by therapyinsdcom | Dec 29, 2023 | Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
We all want to accomplish our New Year’s resolutions, but often we miss the mark. It’s exciting to embark on a adventure, but when the shine wears off we often drop the ball. Why don’t you make 2024 different?
The following are 7 tips to help you stick with your resolutions and succeed!
Tip #1: Stick to One Goal
As a cognitive behavioral therapist I almost always assign my clients homework. At the beginning of our work together we design the exercises to be very small. Once someone gains traction moving forward is much less effort and almost organic, so keep this in mind.
When deciding on a New Years’ resolution, stick to the one thing and keep it achievable.
- Use the feeling of overwhelm as a helpful guide.
- When you feel overwhelmed, you get discouraged.
- When you get discouraged, you are more likely to quit at the first sign of difficulty.
Try to find a goal that is small, and cut it by half. You will most likely build momentum as you move forward.
Tip #2: Keep Resolutions Measurable
The best way to keep your resolution measurable is to start small. Begin by taking baby 
steps once a day. If your resolution is to hydrate, drink one more glass of water a day. If you want to stop drinking soda, start by drinking one less a day. Over time, these little changes add up to help you reach your goal. In addition, try to be mindful of your goal throughout the day. When you remember, take a micro-step toward achievement.
Tip #3: Anticipate Barriers
Before you even try to enact your resolution, make a list of the barriers you anticipate in the process. Ask yourself what self-defeating roadblocks you have encountered in past efforts. Then, ask yourself what you see as impeding your future efforts.
- These could sound like thoughts such as, “I don’t feel like it” or “I don’t have time”.
- You may also notice yourself engaging in sabotaging self-talk such as, “I deserve a break” or “I’m not motivated”.
- Now, write down your personal barriers.
Afterward, record what you are going to do the next time this barrier rears its head. In your quest for a change, you are bound to hit upon this resistance. At its root, resistance is a reaction founded in fear. Taking little steps are the best way to get to where you are going.
Here are some ways to cope with the fear of change
Tip #4: Make an Advantages Card for Maintaining Your Resolution
Why do you want this? What is the benefit? There are going to be some hard times throughout your journey of change, times when you need to remind yourself of the why. Therefore, an important step in keeping your New Years’ resolution is making an advantages card.
An advantages card can be made of anything you want. Some people like to use a notecard, while others write on mirrors or dry erase boards. The content is simple. Just make a list of all the reasons why you want to accomplish your goal. Maybe you want to lose weight to become healthier, or maybe you have a specific clothing size you want to hit.
Read your list twice a day, really reflecting on why you want to accomplish your goals. In times of extremely self-defeating thoughts, it is recommended by cognitive behavioral therapists that you read your advantages card as needed.
Tip #5: Accept You Will Have Bumps
It is important not only to realize but also to accept you will slip up along the way. There are instances when you will be barraged with berating thoughts and crumble under the pressure. However, do not use a mess up to engage in all or nothing thinking! When you encounter a bump in the road, do not give up! For example: when you smoke that cigarette and you break the resolution once, do not throw in the towel and buy a whole pack. We will all lapse, but we don’t have to relapse. In order to make a habit your small behaviors will take a minimum of 3 weeks. Those small behaviors will lead to reaching your resolution goal by the end of the year. Be patient and practice self-compassion, especially when you inevitably mess up!
Tip #6: Ask Someone to Hold You Accountable
This tip sounds as though it would be easy. However, it can be the most difficult, especially if you are allergic to criticism. That is why it is important to find someone you trust and respect to hold you accountable to reaching your resolution. Although you may want to fight them, you will be more likely to listen when you know they are giving advice with good intentions. A good CBT therapist holds their clients accountable by assigning homework and expecting follow-through, so don’t be afraid to seek out professional guidance if you are having difficulty finding external support.
Tip #7: Make a Plan
When you make your plan, focus on the small steps and not the goal. Instead of writing down “I will lose 20 lbs this year”, break that larger resolution down into more manageable steps. This could look like, ‘I will drink more water’ and ‘do 10 jumping jacks a day’.
After you accomplish small successes, find a way to celebrate! Don’t skip this step, because it is extremely important. When you reward yourself, your brain will remember the dopamine rush and be more willing to do your bidding. Keep in mind the reward does not have to be big- many of my clients will say out loud ‘gold star!’ when they do something good. That’s the cognitive behavioral way of imprinting the good stuff into our brains in a fun and positive way.
Check out this blog from TED to give you some motivation!
Part I: How to Keep the ‘Happy’ in Your Holidays
Part 2: 4 CBT Based Tips for Overcoming Perfectionism
Part 3: 10 Ways to Ward off Loneliness this Season
by therapyinsdcom | Dec 19, 2023 | Uncategorized
This year, the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy cited loneliness as not only a crisis in America, but also an epidemic. Feeling alone is not just an unpleasant emotion you need to learn to live with, as it effects out physical health as well. Research reflects that a sense of loneliness can lead to inflammation, heart disease, and more. Unsurprisingly, this sense of loneliness during the holiday season can be especially poignant.
Feeling isolated from time to time is natural, but it is important to understand why and nip it in the bud before it becomes something deeper. This article will give you the rundown of why you feel lonely, how you feel lonely, and what to do if you feel lonely.
So Many Ways to Be Lonely
In order to keep away the lonesome blues during the holiday season, it is important to understand why you are feeling this way. According to Psychology Today, there are 7 distinct types of loneliness. Here is a run-down.
#1. A New Situation – You are a new person in a new place. If you just switched jobs, moved to the city, or are the new person at school what you are feeling is new-situation loneliness.
#2. I am Different – If you feel as though you are different from the people around you, you may be experiencing this type of loneliness. Maybe everyone around you grew up together except you. It could be you feel deeply passionate about a social issue that no one else around you cares about.
#3. No Romantic Partner – Sometimes, simply not having a partner during the holidays can drag you down.
#4. No Pets– Maybe you deeply want a fish, cat, or dog, but right now is just not the right time. Maybe seeing pictures of cats dressed up like Santa depresses you. This is no-animal loneliness in action.
#5 No Available Friends – This tends to happen when your friends and family make life changes. No one has time for you, and you feel lonely.
#6 Bad Friends – If you do not trust your friends, you may feel lonely. You can have a lot of fun with a lot of bad friends over the years. However, at the end of the day, you ultimately felt unfulfilled.
#7. No Warm Body – Maybe you are completely satisfied with your social life and your work-life balance. However, you miss the feeling of another person sharing your home. Living alone can be difficult sometimes, especially around the holidays.
10 Tricks to Keep Loneliness at Bay
1. Find Like-minded People to Connect With – Try joining a Meetup.com group, a book club, or a workout class. Eventually, you will have a community.
2. Stay Healthy – This includes getting enough sleep, eating healthy foods, and exercising. All of these things have been found to improve mood.
3. Work on Existing Bonds – We now know intimate bonds are necessary to happiness. Work on fortifying your current friendships, whether long-distance or close-by.
4. Learn from Your Experiences – Ask yourself what you can learn from your loneliness, and how you can put your new appreciation for connections into practice.
5. Mindfulness – Identify your thoughts when you feel lonely. Many times you will have self-defeating thoughts about your state of mind. Realize these are just thoughts and do not attach any significance to them.
6. Show Self-Compassion – Develop and nurture compassion, love, and acceptance of yourself. You can treat yourself to an act of kindness, or meditate on directing love toward yourself. In addition, you can practice self-soothing techniques.
7. Get Comfortable with Yourself – It sounds cliché, but in order to beat loneliness, it is important to try and become comfortable alone. Sometimes people get down about doing fun activities alone. However, if you learn to work through the self-conscious thoughts you can actually start enjoying time with yourself!
8. Get that Pet –Sometimes, you just have to go for what you want in the pursuit of happiness! Animals can increase our ‘feel good’ hormones, so heading to the dog park or even a petting zoo can help.
9. Plan Ahead – If you know you get lonely during the holiday season, make a plan ahead of time. List some things that make you happy or that you want to try. Then, bust out this list when you are feeling alone.
10. Make Giving a Habit – Giving doesn’t necessarily mean money. This time of year especially, there are many opportunities to volunteer in the community.
Conclusion
When dealing with loneliness during the holiday season, it is important to remember you are not alone. So if you are feeling blue, cut yourself some slack and practice some the above tips.
by therapyinsdcom | Nov 30, 2023 | Anxiety, Anxiety and Stress, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Depression
The extra demands combined with the typical stress around the holidays can cause many to fall into the trap rigid thinking and the belief that life should be idyllic. If you struggle with anxiety, this season can be an especially difficult time. Perfectionism is something cognitive behavioral therapists see often. Here are some good CBT-based tips on how to help yourself during the rest of 2023 and into the New Year.
Do Not Strive For Flawless
Perfectionism is a self-imposed expectations and the subsequent stringent judgments 
on you, others, or a situation. You are with yourself every day and you see every mistake you make, so we tend to have quite a long checklist of our real and perceived mishaps. When you focus on self-defeating thoughts, you become hypercritical and begin to put more weight on the negative aspects of oneself. Inevitably, this leads to depression, low-self esteem, and a sense of frustration. Of course, this isn’t beneficial to you and the people who love you. When you find yourself revisiting that list of mistakes, it’s time to combat them by a CBT technique termed a ‘positive data log’. Write down events that were ‘good enough’, or events that were just fine in spite of being imperfect you begin to be more flexible, and it’s easier to see things in a more useful way.
Stop Comparing
With so many social media apps, unrealistic advertising, and other messages promoting perfectionism, it’s impossible to not compare your life with an idealized sample of others. For perfectionists, it’s not easy to remember to take a step back and assess reality. When we engage in perfectionistic comparison, we typically measure ourselves next to someone we already think is ‘better’ in some way. However, all that time comparing can have real consequences. A recent study among TikTok users reflected disruptions in sleep, low self-esteem and overall lower life satisfaction after approximately 30 minutes of scrolling through social media.
Are co-workers, ex’s, or family on social media fueling your feelings of inadequacy and stress? If you want to kick perfectionism to the curb, un-follow (or kindly mute) your “competition”, and kindly remind yourself that social media is not a representation of reality, even if just over the holidays.
Temper Family Expectations
Family can cause a lot of distress around the holidays, and even more so when you have lofty expectations. There is already enough pressure around this time of the year without adding perfectionism to the mix. Remember, you can’t control the actions of your family, but you can control your own. Part of walking the walk is that you can identify and reduce acting and thinking in ways that are not productive.
Trying to change others can be akin to entering a faulty debit card pin at checkout. You are in a hurry, and your code won’t work. Instead of admitting defeat, you continue to enter the same thing with growing frustration. Your blood pressure is rising, as is that of the cashier and the people behind you in line. The behaviors may be known and comfortable, yet stress and anxiety could have been avoided if you simply stopped repeating the same unproductive habits and expectations.
Beat Perfectionism by Shifting Perspectives- A CBT Experiment
On days when everything goes wrong, take a minute to consider how much worse things could be to shift your negative perspective. The following are three other tricks to engage your positive lens.
1.Incorporate a daily gratitude practice. According to CBT research, gratitude improves mental health, emotional health, sleep, and self-esteem. Each morning, night, or both write down 5 things you are grateful for, and that is all. Apps like 5 Minute Journal can remind you to practice journaling, and it’s easy to complete.
2. Acknowledge Your Power. Cognitive behavioral therapists emphasize that it’s vital to recognize that we all have control to choose our perspectives. We choose which thoughts to pay attention. Reorienting yourself to the positive can add more value and warmth to the way you experience your life.
3.Take a Breather. Meditation is helpful not only in shifting perspectives but reducing perfectionism and anxiety. You don’t have to sit and hum for an hour to access this relaxed state. Check out this blog to find useful techniques: Can’t Meditate? Think Again: 10 of the Best CBT Hacks to Trick Your Brain into Bliss.
In Part 3, I’ll be discussing cognitive-behavioral approaches to coping with loneliness over the holidays. As always, please let me know how these tips work for you. Other ideas? Please share. Enjoy the rest of your month and experiment with your new tools. What to know more about cognitive behavioral therapy? Click here for an FAQ: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy/CBT in San Diego
Part I: How to Keep the ‘Happy’ in your Holidays
Part 2: 4 CBT Based Tips for Overcoming Perfectionism
Part 3: 10 Ways to Ward off Loneliness
Part 4: 7 Secrets to Making Your New Years Resolution Stick
by therapyinsdcom | Nov 13, 2023 | Anxiety and Stress, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Depression
Stress management during the holidays can be challenging. Look around in any store and you’ll find early reminders of what’s ahead of us- spending quality time with people we love, great food, awesome parties, and the list goes on. Of course, these are what we all hope our holiday season will be made of, but that’s not always the case. Even in the best of situations, people struggle with excessive commitments, social anxiety, fallouts with loved ones, unrealistic expectations, and financial pressures. If any of those sound familiar, you may be wondering how to get on top of your mental health this year. In this 4-part series, you will find a way to manage the top holiday mental health concerns and start your 2018 fresh instead of frazzled.
Part 1: Start Now, Not Later
Early November can feel too soon to consider digging into holiday preparation, but if you want to enjoy some bliss this December start the ball rolling now. Planning helps you take back control, and the time to plan your upcoming season is here! It is much easier to attack the extra demands on your time early in the game. Why? You are more objective when you are not in a time crunch.
Tip #1: Give Yourself Time
One of the most effective ways to kick the holiday dumps is to use planning to your advantage. An important rule to use during this time of the year is to assume everything will take 2 times as long as you think. When you plan upcoming errands, it can be hard to remember how time-consuming many of the demands are. This can lead to overbooking and excessive commitments, which leads to unnecessary anxiety.
Tip #2: Don’t Forget Yourself
This may be the most important tip on the list. It is easy to get so caught up in the swirl of holiday activities you forget to spend time with yourself. Reserving chunks of personal time will help you keep what is important in perspective, and help you with stress management during the holidays. When we neglect to care for ourselves, we are vulnerable to poor moods. Need ideas? Check out some clever ways to enjoy the moment in front of you.
Tip #3: Prioritize
This holiday season ask yourself honestly: what and who is truly important? What can go to the side if I begin to feel overwhelmed or rushed? Although it can be hard, learn to say no to things you do not actually want or need to do. If you are having trouble figuring out how to prioritize, look to your values. Values, not external expectations, will guide you during this time. Don’t know what your core values are? Here is a great exercise to use to figure out what is truly important to you, so that you can put your priorities in order.
Tip #4: Practice Mindful Gifting
We all know this state of awareness is the best way to go about our day. What you may not have known is you can also practice mindful gifting. When we have time to be leisurely about purchasing gifts, we tend to think more deeply about the person we are gifting for. If you take this time now, the gifts you give will mean much more to the recipient and yourself. Set aside some chunks of time as soon as possible for reflection. During this time, make a list of each receiver and write down what they truly like and enjoy. If you do not yet know, keep an eye out for clues.
Holiday Stress, Anxiety and Depression
Holiday stress and depression can extend into your new year if not dealt with sooner than later. The aforementioned tips and tricks help answer the question of how to establish holiday stress management tools through planning. However, there may be times when you need more help to deal with your anxiety. Finding the best cognitive behavioral therapist for you can be another important tool in your box when dealing with the holiday blues.
Did you enjoy this article? If so, you may want to read Combat the Holiday Blues by Helping Others for additional tips and ideas.
Part I: How to Keep the ‘Happy’ in your Holidays: Stress Management During the Holidays
Part 2: 4 CBT Based Tips for Overcoming Perfectionism
Part 3: 10 Ways to Ward off Loneliness this Season
Part 4: 7 Secrets to Making Your New Years Resolution Stick
by therapyinsdcom | Oct 30, 2023 | Uncategorized