Develop your ability to move forward with stress management techniques

Description of the video:

Kelley faculty presenter: Nichole Alspaugh Williams, Ed.S, LMHC, NCC

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Power of Positive Psychology: New Habits for Work and Life. We are now in week three, where we will be talking today about managing stress on a personal level. Today's agenda is to first cover two different techniques and strategies about how to handle negative thoughts in order to reduce your stress. We'll then move into some benefits of meditation. And then finally, I'll give you your tasks and your happiness habits for next week. So the first thing that we will start with is the cognitive behavioral model. But before I get into that, I do want to call your attention to the disclaimer at the bottom of the screen that what I'm providing for you today is for educational purposes only. If you find that this seems like it would be really helpful for you. If you're struggling. Please don't hesitate to reach out to a local mental health professional who will be able to help you with these strategies. So the cognitive-behavioral model I have up here on the screen for you. And if you go to someone who practices cognitive behavioral therapy, they are not going to spend a lot of time in your past figuring out why you do what you do now based on what happened in your childhood. This is based in the here and now, and it focuses on what you can control, which are your thoughts, behaviors. So the idea here is that something happens, that's the situation. You have a thought about what happens. It's that thought that causes your feeling. It's not the situation that causes the feeling. So the thought causes the feeling, and the feeling causes the behavior. So the example that I use to explain this to my students when I'm talking about it is a situation that happened a couple of years ago when I decided to study for my licensure exam. This is an exam that only fifty - Approximately 50% of people pass the first time. And I had been out of my master's and my EDS program for 13 years. So that was my situation. Just matter of fact. You can imagine my trepidation at such a thing. I had to memorize all the diagnoses in this book. I had to learn the effective treatments for, for the diagnosis. It was a beast of a test. So you can imagine my thoughts. The thoughts that came to mind immediately were, I can't do this. There's no way I waited too long, I will fail. So my, my emotions weren't great. I was feeling sad, I was feeling defeated. I was embarrassed that I had waited so long. And so my behavior was that my brain just shut down and I couldn't get any, any of the information into my brain and so I did nothing. I just stopped studying. So the heart of CBT. So that's what happens. So let's talk about how, how we change that. So negative thoughts happen automatically, so that negative thought of I will fail happened automatically. And it led me astray. So you need to slow down your thoughts. This process I'm going to talk about is clunky and uncomfortable at first until you really start using it and get practice with it. Once we've slowed down our thoughts, we identify the negative thoughts. Test whether they're true or not. Change that negative thought. If it's an untruth thought, that of course then changes your feeling and then the behavior. You first have to recognize your thought is negative, you test it for accuracy. You do evolve a better way of thinking which improves your feelings and your actions. So taking a look back at this again, so situation remains the same. But I consulted with a psychologist who specialized in preparing people for this exam I was about to take. And she had we write down on an index card. If I study, I will pass. And she had me put that next to the area where I studied. So that changed my thought from there's no way I could ever do this to if you just sit down and break it down and study, you will pass. That gave me peace. It made me feel calm. It made me feel hopeful. And so my behavior then changed so I was able to sit down and start studying. So what you're looking for in, in these thoughts, these "stinkin think" - "stinkin thinkin", if you will, are cognitive distortions. And examples of the cognitive distortions that, for instance, that I was using here, could fall under either fortunetelling or catastrophizing. So let me switch, and I know this is going to be hard to see, but I will have this in the resources for you. But catastrophizing is seeing only the worst possible outcomes of a situation. I was definitely doing that. Fortune telling. The expectation that a situation will turn out badly without adequate evidence. If you can read over these cognitive distortions on your own - those are two I specialize in by the way, I'm saying that tongue-in-cheek, but seeing which one of these are common for you and it will help you start to notice those so you can start testing your, your thoughts. Also in the resources, I will have a template that you can use that can walk you through how to change your thinking in order to change your feelings and lower your stress. Alright, moving on, the next theory that I want to talk about is acceptance and commitment therapy or ACT. It's not A-C-T, It's ACT. And when I went to the class about this, the trainer joked about how when he goes into businesses to talk about this, he calls it acceptance and commitment training because businesses don't like the therapy. So I hope we're all in a place that we can call it by its actual name of acceptance and commitment therapy. So we have two definitions of happiness that we talked about last week. The first one is the fleeting sense of happiness, just feeling good, a sense of pleasure. You buy something new, you eat something good. It's, it's gratification and it tends to be fleeting. What we're talking about here, and I added a couple of bullets to it for this week, is the definition of happiness that we're working with is living a rich, full and meaningful life. Working towards things that matter and acting according to what we stand for. So when we look at ACT versus CBT, CBT combats negative thinking with clear thinking. You're testing your thoughts and you're replacing your thoughts. When we look at ACT, Your thoughts are just your thoughts. ACT encourages you to accept your thoughts and the realities of life rather than try to change them. The idea is that you distance yourself from your thoughts. To mark those as, as thoughts, you defuse them. And once distanced, then you can take action to live your life according to your, to your values. And ACT can be really helpful for workplace stress, especially with things you can't control. This is not to say that you shouldn't try to change things that you can to make them better. But there are a lot of things for most of us in our jobs that we can't control and ACT can be really helpful with that. So I bring this up here, not to go into it because we don't have time, but just to talk about how while CBT is a linear model, we went from situation to thought, to emotion to behavior. ACT is in a hexagon. And you can use, start anywhere in here with the goal of increasing what they call your psychological flexibility. This is beyond what we can go into today, but what I do want to talk about is something that's worked really well for me within ACT, which is diffusion. So when we are using ACT to handle our thoughts, whether the thought is true or not, is much less important than whether it's helpful or not. So when you have a thought that's bothering you, the first thing you should ask is, is this thought helpful? If it is, then pay attention and do something about it. If it's not helpful, then diffuse it. So some example, a couple of examples I have for you. I'm incompetent. Is that helpful? Yeah, we're talking imposter syndrome here. Is it helpful to you and how you live your life to be telling yourself that you're incompetent? Does it help you live the life you want? Probably not. So if you are, have a value of lifelong learning and you're telling yourself that you're incompetent. If you can defuse that thought, step away from it and kind of put it out there. It frees you up to be able to work towards that lifelong learning value. Let's take it to the personal. A lot of us are parents. A lot of us have had the thought, I'm a terrible parent. Does it help you to beat yourself up about being a terrible parent? No. But if you can defuse that thought, step away from it, you can work towards your value of raising happy, well adjusted kids. So diffusion, that's how we get away from, that's how we step away from these thoughts. And here's where this, is where it differs from, or one of the many places it differs from CBT. You make room for these unpleasant thoughts without fighting them. So CBT, you're fighting the thought, in ACT, you are making room for them without fighting them. And there are many diffusion techniques. The one I'm going to share with you today, it's, we're going to use the "I'm incompetent" or the imposter syndrome as the example. So I encourage you after I explain this, to stop the video and try this with a distressing thought that you've been having. So let's say that you're, you're feeling really bad about yourself at work. Feeling like you're incompetent. People could see through you. You're just having these thoughts. In order to diffuse it, you put a few words ahead of it. So, I'm having the feeling that I'm incompetent. And you just think that through a few times: I'm having the feeling that I'm incompetent. Go a step further. I notice that I'm having the feeling that I'm incompetent. That is making it more into just a thought that's out there. And that allows you just to see it as a thought. To see it as a story. And there's even a technique where you name it. Oh, I'm having my incompetence. That's why incompetent story again. That's my terrible parents story again. And it allows you to move past it so then you can act in line with your values. So just the act of diffusion can make you feel better. But the goal, and I'm reading this I know, is to diffuse it to the point that you can start acting in accordance with your values. So by taking a step away, by saying I'm having the feeling that I notice, I'm having the feeling that it allows you to get away from that thought. And that allows you to start working towards the values that you have in your life. If this has been interesting to you at all, this, this diffusion technique, I highly recommend this book, The Happiness Trap. I picked it up at the beginning of the pandemic because there was a lot we couldn't control at the beginning of the pandemic. There still is a lot we can't control. I got 24% through this book and I was already recommending it to my friends. I felt so much better. So if this is intriguing to you, this is a great book to pick up, and I'll have a link to it in our resources. My final bit of new information for you this week is that of meditation. Meditation not only, well, mindfulness is a big part of ACT, but meditation helps reduce stress. It also boosts happiness and we'll talk about the happiness piece in a later session. But this will just be in brief because we're running tight on time. But I will have the link to this study and our resources. But meditation has been proven to preserve the aging brain. It reduces activity in the brain's "Me Center". There was a study at Yale that proved that people that meditate have less activity in the part of their brain where, where the mind-wandering occurs, thoughts about the self, and that's where rumination happens, and worry and fear. It rivals antidepressants to reduce depression and anxiety. The effect size of meditation on depression and anxiety is the same as the effect size as antidepressants. Now it's not a great effect, a great effect size, it's 0.3, but it rivals that. So not to say to get off of antidepressants, but add this to your toolkit and it can help with depression and anxiety. It can lead to volume changes in key areas of the brain. It increases areas that increase learning and memory and decreases areas where we're fear, anxiety and stress live. Just a couple weeks can improve concentration and attention. It can be really helpful for people with ADHD. The study that was cited talked about people that improved - after meditation improved verbal reasoning on the GRE by 16 points, which is pretty impressive. And it reduces anxiety and social anxiety that ties to a bullet, a couple bullets up there. And then it can help with addiction. There was a study done on smoking with the American Lung Association program. But it's a really interesting article and I'll have that linked in the resources for you. Alright, we have come to our tasks in our happiness habits for this. So I would like you to continue your gratitude journal. I would also like you, as you are coming up against distressing thoughts, identify some thoughts to either test through CBT or to accept and try to diffuse through ACT. There will be, I've talked about the CBT resources that will be under our resources section. Don't forget about The Happiness Trap, the book and journal about your, your attempts to do this. And last but not least, I would like you to meditate for five minutes each day. You can use apps like Headspace or Calm. YouTube has, has meditation videos out there. And if you'd like to continue with our previous habits using, doing something from our happiness quadrant every day. Doing a random act of kindness. But the ones that I would definitely like you to do between now and next week are the three over there on the left. Thank you for coming. Thank you for your attention. And I will see you next week.