Tools And Techniques For Mental Health And Happiness - The Fast Track For Behavior Change: Corrective Cognitions

Experience gained from my 30+ years  in practice as a cognitive-behavioral psychologist shows that with the right tools people readily learn to elevate and maintain emotional well-being and happiness. 

At the Think Right Feel Right Blogoscope you will find the behavioral tools and techniques that help to ward off anxiety, depression and addiction.  You will learn about ways to defeat troubling emotions such as anger, worry and sadness.  You will also find practical strategies for increasing self-esteem, positivity and for being a happier you. 

Why Do Corrective Cognitions Fast Track Behavior Change?  Corrective cognitions change thoughts and, thoughts control behavior.  So, when we use a corrective cognition to change the way we think about something, we change the behavior and feelings that are controlled by this thinking.  If I decide to like catsup, I will feel better about catsup and probably buy and eat more of it.

When we change our thoughts (cognitions), we change.  If I think pitbulls are dangerous, I will be afraid of them and want to avoid them.  A useful corrective cognition in this instance might be, "These dogs have gotten a bad rap.  If they are treated well, they are usually very sweet."  Next thing you know, I might have a pitbull of my own!

We accelerate behavior change by improving the way we think with corrective cognitions.  Losing weight is easier, and more likely, if I think, "I want to be trim and healthy," rather than, "I guess I will have to go on another diet." Improving the way we think, replacing problematic thoughts with better ones, greatly improves our success rate for behavior change and happiness. Remember to stay tuned to #ThinkRightFeelRight for more practical #self-help

How To Lock In Behavior Change: What Does Love Have To Do With It? Part 3

Experience gained from my 30+ years  in practice as a cognitive-behavioral psychologist shows that with the right tools people readily learn to elevate and maintain emotional well-being and happiness. 

At the Think Right Feel Right Blogoscope you will find the behavioral tools and techniques that help to ward off anxiety, depression and addiction.  You will learn about ways to defeat troubling emotions such as anger, worry and sadness.  You will also find practical strategies for increasing self-esteem, positivity and for being a happier you. 

How to Lock In Behavior Change.  Sadly, as New Year's resolutions have shown, good intentions are often ineffective strategies for behavior change.  If we want to succeed at our efforts to lose weight, stop worry, be on time, or acquire self-esteem, we need to follow a strategy that promotes effective follow through. To lock in more successful change, I encourage people to create and follow a six-step plan.  A six-step plan clarifies the necessary elements for behavior change and locks in the essential follow through that is needed for success.  

A six-step plan assures more reliable improvement in self-esteem. Preparing a good plan entails developing clear answers for each of the following: who is responsible, what is the desired behavior, when will it occur, where will it occur, how often will it occur, is the goal attained, and finally, did I miss any steps today.  

So, if I want to improve my self-esteem with a corrective cognition, my six-step plan might look something like this:

1) I will think,

2) I am fully committed to love myself, unconditionally, forever

3) Ten times a day.

4) Prompting this thought each time I use the stairs,

5) For 30 days, or until this new way of thinking becomes my

    customary way of thinking about myself,

6) And, at the end of each day, I will check to make sure that I
    completed my six-step plan and, if not, I will complete steps 2
    and 3 before I go to bed tonight.   

The idea behind  using six-step plans is to make sure that we  have thought through the details about behavior change  and that we are following through on them correctly.  Step 2 highlights the precise wording of the corrective cognition.  Step 6 is there to prevent slippage or failure through oversight. These techniques are discussed in greater detail in Think Right, Feel Right .  

Remember to stay tuned to #ThinkRightFeelRight for more practical #self-help

      

The CBT Tool Set For Self Love: What's Love Got To Do With It? (Part 2)

Experience gained from a 30+ year practice  as a cognitive-behavioral psychologist shows that with the right tools people readily learn to elevate and maintain emotional well-being and happiness.  At the Think Right Feel Right Blogoscope you will find the behavioral tools and techniques that help to ward off anxiety, depression and addiction. You will learn about ways to defeat troubling emotions such as anger, worry and sadness. You will also find practical strategies for increasing self-esteem, positivity and for being a happier you.

Fixing Intrinsic Self-Esteem.  In yesterday's post, I heralded the importance of self love for mental health and happiness. Self-love is the mainstay for emotional health.  Many walk the planet without nearly enough self-esteem and pay a heavy price for doing so. Because self love and self-esteem are so vital to emotional health, I discuss these topics in depth in Think Right, Feel Right.  Today, I want to suggest a good starting point for improving self love or intrinsic self-esteem: the corrective cognition.

I use the term, corrective cognition,  to refer to a new thought or belief that is designed to correct the way we think, feel, and behave. For example, if I worry about taking tests, a corrective cognition might be, "No sense worrying about it.  I will prepare for the test and just do the best I can."  Since self-love, self-esteem, and self-nurturance are all rooted in thought, you can use corrective cognitions to change and improve the way you think about them and thereby elevate your self-worth, self-esteem and  inclination to be more self-nurturing.

An example of a corrective cognition for self love is: "I am fully committed to deeply love myself, unconditionally, forever." This thought may sound strange.  It does sound strange to those who are not accustomed to thinking about themselves in this way. However, this new way of thinking has helped to inflate thousands of emotional flat tires!

Corrective cognitions only work if we use them.  If we drop the ball, and do not give ourselves the chance to endorse the new corrective cognition, we lose out on our hopes for change.  As a remedy for this problem, I developed something I call a six-step plan.  The six-step plan encourages proper follow through and promotes successful change.  I will discuss this concept in a future post. Remember to stay tuned to #ThinkRightFeelRight for more practical #self-help

#Mental Health and #Happiness: What's #Love Got To Do With It? (Part 1)

Experience gained from my 30+ years in practice as a cognitive-behavioral psychologist shows that with the right tools people readily learn to elevate and maintain emotional well-being and happiness. At the Think Right Feel Right Blogoscope you will find the behavioral tools and techniques that help to ward off anxiety, depression and addiction. You will learn about ways to defeat troubling emotions such as anger, worry and sadness. You will also find practical strategies for increasing self-esteem, positivity and for being a happier you.

So what does love have to do with mental health and happiness?  Love has a great deal to do with it and so do you.  You need it and, you need to be doing it:  You need to love you!

Notice, I did not say: like you, try to love you, love you sometimes,  love you somewhat, or let someone else do it for you.  No, it is really important for you to love you,  no "ifs," no "buts," and no "maybes."  Do it right.  Go all in, no stutter-stepping.

Strong and unwavering self love creates essential emotional resources: it authenticates and deepens self-esteem;  it promotes proper caring and self-nurturance, and it strengthens personal security and resilience.  These are the essential ingredients for emotional health.  When self love is weak, we lack these essential  resources, and our mental health and happiness suffer.

If you think I might be overstating the importance of self-love, keep this in mind:  In over 30 years of private practice work, all or almost all of my clients were lacking in the ability to love themselves correctly, lacking in the ability to self-nurture correctly, and not surprisingly, symptomatic and unhappy as a result.

If you didn't learn how to love yourself enough while you were growing up (sadly, many have not), you owe it to yourself to learn how to do so now. Your emotional health and happiness depend upon it. 

Remember to stay tuned to #ThinkRightFeelRight for more practical #self-help

A Promising Path Forward To Improved #Mental Health and #Happiness: #CBT Based Emotional Education

CBT-based emotional education holds great promise for helping us achieve lasting improvements in mental health and happiness. With these thoughts in mind, I decided to write a practical guide that fulfills this promise. Think Right, Feel Right is the finished product. Step-by-step, the guide provides readers with a clear understanding of the cutting-edge ideas and behavioral tools that empower emotional health and happiness, and the skills needed to use these ideas and tools effectively.  

Think Right, Feel Right, The Building Block Guide for Happiness & Emotional Well-Being Is available in print and digital formats. In addition to English, you can now find published translations in Spanish, Korean and Romanian. To find out more about this book, preview it online at Amazon.com.

I hope you will visit this blog often to view more posts relating to emotional health education and happiness.

Ten Tips For Improving Your Aim At #Love and #Happiness On #Valentine's Day And Beyond

Love seems like a very timely subject for a post just before Valentine's Day.  In no particular order, here are a few thoughts about launching cupid's arrow.

1)  Love begins where need stops; love is more about giving than needing.

2)  Loving yourself allows you to give love that you possess rather than need the love you lack.

3)  Too often," I love you" means I need you to love me because I don't know how.

4)  Love is best when it is freely given; it can be given freely only if it is yours.

5)  If someone loves you more than you do, you won't have room for all of theirs.

5)  Knowing how to love yourself improves your ability to know how to love others.

6)  Loving yourself doesn't make you selfish, it helps to keep you from behaving selfishly.

7)  Developing true self-esteem helps you to pass it along to the next generation.

8) When we don't have enough love of our own we search for more, often leaving behind those who love us.

9) Knowing how to love yourself helps you to see more clearly if others do.

10) To improve your aim at loving others, be sure not to miss yourself.

Stuck With The Happiness We Have ... Or With Another Bad Theory?

The notion that there is a set point for happiness implies that even when we experience increases (or decreases) in happiness, they are  only temporary and, we will eventually return to our baseline, our set point.  Long story short, we are being told that happiness doesn't change that much over time. We are likely to be stuck with what we have, or don't have.

Is it such a the big deal if our happiness is "fixed" like other traits, as some say?  Well, what kind of life will there be for those who don't know happiness or don't experience enough of it?   Tough luck for them I suppose.  What about if I have always been a little bit happy, but never really happy, at least not for very long?  Am I out of luck too?  What can I do as a  parent if happiness is just something children are born with or maybe not so much?  How can we possibly claim that our mental health interventions are effective if we can't even fix happiness (don't know how to fix happiness, or believe it can't be fixed)?  If we can't make lasting improvements in happiness, why waste so much time and money trying?  This is pretty troubling news.

Maybe we had better take a second look at our ideas about happiness.  I would like to use basketball as an analogy.  Let's say I am a short basketball player, about five feet nine inches tall, averaging eight points a game.  I score more points when I play against shorter or less skilled players, less against really good teams or teams with really tall players.  Overall though, I average about eight points a game.  So, if I go along playing basketball without growing taller, should I buy into this idea that my average probably is my set point?  Is eight points a game, like happiness, about it for me?

Suppose I had the opportunity to enroll in a quality sports education program.  I learned better ball handling, worked on my jump shot, and honed my skills at the foul line.  I'll bet I could better my old average and knock this set point idea for a loop.

Unfortunately and sadly, set point thinking reinforces beliefs that our happiness "average" is fixed, something we can't do much about.  At one time, our thinking that the world was flat was fixed.  So, we believed we could not do much about that either.

Give me a brake!  I know that most of  my clients report and evidence that their happiness average has improved substantially and, I am sure that this is true for others as well.  A more likely and better explanation of this set point  position is that our happiness only appears to be set because we lack the emotional education that would enable us to change it.

So let's not get bogged down here in yet another ill-guided theory of why we can't improve our happiness and well-being.  Instead, all of us, especially parents, educators, and therapists, need to upgrade our training, skills, and tools so that we can and do better our averages for happiness. In the meantime, for happiness sake, don't fall in love this set-point thinking.

Happiness, Must We Eventually Fall Back to Where We Started?

I mentioned in yesterday's post that I would follow up on how to move past the happiness set point. Set-point theories about happiness suggest that after upturns or downturns in happiness, we return to our baseline.  This baseline, thought to result from hereditary and habituation factors, is referred to as the happiness set point.  The findings from some happiness studies support this idea of a set point, firming up convictions that we are stuck with what we have when it comes to happiness.  But, not so fast here.

First, not all of us return to this set-point.  Some stay sad and some stay happier.  Some people do lose their happiness for their marriage or what they do in life and go looking for it elsewhere.  For others, happiness gets better and stays better.

Certainly it is easier to feel happy when everything seems to be going right, when what we like is new and all around us.  Excitement and happiness are like low hanging fruit, easily grabbed, easily held on to.  But what about when this emotional lottery does not work in our favor?  Must we all fall back to our setpoint, or even drop below it?

No, we need not become these predicted victims of negative circumstance, set point theory, or habituation.  When the slope for keeping happiness is steep, we need to know how to counterbalance our thoughts and emotions so that we don't slide backwards. Our mindset intensifies reassurance, gratitude, awe, savoring, appreciation, inspiration, kindness, and compassion to help us hold our ground on happiness.

A likely reason why so many  of us do fall back to baseline is that we have not yet learned how to do otherwise.  It's not that we can't make happiness last, it's that we are not being taught how to. Hopefully, through improvements in emotional education, we will acquire these important life skills.

Tools and Techniques For Happiness and #Emotional Health: What Makes #Happiness Last?

What Makes Happiness Last?  Some say nothing.  People in this camp hold views like "we are not meant to be all that happy," "you have to experience unhappiness to know happiness," "happiness comes and goes with circumstance."  Another view is that we have a setpoint for happiness.  We experience upticks in happiness when good things happen but, after a period of adaptation, we return to a lower point, referred to as our setpoint.  So,  alas, we may get pretty happy but, we don't stay that way.

It is true that people who think negatively or believe happiness won't last, constrain happiness.  Because happiness is rooted in thought, those who think this way create a self-fulfilling prophecy:
They believe they won't be happy very long and, they aren't. 

Those who think that circumstance determines how a person feels, also limit happiness.  They tie it to what goes on around them.  In my guide, Think Right, Feel Right,  I liken this behavior to playing an emotional lottery where we believe that happiness in life is governed by the chance events of circumstance.  When we hand over happiness to circumstance, we loose our grip on it.  

We can make happiness more lasting.  But first we must realize that happiness, like other emotions, arises from the way we think about things and circumstance, not from things, not from circumstance.  So, if we want happiness to last, we don't attribute our ups and downs to circumstance.  Instead, we strive to think in ways that preserve emotional health and well-being.  

Positive thinking bolsters happiness and well-being.  We profit by getting good at it.  Especially in the face of adverse circumstances, our thoughts must keep our spirits uplifted so that we stay well. Improving our mindset about life increases our ability to keep happiness in it.  

More to follow on this important topic, especially how we can move past the "setpoint."