Simple Self-Help Tactics

Severe problems usually require professional help, but garden-variety sadness, worrying, and anger can often be moderated with simple self-help tactics. Perhaps you’ll find one or more of these techniques worth trying. I list them in order of what’s been most helpful to my clients.

Prove ‘em wrong. The most powerful motivator may not be fear. After all, people return to bad habits after a heart attack. Could the most powerful motivator be to prove yourself right?

Have something to look forward to. It could be an hour doing your hobby, talking with a friend, or a nice meal ahead.

Journal. Journaling is empowering, free, and likely to be a source of good advice. You know yourself, so the advice is more likely to be on-target than if dispensed by someone else.

Have perspective. At the risk of sounding like your parents, some people really are starving in Africa. Often, when I’m complaining about something, I remind myself that it’s a first-world problem.

Be in the moment. Focus on what you want to be doing this second to avoid feeling saddened, mired by past trauma or self-recriminations, and overwhelmed by all you face in the future. If an unproductive thought intrudes, force yourself, yes, force yourself, to refocus back on your present activity. If the activity is difficult, and you need to escape for a while, do something easy yet productive: clean house, help someone else, whatever.

Fix, suppress, refocus. Yes, sometimes a personal problem requires psychotherapy and/or drugs. But often, it’s wiser, perhaps after having tried to fix the problem, to suppress unwanted thoughts and distract yourself by focusing on something more constructive or pleasurable. Suppress and refocus tends to atrophy the memory neurons associated with the unhappy thought, thus making you happier. Plus, by not revisiting the problem yet again, you’re more likely to be productive and less likely to annoy others with your repeated "processing."

Practice self-acceptance. Yes, you can tweak things about yourself, but accepting your basic self is wise. Examples:

• Rather than diet, work on accepting your body as it is and if you wish, make modest, sustainable tweaks in what you eat. (Of course, alcohol and marijuana make restraint difficult.)
• If you sense you’re not fit for a high-status career, choose something that with moderate effort, you can succeed at. You’ll be happier and more successful. Status can be the enemy of contentment.
• If you’re quiet by nature, instead of feeling jealous of charismatic types, try to accept that quiet is okay, perhaps especially okay in today’s loud-and-proud world.
• Aging is inevitable, and it’s impossible to merely shrug at it, but try to accept it, and when emotions get in the way, try to refocus on something more constructive.

Stay busy. At a talk by famed psychotherapist Karl Menninger, an audience member asked him what to do about a severely troubled client. The audience expected the answer to be “long-term psychotherapy.” Instead, Menninger said that the client needs to stop navel-gazing and get busier. For example, help someone else or get into your work, or something easy, for example, make a favorite dish, clean your place, weed your garden.

Celebrate little wins. Find goals that you have a good chance of achieving quickly, and take a moment to feel good about those little wins. If you withhold happiness until a big win, you’ll spend too little time happy.

Exercise. It increases oxygenation and a sense of well-being. It’s tough to worry when you’re playing a favorite sport. Gardening also gets the blood flowing while bringing you closer to the miracle of growth. (See Tips for Smart Gardeners.) Walking also is good exercise, plus you get to see pretty houses, attractive landscaping, nature views, and attractive store windows. And then there’s the people watching. To get my exercise, I walk fast but occasionally make myself amble. That allows me to appreciate, for example, as I did recently, the design made by a tree’s bare branches, its interstices painted in the sky.

Enjoy music. It’s a mood regulator without side effects. My favorites include:

Uplifters

• Susan Boyle’s so-touching performance of "I Dreamed a Dream" on America’s Got Talent.
• Shout
• Fantasy
• The finale from Book of Mormon
• Defying Gravity from Wicked
• A Few Good Men
• Puff the Magic Dragon
• Maple Leaf Rag (I’m the pianist)
• Armed Forces Medley

Calmers

• Air on a G String
• Clair de Lune
• Autumn Leaves
• Spiegel im Spiegel
• Adagio
• My Funny Valentine. (I’m the pianist)
• Sunrise Sunset

You might even take up playing music. I believe that it’s more enjoyable and rewarding if, instead of reading music, you learn to play by ear. Here, I offer a six-minute course on how to do that.

Screen-watching. Far from a boob tube, TV shows and instant-video movies can be a welcome escape from malaise, taking us into worlds we’d otherwise not see or that require an expensive, time-consuming, side-effect-laden pilgrimage. Even maligned TV comedies may induce happiness. (Worried about screen time's ill effects? See The Case for Screen Time.)

Reading. Reading is an excellent distraction, whether professional material, a novel, or even a mail-order catalog. That's relaxing, not taxing, and downright fun to see so many photos of interesting stuff and to decide if I want to buy any.

Consider re-reading your favorite book or story, re-watch your favorite movie, or re-listen to your favorite song or piece of music. Don’t be embarrassed to repeat it three, five, 10, or 20 times. Children, unburdened with repetition inhibition, beg to hear the same story again and again and again ... and again. Repeating the pleasant is comforting—plus, each repeat usually teaches you something or lifts something old and worthy back into consciousness.

Consider getting a dog. I’m biased, but a cat just isn’t the same. Rescue a sweetie. See petfinder.com and adoptapet.com for huge national databases of dogs and, OK, cats that are waiting for you in a pound, humane society, or other rescue organization.

Prayer or meditation. For believers or agnostics, prayer can comfort, clarify, or create hope. Too, some people find meditation helpful emotionally. That said, some people view meditation as more like a nap—you’ve spent some time and the problem is still there. Indeed, a Scientific American review of the literature on meditation's impact on anxiety is equivocal. In addition, a Canadian meta-evaluation of 124 studies on mindfulness warned of biased investigators and weak results. Anecdotally, my clients generally report that soon after a meditation session, their anxiety level returns to baseline. Mindfulness meditation training encourages people to let go of control and merely observe, at least among my clients and friends, that advice has proven difficult to follow. But everyone’s different. What counts is you. So, in your case, do you think it’s wiser to use the above strategies or to add meditation for a few weeks, perhaps using one of the guided meditation voices and music on the Sanvello app?

Sex. For many people, I’ve saved the best for last. And if your sex life isn’t all it could be, is the answer to search for more, communicate better with your partner, and/or enjoy solo activity?

Self-help tips specific to your problem. Here are tips for dealing with worry. Soon, I plan to publish a post on tips specific to sadness and one on anger.

Deeper solutions

All of the above work often; none work all the time. One size doesn’t fit all. These somewhat deeper approaches may help.

Fear of failure/rejection

Which, if any, of these do you believe are at the root of your fear of failure/rejection: something that someone in your family of origin or current life said or did to you? A realistic assessment based on your work-life experiences? Something else?”

Now think or journal about how that cause may be affecting you at what I call “the moment of truth”: when you know you should, for example, be working on your job search but are procrastinating.

You might even keep a log of what’s going through your mind and heart at those moments of truth, review those nightly for an insight that will facilitate moving forward. Sometimes, a psychological block emerges, and other times, you may conclude that your fear of failure or rejection are rational, and that you need to improve yourself to boost your chances of success or tackle a goal more consistent with your existing abilities, skills, and emotional bandwidth.

Fear of embarrassment

This often has roots in feelings of inadequacy: that the person is so unworthy—either on the merits in the particular case or because of guilt or shame about past behavior—that an embarrassment such as flubbing their elevator pitch is confirmation that they're a loser.

If that sounds like you, think about and perhaps journal about the roots of that as well as identify areas of your legitimate strengths, perhaps by writing your resume and LinkedIn profile—that helps you identify their accomplishments and strengths. Seeing all those in writing can make a person feel worthy enough to think, “Well, if I screw up, I screw up. We all do. I have strengths.”

Fear of imposing on others

Again, this often is rooted in feeling unworthy, perhaps just for a particular job, but perhaps a global feeling of unworthiness often accompanied by guilt and shame. Inventorying one’s strengths and accepting that we’re all flawed can alleviate the fear of imposing and, as important, help identify jobs, careers, and personal environments that play to their strengths and skirt their weaknesses.

Fear of success

This is often caused by a perceived lack of agency, of control. You might ask yourself, "When did I start to feel I can exert less control over my life than do others, and to what extent are those feelings valid?"

Low self-esteem: Low self-esteem is often a signal you should try to improve. Gurus often imply that low self-esteem is an irrationally negative self-assessment. More often, low self-esteem has significant legitimacy. Decide whether it’s wiser to try to improve or just pump up your self-esteem. To boost self-esteem, accept that you’re flawed like everyone, do what you’re good at, and accomplish: Even little wins boost self-esteem.

The positive use of emotion: Sometimes emotions aren't a block but, especially if fanned, a positive. For example, perhaps someone doubted your ability to achieve a certain level of job. Would it help you to think, "I’ll show him/her"?

Also, many people who had been stuck are moved to action if they can think about the impact of doing that on their romantic partner, children, or parents. For example, you might find it helpful to tape a photo of your loved one(s) to the side of your computer screen or as the computer’s wallpaper.

And sometimes, for no apparent reason, our mood is better, if only for an hour. I encourage my clients to be vigilant for those wonderful moments. Perhaps that’s when they’ll be motivated to tackle that onerous task.

Find a good professional. Sometimes, self-help isn’t enough. To find a good and well-suited counselor or therapist, initially screen using Yelp or Google reviews—because they aggregate many clients’ ratings and narrative reviews, Yelp or Google reviews rather than a personal referral tends to be a more valid way to identify two or three practitioners you’d like to check out in a phone call. For more on how to choose a counselor, see this post. In that call, before describing your situation, ask the practitioner for the kind of problems s/he’s most effective with and the approach(es) s/he tends to use. Then describe your situation and ask if s/he thinks s/he’s a good fit and how she’d tentatively plan to work with you.

Medication

We don’t yet sufficiently understand the roots of many people’s psychological blocks. So the above works only some of the time. For example, sometimes, a physiologically-based depression, anxiety, ADHD, etc. preclude a person from making the most of the above approaches. And while the current crop of drugs may only take the edge off the problem, making the person more able to use the above techniques can be worth the drug’s side effects. That said, before recommending that a client see an M.D. about medication, I normally ask if the client is doing the self-help activities described above.

My next post shows how to make the most of counseling.

I read this aloud on YouTube.