Research indicates a surprising discovery about how our face affects our emotions.
I love it when I learn something new that adds a bit of joy to life. In the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, I read of a study done by three men – Paul Ekman, Wallace Friesen and Robert Levenson, on what happens in the body as a result of facial expressions.
Volunteers were “…hooked up to monitors measuring their heart rate and body temperature – the physiological signals of such emotions as anger, sadness, and fear. Half the volunteers were told to try to remember and relive a particularly stressful experience. The other half were simply shown how to create, on their faces, the expressions that corresponded to stressful emotions, such as anger, sadness, and fear. The second group, the people who were acting, showed the same physiological responses, the same heightened heart rate and body temperature, as the first group.” (p. 207)
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” ~ Rumi
Waking up in a jail cell with little to no recollection of how you got there really isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time—okay, at least it’s notmostpeople’s idea of a good time—yet thanks to living in active addiction for many years, I’ve managed to accomplish this feat on more than a few of occasions.
Today, I have more than a couple of years insobriety, a first in my life since the age of fifteen. This isn’t my first time in recovery, though it’s definitely been the longest and most heart-centered attempt I’ve ever made. I’ve knocked on deaths door numerous times as a result of being an addict and spent more time in detoxes, rehabs, psychiatric hospitals and jails than I care to remember.
I was actually messaging with someone from my past recently, someone I hadn’t spoken with in quite a long time as a result of addiction and other circumstances. At one point she wrote, “I used to check the obituaries for you, Chris” and I didn’t even blink an eye at that statement.
For all intents and purposes, the way I was living should have killed me ten times over and yet, for whatever reason, I’m still here, I’m still alive, something so many addicts can’t say as they’ve lost their lives to thisinsidious disease.
I attribute the better part of these years in recovery to something I’m grateful to havefinallylearned, something I’d let slip through my ears at 12 Step Meetings for far too long, so I ask you to hear me when I say; the healing process (which goes for both addicts, and non-addicts alike) is always,alwaysan inside job.
I teach 18 hours a day, 12 days straight, nonstop. When I teach weekend seminars, I do 32-40 hours in two and a half days.
In my opinion, you can drink all the green juice, eat the superfoods, inject yourself with IV supplements, do crazy exercise routines, all of which are great…..
But unless you have your mind, your heart, your spirit right, none of that really matters.
Why?
Your unresolved stuff will simply bring you down to that level at which you haven’t healed yet. So I found a lot of health approaches to be “Outside-In” rather than “Inside-Out.”
Self care needs to be positioned above all else. If we don't take adequate measures for self care, all the self relief activities we delve into, are a pretty useless excercise.
Self care has been defined in a medical journal as" a multidimensional, multifaceted process of purposeful engagement in strategies that promote healthy functioning and enhance well being." This might sound complicated, but in simple words we need to just say that Self care is extremely essential for our physical and mental well being.
MIND BODY CONNECT
When you have taken adequate steps to care for your mind and body, you are well equipped to handle the daily stressors that life seems to throw at you. The same thing which could be a stressor for one person, could be an exhilarating adventure for another. To each his own actually.
It’s easy to let the stresses of daily life overwhelm us and send us into unhelpful thought patterns. Before I learned mindfulness, I suffered greatly from depression and even had thoughts of suicide. Now, though – thanks to a wonderful therapist and my committed study and practice of mindfulness techniques – I have tools right at my fingertips that can help me through the hardest times. My goal is to share these tools with as many people as possible so others can feel empowered to help themselves, too.
I invite you to try these three mindfulness techniques for yourself and see what impact they have on your mental state and well-being.
“Troubled by questions all my life, like a madman, I have been knocking at the door. It opened! I had been knocking from the inside.” -Rumi
I've Been Thinking...
This week, I interviewed Dr. Mehmet Oz about his mother’s recent Alzheimer’s diagnosis. As his friend, it ached me to learn that he and his family are now confronted with this mind-blowing disease. Long after the interview was over, though, I found myself thinking even more about something Dr. Oz had said to me about himself. I found myself thinking about how he said he felt shame and guilt that he had missed the warning signs of his mother’s health.
Summer is amongst us and in full bloom. It usually signifies a happy season for most of us. As children Summer meant no school, longer daylight hours and more time to just enjoy youth. As an adult, it usually means vacations, barbeques, and delicious seasonal foods. I remember as a child looking forward to the last day of school because it meant that boating with my family on the Long Island Sound was coming-up.
“ Spring is when severely depressed people can be motivated enough to take action and do something. In most people, depression creates overwhelming feelings of listlessness and disinterest, so the idea of putting together a plan to commit suicide is too difficult during the winter, when depression symptoms may be worse in some people, he (Dixon) said. "Another hypothesis: [Patients] know how they're affected by seasonal winter depression. They anticipate they'll feel better when spring and summer roll around," Dixon said. "When they don't, that's a catalyst for suicide." One of the oldest theories holds that people who are depressed and withdrawn during the winter don't bounce back in spring, as other people do.”
Are you ready to move beyond obsessive ruminating and worry? Are you ready to move beyond fear, anxiety and depression? What works for me can work for you too!
I used to spend hours and even days ruminating about different things – a conflict with someone important to me, a work situation, finances, time pressures. I would obsessively worry or try to figure out the “right” thing to do or how to get the outcome I wanted. Of course, I would end up drained, anxious and confused, but this didn’t deter me from this addiction. It was in my blood, absorbed from my mother and grandmother.
In some wounded part of me, I believed that ruminating, obsessing, and worrying would somehow give me control over the outcome of things. I was afraid not to obsess – not to try to control others and outcomes.
But ruminating, obsessing and worrying created very low-frequency feelings of fear, anxiety, and depression…
I feel that your emotional well being is what holds the answer to your overall happiness and joy. Happiness is what the human being is looking for. This comes to us through a combination of two things, we need to focus our concentration on these constantly.
PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL BEING
This is what is important. It means, you combine, Feeling good with Effective Functioning. This basically includes, feeling good, happy and satisfied with life.You need to feel capable and we'll supported. There are only subtle differences in all these factors. They are basically almost the same, or we can even say, on a similar vibrational frequency.
HAPPINESS
This per se is supposed to be associated with, more money, higher performance, helping others, generally all behaviors that you can identify with success. Psychological well being means, feeling happy and doing well.
Imagine for a moment a man walking through his office when his boss passes by and gives him a blank look. Suddenly the thought pops into the man’s mind that his boss is criticizing him or doesn’t like him.
Now, as he starts to fear this idea, a negative picture is produced by his imagination. His mind focuses its attention on this disturbing image. And the more he attends to this dark dream, the further into its labyrinth he descends, strengthening its presence and power to further frighten him. A heartbeat later, he has no doubt: the boss has it in for him!
This thought grows in authority for him, tormenting him for the rest of the day and causing him to snap at his family when he gets home. And all of this suffering is born of what? The conjunction of a passing glance and a moment of misdirected attention!
Here’s the amazing thing about this illustration, and what we want to learn from it: this whole drama has been played out inside of the man – storyline, stage, cast, and leading characters. But he doesn’t see how this painful state is self-created; instead he believes it has been thrust upon him by someone else – his heartless boss! So, what else can he do – being in the dark as he is to his true condition – but try to rid himself of his stressed feelings?
In today's fast track world people are suffering from many facets of anxiety disorders. Loneliness is a key factor, closely followed by fear, which could further lead to depression.
Many people chance themselves upon panic attacks due to these feelings, as being constantly inwardly drawn and tuned in without adequate outside support, leads to a condition we could name as a panic disorder.
People who could be categorized into this, are the ones who are coping with challenging situations, nervous disorders, fear based problems and a general state of uneasiness.
Most people are trying in their own variant ways, to deal with these emotions:
MALADAPTIVE TECHNIQUES
These are the practices followed to cope with the emotional anxiety challenges. Most of these methods are incorrect.They will only make the emotions go away temporarily. On the other hand may even lead to enhanced anxiety, and may have a negative effect in the long run.
Modern medicine has triumphed on many fronts in conquering diseases and extending life, but its greatest advance is almost totally unsung. Health and longevity have made it possible to see the body as our greatest ally. After centuries of inevitable sickness and early death for the vast majority of people, the human body is poised to become our greatest ally on a new front: consciousness.
If you can step outside the accepted image of your body as a machine, you will discover that it is actually not a separate physical object but united with your mind as one consciousness—call it the bodymind. This step alone rids you of many damaging attitudes. As a thing separate from ourselves, the body is an obsessive source of worry over sickness, aging, and death. Equally obsessive is whether someone’s body is beautiful enough, strong enough, appealing enough to the opposite sex.
Leonardo di Caprio has it. Often, he feels the urge to walk through doorways multiple times. So does Daniel Radcliffe. It used to take him as long as five minutes or more to turn off a light. Then there’s Charlize Theron who claimed that she would lose sleep thinking about other people’s disorganized cabinets. And of course, there’s Howie Mandel who refuses to shake hands with people he meets. This is what obsessive-compulsive disorder — known simply as OCD — looks like for different people.
“You have OCD!,” exclaimed my friend back in college. She was a Psychology major and we were talking about something I don’t even remember. I told her that the first thing I did when I got home from school was wash my hands. I told her that I did this, too, after I’ve read the papers. “What’s wrong with washing your hands?” I replied, “Don’t you know how dirty public transportation is? And how can you not wash your hands after touching a newspaper? Your fingers turn black from the ink!” I didn’t believe her ‘diagnosis’ of my apparent disorder and I could honestly say I didn’t suffer from OCD — until much later.
There are no recent statistics on OCD sufferers but according to a 1997 National Center for Biotechnology Information report, 2% of the global population suffered from it at that time. In the U.S., it affects about 1% of Americans. A Psychology Today article explains that OCD manifests in different ways, among them washing, cleaning, repeating, and orderliness.
Losing control
BeyondOCD.org states, “Although it has been established that OCD has a neurobiological basis, research has been unable to point to any definitive cause or causes of OCD.”
For me, though, I know when things happen out of my control, OCD rears its ugly head. I become a scrubaholic. I want everything to be clean and I get upset when someone messes up my sparkling clean stainless-steel sink and clutter-free kitchen countertop.
Anyone who has gone through depression—whether their own or someone they know or care about—would know it is such a dark place in which to find yourself to be. Many people suffer from emotional “dips” from time to time and others go through temporary episodes like Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) or post-partum depression but there are those who have been suffering from it for most of their lives. But whatever is the case, not only is the experience the very description of internal hell, its social stigma as a “mental illness” makes it even worse for those going through it. Being classified as mentally ill is terribly isolating as you are made to think that you are not “normal” and that the only way to sanity-land is by way of medication. My experience tells me different.
Twenty years ago, I went through major changes in my life. My marriage fell apart, which took me away from my only child. Needless to say, it was one of the most tumultuous times in my life. Sometime after, a new relationship led me to an entirely different destination than I had originally planned, to a country whose language I didn’t speak.
I’ve written here before about my conversations with Dr. Gabor Maté, and his life-changing bookIn the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a comprehensive exploration of what addiction is, its causes and consequences, and much more. As well as being a bestselling author, Dr. Maté is a renowned speaker, highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics, including addiction, stress, and childhood development.
I was curious about family members who are dealing with a loved one’s addiction. What can they do for those who are caught in the grips of active addiction? It mattered to me because when people are that deep in addiction, they’ve lost themselves—they’re gone in a way. I know I was. I know there was nothing my family could have done no matter how much they wanted to help me.
Gabor didn’t agree with me. According to him, “You don’t know that. What you do know is what they tried didn’t work, but you don’t know that there’s nothing they could have done. In one sense, you are 100 percent right: There’s nothing they can directly do to change your mind. There’s nothing they can directly do to change your mental status. There’s no way that they can talk to you, advise you, control you, beg you, accuse you. That does not mean there’s nothing they could have done.
All of us are waves in the same ocean, different experiences on the same journey. Separate self syndrome is a common condition that leads to disease and suffering. It is caused by the belief you are an independent self separated from the world, at the mercy of vast uncontrollable forces. This sense of a separate self gets deeply ingrained in habitual patterns that take up all your attention and energy. You become scared of death, consumed with desire. Your separate self strikes out against the "other" it believes is trying to destroy it. It fills itself up with things promising to satisfy and sustain you, wearing you down into crisis and disease, always searching for answers.
Most of us have blind spots -- situations in our life that we can’t see clearly or, consciously or unconsciously, choose to avoid. Whether we realize it or not, on some level, we even fight to keep our avoidance alive. We justify our excuses and buy into our rationalizations of why we should or should not do something.
On a daily basis I hear stories from people who, despite what they say they truly want in life, remain in the cage of their comfort zone. They validate their justifications by telling themselves that they should:
Not get into a relationship because they might lose themselves it,
Avoid looking at their bank balance because it might impact their feelings of security,
Or if they are like me, they convince themselves that they should not get on the scale because it may trigger their body and eating issues from the past.
In the article, Laura Vanderkam, a productivity expert and author of Off the Clock: Feel less busy while getting more done, advocates finding time for yourself as a means to greater happiness overall. “Life just feels better when you have things in your hours that you want to do,’ Ms. Vanderkam said. ‘There’s moments where time almost has no meaning because we’re so happy about what we’re doing. The more time you can spend in that zone, the better life feels...
Maybe you can carve out a few hours of really fun, cool stuff per week. That will make the other 165 hours that are in a week feel a lot more doable,’ she explained.”
All of us have goals, no matter how modest or majestic they may be.
Some of us have specific, written goals that are broken down into action items that we can check off as we accomplish each step, while others may have more general goals that are longer term and less formalized.
Unfortunately, regardless of the types of goals you’re trying to achieve, any people-pleasing or perfectionist tendencies you may have can keep you from realizing them.
In fact, for those of us struggling with perfectionism, just deciding which goals to pursue can be a challenge.
It’s not that those of us struggling with perfectionism can’t see a multitude of options and possibilities. We can.
But all too often, us perfectionists find ourselves frozen in place at the outset as we attempt to choose the ultimate, ideal goal that will bring us the greatest benefit for the time and energy we invest.
And, perfectionism doesn’t just make it hard to get started. It can also make it extremely difficult to move forward and implement the steps necessary to achieve our goals.
If any of this feels familiar, I highly recommend you start by choosing a goal based on what matters most to you and not what you think you “should” be doing. It’s all too easy to set a goal based on the criticism of others or what you see others trying to achieve, but you’ll have a much harder time following through on the steps necessary to achieve your goal if the goal itself doesn’t resonate deeply with you.
Allowing ourselves to wallow in the past or the future is the favorite game of the human mind. This constant yo yo situation is a source of a new level of stress, beyond the existing stress level in your life. There are many ways our mind strategizes in order to manage the stress in our lives, yet at most times stress continues to nag at us.
This is like a warning to take charge of our lives and begin to focus on our lives in a more specific way. The important thing is for us to realize that it is imperative to live in the present moment.
POSITIVE CHANGE
This is only possible if we accept our present condition, understand it, realize its impact on our state of mind and our health, and also our power to be able to change this.
