~ The way people think and perceive situations has a huge impact on how they feel
~ Helping people embrace the dialectics can help them feel more positive and empowered
~ Just like it is imperative to add happy emotions, it is imperative to add happy thoughts as well
~ By practicing optimism and addressing unhelpful thoughts people can reduce their overall stress, sleep better, gain more energy and feel less hopeless and helpless (depressed).
Based on Doc Snipes’ upcoming book 100+ Practical Tools to Defeat Depression. Summary
When people are depressed, they often feel helpless and hopeless and nothing makes them happy.
By adding in happy things, people can buffer against the depression
By addressing the unpleasant feelings, they happy chemicals can be more effective.
Emotional interventions help you address the unpleasant feelings and add pleasant feelings
By developing a better feelings vocabulary, it will be easier to identify how you are feeling and address it.
Mindfulness helps you stay in the present moment so you are in touch with your feelings and don’t let them fester like a dirty wound (or a bag of poop)
Steps Toward Self Validation
~ Identify the values and characteristics about yourself that make you awesome.
~ Make a Bill of Rights. “I deserve to…”
~ Follow your own Bill of Rights
~ Identify the people in your past from whom you craved validation and never got it. Explore why that may have been more about them than you.
~ Identify why you crave validation. Do you want to know you are important? Relevant? Lovable?
~ Make a list of people you know who fit that label.
~ How are you like those people?
Raising a Happy Child
~ Help them develop an emotional vocabulary
~ Develop self-awareness, mindfulness and psychological flexibility
~ Develop empathy and compassion for self and others
~ Develop self-esteem and self-confidence
~ Educate about unhelpful thoughts
~ Educate about hardiness
~ Develop good vulnerability prevention habits
~ Teach about distress tolerance Accepts and Improves
Depression and anxiety impact millions of men annually. In this episode for men’s health month learn about the causes, signs, symptoms in men (which are often different than in women) and treatments available.
