Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “change”
New Year’s resolutions actually tap into a very strong human impulse to create start-over points in our lives and to use them to motivate improvements that we wish to incorporate into our regular lives. Internet searches for items like “diet” and “gym” that may be prompted by a desire to do something healthy show increased activity around the first day …
How to make New Year’s Resolutions What is a New Year’s resolution, anyway? Are you always determined to make yourself a better person than you were before? Or is it more like the wish you make when you blow out your birthday candles: quickly thought up and quickly forgotten? Before you set this weight loss goal or that gym membership …
“Give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” This “Serenity Prayer” attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, and often associated with Alcoholics Anonymous, is known to many, and found hanging in cross-stich patterns, wood carvings and photographs on walls across the country. It seems to offer …
Are you contemplating a significant lifestyle change this year? Quitting smoking for good, or really getting fit, not just losing a few pounds and gaining them back later? Research shows that making real changes in life is not just a matter of motivation, commitment, or not being “lazy”. Change requires skills and knowledge that can be learned and applied for …
We’ve discussed the mental health strategy called “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy” several times in Moodsurfing (see below for links), and it’s an important feature of our Bipolar Disorder Workbook. It’s a multifaceted approach, and there’s a lot to unpack. This post explores the “commitment” part of it all. Once you’ve trained yourself to look squarely at your reality, without focusing …
What do we mean by anger uses and abuses? Righteous anger is a powerful force for change in the world. But some folks seem to live in anger all the time, and for them, and those around them, anger can become a trap. As others pull away from them they feel more helpless, and more angry. How to break this …
How can you make meaningful resolutions for 2018? Maybe not something like “adopt more healthy habits”, which can be hard to do. How about resolving to work on something that research shows is foundational to healthy habits and healthy motivations? Cultivating a sense of purpose in life has been shown to affect health and longevity through numerous avenues of study. Those …
When you find yourself unable to make progress towards a goal, it helps to know some tricks for “getting unstuck.” One extremely useful trick is to find a detour around a roadblock. Let’s say you want to lose weight. But every effort to change your diet results in failure. Perhaps you find yourself feeling increasingly irritable and your feelings of …
Feeling trapped is one of the most painful emotional experiences. The need to escape from this place can sometimes lead us to do things that are irrational and self-destructive. A young woman who I’ve been working with for couple of years who struggles with chronic depression, finally seem to be making some headway in her life with a new relationship …
What is the most effective way of motivating healthy behavior changes? And how does medical practice best take advantage of information about what motivates people to make positive changes? It should be obvious that just telling someone that a certain behavior is healthy is often not enough to motivate change. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal …
Sometimes I wish that my depressed patients had more impatience. Eagerness for change when you have been depressed for a long time can be a good thing. But if you have bipolar depression, impatience is not always a useful emotion. This past week, several people began expressing impatience with their progress. A couple of them expressed the view that I …
In my previous post I outlined the idea of “stages of change,” here I want to focus on some of the tools for change. In the picture below you will they the stages of change lined up with appropriate tools for change. Some of the tools are appropriate in more than one stage and, in general, the activities that support …
Getting Ready for Change The process of getting ready for change has been the focus of the research of James Prochaska for the last 40 years. James O. Prochaska and Carlo Di Clemente, developed the Transtheoretical Model for change (TTM), which is the most widely accepted framework for understanding change in the mental health and substance use treatment communities. They found …
Believing you can create change in your life is the foundation for successfully making the change. Self efficacy is the sense that you can make change and thus hope and self-efficacy are intimately connected. Often people with bipolar or depression are overwhelmed with feelings of hopelessness. They feel stuck and unable to manage their moods. And yet a great deal of research shows …
One of my patients wrote to me this morning asking if she could get a medication to help with her anxiety. She has been trying to find a good therapist for quite a while and I think she might have found someone who could really help her. But this is making her feel anxious and irritable. Now she has to wrestle …
Charlie is concerned that by being too positive he will trigger mania. He has been hospitalized once a year and the pattern always seems to be the same. He will have settled into a seemingly fixed state of depression, and then will begin to feel frustrated with that state and tried to make changes to escape from the swampy morass. He …
Breathing Techniques One of the oldest “self help” movements is based on breathing, helping us to use our breath, and how we breathe in order to reduce stress and to achieve a sense of connection with the world around us: Prana Yoga. Prana is the Sanskrit word for “breath” and also means “life.” Therefore, prana can be translated as “the …
What is the power of a morning walk? Even such a simple daily ritual can have profound effects on mood. After two years working with a young woman who is now heading off to graduate school and bright future, we were reflecting on lessons learned. “I can be a bit dense about cause and effect. I am surprised when something …
Why do we sometimes come up with self-destructive responses to the unpleasant feeling of being trapped or the anxiety of an unhappy life situation? I talked about this a little bit in an earlier post that was based on an article in the New York Times. In that article, it was noted that many people may find it so hard to deal with the stress …
First Things First The process of gaining or regaining a greater sense of confidence and control over your life can seem overwhelming to almost anyone. That is part of the reason why having someone who can be a guide or facilitator (a therapist or coach) can be so helpful. Having someone who can look at your situation with a greater …
