The ridiculously cheery song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” offers advice that may be a little hard to follow sometimes. Sometimes we’re not prepared to let go of fears and anxieties, feeling that we need them–occasionally, we may even be right. But even when we’re ready to stop worrying and be happy, letting go of stress is easier said than done.

To help reduce stress, there are many useful approaches described on this site, including meditation, mindfulness, emotional antidotes, a brief walk in a natural setting, and more. However, there are two especially effective, immediate approaches that have both been shown to greatly reduce stress, although both take some effort.

One is social time: if you’re spending most of your time alone (or perhaps with people it’s hard to be with), spending a lot more time with people you like can help enormously: see “Want to Reduce Stress? Increase Social Time.” E-mailing, time on the phone, and even time working with others in the course of your job can “count” toward your total. People who get in at least six hours of some kind of social time per day report being happy and relatively free of stress. See the article for more details.

The other option is idea repair: noticing and fixing thoughts of yours that encourage you to feel anxiety or frustration over time. By learning to recognize and remake these thoughts, you can make immediate, dramatic changes in your stress level. The thoughts are likely to come back again soon, but then you just repair them again, and over time they stop coming back as much until they go away completely. I recently posted an article covering the most useful idea repair articles on this site, which may be a good place to start if you’d like to take this approach.

Of course, you could work on both social time and idea repair, but people tend to be much more successful when they focus on just one thing at a time. Trying to add too much to your obligations at once can be a little overwhelming, and the last thing most of us need is something else to stress about.

This is the fifth in a series of articles that strive to answer the question “How can I get myself to work harder toward a goal?” Today’s article tackles the problem of being worried about what will happen to you if you try.

In part III of this series, I talked about emotional conflicts–about both wanting to do something and not wanting to do it. Being worried about trying is a special kind of emotional conflict, and a common one. I realized the other day that I’ve been running into this problem myself. Lately I’ve been sending out magazine article queries (that is, proposing to write articles for various magazines), and in some cases getting assignments (success!). However, I haven’t been sending out nearly as many queries as I’ve been wanting to, and when yesterday I sat down to send out another, I also did some thinking about why my progress has been so slow so far. As silly as it is, it became clear that I’m just worried about rejection.

I say “silly” because for writers, rejection isn’t so much something to worry about as a near-unavoidable fact of life. For any given query, the editor who reads it could just not like the idea, could have bought something just like it, could decide that they don’t want to work with a writer new to them just now, or could reject the story for any number of other rational or irrational reasons. Whatever reaction the editor has, it’s out of my control: all I can do is send out the best queries I can manage.

But I haven’t done as much querying on articles as I have of submitting short stories and even work on book proposals and submissions. It’s more familiar and comfortable for me to pitch a novel, propose a non-fiction book, or send a short story to a good market than it is to query about a magazine article, just because I’ve done those other things more. And without even noticing it, I was letting my fear of not doing well slow me down.

Like most fears, the best way to get past this one is to both acknowledge it and ignore it. Yes, I’m likely to receive some rejections (or non-responses, which is how some magazines do things instead of sending rejection letters). But I’m also likely to continue to sell some articles, and so rejection ultimately doesn’t mean anything: what matters are attempts and successes. Any query I don’t send is one that has failed out of the gate. If I send it and it gets rejected, at least I’ll have some information with the failure–and if it gets accepted, I have both some information and an article sale.

It’s the same for anything. Yes, failure is always possible, and trouble can always arise: finally getting around to sorting out an old pile of mail might reveal an unexpected overdue bill (or unexpected uncashed check! Though I admit those are rarer). Asking someone out may lead to failure or even embarrassment. But since not attempting at all is a guaranteed failure, trying–while sometimes painful or scary–is almost always an improvement.

Photo by CRASH:candy

The previous installments in this series are:

• Plausibility (do you really believe you can achieve the goal?)
• What Matters and Keeping Score (meaningfulness and the role of being able to see your progress)
• Willingness (resolving emotional conflicts about your goal)
• Daily Involvement (working toward your goal even in small ways every day)

Pema Chödrön

Buddhism is a rich source of insights about emotions and emotional states. While I don’t know that we can fairly call the centuries-old Buddhist tradition of investigation into the human mind a strictly scientific approach, it really is a rigorous tradition that builds its conclusions on direct experience. So I offer today’s post, based in Buddhist teachings, as food for thought.

American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, in her book When Things Fall Apart, offers an unusual route to living a happy life: embracing hopelessness. My initial reaction to this idea was extreme doubt, but hearing her point of view, I began to see the value of the idea.

To get a sense of what she means, let me give the example of my fear that everything will go to hell in a handbasket. Being interested in how things fit together–societies, supply networks, and so on–I often think about how easily something I’m used to having could be cut off. For instance, this past winter during a storm, we lost power at my house. This should not have been a big problem, especially since we have gas heat. Except that I found out that the gas heat system is dependent on electricity to run, so we had no heat or power. And the water is dependent on an electric pump, so we had no heat, power, or water. And our phone is through a VOIP service, so since we had no Internet due to having no power, we also had no phone. And of course with the refrigerator not working, I was concerned about most of our food going bad.

The power came back on after not too many hours, and my son and I had other places we could go if the outage went too long–and since it was winter, at worst I could put our perishable food outside. Still, it’s a little sobering to realize that one break in a cable can mean losing Internet, power, phone, heat, water, light, food, and more. And for years I’ve been a little bit concerned. What would happen if there were a really bad economic situation, or a plague, or a war, or something else that interrupted some of the ways that food, power, water, and other necessities get to us? How would I keep myself and the people who are important to me safe, sheltered, and fed?

Hopelessness doesn’t solve this concern, but interestingly, practicing it made things better. You can’t make anything completely safe, hopelessness says. Stop hoping that you can prevent every bad thing from happening if you just scramble hard enough. Bad things will eventually happen. Eventually, too, we’ll all die.

If you’re not feeling happier yet, I don’t blame you–but when we think about it, giving up the idea that everything will ever be perfect or absolutely safe allows us to let go of a lot of unneeded anxiety. “Giving up hope is encouragement to stick with yourself,” says  Chödrön, “to make friends with yourself, to not run away from yourself, to return to the bare bones, no matter what’s going on … if we totally experience hopelessness, giving up all hope of alternatives to the present moment, we can have a joyful relationship with our lives, an honest, direct relationship, one that no longer ignores the reality of impermanence and death.”

Stress and anxiety are a result of struggling with fears and things we want to avoid. If we don’t struggle, if we accept that bad things will sometimes happen, then the stress and anxiety lessen or disappear, because all we have to deal with is the moment right in front of us, and the moment in front of us usually isn’t so bad. Think of your situation right now, for instance. You probably have things you need to do, things you’re worried about, things you can think of that might cause trouble. But if you focus on how things are with you, right in at this moment, you may find it surprisingly easy to feel that everything’s fine. You are probably not in any great amount of pain. You’re alive. You have the ability to think about things that make you happy. Things could be worse.

There’s a limit to all this, though, at least if you ask me. I see value–real, lasting value–in moving toward our goals, in making progress, in striving for things. Hopelessness is absolutely not about striving: it’s about letting go. There is even value in negative emotions: see my article The Benefits of Feeling Bad. But striving for things is living in the future, and by my reckoning, there are times to live in the future, times to live in the past, and times to live in the present. When we need to come back to center, to marshall ourselves, to let go of things long enough to get our bearings again, then hopelessness and living just in the present moment can be just what we need.

I’m reading a book called Start Where You Are by Pema Chödrön, an American Buddhist nun, about meditation, coming to terms with suffering (our own and others’), and connecting to the world in a compassionate way. Much of the book is about meditative and partly spiritual practices that I won’t go into here, but there’s one particular section where she says something very striking that applies equally well to any process of self-improvement:

And later, she continues:

She goes on to describe how to harness these emotions in meditation, but the point I’d like to make is that they’re essential to any process of improving your life through changing the way you think. There are a few reasons for this. First, feelings like this that go unacknowledged tend to continue to torment us, because if we don’t take them in and really pay attention to how we’re experiencing them, we only have our habitual ways of responding to them, which won’t change anything (by definition, because habits are what we automatically do already). Second, if I’m going to improve my life, why should I wait for a time when I feel better? If I’m feeling bad now, then now is when improvement would be the most welcome, and there’s nothing preventing me from improving more when I feel better some other time too. And third, as Chödrön points out, strong negative emotions have a lot of juice. Someone who doesn’t feel excited (in a good or a bad way) about anything much at the moment doesn’t have a strong emotional incentive to change their lives. Someone who’s feeling something strong, whether it’s delight or love or anger or despair, has an immediate emotional reason to change things for the better.

Chödrön has specific recommendations for using negative emotions in meditation practice, and for anyone interested in Buddhist meditation, I strongly suggest the book for that purpose. For our intentions here, though, there are also specific ways we can harness negative emotions. In tomorrow’s post, I’ll talk about how to use pain and trouble to repair broken ideas.

Photo by Pensiero

The most anxious time of my life to date was soon after separating from my son’s mom. The marriage had turned out to be very much a mismatch, so I wasn’t unhappy that it was ending–but I was worried about my relationship with my then-2-year-old son. If I wasn’t able to work something out about custody arrangements with his mother or through a court, I might be relegated to the every-other-weekend schedule of parenting, and while that might be a good arrangement for many dads, I emphatically wanted to be more involved.

It all came out well in the end: after a lot of work and discussion, we settled on a workable arrangement for custody, and I never did get bumped to “every other weekend” status. So all that anxiety and unhappiness while the situation was up in the air: what was the use of it? To put it another way, do negative emotions have any value, or are they always trouble?

My friend Oz Drummond pointed me to a recent New York Times Magazine article called “Depression’s Upside“, which examines some of the potentially positive effects of some kinds of depression. The particular advantage the article describes is a neurological process in which a painful event (like a divorce or death of a friend) causes the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) to create intense mental focus on a problem, offering an unusually powerful ability to examine and possibly learn from it. This doesn’t necessarily seem to be the case with all depression, and even when it is the case, the person isn’t necessarily better off going through the depression than not. But we can pull a useful lesson out of this research, which is that negative emotions can be extremely useful in focusing attention. Some examples:

Anger: Focuses attention on a potential threat so that we can act against it if we need to.
Fear: Keeps attention on a dangerous situation so that we won’t drop our guard.
Guilt and shame: Brings our attention to actions we regret, with the possible result that we will avoid those actions in future.

… and so on.

In other words, many negative emotions have the specific purpose of making us mindful of something. There are two useful things that come out of this realization: first, when a negative emotion occurs, there may be a lot to gain out of figuring out what it’s trying to tell us. Second, negative emotions can often be addressed simply by paying proper attention to what they’re trying to tell us.

In the Times Magazine article, University of Virginia psychiatrist Andy Thomson talks about this process:

“What you’re trying to do is speed along the rumination process,” Thomson says. “Once you show people the dilemma they need to solve, they almost always start feeling better.” He cites as evidence a recent study that found “expressive writing” — asking depressed subjects to write essays about their feelings–led to significantly shorter depressive episodes. The reason, Thomson suggests is that writing is a form of thinking, which enhances our natural problem-solving abilities.

Image by MissCartier

A good imagination may not be strictly necessary for procrastination, but it can help.

In his book Getting Things Done, David Allen talks about the nature of procrastination: picturing something in the future and imagining how hard it will be or what can go wrong. He goes on to point out that the more easily a person can imagine problems, the more incentive they have to procrastinate “… because their sensitivity gives them the capability of producing in their minds lurid nightmare scenarios about what might be involved in doing the project and all the negative consequences that might occur if it weren’t done perfectly.”

How do people successfully combat procrastination? They take control and move things forward–that is, they figure out what the next physical action is.

Allen is big on the next physical action, and close examination of the idea helps explain why: figuring out the next action changes the focus from broad dangers to easy, short-term wins. For example, if you’re daunted at the prospect of doing your taxes, you may find yourself distracted by thoughts of a big balance due, mistakes, or audits. Figuring out your next task (“Sort through receipts in receipt box” or “Call tax preparer to make an appointment” or “Download an update to the tax softare”), by contrast, puts things on a much more comfortable level. Almost anyone can sort receipts, make a telephone call, or click a button on a Web site, and doing so moves the tax process forward. Reducing large tasks to a series of next actions–only one of which needs to be figured out at any given time–can create enthusiasm or energy around getting things done instead of wrapping the task in anxiety.

Photo by tracer.ca

The other day I was driving through the small city of Montpelier, Vermont when a guy in a parked car didn’t notice me coming up and tried to pull out just as I getting to where he was. I stomped on the brake and hit the horn, which got him to stomp on his break: accident averted. He immediately then waved me by, as though he had been waiting for me to drive around him and I was holding him up.

I thought “What? Don’t wave me by! I’m still making sure you don’t get us in a car wreck: I don’t need traffic direction from you!”

To my credit, I didn’t proceed the next logical step to “What a jerk!” Instead I immediately thought, “Come to think of it, he must be waving me by to cover his embarrassment at his driving goof.” In his place, I probably would have tried to communicate “Sorry!” in some way, but it’s not as though I’ve never make a dumb mistake while driving. He and I really weren’t that different; I just didn’t take to the way he dealt with embarrassment.

Why Not Just Call Them Jerks?
We know that people make mistakes sometimes, and at other times people (not you or me personally, obviously) act badly out of negligence or because they’re in bad moods. In such situations, why not call a jerk a jerk? There seem to be two good reasons not to.

First, if we really want to understand people–and therefore get a better idea of how to deal with them, what they might do next, and what’s really going on around us–it doesn’t help to dismiss their actions as just being due to some inborn quality. After all, what baby is born a jerk? Colicky, sure, but a jerk? And we ourselves always do things for a reason–habit, intention, encouragement, desire … so it seems reasonable to assume other people are coming from the same place. When understanding people in general, we’re likely to get much better results by labeling their behavior than by labeling the person. This is the difference between “He’s acting like a jerk” or “He made a bad decision” and “He is a jerk.”

Second, calling someone a jerk (or worse) is a broken idea (a.k.a., cognitive distortion), and broken ideas generally lead to negative emotions we don’t need and to bad choices.

Reasons Someone Might Be Acting Like a Jerk
Here are some of the main reasons someone might be acting like a jerk:

• Stuck in a schema: Most of us developed at least some patterns of behavior as children that don’t help us as adults: these are called schemas, and they amount to a habit of having a particular kind of broken idea. For example, someone might feel they can’t trust others, or that they’re entitled to special treatment.
• Fear: It’s easy to make bad choices when we’re afraid. Fear can be expressed as cowardice, avoidance, anger, and other kinds of negative emotions. There’s a certain school of thought that proposes that all negative emotions can be traced back to fear.
• Shoulds: If a person gets it in their head that someone else should act a particular way, this is a recipe for trouble, since we don’t really control each other or even necessarily understand all of one another’s needs and conditions.
• Bad habits: Developing a habit works the same way whether the habit is useful or a problem: a person does something consistently a particular way for a period of time until it becomes ingrained. So for instance, becoming friends with a master procrastinator in college and getting in the habit of blowing off studying with this person can create a procrastination habit even in someone not inclined to procrastination.
• Tunnel vision: There’s a fine line between prioritizing what matters most and using one priority to block out all other priorities. Even the most important priorities, like protecting a child, can create problems if everything else is disregarded.
• Bad good intentions: Sometimes people act like jerks out of kindness, honestly believing that what’s needed is a little more discipline, or the unvarnished truth, or good kick in the pants. Sometimes–though definitely not always–they’re even right.
• Mislabeled jerkistry: Sometimes the jerk-like actions are all in our heads. For instance, if when that near-accident occurred the other day I had waited in the middle of the road an extra long time to maximize the other driver’s embarrassment, and if he had waved me on because of that, it would be me being the jerk, even though I might semi-reasonably have been casting him in that role because of his causing the near-accident. Sometimes we make people into something they’re not at all.

The joys of de-jerkifying
The benefit of thinking about the above list is that it immediately benefits mood to re-interpret a jerk-related incident as an understandable human shortcoming. Anger is a trap, and not always one that’s easy to get out of. If someone almost causes an accident, it doesn’t benefit me to be in a lousy mood about it all the way home, and it benefits me even less to get out of the car and start shouting at the poor guy. The ideal thing is to be able to immediate transmute that negative experience into a tiny bit of deeper understanding about other people. Applied vigorously enough, this approach can translate to some extremely gracious behavior, which benefits everyone involved. The would-be jerk might even go away thinking “Wow, what a nice person.”

Which means that the would-be jerk is labeling you, arbitrarily lumping you in with “nice people,” as though you didn’t have other qualities. Man, what a jerk.

Photo by (nz)dave

Note: This post is mainly about situations where someone else’s behavior is contributing to our own bad moods or poor choices. It’s not meant to address situations where someone is being abused and taken advantage of: in those cases, safety and well-being are much more important than finding a more generous perspective.

This is the second in a series of articles that draw on the field of schema therapy, an approach to addressing negative thinking patterns that was devised by Dr. Jeffrey Young. There’s more information about schemas and schema therapy on a new page on The Willpower Engine here.

The Mistrust Schema
People with the Mistrust Schema expect bad treatment from others. They tend to think or say that they always get the worst of things, that other people want to do them harm, or that it’s not safe to trust others. Having a Mistrust Schema means feeling deep down, on a gut level, regardless of logic, that other people cannot be trusted, that the only safety is in keeping others at a distance.

Mistrust Schemas can be complicated or maintained in part by a person who avoids close connections with others out of fear of being hurt. This kind of avoidance encourages others to shun or disregard the person with the Mistrust Schema and makes it especially difficult to have any relationship that could prove the mistrust unfounded.

A person with a Mistrust Schema may also tend to jump to conclusions about others’ intentions and motivations, leading to unfounded accusations or preemptive counter-strikes–both of which, needless to say, tend to make others less well-disposed toward the person struggling with mistrust.

The Mistrust Schema generally is built early in life in response to abuse, whether emotional, physical, or sexual, by a person in authority or by anyone who is deeply trusted. A child who is mistreated will often naturally adopt a strategy of assuming the worst of other people in order not to be put in a vulnerable position again if it can be helped. While this behavior may help with the original untrustworthy person, it gets carried over to everyone else as life goes on, creating an emotional barrier that encourages isolation and fear.

Overcoming a Mistrust Schema
Relieving and eventually overcoming a Mistrust Schema requires an act of faith: consciously deciding to trust a person from time to time. A Mistrust Schema expresses itself in part as the broken idea known as fortune telling, in which a person makes assumptions about how the future will be (in this case, assuming that others will treat them badly), or in the related broken idea called mind reading, in which a person assumes things about how someone else is thinking (in this case, assuming that they are planning something unkind). For a person to come to grips with this schema means first noticing how it is affecting their life, behavior, and especially thinking: perceiving that this basic assumption that others will be hurtful is causing thoughts to run a certain way, then consciously rerouting those thoughts.

For example, a person with a mistrust schema may see a family member’s number coming up on caller ID before answering the phone and assume that the family member is calling to say unkind things. If the phone is answered with a hostile tone and the person with the mistrust schema is unkind or suspicious in the conversation, this encourages exactly the kind of behavior the person is predicting.

To cause the phone call to go another way, it’s necessary to stop and change the thought “That’s my sister. She’s calling to harangue me again.” to something like “That’s my sister. She may be calling to say something unkind, something nice, or just to pass on news. If I act kindly toward her over the phone, though, she may possibly talk kindly back.”

Small instances in which a person can demonstrate that mistrust is ill-founded can add up to greater confidence over time that can be used in situations that require more trust.

I’ll also mention that a good cognitive therapist can often be very helpful when a person is facing a major or ongoing problem like an especially bad mistrust schema. Even without the help of a therapist, though, it’s possible to take a stronger role in shaping our own mental landscapes when we’re aware of and deal directly with our own broken thoughts.

Photo by  j / f / photos

This is the first in a series of articles that draw on the field of schema therapy, a fairly new approach to addressing patterns of negative thinking that was devised by Dr. Jeffrey Young. There’s more information about schemas and schema therapy on a new page on The Willpower Engine here.

The Abandonment Schema
A person with the Abandonment Schema feels that people can’t be relied on to be around when you need them or to help. Such a person may feel on a gut level that important people in their lives, like significant others, are going to leave, drop them for someone better, or die, or that others in their lives aren’t dependable and won’t be there when they’re needed the most.

While this is not always the case, often an abandonment schema starts in childhood, when an important figure in a child’s life–usually a parent–leaves, whether literally or figuratively. For example, a parent might have run off, gotten divorced and moved away, left the child or child(ren) with a relative, sent the child(ren) away at a young age, or be physically present but undependable or unavailable, as with an alcoholic, workaholic, or exceptionally unemotional or uncommunicative parent.

A person with an abandonment schema might react by avoiding close relationships, being clingy, or repeatedly accusing people close to them of being–or even just intending to be–unavailable, unreliable, or unwilling to help. Other people with this schema may find ways to drive normally reliable people off, thereby forcing them to fulfill the schema’s predictions.

Overcoming an abandonment schema
Tackling an abandonment schema means coming to terms with two conflicting facts: that unless a person’s behavior encourages it, loved ones don’t generally abandon people who are important to them; and that despite this fact, sometimes people will not be there when we want or need them, but that this is not necessarily the end of the world. This addresses the two basic broken ideas about the abandonment schema: that important people will leave (fortune telling) and that when that happens, it will be awful (magnification, specifically the type called “catastrophizing”).

Greater awareness of our own thoughts (mindfulness or metacognition) tends to create opportunities to challenge the kinds of negative thinking that schemas inspire. Challenging those negative thoughts removes barriers to motivation and supports greater serenity and drive.

Photo by Skylinephoto

One of the real benefits idea repair has brought me since I started learning about it years ago (under the title of “Rational Emotive-Based Therapy”) is an awareness that my bad moods, when they come, generally can be traced to something. It’s true, sometimes being overtired or not having had a chance to eat (or especially, both) can jostle me over into my least flattering behaviors, but much more often, if I feel bad emotionally, it can be traced to some thought I’m having. For me, it’s usually worrying about something. For instance, I might find myself getting more anxious than really makes any sense over a minor work deadline.

The thing is, when I’m working myself up about something, often I’m signaling myself that there’s a larger, underlying problem. This points to the one limitation I know of about idea repair: idea repair helps a person feel better right away, but sometimes it helps to trace a broken idea to its source before fixing it, because our emotional reactions give us important clues to what will make us happy (or drive us out of our tree with worry or annoyance).

So when I find myself seriously overreacting to a situation, I’ll often try to find out what’s really bothering me first, and once I know that to use idea repair to bring my mood back into balance. Here are some ways to cover that first step: finding out what’s causing the negative emotions, deep down.

Interview
Major issues that bother a person usually don’t lurk too far beneath the surface. One of the quickest and most direct ways to get to those issues is to have someone ask you some very straightforward questions, or even (if you don’t mind talking to yourself a little), asking them yourself.

The kinds of questions to ask are very basic, like “So, what’s bothering you today?” or “What are you most concerned about at the moment?” or “If you could have one thing happen today to make you happier, what would it be?”

Continued questions just follow up on the answers. For instance, if a person being interviewed (or self-interviewing) comes up with the statement “The thing that worries me the most is that I don’t think I’m going to have enough money to send my daughter off to college next year,” then the follow-up question might be something like “What would happen then?” or “Why don’t you think you’ll have enough money?”

Another handy kind of question for these situations is “What else?” This is useful when the real problem still seems to be lurking out of sight. “OK, you’re worried about that deadline at work. What else is bugging you these days?”

An interesting side note for writers: this same strategy works well for character and story development. There’s more detail in my free eBook, The Writing Engine: A Practical Guide to Writing Motivation.

Journaling
It’s true, I recommend journaling for a lot of things: for detecting broken ideas, getting immediate motivation, feedback loops, tackling daunting tasks, and so on. Of course, the reason I recommend it so often is that it’s a very practical technique: writing things down draws thoughts out of our heads that we might not otherwise have pursued, and it helps give these thoughts structure and direction. It also provides a record, should we want to go back in future and remind ourselves of past states of mind.

In effect, journaling works much like interviewing, and can be done question-and-answer style if that format helps. Alternatively, a free flow of thought spurred on by focusing on the negative emotions can get to the same place by a different route.

Talk therapy
If you find that lurking anxieties or frustrations are sabotaging your mood on a regular basis, you may want to consider whether a therapist could help out. Unfortunately, therapy often seems to be thought of as being only for people with serious mental illnesses rather than also for people who are doing fine with their lives but who want to sort out a particular issue or concern or get more clarity. A good therapist can help either type of person.

Cognitive therapy particularly has a high success rate in studies done on it, for a wide variety of conditions and needs. One way to find a certified cognitive therapist is through this link on the Academy of Cognitive Therapy Web site.

Photo by manic*.