H E Y. . .
Wait a Moment
DID YOU. . . ?
Actually about 6 minutes of moments
with a severely powerful, undeniable
TRUTH:
1 out of 1 of us will die;
though we know this brutal truth,
few ACT
as if this is a bonafide truth
and we live, well,
like we’ll live forever. . .
THE SECRET:
Life gets Lived best
when every moment is lived
as if it might be the last
or better
as if it’ll never be lived again. . .
WAIT A MOMENT:
ONE OUT OF ONE OF US DIES
. . .and. . .
LIFE
GOES
ON
R E A L L Y
(uhhhhhhhh. . .that’s a STATEMENT not a QUESTION)
THESE WORDS
Guilty I have piles and piles of books that I have not read even even at the moment that I’m ordering other ones that will make a part of yet other piles.
I lie to myself and say oh I’ll get to that or wow this really looks good and I’ll read it immediately and of course it ends up in another pile. Sometimes the nearer the pile the closer I will get to reading it but this past week, my friend Beth told me that I needed to take this book out of a pile and put it on top of the next one to read and I’m glad she did. . .
Rarely do, I read the authors note before I write in a story or a book but this time I did and once again, I’m really glad that I did, because on the second page was an excerpt from the Hippocratic oath.
One of the reasons why I like, holding a physical book in my hand is because I can dog ear all the pages; I can write in the margins, I can underline, and I can write what I want to write at that time when I read a passage. . .
This excerpt from the Hippocratic oath literally has grabbed me around the throat where I can’t get past too many other pages before I come back to that and oh yes, it is dog eared and oh yes, it has been underlined and exaggerated on the side because even though I’m not a physician, I like to think that I’m a caregiver who tries to offer some kind of comfort to every person that I meet whether I know them or not; whether they are in hospice or in a hospital setting or not. This passage, kind of brings mirror to face and lets me see, allows me to understand and removes some protective buffers I insulate myself with so that I can fully, unabashedly experience my WHY. . .it has nothing to do with a vocation or a paycheck so much as a lifestyle.
As a mere human just BEING
sit with this again
and this time don’t let it wash over you
so much as
SINK
throughly
INTO YOUR
Y O U E S T
OF YOU
JUST A MOMENT
Seriously. . .
t a k e
J U S T
A
M O M E N T. . .
or at least
Pssssssssssssssssssssssssst:
That was 9 years ago; it’s even shorter now
So I’m going to switch things up. On my Wednesday Blog, I usually do an educational piece that usually reads anywhere from 3 to 8 minutes
and given the information ahead
THAT’S
WAY
TOO
L o N g
so beginning with this blog post
on Wednesday’s I’ll be doing a quick
(less than 2 minutes)
video that’ll take you,
(you’ve got it)
JUST
A
MOMENT
If you wouldn’t mind,
I’d like your feedback or your feelings on this
new format
but only if it’s
JUST A MOMENT
otherwise my attention span of a gnat
might not be around to
get the message
Just sayin’
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
PEOPLE PLEASER
It’s really sneaky, in fact for me, it starts out with this one simple thing: CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG? I mean we all share the same biology can’t we just get along and make sure that we live and let live and if at any give opportunity, give someone the benefit of the doubt? Maybe that’s what starts out for me, being a perpetually habitual lifelong people pleaser. . .and just when I think I am way past that and though it’s on my map, it’s in a place I use to be, but no longer am until I’m suddenly NOT. . .
That urge to BE ALL THINGS TO ALL PEOPLE THAT I MAY SAVE SOME AND SERVE ALL still JACK-OUT-OF-THE-BOX jumps out of me; hence, I’m always interested in any information that identifies the PEOPLE PLEASER in me and more, hints at what to do about it
People-pleasers are at a higher risk
of burnout,
says Harvard-trained psychologist—
how to spot the signs. . .
![](https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/107244165-1684521016050-gettyimages-735932519-knsf01327.jpeg?v=1684677601&w=929&h=523&vtcrop=y)
The price of being a people-pleaser can be steep — especially for your mental health.
People-pleasers are especially prone to burnout at work, says Debbie Sorensen, a Harvard-trained clinical psychologist based in Denver.
And being a constant yes-person is a double-edged sword: You might feel guilty telling others “no,” and resentment every time you say “yes.”
You don’t need to let go of your people-pleasing tendencies entirely to avoid burnout — past research has shown that being polite, friendly and supportive at work are all important traits that can help you be more productive and happier in your job.
The difference, Sorensen explains, is that people-pleasers tend to have difficulty setting boundaries, which can be “really exhausting” and lead to “chronic stress,” she warns.
3 signs people-pleasing is hurting your mental health and career
If you frequently take on more responsibility than you can comfortably manage because you’re afraid of disappointing someone, your people-pleasing tendencies could be pushing you to the brink of burnout.
While people-pleasing looks different for everyone at work, Sorensen says there are three common signs to watch out for:
- Saying “yes” to every request for help, even if it interrupts your own work
- Disregarding your feelings when something is done or said that upsets you because you fear potential conflict
- Agreeing to unrealistic assignment deadlines
People-pleasing isn’t just dangerous for your career because it can lead to burnout — it can make you lose sight of your own needs and professional goals.
“When you are constantly putting other people’s needs before your own, it becomes that much harder to focus on your work and advance in your career,” says Sorenson.
How to stop being a people-pleaser at work and avoid burnout
The first step in alleviating overwhelm and burnout is learning how to set boundaries.
“It can be uncomfortable to set boundaries at work, but next time you’re tempted to pile more responsibilities on your plate, pause and ask yourself if you really want, or need, to take that on. And fight the knee-jerk reaction to say ‘yes’ to everything,” says Sorensen.
Curbing burnout and letting go of the habits that might be doing you more harm than good is an imperfect process that takes time, says Sorensen, so be consistent in your efforts, but try to avoid the pitfalls of self-criticism.
Don’t look at saying “no” as a reflection of your self-worth or capabilities. Instead, think of setting boundaries as you protecting your energy, goals and priorities so you can be a more effective employee, says Sorensen.
“You just have to keep tuning in and reminding yourself that time off from work, in any amount, is really, really important,” she adds, whether it’s resisting the urge to work after-hours or taking a longer lunch break. “We all deserve the time and space to recharge.”
BEING A CARING CATALYST doesn’t mean fulfilling every need, every time, it means taking the Light of your day and sharing as it has been shared; no need to ever make the SIMPLE, COMPLICATED–EVER
LIGHTING ANOTHER’S CANDLE IS THE SUREST WAY TO MAKE SURE THAT NEITHER OF YOU WILL EVER WALK IN DARKNESS. . .or suffer from BURNOUT
A LETTER TO YOUR HIGH SCHOOL SELF
With Proms mostly over and High School Graduations very much on the the horizon, somehow this song, these words seem very appropriate. . .
Letter To My High School Self (Be Kind) By JJ Heller, David Heller, and Ginny Owens
I’m writing you this letter ‘Cause I’ve walked in your shoes I hope that you will read this When you’re feeling confused
The hardest part of high school Is living in between The person you’re becoming And the kid you used to be
Dizzy from highs and lows You can’t see which way to go I’ve been there too Here’s what you do
Be kind Be strong Believe You belong Love God Work hard Just be who you are
You want to feel important But don’t be fooled by fame ‘Cause everyone who loves you Already knows your name
And when you have a house someday There won’t be trophies on display There’s so much more Worth living for
Be kind Be strong Believe You belong Love God Work hard Just be who you are
Let go of the last times Celebrate the first times And keep your heart wide open
Be kind Be strong Believe You belong Forgive Yourself Don’t be afraid to ask for help Love God Work hard Just be who you are. . .
AND JUST WHAT WOULD YOU WRITE TO YOUR HIGH SCHOOL SELF
Psssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst. . .
THAT HIGH SCHOOL SELF
IS STILL HERE
Hopefully
L I S T E N I N G
L E A R N I N G
L O V I N G
(always loving, hoping for a little love in return and finding, having, keeping it)