Private Practice Psychology

We all feel sad sometimes. Sadness is a normal emotion that can make life more interesting. Much art and poetry is inspired by sadness and melancholy. Sadness almost always accompanies loss. When we say goodbye to a loved one we usually feel sad. The sadness is even deeper if a close relationship has ended or a loved one has died.

Sadness also helps us appreciate happiness. When our mood eventually changes from sadness toward happiness the sense of contrast adds to the enjoyment of the mood.

Here are some ways to experience normal sadness in a healthy way and to allow this emotion to enrich your life:

• Allow yourself to be sad. Denying such feelings may force them underground, where they can do more damage with time. Cry if you feel like it. Notice if you feel relief after the tears stop.

• If you are feeling sad, plan a sadness day. Plan a day or evening just to be alone, listen to melancholy music, and to observe your thoughts and feelings.
  Planning time to be unhappy can be actually feel good. It can help you ultimately move into a more happy mood.

• Think about the context of the sad feelings. Are they related to a loss or an unhappy event? It is usually not as simple as discovering the “cause” of the sadness, but it may be possible to understand factors involved.

• Sadness can result from a change that you did not expect, or it can signal the need for a change in your life. Change is usually stressful, but it is necessary for growth.

• Know when sadness turns into depression. Get help if this happens rather than getting stuck in it.

Get help if you experience more than a couple of the following symptoms of depression:

• Persistent sad, anxious, or “empty” mood
• Feelings of hopelessness, pessimism
• Feelings of guilt, worthlessness, helplessness
• Loss of interest or pleasure in hobbies and activities that were once enjoyed, including sex
• Decreased energy, fatigue, being “slowed down”
• Difficulty concentrating, remembering, making decisions
• Insomnia, early-morning awakening, or oversleeping
• Appetite and/or weight loss or overeating and weight gain
• Thoughts of death or suicide; suicide attempts
• Restlessness, irritability
• Persistent physical symptoms that do not respond to treatment, such as headaches, digestive disorders, and chronic pain.

A funny thing happens when you don’t make a practice of listening to people. They find others who will. Anytime employees, spouses, colleagues, children, or friends no longer believe they are being listened to, they seek out people who will give them what they want. Sometimes the consequences can be disastrous: the end of a friendship, lack of authority at work, lessened parental infleunce, or the breakdown of a marriage.

What are the reasons why people fail to listen???

1. Lacking Focus

For some people, especially those with high energy, slowing down enough to listen can be challenging. Most people tend to speak about 180 words a minute, but they can listen at 300 to 500 words a minute. This disparity can create tension and cause a listener to lose focus. Most people try to fill up that communication gap by finding other things to do, such as day dreaming, think about their daily schedule or mentally review their to-do list, or watch other people.

2. Experiencing Mental Fatigue

Former president Ronald Reagan told an amusing story about two psychiatrists, one older and one younger. Each day they showed up at work immaculately dressed and alert. But at the end of the day, the younger doctor was frazzled and disheveled while the older man was as fresh as ever.

“How do you do it?” the younger psychiatrist finally asked his colleague. “You always stay so fresh after hearing patients all day.”

The older doctor replied, “It’s easy. I never listen.”

An eighty-nine year old woman with hearing problems visiting her doctor was told, “We now have a procedure that can correct your hearing problem. When would you like to schedule the operation?”

“There won’t be any operation because I don’t want my hearing corrected. I’m eighty-nine years old, and I’ve heard enough!”

So if you’re tired or facing difficult circumstances, remember that to remain an effective listening, you have to dig up more energy, concentrate and stay focused.

3. Selective Hearing

You have already stereotyped the people whom you are communicating with and this can be a huge barrier to listening.

“She’s just another woman. All she has to say revolves around shoes, handbags and clothes. Nothing will interest me.”

“She’s talking about her trip to Europe…oh yeah, been there done that. I won’t get anything new from listening to what she has to say.”

It tends to make us hear what we expect rather than what the person is actually saying. Most of us think that we don’t fall into this trap, but we all do to some degree.

4. Carrying Emotional Baggage

Nearly everyone has emotional filters that prevent him or her from hearing certain things that other people say. Your past experiences, both positive and negative, colour the way you look at life and shape your expectations. and particularly strong experiences, such as traumas or incidents from childhood, can make you tend to react strongly whenever you perceive you are in a similar situation. As Mark Tawin once said, “A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. He’ll never sit on a cold stove either. From then on, that cat just won’t like stoves.”

If you’ve never worked enough through strong past emotional experiences, you may be filtering what others say through those experiences. If you’re preoccupied with certain topics, if a particular subject makes you defensive, or if you frequently project your point of view onto others, you may need to work through your issues before you can become an effective listener.

5. Being Preoccuped with Self

Simply said, if you don’t care about anyone but yourself, you are not going to listen to others. But the ironic thing is that when you don’t listen, the damage you do to yourself is ultimately even greater than what you do to other people.

Recent research has linked lack of sleep to a wide range of ailments, including memory problems and obesity. Learn more about some of the top reasons why you should get a good night’s sleep.

Sleep May Help You Learn More Effectively

Researchers have long believed that sleep plays an important role in memory, but recent evidence suggests that getting a good night’s sleep can improve learning. In one study, researchers found that depriving students of sleep after learning a new skill significantly decreased memory of that skill up to three days later (Winerman, 2006). Known as the memory consolidation theory of sleep, this notion proposes that sleep serves to process and retain information learned earlier while awake. While there is research both for and against the theory, many studies have shown that sleep can play an important role in certain types of memory.

Research Suggests Sleep Deprivation May Contribute to Obesity

In addition to affecting memory and learning, lack of sleep has been linked to body weight. In one 2005 study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, overweight participants were found to sleep less than participants of a normal weight (Vorona et al., 2005). Brandon Peters, About.com’s Guide to Sleep Disorders, reports that poor sleep at age 30 months can predict obesity at age seven. While researchers do not yet understand exactly how sleep disruption impacts appetite and metabolism, getting a good night’s sleep certainly can’t hurt your weight loss or weight maintenance efforts.

Sleep is Important for Managing Stress

According to many experts, most people need between seven and eight hours of sleep each night. What happens when you don’t get enough sleep? Symptoms such as moodiness, anxiety, aggression and increased stress levels can result. About.com’s Guide to Stress Management, Elizabeth Scott, suggests taking “power naps” to combat drowsiness, reduce stress and increase productivity. While sleeping more certainly won’t eliminate all stress, it can help increase your readiness to cope with the stress of day-to-day life.

Sleep Can Help You Make Better Decisions

Have you ever found yourself struggling to make relatively simple decisions after a night of poor sleep? In addition to reducing such things as response time and accuracy, lack of sleep has also been linked to difficulty making good decisions. In one study published in the journal Sleep, researchers found that sleepiness has a serious impact on the ability to make effective decisions (Roehrs, 2004). Another study suggested that sleep impairs decision-making when gambling by increasing expectations of potential gains while minimizing losses. If you’re facing a challenging decision, make sure that you are well rested so that you will be at your best.

References

_{American Academy of Sleep Medicine (2007, May 5). Sleep Deprivation Can Threaten Competent Decision-making. ScienceDaily. National Sleep Foundation. (2008). Longer Work Days Leave Americans Nodding Off On the Job.}

_{Peters, B. (2008). Why so fat and tired?}

_{Roehrs, T., Greenwald, M., Roth T. (2004). Risk-taking behavior: effects of ethanol, caffeine, and basal sleepiness. Sleep, 27(5), 887-93.}

_{Vorona, R. et al. (2005, Jan. 10). Overweight and Obese Patients in a Primary Care Population Report Less Sleep Than Patients With a Normal Body Mass Index. Archives of Internal Medicine, 165, 25-30.}

_{Winerman, L. (2006). Let’s sleep on it: A good night’s sleep may be the key to effective learning, says recent research. Monitor on Psychology.}

All animals, including humans, use emotional displays to interact with one another. Aggression is the most dramatic example. Dogs growl, cats arch their backs, snakes hiss, horses stand up and wave their front legs menacingly, bulls kick sand, apes beat their chests, and humans puff up their muscles. (Early humans use to roar, which is why you talk in a more menacing voice when angry and want to scream in traffic.) There are just as obvious though less dramatic gestures of courtship, affiliation, playfulness, and interest in humans and other social animals.

More recent observations suggest that all social animals, including humans, put out much more subtle emotional signals as well — most of which are outside conscious awareness — and that these, too, affect how we interact with one another. Like all social animals, we can pretty much feel when someone is putting out positive or negative emotional energy, even if he or she makes no overt behavioral indication. Although we can’t tell what they’re thinking, we can read the emotional tone of most people — whether they are quiet or whether they are shouting — with a fair degree of accuracy. Of course, the accuracy declines as we move further from loved ones, friends, neighbors, and members of our own culture.

How many times have you asked someone you know, “Is anything wrong?”

“No, nothing’s wrong,” is the abrupt response. You don’t buy it because you know there is something wrong.

Even when we consciously try to shut out our unconscious perceptions of one another, we retain our natural sensitivity to each other’s emotions. That’s why you feel different when you ignore your spouse, compared to the way you feel when he or she is not in the room with you. It’s why you feel different when you’re the only one walking down your side of the street, compared to how you feel when the sidewalk is crowded with other people, whom you try to ignore.

This innate sensitivity to one another’s emotional states derives from the social nature of our central nervous systems. From the beginning of our time on this planet, humans lived in groups and tribes. We are very much social animals, hard-wired to interact emotionally, in subtle yet profound ways, with everyone we encounter. On a deep, visceral level, we continually draw energy from and contribute energy to a dynamic web of emotion that consists of everyone we interact with and everyone with whom they interact. Each person you pass on the street subtly reacts to you and vice versa. Each person you pass in turn subtly influences each person he or she passes. In the web of emotion, you never react to just one person but to everyone that person has recently encountered.

Whether we like it or not, we are emotionally connected to virtually everyone we encounter. Our only choice is to make the connection positive or negative, to put out compassion or download resentment, to clean up emotional pollution, or contribute to it.

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” - Cicero

While many readers have noted my efforts and articles on self-improvement, what I haven’t stressed as much is the beauty of becoming content with what you have and who you already are.

I’m definitely a goal-oriented person — I always have my eye on a goal, whether that’s writing a book, climbing a mountain, improving my blog, waking early, or one of a dozen other goals I’ve had (and usually achieved) in the last couple of years. And once I’ve achieved a goal, I begin looking for another.

So isn’t that a contradiction? Doesn’t that seem to indicate that I’m not content with my life? Not at all. I’m extremely content with my life, with what I have, and with who I am. I have accepted that I am the type of person who will always be striving for a goal, the type of person who enjoys a challenge, and who enjoys the journey. It’s not the goal that matters to me — it’s the journey to get there that is meaningful for me. And I’m content with being that type of person.

So contentment isn’t a matter with being content with your situation in life and never trying to improve it. It’s a matter of being content with what you have — but realizing that as humans, we will always try to improve, no matter how happy we are. If we don’t, we have given up on life.

“Happiness is self-contentedness.” - Aristotle

Life

We choose whether we are happy or unhappy.

Read that sentence again if it’s not already something you consciously practice in your daily life. If you’re unhappy with your life right now, I will venture to guess that it’s because you’ve chosen to be unhappy. That sounds harsh, but in my experience it’s completely true.

[I cannot speak to whether this concept of happiness applies to everyone — especially clinically depressed or those with similar disorders, people who are starving or homeless, people who have undergone massive tragedies or abuse, or others in such circumstances. However, for most readers, I believe the principles will apply.]

You might say, “But my life is crap! Of course I’m going to be unhappy!” And I hear you: I’ve had those times when my job wasn’t going well, when my relationships weren’t going well, when my finances were very bad, when my life was a mess.

But listen to this: I’ve had those conditions at several points in my life. And sometimes, I was unhappy in those kinds of conditions. And others, I was happy and content. So I’ve come to the conclusion — and it’s proven true time and again — that it’s not the conditions that make me unhappy, but my choice of thoughts, of attitude, of behavior.

What behaviors and thoughts and attitudes were different between my times of unhappiness and happiness? When I was unhappy, I focused on all the bad things in my life. Not only that, but I continually thought about how bad they were, and would complain, and would ask, “Why me?” I would let myself sink into inaction and eventually depression. I would be grumpy and cause those around me to be unhappy. That, in turn, only made the situation worse.

Let’s look at the times of happiness, in contrast: I focused instead on the good things in my life. Because while I had problems at my job and with my relationships and with my finances and health and all that … there were still good things. At least I had a job! At least I had someone who loved me! At least I wasn’t sick! At least I wasn’t bankrupt and homeless! I counted, instead, my blessings. I do this when things aren’t looking so good, and it turns me around.

I was happy, despite my conditions, because I chose to be happy. I found contentment in what I already had, instead of wishing I had something else, instead of being discontented with what I had. Contentment not only made me happy, but it transformed my life in many ways. Here’s how.

Happiness

This is perhaps the most obvious area affected on this list, because many people see “contentment” and “happiness” as one and the same. In many ways, they are, but it’s really a matter of focus. When you’re happy, it’s really a state of being, influenced by a number of factors, including contentment.

Contentment, on the other hand, is a matter of being satisfied with what you have. It focuses on what you have and don’t have instead of just being a state of being. It influences happiness. However, you can choose to be content, just as you can choose to be happy, and if you choose to be content, you will be happy.

There are many ways to become happy — you can become happy by doing certain things (running, getting into flow, reading, sex), you can become happy because you are loved or in love, you can become happy because you just won a competition or a million dollars. Being content is just one way to be happy, but it’s a great way.

Simplicity

Simplicity, of course, means many things to many people, but for me contentment is at the core of simplicity. It’s about being content with less, with a simpler life, rather than always wanting more, always acquiring more, and never being content.

Simplicity means examining why you want more, and solving that issue at its root. At the root of wanting more is not being content with what you have. Once you’ve learned to be content, you don’t need more. You can stop acquiring, and start enjoying.

Finances

Really this is the same as simplicity, but I wanted to show it from a financial angle. The reason we get into financial trouble, oftentimes, is that we buy more than we can afford. And the root of that buying is buying things we want instead of only things we need, and the root of that is not being content with what we already have.

Finding contentment with the stuff you have and with a simpler life can lead to buying less, to buying things we need instead of want, and to only spending what we can afford.

Relationships

Many times it seems that we’re never satisfied with our significant others. They don’t behave how we want them to. That’s often at the root of relationship problems, as many-headed as those problems may seem.

Instead, learn to be content with the person you love, just as they are. This isn’t always easy, as we are usually trained (by our well-intentioned but never-satisfied parents, and others around us) to do just the opposite — to try to change people. However, you will only find trouble if you try to change your significant other. You might get them to change their behavior (but most often not), but they will be unhappy, and in turn the relationship will suffer.

Children

As mentioned above, parents are often not satisfied with their children. They need to be cleaner, better behaved, better in school, more organized and studious, more courteous and kind and compassionate, better groomed and better at sports. Well, that leads to the relationship problems mentioned above, later in the children’s lives, as they have learned to never be satisfied with others and to try to change them.

It also leads to inferiority complexes in our children, in unhappiness, and in bad relationships with them. Instead, we should learn to love our children unconditionally, to accept them for the people they are, and to let them know this through not only our words but our actions.

Accept children for who they are, and they will be happier, and so will you.

Jobs

Should we be content with our jobs? Well, I won’t say that you should stick with a dead-end job and a boss that treats you like dirt. If you’re unhappy with your job, change it. That’s been my approach and it’s worked for me.

However, I have learned that being a content person in other areas of my life, and being content with my life in general, has generally helped me at any job. Discontented people tend to be complainers, or grumpy, or negative. That leads to problems at the job. People who are content tend not to complain and tend to have a more positive attitude, and in my experience that almost always leads to more opportunities, both within the job (promotions, new projects, etc.) and outside the job (job offers, networking, etc.).

Social change

I’ve heard some writers say that people like me, who preach happiness and contentment and a positive outlook on life, are teaching people to accept social injustice and not strive for change. I disagree completely, and as someone who would like a freer society than the one in which we currently live, I have given this much thought.

My favorite social disrupter, Gandhi, had two seemingly contradictory quotes on the subject of contentedness. The first: “Man’s happiness really lies in contentment.” And the second: “Healthy discontent is the prelude to progress.”

This might seem confusing until you look at how Gandhi brought about change. He was discontent with the system of oppression in his country, so he sought to change it. However, he was content as a person, with who he was and what he had in his personal life. This inner content allowed him to have the inner power to face (and eventually beat) the very powerful authorities in his country at the time. He could face them because nothing they could do to him could take away his happiness. They could take away all his possessions, throw him in prison, take away even food, and he was content.

He taught his fellow countrymen the same lesson, to make the best of what they had in India (making their own simple clothing, making their own food) instead of wanting the commercial goods from foreign countries. Being content with such simplicity would give them the independence from foreign commercial powers, and eventually (as they are part of the same organism) foreign political powers.

So social change can still happen if you are content with yourself, with your life, but not content with the system of oppression around you. This system, in my opinion, is responsible for holding us down, for the deaths of millions of people in Third World countries … but it isn’t until we learn to be content with what we have, and free ourselves of our dependence on commercial goods, that we will be able to change the system for good.

Getting to Contentment

So if contentment is so great, how do you get there? That’s not always easy, but here are some things that have worked for me:

• Count your blessings. I mentioned this above, but for me it’s the best way to get to contentment. When you find yourself unhappy with something, or with what you don’t have, take a moment to count all the good things in your life. And I would bet there are many. It puts the focus on what you do have rather than what you don’t.
• Stop, and remind yourself. When you find yourself unhappy with someone, or trying to change them, stop yourself. Take a deep breath, and remind yourself that you should try to be happy with that person for who he/she is. Take a moment to think about the good things about that person, the reasons you love that person. Then accept their faults as part of their entire package.
• Stop, and consider why you want something. When you feel the urge to buy something, think about whether it’s a need or a want. If it’s a want, take a pause. It’s good to wait 30 days — keep a 30-day list … when you want something, put it on the list with the date, and if you still want it in 30 days, you can buy it). Consider why you want something. Are you not content with what you already have? Why not?
• Take time to appreciate your life! I like to reflect on my life, and all the good things in it, on a regular basis. I do this when I run, or when I watch the sunset or sunrise, or when I’m out in nature. Another great method is a morning gratitude session — think of all the things and people you’re thankful for, and thank them silently.
• Show people you appreciate them. It’s good to appreciate people, but it’s even better to show them. Give them a hug, smile, spend time with them, thank them out loud, thank them publicly.
• Breathe, and smile. Once again, advice from one of my favorite monks, but it works in this context. Sometimes when we take the time to breathe, and smile, it can change our outlook on life.
• Learn to enjoy the simple things. Instead of wanting to buy expensive things, and spend money on doing things like eating out or entertainment, learn to enjoy stuff that’s free. Conversations and walks with other people. Spending time outdoors. Watching a DVD or playing board games. Going to the beach. Playing sports. Running. These things don’t cost much, and they are awesome.

During the first half of the 20th century, many psychologists believed that showing affection towards children was merely a sentimental gesture that served no real purpose.

Behaviorist John B. Watson once even went so far as to warn parents, “When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument.” According to many thinkers of the day, affection would only spread diseases and lead to adult psychological problems.

During this time, psychologists were motivated to prove their field as a rigorous science. The behaviorist movement dominated psychology and urged researchers to study only observable and measurable behaviors. An American psychologist named Harry Harlow, however, became interested in studying a topic that was not so easy to quantify and measure: love.

In a series of controversial experiments conducted in 1960s, Harlow demonstrated the powerful effects of love. By showing the devastating effects of deprivation on young rhesus monkeys, Harlow revealed the importance of a mother’s love for healthy childhood development. His experiments were often unethical and shockingly cruel, yet they uncovered fundamental truths that have heavily influenced our understanding of child development.

The Wire Mother Experiment: Harlow noted that very little attention had been devoted to the experimental research of love. “Because of the dearth of experimentation, theories about the fundamental nature of affection have evolved at the level of observation, intuition, and discerning guesswork, whether these have been proposed by psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, physicians, or psychoanalyst,” he noted (Harlow, 1958).

Many of the existing theories of love centered on the idea that the earliest attachment between a mother and child was merely a means for the child to obtain food, relieve thirst, and avoid pain. Harlow, however, believed that this behavioral view of mother-child attachment was an inadequate explanation.

Harlow’s most famous experiment involved giving young rhesus monkeys a choice between two different “mothers.” One was made of soft terrycloth, but provided no food. The other was made of wire, but provided food from an attached baby bottle.

Harlow removed young monkeys from their natural mothers a few hours after birth and left them to be “raised” by these mother surrogates. The experiment demonstrated that the baby monkeys spent significantly more time with their cloth mother than with their wire mother. “These data make it obvious that contact comfort is a variable of overwhelming importance in the development of affectional response, whereas lactation is a variable of negligible importance,” Harlow explained (1958).

Fear, Security, and Attachment: In a later experiment, Harlow demonstrated that young monkeys would also turn to their cloth surrogate mother for comfort and security. Using a strange situation similar to the one created by attachment researcher Mary Ainsworth, Harlow allowed the young monkeys to explore a room either in the presence of their surrogate mother or in her absence. Monkeys in the presence of their mother would use her as a secure base to explore the room.

When the surrogate mothers were removed from the room, the effects were dramatic. The young monkeys no longer had their secure base to explore the room and would often freeze up, crouch, rock, scream, and cry.

The Impact of Harlow’s Research: While many experts derided the importance of parental love and affection, Harlow’s experiments offered irrefutable proof that love is vital for normal childhood development. Additional experiments by Harlow revealed the long-term devastation caused by deprivation, leading to profound psychological and emotional distress and even death. Harlow’s work, as well as important research by psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, helped influence key changes in how orphanages, adoption agencies, social services groups and child care providers approached the care of children.

While Harry Harlow’s work led to acclaim and generated a wealth of research on love, affection, and interpersonal relationships, his own personal life soon began to crumble. After the terminal illness of his wife, he became engulfed by alcoholism and depression, eventually becoming estranged from his own children. Colleagues frequently described him as sarcastic, mean-spirited, misanthropic, chauvinistic, and cruel. Yet Harlow’s enduring legacy reinforced the importance of emotional support, affection, and love in the development of children.