M O M E N T S
In so many different ways we can literally live a lifetime in
JUST A MOMENT
and sometimes it can be really tasty. . .
When I had some time in between two graveside services
I ducked into a middle-of-the-day-busy bakery
and yes,
ON PURPOSE
I took this
JUST A MOMENT Video
knowing full well that it would be difficult
if not next to impossible to HEAR my commentary
but so very easy to
SEE
to
FEEL A TASTY MOMENT OF LIVING
hopefully so much so
that it more than tempts you to go out
JUST FOR A MOMENT
to have a slice of tasty living yourself. . .
GO AHEAD
it’s not a morning or an afternoon or a whole day
IT’S JUST A MOMENT
STEP UP
TAKE A NUMBER
ENJOY
J U S T
A
M O M E N T
REGRETS. . .WE’VE HAD A FEW
We are all
s h a t t e r e d
in so many places
we can barely call it
B r O k e N e D
so we reframe it and call it
R E G R E T S
and not always the ones that
Frank Sinatra
belts out in
MY WAY. . .
which is exactly why we need to understand
How Regrets Can Help You Make Better Decisions
A new book explains what makes people prone to regret and how it affects our lives, for better and worse.
:
Have you ever regretted something you did or didn’t do in life?
If you’ve lived a long life, you probably carry many regrets, large and small. Some of my own regrets relate to my career (why did I never become a teacher and a basketball coach; a full-fledge writer), past relationships (why did I lose a good friend over a small disagreement), and parenting (why didn’t I respond instead of react well to my kid’s worries and unmet expectations?). No matter the regret, it’s hard not to wonder how things might have turned out if I’d only made a different—and better—choice at the time. I thought I was reading this book to help some of the patients I families I meet every day in the hospice setting. . .well. . .
Ruminating on past mistakes is a downer and can lead to depression or anxiety if it continues unabated. But a new book by psychologist Robert Leahy, If Only…Finding Freedom from Regret, suggests that regrets don’t always have to bog you down. If you understand how regrets work, recognize their effect on your decision making, and find ways to manage life’s inevitable disappointments, you can suffer less from regret and, instead, use your regrets as helpful guideposts for your life.
“Regret is a part of life, but it doesn’t have to take over and hijack you,” he writes.
The nature of regret
Regret can come in different forms—for something we did (like overeating or hurting our loved one) or something we didn’t do (like not graduating from college or not asking someone out on a date). Most people have a mixture of both types, though the latter tends to make us feel worse, writes Leahy.
According to research, the most common sources of regret involve our education, career, romance, and parenting (in that order). That’s because we tend to regret things that reflect bigger concerns and opportunities in life, rather than what we ate for breakfast.
Culture can affect how people experience regret, too, with people from more individualistic cultures usually having more regrets about their personal situation (like achievement or career) and those in collectivist cultures having more regrets about their relationships. And women and men differ some in how they experience regret, with women typically regretting romantic and sexual relationships more than men and men regretting inaction more than action.
Regret is associated with unpleasant emotions, like sadness, disappointment, guilt, and shame. But people also regard it as one of the most beneficial negative emotions, because it can be instructive. For example, if we regret how we behaved the last time we drank too much, we’re less likely to order a third round the next time we’re at the bar. Or, if we regret yelling at our child when angry, we may take a breath the next time we’re upset and respond with compassion.
Our regrets can teach us about ourselves, help us to avoid repeating mistakes, and encourage us to make better decisions in the future. On the other hand, if we use our regrets to beat ourselves up, or if we ignore them completely, they will not lead to growth. The key is finding the right balance, says Leahy.
“Regret doesn’t have to lead directly to self-recrimination,” he writes. But “never feeling regret is not a sign of wisdom or righteousness. It may be a sign you don’t learn from your mistakes.”
Why some people suffer from regret more
Some of us are more prone to regret than others, and Leahy provides multiple questionnaires within his book to help you identify where you fall on that scale. Though there is no way to eliminate regret completely—and the world would be worse if we did—there are factors that increase our chances of experiencing regret in a more negative way and suffering from it, says Leahy. Here are some of those risk factors.
Not tolerating ambivalence. Many life choices have pros and cons, and there are no guarantees about the future. But, if you can’t stand uncertainty, you are bound to avoid making hard choices, leaving you vulnerable to later regrets.
If Only…Finding Freedom from Regret (The Guilford Press, 2022, 246 pages). Falling prey to biases. We all have cognitive biases, but some influence regret more than others. If you suffer a lot from negativity bias (discounting or not even seeing the positives in your life), black-and-white thinking (thinking things are either all good or all bad), or catastrophizing (thinking that if something goes wrong, you won’t be able to handle it), it’s bound to affect how much you suffer regret.
Worrying about “buyer’s remorse” or how bad we’ll feel in the future. If you’re the kind of person who often anticipates feeling awful for making a choice, it may keep you from deciding on a course of action that could bring you happiness, increasing the potential for regret.
Having too many choices. “Regret is an opportunity emotion—the more opportunity we see, the more likely we are to regret something,” writes Leahy. For example, a college graduate with multiple job offers might regret taking one over another, especially if it doesn’t pan out. Having too many choices increases your potential for making the “wrong” one.
Being a perfectionist. If you expect to have an ideal, happy life all of the time and are not easily satisfied, you will be more prone to regret. “Maximizers” (people who seek out optimal outcomes) tend to feel more regret than “satisficers” (people who are content with good-enough outcomes), unless they can take steps to lessen their maximizing tendencies.
How regret can guide our decisions
“Regret is a possible element of any decision that we make,” writes Leahy. “But the likelihood that you will regret your decisions will depend on how you think about making your decisions and how you cope with living with the result.”
If you’re someone who lets past regrets fester in your mind, Leahy recommends that you fight against irrational thinking and think more realistically about where you are in life. He suggests using approaches from cognitive-behavioral therapy to question your assumptions. Here are some of his tips.
Remember that you don’t know things would have turned out better.If you imagine your life would have been better “if only…,” keep in mind that your assumption is not based on real evidence. Instead of focusing on where you might have been, turn toward the future and remember it can change based on the choices you make now.
Focus on the positive aspects of your current life, to balance out the negative feelings that come with regret. Your negativity bias can keep you preoccupied with what’s wrong rather than what’s right. So, it’s a good idea to practice gratitude for the good in your life—even for the small, simple things.
Don’t forget that sometimes things don’t turn out the way you wanted them to, even with your most thoughtful planning. Life can hand you lemons, but that’s not necessarily your fault. You cannot be omniscient; so, you need to accept that sometimes you will regret your choices. But that doesn’t mean you should criticize yourself endlessly. Better to learn from your mistakes than to punish yourself.
Accept tradeoffs and compromises. Not everything has to turn out just the way you wanted it to. You will stymie your progress if you insist otherwise and make yourself miserable in the process. So, aim to be a satisficer rather than a maximizer.
Overall, Leahy advises that, once you’ve learned whatever lessons regret can teach you, you can let go of unrealistic expectations about what might have been, enjoy your life as it is, and start planning for a better future.
“Look around you at what is in the present moment and hold on to it with a warm embrace,” he writes. “Because your regrets will only keep you from what you have and who you are and trap you in a fictional world that never was—and never could have been.”
Life isn’t always
(forgive the pun)
CRACKED UP
what it’s suppose to be
but then again. . .
when it comes at us in
BITE SIZE
Pieces
We have a better way of
NOT REGRETTING
and savoring all of the goodness out of it
we can. . .
S U M M E R I N G
I am not the only one who
THINKS
or most certainly
F E E L S
I T. . .
But I keep looking for the rest of Summer
as soon as the last sparkler loses its sparkle
on the 4th of July
which got me to thinking about things
a little beyond Summer
and this one Summer of 2023
being the last one any of us will
ever live. . .
h e n c e:
100 Summers
100 Summers from now
I’ll be gone
and so will everyone
I know and love
(and you too, dear reader)
My name won’t be
remembered or spoken
The Okay-ness
of this is that after
100 Summers gone
is there’ll be as many
Falls, Winters and Springs
taking their places as
100 Seasons before
without much explanation
(recently written for a 15 poems in 10 day challenge for local gems)
Uhhhhhhhhh
days gone by
are never really days
g o n e. . . .
ANXIETY BUSTER
I threw this out to a group that I was presenting to recently:
“HEY, HAVE ANY OF YOU WORRIED ABOUT WORRYING?
Everyone kind of laughed and began hushing to a few mufflecd chuckles as hands went up in the air. . .
WELL,
ARE YOU GUILTY?
I mean, it’s kind of hard to
BE THERE
for someone if you’re worrying about worrying
even you’re worrying about them. . .
If You’re Feeling Anxious,
Try This 2,000-Year-Old, Neuroscience-Backed Hack. . .
Julia Hotz from Time Magazine took a deep dive into our worrying. She reported that some 2,000 years ago, in the throes of a targeted chase to his death, a Roman philosopher named Seneca had a thought: “what’s the worst that can happen?”
Today, a growing body of research finds that a Seneca-inspired exercise—inviting the worried brain to literally envision its worst fears realized—is one of the most evidence-based treatments for anxiety. In scientific terms, that exercise is called imaginal exposure, or “facing the thing you’re most afraid of” by summoning it in your mind, says Dr. Regine Galanti, the founder of Long Island Behavioral Psychology, and a licensed clinical psychologist who regularly integrates imaginal exposure into her therapy.
As a subset of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), imaginal exposure relies on simple logic. Just as anxiety is created in your head, it can also be squashed in your head. And even though the most effective anxiety treatment is administered by a mental health professional over a long period of time, a growing brigade of psychologists are finding ways to help people do imaginal exposure in their own homes, on their own Two thousand years before imaginal exposure would be proven one of science’s strongest anxiety treatments, dozens of Greek and Roman philosophers had the same intuition about the theoretical value of putting worry in perspective.
In a letter to his friend Lucilius, around 64 A.D., Seneca wrote: “There are more things likely to frighten us than there are to crush us. We suffer more often in imagination than in reality. What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes, since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you.”
Dr. Marc Antoine Crocq, a psychiatrist at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire in eastern France, says that worldview had to do with their religious beliefs.
“They believed in a god (Zeus or Jupiter) who was rather distant and not interested in the daily life of humans,” says Crocq, who has researched the topic. “So they tried to understand the world and human functioning with a more materialist scientific approach.”
The philosophers’ conclusion, Crocq says, was that “pathological anxiety is a mental representation”—and therefore, something that humans can address themselves.
Dr. Stefan Hofmann, a professor of psychology and director of the Psychotherapy & Emotion Research Laboratory at Boston University, has proven this empirically and, like Crocq, has studied the theory’s deep historical roots. He references the ancient Greek philosopher, Epictetus, who wrote: “Men are not moved by things, but the view they take of them.”
As Hofmann explains, “The idea [behind that quote] is that we are always engaging with our environment to make sense of it, and so it really matters how we perceive things. Anxiety itself is a healthy, adaptive response to an environmental threat, but sometimes, those perceptions are maladaptive, if they’re not actually putting you in danger.” He points to the way people commonly fear spiders or snakes, or even social situations. “Sometimes we respond with emotional distress in situations where it doesn’t make sense to feel emotional distress.”
Correcting those maladaptive perceptions, Hofmann says, is at the heart of CBT, a practice he describes as “toning down the intensity of the emotional states” that follow anxiety, in order to feel better. When Dr. Aaron Beck, who died last week, coined the approach in the 1960s, he was interested in helping people recognize how their thoughts were often separate from reality.
And though each therapist may differ in precisely how they administer CBT, the elements of imaginal exposure—confronting the source of anxiety-provoking thoughts, and developing healthier thought patterns around them—is a common entry point.
In the decades since, CBT has consistently been considered one of the most effective practices to manage anxiety in the long term. Hofmann conducted one of the most widely cited literature reviews on its efficacy. And imaginal exposure, the small Seneca-inspired slice of CBT, is associated with a wide spectrum of mental health gains, including reduced worry and negative emotion, improved symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorderand increased ability to engage in the once-feared activity
Still, not all people have access to professionally-administered cognitive therapy. One study of 2,300 psychotherapists in the U.S. found that only 69% use CBT when treating anxiety and depression. And then there’s the problem of access: one Census Bureau survey indicates that more than one-third of Americans live in areas lacking mental health professionals. The problem has worsened over the past year. Just as the pandemic triggered unprecedented rates of anxiety, it also led to a shortage of therapists available to treat it. But even without professional supervision, psychologist Dr. Regine Galanti says there are simple CBT-informed techniques anyone can integrate on their own.
Before encouraging people to actively confront their worry, Galanti starts with a simple question: why is it there in the first place?
“People don’t often stop and think about what it is that they’re afraid of, or even that they’re afraid at all,” she says, describing a patient who’s scared of dogs and, as a result, avoids them.
After identifying the cause of someone’s fear, Galanti focuses on validating the emotion—not diminishing it or reassuring the patient. “We think naturally when someone’s anxious to say, ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s gonna be okay,’ but anxiety is not logical,” she says. “Often when we feel anxiety coming on, we do everything we can to get away from it, but we’re rarely successful, since we don’t follow it through to its logical conclusion. So these little worries just pile up, and you never actually give it the time and space to see what happens when it is there.”
Take, for example, the patient afraid of dogs. Galanti did something that perhaps seemed counterintuitive: inviting the woman to spend time with a dog, so she could face the fear head on. That worked well, Galanti says, but what about when people’s fears—like the death of a loved one—aren’t as plainly testable? “It’s about learning to handle uncertainty that we don’t know what’s going to happen,” she says. “But how can we orient ourselves to the present to say it’s not happening now?”
That advice was particularly apt during the early days of the pandemic, when uncertainty skyrocketed. At the time, Galanti advised people to set aside 15 minutes of worry time for themselves.
“Anxious thoughts tend to take over your thinking, and it ends up being a game of whack-a-mole—when you knock one down, another pops up,” she says. “So this strategy focuses on not postponing your worries, [instead] setting up a time where you can worry all you want.”
Through this strategy, Galanti encourages people to jot down whatever is causing them anxiety, and then to pick a dedicated time—ideally not before bed—to revisit those concerns. “The reason why this works is that it sets boundaries, so when a worry comes up at 9 a.m., you can say, ‘Hey, not now, your time is coming.’”
She says people rarely use the full 15-minutes of allotted worry time, but it helps put anxiety into perspective. ”Sometimes when you hit your worry list, you might find that the thing that bugged you at 9 a.m. that you thought would be the end of the world is actually not bugging you anymore at all.”
SO. . .
are you worried about worrying. . . ?
WHAT’S THE WORST THAT CAN HAPPEN
Psssssssssssssssssssssssst:
SAYING IT WON’T HAPPEN
doesn’t make it so
. . .THINK ON IT
for a solid planned 15 minutes
not an out-of-control-anxiety-filled
24 hours
and then
RINSE & REPEAT
FEEL BETTER
T H O U G H T S ?
DO ANY OF THESE STRATEGIES WORK FOR YOU?
Pssssssssssssssssssssssssst:
Don’t tell anybody, but I turn to music to feel better in almost any situation, You?
(My thanks to Polly Castor for the graphic.)
FEEL BETTER
THE VIDEO YOU WON’T WATCH BUT SHOULD
THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT/HELPFUL/INSIGHTFUL MONDAY BLOG VIDEO’S I HAVE EVER POSTED IN THE PAST SEVEN YEARS AND THERE’S A REALLY GOOD CHANCE YOU WILL NEVER WATCH IT, BUT SHOULD
THE MOST IMPORTANT 10 1/2 minutes you can spend for this entire year and the rest of your life. . .
(Or NOT; YOU can go on, not connecting and worrying and fretting AD NAUSEAM)
AMBIENT STRESS
Feeling Off? It Could Be ‘Ambient’ Stress
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat. . .?
Jamie Ducharme, a reporter for Time Magazine tells us that Americans’ mental health tanked during the first year of the pandemic. More than 36% of U.S. adults experienced symptoms of anxiety or depression in August 2020, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By January 2021, the number was above 40%.
It’s not hard to see why. A novel and scary virus was spreading without vaccines to slow it. Cities and states were in various degrees of lockdown for much of 2020, with many people forgoing special occasions and visits with friends and family. Isolation and fear were widespread, and people had every reason to feel acutely stressed.
But even as lockdowns lifted, people got vaccinated, and life resumed more of its normal rhythms, many people continued to feel…off. In an American Psychological Association survey published in October 2021, 75% of people said they’d recently experienced consequences of stress, including headaches, sleep issues, fatigue, and feeling overwhelmed.
Now, more than two years into the pandemic, many people still haven’t bounced back. One reason could be “ambient stress”—or “stress that’s running in the background, below the level of consciousness,” says New York-based clinical psychologist Laurie Ferguson, who is director of education development at the Global Healthy Living Foundation, a nonprofit that supports people with chronic illnesses.
“There’s something amiss, but we’re not registering it all the time,” Ferguson says. “We’re always just a little bit off balance. We kind of function at a level like everything’s fine and things are normal, when in fact, they’re not.”
In a 1983 article published in the journal Environment and Behavior, researcher Joan Campbell described ambient stressors as those that are chronic and negative, cannot be substantively changed by an individual, usually do not cause immediate threats to life (but can be damaging over time), and are perceptible but often unnoticed. “Over the long run,” Campbell wrote, these stressors could affect “motivation, emotions, attention, [physical] health, and behavior.”
Campbell cited examples like pollution and traffic noise, but it’s also an apt description of this stage of the pandemic. In March 2020, the pandemic was an in-your-face stressor—one that, at least for many people, felt urgent and all-consuming. Two years later, most people have adapted, to some degree. Most people are vaccinated, the news isn’t broadcasting the latest case counts 24/7, and life looks closer to 2019 than 2020. But, whether we’re conscious of it or not, we’re still bearing the psychic toll of two years of death, disease, upheaval, and uncertainty, as well as smaller disruptions like changes to our social or work lives, Ferguson says.
Even ambient stress can have health consequences, as Campbell pointed out. Humans evolved to deal with short-term stressors, but we’re not as good at coping with chronic stress, explains Laura Grafe, an assistant professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College. Chronic stress has been linked to conditions including high blood pressure, diabetes, sleep issues, and mental health and cognitive disorders.
Constant stress can also compound the effects of other stressors. “Everything else just seems worse with the chronic stress of the pandemic going on in the background,” Grafe says.
Ambient stress doesn’t have to zap all the joy from your life, though. In a 2021 study, Grafe and her co-authors examined how pandemic stress and coping strategies affected sleep. Her team found that a person’s sleep quality wasn’t necessarily dictated by their overall level of pandemic-related stress, but rather by how well they coped with that stress. That suggests stress, itself, isn’t necessarily the problem—it’s unmanaged stress.
When stress becomes so routine that we stop acknowledging it, we’re less likely to manage it effectively. As Cambell wrote in 1983, “coping is most likely to occur when the stressor is still novel.” Halfway through 2022, many people have abandoned soothing hobbies like bread-baking, yoga, and knitting that they adopted in spring 2020.
That’s why it’s important to develop sustainable coping strategies, says Niccole Nelson, a postdoctoral research associate in the University of Notre Dame’s psychology department who has also studied pandemic stress. “There’s no single coping strategy that is inherently good or bad,” Nelson says, but it’s often helpful to mentally reframe a stressor as less threatening. That’s difficult to do with something as serious as the pandemic, but Nelson suggests trying it on a smaller scale: finding ways to appreciate the positive aspects of working from home, for example. (Grafe suggests mindfulness exercises and cognitive behavioral therapy to cope with stress.)
Giving your brain new stimuli can also help during a prolonged period of stress, Ferguson says. Even small changes, like eating something new for breakfast or taking a different route for your daily walk, can introduce some healthy novelty. Physical activity is also a tried-and-true stress reduction tactic, she adds.
Simply noticing and naming your ambient stress can also go a long way, Ferguson says. “Even people who have gone ‘back to normal’ still have that ambient stress running, and they may not realize they’re a little more short-tempered, or they’re a little less hopeful,” she says. “It’s subtle, in many ways, and harder to notice” than full-blown pandemic stress, but just as important to manage.
Have you noticed maybe what you haven’t always recognized. . . ?
Maybe the best way to see the
Ambient Stress
in yourself
is just to
S P O T
it in
A N O T H E R. . .
FUNNY BUSINESS
A few years ago I became a
C L L
. . .that’s right,
a real bonafide
CERTIFIED LAUGHTER LEADER
even though
LAUGHING
and attempting to make people
H A P P Y(IER)
has been a life long pursuit of mine. . .
enter the infamous JOYOLOGIST
STEVE WILSON and his beautiful bride, Pamela
I attended their WORLD LAUGHTER TOUR
Steve Wilson| Psychologist | The Joyologist | Cheerman of the Bored
Director-National Humor Month
http://www.worldlaughtertour.com
http://www.humormonth.com
http://www.stevewilson.com
http://www.laughterfoundation.org
Skype: s_h_wilson
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/World-Laughter-Tour/57984062492
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevehwilson
Twitter: (@joyologist)
Phone: 614-855-4733
Blog: http://www.laughterandhumor.blogspot.comand it was literally
LIFE CHANGING. . .
I have had the privilege/pleasure of actually hosting several LAUGHTER SESSIONS and have shared some of those techniques in several of the presentations I do and believe me, no pun intended. . .
THIS IS NO FUNNY BUSINESS,
in fact the one simple-start-using-it-at-this-very-second-give-a-away
IS FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT. . .
That’s right, even fake laughing for a mere 15-30 seconds gives you all of the health benefits of actually laughing as if you were watching your favorite comedy or having a laughfest with your friends. . .
In fact, SMILING has the same kind of benefits, especially when you feel the least like cracking a smile. . .
and yet even FAKE SMILING opens wide those big Carotid arteries that supply the head and neck with oxygenated blood and instantly changes your mood and demeanor. . .
FUNNY BUSINESSThis past Sunday, Steve DIRECT MESSAGED me the image below
It made me take a look at a pile of books I had in a corner section of the library I have in my basement and WHAAAAAAA-LAAAAAAAA I found thisLord Is a Whisper at Midnight https://a.co/d/bW9xGyHbook that I hadn’t opened in a while but slid in a chair on a rainy afternoon and let it READ ME as much as I pursued it. . .
FUNNY BUSINESS
I was COLOR BLINDED no more and the smiles weren’t fakeTHANK YOU, STEVE WILSON
for HOW-TO
that made the WANT-TO
feel kind of
F U N N Y
naturally. . .
F R I T T E R I N G
We all do it
. . .in fact,
it may be the one thing that every single one of us are
E X P E R T S:
F R I T T E R I N G
SOMETIMES BEING ALL THINGS TO ALL PEOPLE
MEANS BEING NOTHING
TO NO ONE. . .
We are all so busy
DOING THE BUSY
that we let the
PRECIOUS
slip us by
without much noticing it
. . .THE EXTRA of the o r d i n a r y
and then much to late
with much less than an
exhausted sigh
it’s ALL gone. . .
WE WISH FOR MUCH
but seldom for
the REALIZATION OF NOW
the RIGHT HERE
the MOMENT
the NOW
NOT TODAY
NOT EVER
as long as you ask often:
WELL. . .
What answer you
Never make a
QUESTION
what you can have as a
LIFE STYLE STATEMENT
FRITTER ON
(no more)
C R A Z I E S
T H I S
is just like us
. . .a mess
Until we come together
amazing things happen. . .
when your crazy
meets my crazy
and we know that it just fits
I T
doesn’t just feel like Christmas
it is
C H R I S T M A S
forever
NOW
Multiple that
with half the people in the world
with the other half people the world
And this world
just doesn’t become a crazy place
it becomes a craziest
of the craziest place
And
ON EARTH
AS IT IS IN HEAVEN
BECOMES THE CRAZIEST
OF THE CRAZIEST
NORMAL
OF ALL
FOR ALL
FOR AN EVER
ALL. . . .
Connect
them
l i n e s