us we need to find the right place of balance. Places to look for clues as to where you fall on this spectrum are how you spend your free time, spare money, and extra energy. How much of each do you allow yourself to “save” or “spend”?

While the popular and common notions of self-care do take care of (and are important) for the short-term self, we need to remember the long-term self. If you are in a cycle of burnout at work or with family or friends, short-term self-care may help you feel better in the moment, but what’s needed is long-term self-care to interrupt a cycle that’s got you stretched too thin and out of balance.

Notes:

This post covers topics similar to those covered in my post on wants versus shoulds.
Marsha Linehan’s Dialectal Behavior Therapy treatment covers the need for regular positive experiences and it is her treatment protocol that prescribes it as essential for a happy life. Per the treatment plan, without regular positive experiences no one, regardless of their privilege or circumstances, can be happy and satisfied with their lives.
Sometimes this concept is best understood if you think about how it applies to money. If you spend all your money on a goal for the future and very little money on experiences that make you happy or comfortable in the moment you are likely to be putting a premium on your long-term self at the expense of your short-term self. Alternately, if you spend all your money on the here and now, (things that bring you temporary joy like vacations, nice food, or items that won’t appreciate in value in the long-term) you are taking care of your short-term self at the expense of your long-term self. There is such a thing as not preparing enough for the future, BUT there is also a thing as preparing too much and missing out on present-day experiences, living too cheaply or in a way that leaves you stressed out and frazzled.
The more privilege we have the more control we have over factors like how much we work, how much vacation we take, how much money we have to save or spend and how much we time we can spend on leisure vs work. This concept can be applied relatively, and regardless of your level of privilege you can work towards caring for yourself by working towards considering what will help you feel good now, what will help you feel good later, and trying to find a balance between the two.
What about vacations? Vacations are an incredibly important tool to reset, have new experiences, relax, learn, spend time as a family, and (temporarily) reduce burnout. However, there has been research that shows that the effects of a vacation wear off very rapidly after a return to work and those effects diminish even faster with a more demanding workload. Vacations are great, but you are more likely to find happiness by paying attention to your day to day experience and finding ways to improve that then relying on vacations to “reset” you.

June 14, 2021March 27, 2023

Acceptance

Sometimes the reality we want or believe “should” exist is not the reality that’s in front of us
When we don’t want or can’t accept something we can fight it by hiding from it, pushing it away, denying it, or actively resisting it
This applies to our external reality (including facts about our family, our culture, our country, our jobs, and our lives)
It also applies to our internal reality, including thoughts / feelings we may not like or want to be there, and thoughts / feelings others tell us we “shouldn’t” have.
When we are stuck in the place of non-acceptance, we are in a no-mans-land of desperation, anxiety, resistance without traction, refusal, and misery where we are trying to control, change, and prevent something that already is.
For many of us, the fixation on the reality we wish were true is a distraction – a way to shield ourselves from the pain, shame, embarrassment, loss, or disappointment that would come if we conceded to what the reality in front of us was telling us about our lives or the situation we were in.
When we accept the reality in front of us we can still work towards changing that reality. When we accept we don’t have to approve, or condone.
With acceptance we acknowledge what IS and from that baseline we can make changes in our lives, relationships, or the world around us – rather than being caught in the in-between of what is true vs what we wish or want to be true.
Sometimes the most important thing for us to accept is that we don’t have the power or authority to make or prevent a change we are not comfortable with. When we accept that reality we can begin to refocus on items we do have control over and pursue what is meaningful to us in other ways.
If you have found yourself “cycling”, unable to stop thinking about something, or in a pattern of repetition in your life consider that you may be resisting accepting the reality of something in front of you.

A lot of the distress in our lives is driven by our struggles to acknowledge and accept a reality we do not like or approve of. A “this can’t be happening” mentality can consume us, and efforts to “make it right” or “not let it happen” can preoccupy us. We can just refuse to put up with it as though digging our heels in and not accepting something changes it from being real or true.

As Bessel Van Der Kolk writes of his training, “The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves’ …be honest with ourselves about every facet of our own experience…people can’t get better without knowing what they know and feeling what they feel”. Our refusal to accept the situation at hand (which includes realities in both our internal and external worlds) creates the suffering Van Der Kolk writes about; we are miserably stuck in-between what we wish to be true and what is. This is when we can get stuck doing the same things over and over – wanting a different result, but not getting one.

We can then be given advice that may not sit right with us, which is to “accept” the situation at hand. For many of us the term accept has associations of approval tied to it, “if I accept it, that means I am saying it’s ok”. So we push aside that advice and continue on in our state of limbo where on the one side we have the reality we wish were true, and on the other side we have the reality that actually is.

If the term “accept” doesn’t sit well with you try concepts like acknowledge, recognize, or observe. When we acknowledge what is happening, we recognize the reality in front of us without condoning or approving of it. We don’t have to like it, but until we can acknowledge it for what it is we can’t start making changes that make us happier, or make our lives or our world better.

For nearly all of us, once we reach that point of acceptance or acknowledgement of what “IS”, a huge burden of distress is lifted. We can be left with loss, pain, and other difficult feelings, but feelings can be resolved, unlike the constant cycling of refusal, desperation, anxiety, and resistance that can stay with us when we are not recognizing and accepting the reality in front of us.

Notes:

Sample statements that can help move you towards radical acceptance / acknowledgement; “this is just what is happening right now”; “I don’t like it, I don’t approve of it, but it is the reality in front of me”; “I want to work to change it, because I’m not ok with it, but I accept this is what is happening and I will do what’s in my power to work towards creating a different reality”.
This post describes radical acceptance as outlined in Marsha Linehan’s‘s skills training manual on pages 176 and 102 Full citation: Linehan, M., M., (2014). DBT Training Manual. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
The quote is from pages 27-28 of “the body keeps the score”. Full citation: Van, . K. B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma.

June 14, 2021March 27, 2023

Why Meditation

We can work towards having control over our inner world by increasing our ability to control what we pay attention to
For many of us a powerful thought, reaction, or feeling can arise and completely take us over
This is often disruptive, exhausting, and time consuming. We can feel like the thought or feeling is in control of us.
We can dramatically increase our ability to take the intensity out of our thoughts and feelings which gives us more control over our inner experience, actions, and reactions
To do this, we want work to control what we pay attention to, rather than trying to control what comes up for us.
With meditation we can strengthen our ability to select where we place our attention and energy, rather than having our thoughts or feelings decide for us
We can also learn to tolerate our thoughts and feelings without having intense reactions to them
This is NOT learning to “block” feelings, experiences, or thoughts by “tuning them out”.
This is also NOT sitting with a blank mind or a relaxation exercise.
There will be more instruction to come on how to do this, but the goal is to increase your ability to have thoughts, feelings, and take in experiences while still remaining in the driver’s seat of your life.

We can’t control what happens to us, and “what happens to us” includes our thoughts and feelings. We can develop strategies for how to manage them, but ultimately the thought or feeling that arises for us is as much out of our control as the actions of the person down the street.

One of the most powerful things we can learn to do to help us manage our mental health is to strengthen our ability to control where we place our attention, and to increase our ability to tolerate our thoughts and feelings. The more skilled we are at this, the better we are able to manage difficult internal thoughts and feelings when they arise, and the more control we can have over our actions and reactions.

Most of us do not have an intentional relationship with our internal world. We feel a strong emotion, or have a strong reaction and that takes over our attention. Our internal world can then distract us from our external world – making it difficult to focus on an activity, project, person, or event.

There will always be overwhelming moments in life. Most of us can’t learn to take all the power and intensity out of those moments, even with meditation. Sometimes, we will still be distracted by intensity in our internal world, or events that disturb us in our lives. However, we can dramatically reduce our susceptibility to the intensity of these experiences by increasing our ability to control where we place our attention.

With meditation we learn to develop a spotlight around whatever we’ve chosen to focus our attention on. Like a spotlight, the stronger our ability to control our attention, the more we can focus on what we’ve chosen to focus on, and the less energy and attention is given to what we’ve chosen not to pay attention to.

The specific skill that I’ve seen enable many of my clients (and others) is a particular kind of meditation where we are working on observing our thoughts, feelings, and sensations without reacting to them. This skill, like a muscle, requires practice. The good news is it can take as little as 30 seconds a day for you to dramatically increase your ability to control your attention.

Future post to cover HOW to do this.

Notes:

1`. Chelsea Handler’s book, life will be the death of me, covers her journey through therapy and how her use of mindfulness (and therapy) changed her life.

2. I want to be clear: meditation is not intended to numb you, or desensitize you from painful experiences in your life or events in your community. We are not sticking our heads in the sand and “ignoring”. When we control our attention the goal is not to “block things out” (that would be avoidance). There will be more posts to come on how to do this!

3. Jon Kabat-Zinn ‘s book “wherever you go there you are” is an excellent introduction into mindfulness and meditation

May 26, 2021March 27, 2023

Controlling our Attention

We can’t control what happens to us. What happens to us includes events, but it also includes our thoughts and our feelings
Many of us experience inner anguish because we have trouble accepting that what we think and feel is not actually within our control.
We feel what we feel, we think what we think and the best way to insulate ourselves from tough times is work to build coping skills that help us live in harmony with our inability to have the inner world we believe (or have been told) we “should” have.
We can use meditation and mindfulness based skills to help us detach from the intensity of our thoughts and feelings. While we can’t control what happens, these skills help us increase our control over what we pay attention to.
We can use emotion regulation skills that help us to “turn down the dial” on emotions when they are intense, but not at their most powerful.
When emotions are their most intense we can use distress tolerance skills to help us get through a situation without responding to them in a way that will create a problem for us further down the road.
This account will help you learn skills in all three of these categories, and work to help you build awareness of when it makes sense to use which kind of skill.
These skills help us manage pain when it arises in a way that won’t create further suffering for us, and will help protect our relationships and get us through with as little suffering as possible.
No one manages their thoughts and feelings ideally 100% of the time. That is not possible. We are all human. The goal is to help you have the skills so that you know what to do, aren’t so lost in those moments, and can get through them with as little suffering as possible.

One of the things we therapists know, and we work to help our clients accept, is that coping is about learning and accepting what we can and can’t control. We can’t completely control what happens to us, our thoughts and our feelings.

Many of us have luck for sometime pushing thoughts and feelings down or away. We also can organize our lives in such a way that we can have some control over what happens in it, though that’s more often possible when we have more resources. Regardless, at best we only have some control, and we don’t have the level of control many of us wish we did.

I want to be clear: pushing feelings or thoughts down or away isn’t bad. It’s a skill. A skill that works some of the time. However, if we only rely on that particular skill for coping with our internal world we are not equipped for very difficult times, or for when a tidal wave of thoughts or feelings comes in. Further, we lose our ability to learn from our feelings if we rely too heavily on pushing them away.

So, we all need to have a broad array of coping skills. Think of them like tools in a tool belt, different skills for different scenarios.

Instead of trying to control what happens to us, our thoughts, or our feeling we can work to increase our ability to control what we pay attention to and to detach from the intensity of what we may be feeling or thinking. This can be done through meditation and mindfulness based work.

Sometimes we need to learn how to lower intense feelings, that’s called emotion regulation. We use emotion regulation skills when we feel emotions on a level where they “need some wrangling” (i.e. they aren’t dissipating on their own), but not when they are at their most powerful.

When our feelings are really intense, and emotion regulation skills don’t work we can learn to ride them out, let them peter off, distract, or soothe ourselves through distress tolerance skills. With these skills we are working on introducing new and different focal points to divert our attention for a period of time. We are not solving or changing, we are getting through and in doing so helping our brains “reset” so we can tackle the issue when our feelings are not as intense.

Notes:

This post outlines three of the fours modules in Dialectical Behavior Therapy’s skill’s training program. For more information Full Citation: Linehan, M. (1993). Skills training manual for treating borderline personality disorder. New York: Guilford Press.
Pushing thoughts and feelings down or away, as mentioned in the post, is a distress tolerance skill. It is a powerful tool to use when our emotions are too overwhelming for us to face, or when the scenario we are in requires we move forward rather than address our experience. For more on why we need distress tolerance skills see the argument for distress tolerance. As with ANY distress tolerance skill we want to return to the topic at hand once we are available to face it (i.e. the scenario allows it, and our internal world feels more balanced).
We use emotion regulation skills when we are still in our window of tolerance, but nearing the edges of it, or perhaps just outside of it. For information on what our window of tolerance is and what it feels like to be outside of it, see “window of tolerance”.
Another reason it is difficult to control our thoughts and feelings is outlined in the post “your brain as an association machine“.
Post covering how we can learn from our emotions is called “emotions as traffic signals” .
Unsure if your emotion is dissipating on its own, or if you need to intervene to help? See Emotions are brief.
One thing that feels important to acknowledge: While these skills can help us manage pain they are not the be all end all and it’s not as though these replace the need for therapy or support from others at times. These skills do not turn us into a one person “cope with anything and everything” machine. These skills help us manage pain when it arises in a way that won’t create further suffering for us, and will help protect our relationships and get us through with as little suffering as possible.