Hi, folks. So we are moving into the second half of Emotion Regulation.
Previously, we've been focusing on ways to change emotions. This half of the module is focusing on ways to reduce your vulnerability to emotion, mind, and also to build a life worth living.
The focus of these skills is going to be a little bit different, but equally helpful. These are more preventative, as opposed to changing. So there's going to be four skills that we cover over the next several weeks.
Today's task is the skill of accumulating positive emotions. We're going to focus today on short term. So you might be asking, why do we focus on positive events, there's a few reasons why this is super important. So bare minimum positive events, increase positive emotions, and decrease negative emotions. And I'm pretty sure that all of you can get on board with that. From just like a human perspective, we need these things in our lives in order to be happy in order to have the type of life that we want. And for most of you, in our very first session, when we talked about what you were looking for, in terms of therapy, being happy, or content, or peaceful was top of the list.
The other big reason why we focus on them is that the absence of them, so too much deprivation or other negative events, causes big time negative effects. For our mental health for our physical health, we tend to feel more fatigued, more down more anxious, because we don't have any of the buffering effects of positive events in our lives. Furthermore, we need them to balance out negative events, all of us are going to experience struggles and strife and stress in this life, it is unavoidable. And we will be experiencing that for the rest of our life. If that is all that we focus on, if all of our attention goes to preventing or responding to these negative events, we are not going to have lives of peace and contentment.
Okay, so some key points to consider as we go forward in this, you need both short and long term.
Today, we're going to talk about just like basic activities that you could do, literally right now when you got off the computer. However, next week, we're also going to be focusing a lot on sort of big picture values. And we'll talk more about that in our upcoming session.
But I want you to think about values as being sort of the goalposts or compass of your life, and that doing things that are consistent with them.
A key value for me is being a compassionate mother, doing things that are consistent with them are going to lead to us feeling better, and doing things that go against those values are going to lead us to feel worse, okay. I also want to point out that it is possible to have pleasant events even in periods of deprivation, so in jail, in an abusive relationship, in living with family, who you really don't get along with, and all sorts of circumstances, people can find small ways to bring joy into their life, even if it's just for a few minutes.
For all my folks who are struggling with the after effects of trauma and the various ways in which they are avoiding things in order to keep themselves or their family members safe, or at least feel like they're keeping them more safe. Please note too, that avoiding negative events can sometimes lead to avoidance of positive events.
Similarly, avoidance of negative emotions leads us to not be able to feel positive emotions. So if you're always terrified that something's going to happen to your child, the way that something happened to you, this might lead you to avoid taking them to parks, to family gatherings. To Allowing them to ride their bike up and down the street, these types of things.
How do we do this?
First, we got to think about planning and preparation, we want you to try and do at least one pleasant thing each day, I don't care what this is, if this is pausing after you get out of the shower, to take two or three minutes to rub some really yummy smelling lotion on your skin and just fully be there with that sensory experience.
Or if it's getting out of your house and going for a walk around the store or taking your kids on a rock hunt, or whatever it is for you at least one of these per day. This can range from 30 seconds to hours at a time, depending on how much time you have to dedicate to it.
The next thing is using your problem solving skills. So finding time for self care, finding time for pleasant events, and finding pleasant events that are doable based on any issues that you have with transportation with the financial limitations that all of us are experiencing, and so forth, using your problem solving skills to overcome these barriers, because again, even in the most difficult situations, we can find ways to incorporate it, we just have to get really creative sometimes planning ahead of time.
So some of you all tend to fall on the more impulsive end of the spectrum, and can feel really constrained by having a set schedule or routine, I hear that.
If you plan, or at least have sort of a menu of activities to choose from in advance is way way more likely that when the proverbial poop hits the fan during the week, and things are stressful, and your kids have a bunch of needs, and there's a million things going on that you will actually do it.
If you have it planned the chances of you not doing it increase quite a bit. And we want to avoid avoiding whenever it doesn't make sense. So using there's going to be times when you're feeling afraid, there's gonna be times when you're feeling down, or you really, really don't want to do be as pleasant events.
We are going to push you to try and do them anyway, even though it's hard with the knowledge that it will get easier, the more you practice.
Finally, lots of you guys have judgmental thoughts about observing, deserving or not deserving pleasant events in your life. These are not effective. They are judgments. And so I want you to try and sort of take that out of the equation, you're not going to be able to prevent those thoughts from happening. But you can, and absolutely should.
That's a judgment, try and use your mindfulness skills to overcome those when they occur. And remember, like I said a minute ago, the more that you do these positive events, the more that you are going to be motivated to do more, because like we talked about earlier in emotion regulation, emotions love themselves. So the more energy that you put towards positive events, the more you're going to feel positive emotions and the more that you will then want to experience that more.
So when you're actually in the experience, it is key that you actually use your mindfulness skills to be present with them. How many of us have gone for a walk or taken a shower or done something that we wanted to do to help ourselves to feel better, but the entire time we spent just thinking about this crappy thing that happened the day before?
Chances are when you left that event, it didn't actually feel very good, he probably didn't feel any different at all. Try and focus using your observe, describe and participate on whatever is happening in front of you.
Your mind will wander all human minds do it's gonna get pulled to past negative events, future worries, your job is to try and notice when that happens, and really bring your focus back to whatever it is that you're doing. To allow you to participate as fully as possible.
Your job is also to be unmindful of these worries or judgments, so don't give them much of your attention.
If they pop up in your brain, which they will do, noticing, oh, there's a word, oh, there's a judgment, bring it back. Okay. And then the biggest point that I would say is Be patient, it is really unlikely that even if tomorrow you start doing one positive event every day, and you haven't been doing that so far, that a week or two from now you're going to see any revolutionary changes in your life.
Remember that these skills are additive, right? Each skill helps a little bit. And the cumulative effect leads to big changes over the long term.
Remember that this is going to be part of the armor that you give yourself to defend against sort of the painful events of the world.
I'm not going to talk about it right now. However, on handout 16, has a list of Oh golly, 225 potential ideas for positive activities. You're welcome to take a look at that handout to start your own brainstorming.
And I want you to come to group prepared to brainstorm with us to brainstorm a variety of things, including positive events that you can do solo positive with kids, things that you can do given our current world events, and things that are both in the home and outside though.
Alright, y'all have a great week.
