When December rolls in, good habits tend to roll out.  Multiple parties, cookie exchanges, and the irresistible toffee your investment club member makes you each year (yes, you, Janet) present layer upon layer of tests to the changes you’re making in your life.  Each year, I hear similar stories of how easy it is to revert back to old habits in December with the best of intentions of starting over in the New Year.  But what I also notice each year is, although people start out with these good intentions, the feeling of failure hangs on and gets in the way of getting back to the successful change.

So here is a change to help you stay on track this December.  Think of December as a celebration month for your change.  Focus on self care and health with the entire month as the time frame.  Engage in self care and goal tracking each and every day, the way an explorer tackles the varied terrain of each day’s journey to make it across a large expanse.  Here are some practical tips to help guide you on your December path.

Plan ahead.  I can’t tell you how important this is for people resisting relapse.  Rate what you will encounter each day and evening as a low/medium/high risk situation.  Review what your triggers may be and create a plan for how you will handle them ahead of time.  Rehearse and have a prepared line for how you can gracefully decline offers of food, drink, or substances you are refraining from.  It really helps to let people know ahead of time, if possible, what your dietary or self care needs are.  Not only will this help you be accountable, but people are surprisingly accommodating if you share your needs.

Keep a Sense of Control.  Do what you can to keep your options open and to control what you can.  Driving yourself to events can be a big help so that you can leave if you feel the need.  Also, bring your own choices of food or beverages.  If you are worried about alcohol intake, bring your own sparkling cider or non-alcoholic option.  Or bring a healthier food option that you prepare the way you enjoy.  And by all means, bring your support system!  Having a friend or partner who knows what you are trying to do can make a huge difference.  Especially in stressful social situations (and boy can family events trigger our childhood responding) bring a person who can be your ally.

Be pro-active.   Take good care of your overall well being as a top priority.  Don’t starve yourself all day because you are going to a party that night.  Your low blood sugar will make you tired, stressed, and vulnerable.  Exercise any way you can, even if it is a quick walk around the block to reduce your tension at a family gathering or work party.  Make sure you keep using the tools that you have been using to support your change.  December is not the time to skip a support group meeting or pass on your daily meditation.  In fact, double down on those helpful habits!

Keep track.  Keeping a food journal, exercise log, or simply writing down how you feel each day is remarkably successful.  It helps to keep you in touch with your body and emotions so that you don’t  just wake up to how you are doing when it’s too late to change it.

Most of all, be kind to yourself.  Write down what a successful December would be for you and imagine how you would feel on January first if you were to meet this goal.  Make some tip sheets for yourself to keep on your refrigerator, in your wallet, and in your car.  Remind yourself every day of your plan and know that the confidence you will gain by successfully managing December is better than the fleeting pleasure of any end of the year indulgence.  Keeping to your goal is truly a gift that keeps on giving!

Networks may be crashing, employees may be distracted, and your fingers may get cramps.  Welcome to Cyber Monday.  If you’re like me, you love the thrill of on-line shopping, the great deals, the ease of finding what you want, and the joy of having it delivered straight to your doorstep.  And the more I shop on-line, the more savvy my computer becomes at knowing how to tempt me.  My fingers seem to have a mind of their own as they click their way down the rabbit hole of material desire.

Then the guilt begins.  I wake from my Nordstrom trance feeling ashamed for even imagining how great the Hunter rain boots would be this El Nino winter or for actually calculating how much I would be saving by spending more.  I feel sick at how easily I am drawn into wanting, whether it is new speakers for my husband or that piece of leftover pumpkin pie sitting in my refrigerator.  I don’t need it, so I shouldn’t want it, right?

But who wouldn’t want a beautiful accessory or a delicious goody?  Wanting is absolutely natural and research shows we couldn’t even control our wanting if we “wanted” to.  (A lot of corporate money is put into the science of how to make tastes, smells, textures and advertisements appeal to us unconsciously.)  As soon as we see something enjoyable, neurons fire electronic signals in the pleasure center of our brain.  These responses happen without our awareness of it.  I have written before about our “flight/fight” automatic responding to something we fear, well think of this as “want/have” automatic responding to something we desire.

Just like with fight/flight reactions, we can’t expect ourselves not to have want responses.  They are a part of our body’s control system for survival.  What we can do is address our reactions to these responses.  We can slow ourselves down, acknowledge them as natural, and drum up the support of our cerebral cortex, the part of our brain that engages in cause and effect reasoning.  We can decide if our want is in line with our needs, and if our long term goals are best served by our short term behavior.

So don’t shame your wanting.  Desire can be a great motivator, inspiring us to do great things and to dream big.  Treat your wanting as your muse.  It can expose you to all kinds of delightful potential that you may choose or choose not to partake in.  In fact, by recognizing it for the lovely experience it can be, wanting actually loses some of its grip over you.  The next time you want the cookie that will put your blood sugar out of whack, the diamond bracelet in the Tiffany ad embedded in your on-line Wall Street journal article, or your child begs for the toy you can’t afford, try saying, “Of course you want it, who wouldn’t?”  Then enjoy the thought of having it and go on about your day.

When I was younger I loved Thanksgiving because of the three “Fs”:  family, food, and football.  I still love these things, but over the years I have come to really appreciate Thanksgiving on a deeper level.  Personally, I have found that as I get older I am more aware of how much I have to be thankful for and how good it feels to think that way.  Professionally, the field of psychology echoes my experience with abundant recent research on gratitude demonstrating the power it holds to make us both happier and healthier.

Gratitude has been linked to less anxiety, depression, and higher life satisfaction.  In studying people who score highest on measures of happiness, researchers consistently find that happy people appreciate what they have.  Grateful people are less likely to experience feelings of resentment and envy, and even regret.  Grateful people also take better care of their health.  They exercise more and follow up on health care routines.  Gratefulness has also been linked to psychological well being, even in the face of trauma.  Having awareness for all the good things you have in life, even during hard times, helps foster resilience.

Gratefulness can be the silver lining of living through loss or tragedy.  Through suffering we realize how vulnerable we all are and awaken to actually how lucky we are most of the time.  We are presented with life’s complexity, simultaneously offering us both challenges and blessings.  Experiencing gratitude connects us to the people and world around us and strengthens our connections in the mutually of supportive community.  It takes our focus away from ourselves to a relationship with something outside our selves, whether it’s other people, nature, or a higher power.

You don’t have to be religious to cultivate gratitude.  In fact, the wonderful thing about gratitude is that it is a rather accessible tool in the well-being tool kit.  Studies show that people who kept a simple journal listing five things they were grateful for, done just once a week, had significant changes in their mood.  They reported feeling happier and more optimistic, and had fewer physical problems.  They even spent more time working out (wow!).  It makes sense that when taking the time to notice all the abundance in our lives, we can’t help but feel more valued by others and better about ourselves.  In turn, gratefulness causes us to be more empathic and pro-social in our interactions with others, which brings about more good feelings.

So, as we head into the time of year when we start making lists of presents to buy and thinking about things we want, it’s a good time to appreciate all that we already have.   Committing to an “attitude of gratitude” may be the best gift we could give ourselves that can last throughout the year.   It’s inexpensive, free of calories, and you can have as many helpings as you want without feeling ill!  (I wish I could say the same about family, food, and football).

Happy Thanks-giving.

Let’s face it, when you’re trying to be healthy it can sometimes feel like life is no fun.  You have to say “no” to a lot of things you normally enjoy and life can feel like one restriction after another.  “No thank you,” to the donut at work or the dessert after dinner.  “No” to a cigarette break when you finish your report or clean your house.  And even “no” to the offer of a second margarita at Happy Hour, even when the guy you like is buying it for you.  Making changes, even when we know the long term will reap benefits, can feel a bit dull in the moment.  That’s why when you feel the loss of pleasure in your life, it’s important to add new things that you enjoy.  Giving yourself rewards for making positive changes not only reinforces your new behavior, but helps to fill the emptiness that can happen when you feel life’s pleasured are being taken away.

According to Learning Theory, a branch of psychology that studies how we acquire and retain information and behaviors, a “reward” is anything that causes a reinforced behavior to increase.  This can take the form of giving something positive after a desired behavior (getting a pay check) or taking away something that is negative (skip doing the dishes when you’ve gone to the gym).  So be creative.  Give yourself a mix of rewards to keep life interesting.  For example, get your nails done when you haven’t smoked for a week or take the afternoon off from doing laundry and chores to see the movie you’ve been waiting for.  Plan out your rewards to celebrate the commitment you’ve made to sustain your new behavior.  Time frame rewards are very powerful.  Everyone in AA knows the intense meaning of getting your sobriety chip for one week, one month, one year, and so on.   Recognizing that we are on a roll of success helps maintain our success.

But choose your rewards wisely.  We can easily fall into traps that actually undermine our efforts.  How many of us have rewarded ourselves for losing weight with an ice cream sundae? Or because we’ve kept to our budget all month, we buy that gadget we had our eye on?  Select rewards that you can feel good about rather than ones that you will feel guilty about later that actually reinforce the undesired behavior.  Just by making something a reward we are giving it a positive status.  I still remember my friend and I suddenly realizing our mistake when we took our young kids for a Happy Meal at McDonalds when they worked hard on a project at school.  As our kids got excited on the drive over, it suddenly occurred to us we were teaching our kids that fast food was a treat!

Life can be hard and thankless at times.  It’s so important to pat ourselves on the back and acknowledge our accomplishments.  Part of becoming an adult is learning to do this for ourselves rather than waiting for the world to do it for us.  No fairy is going to swoop in and give you a Starbucks gift card just for resisting the urge to yet at your children or buy you a diamond pendant for facing your fear of the dentist.  Yes, there is the reward of pride and self esteem, but sometimes it’s nice to give ourselves a little bit more.  After all, you’ve earned it!

Some inexpensive rewards:  Go for a picnic lunch, listen to some wonderful music, plan a coffee date with someone you enjoy, do something creative just for the fun of it, play a game, take a bath, read for pleasure, look through old photographs, take a leisurely walk (not for exercise, but for looking at something beautiful), take a nap, make a new smoothie, sit in the sun and rest, anything you enjoy but never have time for!

The Halloween candy is just about gone, Starbucks is now using their red cups, and there are Black Friday sales ads in the paper.  It’s official.  The holiday season is here.  If this thought brings more anxiety than excitement or more dread than joy, you may want to consider a change in how you approach the season.  While, personally, there are a lot of traditions I enjoy, I also know how keeping up some traditions can be burdensome.  So in today’s blog post, I am officially giving you permission to review your holiday traditions and see if you can change things up to relieve the pit in your stomach when you think about decking your halls.

Traditions imply continuity.  They are a way of remembering the past and honoring people we love, like Great Aunt Sue’s stuffing or all gathering at Grandma’s house.  The anticipation of these events and the seasonal predictable nature of them make them both special and comfortable.  But not always for everyone.  So many women I know would love to have a break from hosting Christmas, but they tell me, “My kids would be so upset.”  And these are actually adult children!  Sure, they love mom taking care of it all, but what about Mom?  And what about the son who has abstained from alcohol or lowered his blood sugar, being told, “Oh, you can have just one glass,” or “Just a small piece of my pie, I made it for you!  You always have my pie.”

Holiday season is already full of stress: the traffic, noise, and travel.  Then there is the eating and pressure to spend money for the people you love.  And for women in particular, there are the hosting obligations with the planning, shopping, cooking, and endless cleaning.  It’s easy to get lost in the obligations and end up feeling resentful rather than blessed.  Traditions have a way of multiplying up over the years, adding layers that might benefit from some pruning.

If the holidays have become overwhelming to you, try choosing just a few activities that reap the biggest benefit for the values most important to you at that time of year.  What are the traditions you enjoy, and what are the traditions you would secretly love to do without?  Changing traditions is going to involve being assertive.  You are going against what is expected and to others it may feel like a rejection.  But see if you can be both honest and creative with the people you love.  After all, the point is celebration.  What is it about the tradition that people enjoy?  Are there ways to preserve the intention while lessening the burden?  Can we draw names from a hat instead of buying gifts for everyone?  Can we alter the menu to include some healthier dish choices?  Or can we try rotating the hosting duties or party locations?  Rather than letting your holiday season come and go like a runaway train, slow it down by focusing your energy on what is most meaningful and healthy.

And don’t be afraid to try something completely new if you need to.  After a painful loss, some people prefer to go away for the holiday, avoiding the weather and constant reminders of what no longer is.  You can always return to your old traditions when you’re ready.  Or you may be surprised; sometimes the best holidays involve an unusual twist.  I remember one of my favorite years involved cooking exclusively on a grill and sitting on plastic chairs by candlelight because the electricity at our new home wasn’t hooked up yet and we had just moved in.  Laughter filled the empty space and somehow, nobody starved!

Welcome to the Monday morning after “falling back.”  Yes, you get the extra hour of sleep, but for many people the early darkness coincides with a depressing feeling when you leave work or pick up the kids from sports practice in the dark.  As seasons shift, so does the amount of sunlight, and for people highly sensitive to this change it can predispose you to depression.  The good news is, even though you may not be able to winter in Ecuador, there are things you can do to help support yourself through this dark time of year.

Seasonal Affective Disorder (appropriately known as SAD) is a subtype of Major Depression that comes and goes based on the seasons.  Symptoms of winter-onset SAD include irritability, low energy, problems getting along with people, hypersensitivity to rejection, “heavy” feeling in the arms and legs, oversleeping, and appetite changes, especially cravings for food high in carbohydrates (more pumpkin pie, anyone?).  (Interestingly, there is also a summer-onset SAD whose symptoms include depression, trouble sleeping, weight loss, poor appetite, and agitation.)  It’s normal to have some days that you feel down, but if you feel down for days at a time or can’t get motivated to do the things you usually enjoy, you may want to incorporate some strategies to help survive the winter blues.  For most people these symptoms are relatively mild, but for some they can be more severe.

The specific causes of SAD are unknown, but there are several factors that come into play.  The decrease in sunlight may disrupt your body’s internal clock (circadian rhythm).  Also, the level of the neurotransmitter serotonin (a brain chemical that affects mood) drops in response to reduced sunlight and melatonin levels (which plays a role in sleep patterns and mood) are disrupted.  There are also risk factors that may make you more likely to experience the winter blues.  SAD is diagnosed more in women, in young people, and those with a blood relative who has been diagnosed with any form of depression. Also, SAD is more common in people who live either far north or south of the equator.

Treatment for winter depression may include light therapy, medication, and psychotherapy.  Light therapy, often called phototherapy, involves sitting 30 to 60 minutes a day in front of a special light therapy box that mimics natural outdoor light (full spectrum UV light). (For best results, pair it with a pina colada).  Some people with SAD respond well to antidepressants, such as Welbutrin, if started before symptoms begin each year.  Psychotherapy can help with stress management and offer support and strategies for coping.

In addition to the treatment options, there are home remedies that can help, especially for people with milder cases.  Getting outside, especially within two hours of waking up, can be helpful.  Try drinking your coffee on the porch or even walking around the block when you get your newspaper.  Open blinds, trim tree branches that block sunlight, and sit near the window while at home.  Exercise helps relieve stress and increases serotonin levels.  When you’re feeling down it is easy to isolate, so make sure you make the effort to connect with people.

My friend with SAD has her favorite treatment, a  yearly trip to a warm, sunny place.  For some of us, however, this is not a reliable option, so I’ll share with you my favorite tip for beating the winter blues.  Make a warm beverage, sit by the fire, and cuddle with someone you love.  Did you know that new research shows that hugs also raise serotonin levels?

Some of the most challenging changes we make involve saying good-bye to relationships.  If you are going through a break up or a divorce, or leaving a job, or moving somewhere new, it involves saying good bye to a person or people or who have been significant to you.  Endings are hard and you’re usually filled with complex emotions at the time they happen.  But often the way we end a relationship colors the way we feel about that person for a very long time, as well as how the person thinks about us.  Putting energy into creating a thoughtful  ending can help you move forward and sustain positive feelings about yourself and your relationships well into the future.

Endings involve ambivalent feelings.  We once were dedicated to someone or something, and now we have to let go.  If we dwell on all the great things we will be losing, we would be stuck and never move on.  But sometimes we go to an extreme.  In order to make the separation, we get angry, seeing only the bad experiences in order to motivate us to let go.  Ever hear someone talk about their “Ex” with such disdain, it’s hard to imagine they were ever in love?  It’s easy to jump on the negativity bandwagon.  It frees you up from taking a deeper look at a complex dynamic and owning your part of what can feel like a failure.  Just as teenagers often need to judge their parents harshly in order to separate, we all have a tendency to become a bit superior as a defense against the pain of loss.

But be careful.  Leaving a job or a relationship in such a negative state can have consequences for you.  Research shows we tend to remember the things that happen most recently (aptly called the recency effect”).  So even if you have loved your job and the people you worked with for a long time, if things end badly, that is what you and your co-workers will remember.  Years of cooperation and mutual respect can be washed away with a bad taste of “they never appreciated me,” or “she always thought she was better than us” types of feelings that linger.

Especially when we feel a lack of control in a situation, it is tempting to end things with a bang.  But relationships don’t truly ever end.  Even if we never encounter the person again, the relationship lives on in our mind.  If we are careful and open to the process of ending, we can preserve good memories and people who are dear to us.  Rather than forming a reserve of bitterness we operate from, it helps to think of creating a treasure chest, where we store the valued aspects of our relationships, both good and challenging.  These relationships are part of our history and our identity.  They represent who we were and how we have grown.  Rather than burning bridges, by working through the painful emotions of endings, we can hold onto the love that was once created.

You are trying to make a change that feels easy and obvious, yet you just can’t do it.  You become frustrated and blame yourself for being weak or lazy.  “It doesn’t make any sense,” I frequently hear, “What is wrong with me?”  It’s easy to get caught up in diagnosing yourself with all kinds of problems, everything from just not being smart enough to having a multi-syllabic mental health disorder.

When feeling stuck in a pattern it’s often helpful to take a step back.  A broader perspective may reveal a hidden answer to your dilemma.  When working with people in therapy I usually assume that people have very good reasons for why they do what they do, but these reasons may not be obvious to the circumstances at hand.  Frequently these reasons stem from the past and represent a pattern of coping that was necessary and helpful at one time that our unconscious minds are reluctant to let go of.

We learn early on what is necessary for survival.  While most of us, fortunately, were never in real danger, children are perceptive to what is needed to fit into the environment in which they are being raised and to preserve their esteem or “emotional survival.”  They learn to adapt to their environment and develop ways of coping with stressors without ever realizing what they are doing.  For example, a young woman I worked with had been avoiding talking to her boss about an idea she had that she thought would help her company.  She hated speaking up in meetings, even though her co-workers were kind, and despite promising herself before each staff meeting that she was going to do it, she just “couldn’t.”  She was sure she had a social phobia and was doomed to forever be relegated to secondary roles.  In shifting her focus from how her behavior was problematic, to how it might have served her, at least at one time, her behavior began to make sense.  She was the sixth child of her busy family.  Her parents and siblings always had advice for her and being younger, whenever she gave an opinion, she was lectured by someone about how she didn’t really understand or how her opinion was wrong.  She learned early on that expressing her opinion was not “safe.”

“But that was so long ago,” people say.  That may be true, but our early experiences are foundations for our development and have years of reinforcement behind them.  The good news is that once you can acknowledge how your behavior served you, you can accept it as a pattern that was learned and had a positive role for you.  Once you do this, you can separate the child you were, who had few resources or choices, from the adult you are now.  The adult woman can take care of the little girl inside of her who was criticized so that she can handle the risk of presenting her idea to her boss.

When making a change, it’s normal to have anxiety and worry about all the “what ifs…”  Anxiety, in small proportions, can actually help you perform well in a new situation by giving you a bit of extra energy and the motivation to prepare.  Sometimes, however, anxiety can run amok.  You can paralyze yourself with the anticipation of situations that may well never happen but get in the way of your feeling good enough:  “What if I embarrass myself,” What if I’m not smart enough,” “What if she doesn’t like me,” or the most common concern, “What if I fail?”

Anxiety takes you out of the moment and is a projection of your fear into the future.  Unfortunately, it can sometimes become so powerful, the “what if” scenario you create in your mind feels like reality.  As in the blog post last week about coping with tempting “just” thoughts, when coping with anxiety, it’s important to recognize your inner “what if” voice is also just a thought.  In this way, you can distance yourself from the thought and keep it in check.  Some people find the mnemonic of “STOP” helpful:

Stop what you are doing and label your anxiety

Take a few deep breaths

Observe what is going on in your mind and body

Pull back perspective as an outside compassionate observer using your more rational mind

The technique of STOP is a way to break the cycle of anxiety as it builds.  “What if” statements become perceived threats and trigger your fight/flight reaction –heart racing, muscles tensing, sweating, and stomach aches.  By actively using your mind to take control of your thoughts, you can slow down your central nervous system responding and stay in the present.

Another similar technique came to me one day when I was driving, not only my car, but myself crazy.  I was worrying about a class I was asked to teach.  It was a new class for me, and while I was excited to expand my knowledge and experience, I began to obsess about it.  “What if the material is boring to people,” or “what If they ask me something I don’t know.”  The worries began to expand from the class to my job, thinking that if I didn’t teach the class well, they wouldn’t want me to teach other classes, and then it expanded to other areas of my life, and how if I messed up, everything would fall apart.  Finally, in my frenzy of “What if” thinking, I suddenly had the insight about what I was doing to myself.  I heard the echoes of all the “what ifs” and realized how I was working myself up for the benefit of my anxiety, not myself.  Then, literally I said aloud, “What if, instead of everything being doomed, what if everything is okay?”  I sat there with that thought in mind:  “What if…everything is okay?”  It was a new thought for me.  It made me laugh.  It was actually amusing to realize how novel an idea it was for me to acknowledge the fact that most of the time, everything was okay.

It’s important not to think of anxiety as your enemy, however.   It’s actually a sign of your caring and your sense of responsibility and desire to be successful.  Those are all wonderful things that give your life passion and meaning.  It’s when anxiety takes over that we need to take care.  Whatever technique you find helpful, the point is to help you manage your anxiety and use its energy to excite you rather than torture you.  Next time you hear a trail of “What ifs”, try to S-T-O-P, and then get going!

While doing your best to make a lifestyle change, beware of the word “just.”  It usually comes right before an impulsive act of giving in to temptation, such as “just tonight,” “just one,” or “just for now.”  It’s not that I’m advocating that you should never indulge yourself or bend your rules a little bit, it’s “just” that by making a decision to engage in the desired behavior in a more mindful way, you will help yourself both enjoy the behavior and have a greater chance of staying on track for long term change.

It’s normal to have days or evenings when you want to throw caution to the wind and break free from restrictions you’ve put on yourself.  Too often, however, it’s followed by a spell of remorse.  You wake up the next day upset and even angry at yourselves for “being weak” or “screwing up.”  After it’s too late you regret your impulsive behavior and wish you had done things differently.  That’s why it’s so important when making lasting change to watch out for “just” statements and recognize them for what they are, rationalizations.   Temptation rationalizations are a normal part of the change process, but often come at times we’re vulnerable to their pull.  That’s why it’s good to identify them when they happen and recognize them for what they are, “just” thoughts.

Temptation thoughts represent our old way of being and come most often when we’re tired, lonely, upset, or feeling less centered in some way.  They can also be a result of unintended or unexpected peer pressure, wanting to be a part of the group and do what everyone around you is doing.  An important way to deal with “just thoughts” when they happen is first to identify it.  By labeling your “just thought” as a “temptation thought,” you immediately put some distance between you and the potential behavior.  For example, you’re having a bad day and feel very lonely.  You run into your ex-boyfriend who was not a very thoughtful partner.  He shows interest in you and you are flattered.  A little voice inside your head says, “Wouldn’t it feel good to be together with him, just for tonight.”  But then you remind yourself that you have just uttered a “just statement.”  You recognize this as a way of fooling yourself into thinking that it would be fine to spend the evening with this man, forgetting the pain he caused you and the disappointment you would feel in yourself tomorrow.  Instead, you decide since you’ve had a tough day and need some company, you’d be better off calling a friend who makes you laugh or even renting a movie that inspires you.

Sometimes you will decide that you want to go ahead and have the piece of cake or skip the workout, or even smoke the cigarette or have the drink.  Change is not a straight line forward.  But by making a conscious choice, you are being more honest with yourself about your behavior.  In doing so, you give yourself a much better chance to recommit to your goal and truly keep it to the “ just one” you’ve decided on.