An affective self-help exercise which will help you to get rid of negative feelings such as stress, anxiety and depression

There are various ways to get rid of negative feelings but different people find different exercises useful. The best ones, in my believe, are the ones which require least of time and give the best of the result. However, these are never the ones you can easily stumble upon on the internet.

The exercise I am going to describe here might help you to deal with stress, anxiety and depression. The idea of this exercise is based on the believe that positive thinking naturally attracts positive things. In this way it is bit similar to a solution focused therapy then negative thoughts and facts are eliminated from the process.  But lets come back to positive thinking. The idea of the subconscious power and the believe that we have energy to influence people and things around us makes this exercise so powerful. People say: ‘what goes around comes around’. Therefore, you can imagine your energy going all the time in circles and getting directly influenced by new energy flows. So if you think negative – that is what’s going to come back to you at the end.

The exercise itself is very simple and will take not more than 20 minutes of your time. You need to be sure that in order to do this exercise you not necessarily need to be already depressed or generally unhappy. This exercise was with me during the best times same as the worst as it can makes you bad times better and the good ones even more amazing.

All you need is an empty notebook. It does not matter what size, color or pattern it is. Just use the one you like and will not mind to hold in hands every day for the following month. The length of the exercise is a month, after you should do a brake but the results will be already seen in a week. Here is the detailed plan of the exercise:

1. Every morning open you notebook’s different page.

2. In the morning on the left page of the notebook write your expectations of the day, one after the other in different lines. The more concrete they are the better.

3. In the evening you have to complete the right page of the day in your notebook. At the top right corner write the date. Also at the top write 3 positive adjectives about yourself. ( I am ….., …… and …….)

4. On the same page write positive things that happened to you that day. It can be anything: maybe the unexpected and good weather made your day? was the sun shining to your face than you walked home from work? did you have nice lunch? did the child on the street smile to you? it can be absolutely anything, even the smallest details that made you happy at least for a second that day.

5. On the left page tick the expectations which became true.

Do this every day for a month and you will see that every day you tick more and more expectations and what a power a positive thinking has. A week after you read this post, come back, and share your experience. Encourage and motivate the others.

To see how your notebook should be filled, look down on the link below  ,-)

Stress. Facts

Stress is a feeling that’s created when we react to particular events. It refers to the consequence of the failure of an organism  to respond appropriately to emotional  or physical threats, whether actual or imagined.

75% of the general population experiences at least “some stress” every two weeks.

Studies show that HIV-infected men are more likely to progress to AIDS if they are under high stress than those with lower levels of stress.

A good belly laugh shuts off the flow of stress hormones which is triggered by our biological “fight or flight” response when we feel stress, anger or hostility.

An estimated 1 million workers are absent on an average workday because of stress related complaints.

Stress contributes to heart disease, high blood pressure, strokes, and other illnesses in many individuals.

Life today is on average 44% more difficult than 30 years ago based on the number of significant life changes  encountered

Up to 90% of all visits to primary care physicians are for stress-related complaints.

Up to 80% of industrial accidents are due to stress.

In 2009, the top most stressful jobs were a surgeon, commercial airline pilot, photojournalist, advertising account executive, and real estate agent. The least stressful jobs were actuary, dietitian, astronomer, systems analyst, and software engineer.

73 percent of Americans name money as the number one factor that affects their stress level.

Stress creates hormonal changes in the human body that can decrease libido and sex response.

When cells shrink due to exposure to stress hormones, they disconnect from each other, which contributes to depression.

While it is a myth that stress can turn your hair gray, stress can cause hair loss.

Stress also contributes to the development of alcoholism, obesity, suicide, drug addiction, cigarette addiction, and other harmful behaviors.

Up to 5 million people in the UK are ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ stressed through work.

Nearly three-quarters of American workers experience frequent stress-related physical or mental conditions that greatly increase health care costs.

Solution Focused Therapy

This post is prepared while analyzing the research done by Stephan Hendrick & Luc Isebaert)

Solution focused brief therapy (SFBT). “What SFBT does is that instead of digging somewhere deep it mainly focuses on client strengths and resiliencies examining previous solutions and exceptions to the problem, and then, through a series of interventions, encouraging clients to do more of those behaviors”. (Trepper&al.,2006) In this case it is important what are the effective therapeutic principles implemented in SFBT.  It is important to mention that principle is ‘ a set of rules that guides the therapy’, than a technique is ‘a specific procedure to get a specific result’. So principles are something what will be followed during all the therapy than technique is something used to achieve a well defined goal at th certain time.  These maight be distinguished as the main principles of Solution Focused Therapy:

1. Start where the client is, or: Adapt to the stage in which the client finds himself

There can be three different types of people who end up in front of the ones offering professional health:

• A Complainant – a person who does not have a clear request for help (a drinking housewife who says that no way she can cope without drinking as long as her husband works long hours and she has to take care of home on her own)
• A Visitor – the one sent to seek for help by the doctors, friends, relatives
• A Buyer – a person who actively seeks for help on his own (contacts a therapist about the drinking problems on his own and not influenced by anyone)

In scientific literature these mentioned types of people seeing for help can also be defined as three stages which change during the process of relationship between the therapist and the client. It is very important that therapist would correctly identify at what stage is the person seeking for help than he first contacts him. In this case therapist can use correct principles to move a client along the stages and get the result more effective. A client can very easily turn from a Visitor to Complainant and than a Buyer.

2. Use and enhance the client’s competence

Every person has abilities and coping strategies prior to any therapeutic intervention. Therefore, the therapeutic process should consist of bringing forward and implementing solutions that are already present in clients and their systems. Therapy works better if the solution suggested by  the therapist is based on the natural healing processes of the patient, in this way all the best competences of the client can be used.

3. Defining clear goals and obtaining the client’s collaboration

Solution focused approach gives a very important meaning to the clear definition of the goal which a person coping with various problems should achieve.  Client needs to define the goal using the details and concrete examples on how his life should be than he is done coping with this problem or is at the certain stage of the therapy.

4. Change client’s perception and experience

Promoting corrective emotional experience is an other basic principle in SFBT.  Corrective emotional experience refers to ‘exposing the patient under more favorable circumstances to emotional situation which he could not handle in the past under less favorable circumstances ‘ (Alexander, French & al., 1946). Nowadays this principle is considered as an efficient. It is described as an ability to create experiences where the client has the opportunity to learn something new is an essential ingredient in brief therapy.

5. Solution oriented language

Solution focused approach helps the clients to discover their own solutions and expects the therapist to adopt a trusting and respectful attitude. In the solution focused therapy it is very important that a therapist adopts the language of the patient: words, intonation, speed of talking and reflex. This, firstly, will build the trust and secondly, will help to communicate. In solution focused approach therapy the one who knows the solution is patient himself, just a therapist needs to help out while bringing that solution to the day light, while being supportive and respectful. There should not be any confrontation, denials, only the suggestions and alternatives.

6. Restore and enhance hope and positive expectation

Hope and positive expectation have a strong influence on final outcome of any therapy. Solution focused approach in therapy seeks of the ways to enhance hope, as a willing to improve into the healing process. Positive expectations in solution focused approach is something that stimulates the patient to focus more on the healing process.

To sum up: solution focused approach in therapy is a process during which the clear goals are defined by the patient and a therapist is the one trying to engage the best of patient’s skills and competences in order to achieve these goals. Also This is the kind of therapy which focuses only on the positive factors: hope, healing, improvement, goals and dismisses the negative things: problems and fails. In this case therapist is like a silent advisor who never is to persuasive and instead of telling the patient what to do only suggests alternatives in the way patient thinks it was actually his idea.

What is self-help. A lego point of view

Self-help is a connection of two words resembling one thing – efforts. Than it comes to self-help we hear these two words a lot: magazines, books, TV programs, very personal stories of various gurus who managed suddenly to convert their life to a lasting miracle. Every second sentence (ok, this is a bit of exaggeration) is all about: ‘quit smoking in 7 days! ‘ ; ‘get rid of your alcohol addiction without professional help’; ‘how did I loose 15 kg in a month!’ and it go on and on and on. Because at the moment it seems that there is no issue you can not actually sort without self-help. But to be honest, I guess some things can not be sorted without help from outside world, because all of us still needs that push or a kick which would make us change.

But my aim here is to talk about the things that can be sorted with self-help and the way this ‘magic’ self-help thing works. If you believe that self-help is something that will change you – you are wrong. If you think it is something that will help you get rid of the old bad and nasty habits – you are wrong once again. To express my very personal point of view – people don’t change. You are a complex of different lego bricks, like the one put by hyper energetic 5 year old who says he building an airplane but than you look at the construction it more reminds of an apple to you. So there is a mix of colors and shapes, shades and sizes in your structure. Non of us were born alcoholics, smokers or naturally depressed. Non of us were struggling dealing with anxiety than we were 2 years old and non of us were obsessed by eating at that time. Just our lego structure was put in different angles at different times, so just the certain bricks you could see and some of them were just somewhere inside the structure, well hidden. Yes, you can not change your lego structure, you can not simply remove all the black and blue bricks and throw them away. But what you can do is to reconstruct. To rebuild yourself from the details you have, putting the yellow bricks on the surface and sticking the black ones somewhere inside the structure. They will still be there, but they will not bother you much as they will be pressed down by the yellow ones. And – you can always add new bricks to the structure.

So that what is self-help. It is reconstructing yourself from the features, skills and qualities you have. Make some of them more visible and leave the rest hidden inside and maybe waiting to be dragged outside than necessary.  It is not changing yourself from who you are – it is simply modifying and shaping yourself to they way you want to be. It is working with yourself and for yourself in order to improve. Figuring out what of the qualities, habits and skills are the yellow bricks and which ones are black. Switching their places and figuring out than the bricks of a new color should be added. It is simply being creative.

How did I quit smoking in one day

A cigarette for me, the same as for most of the smokers, at first was a simple and fast way to get rid of the stress. Every time, something got me out of order, distracted or unpleasantly surprised I just needed to light up a cigarette and in a minute if not all than  half of the problems disappeared.

At the point, where a number of cigarettes I smoked a day could fit in the package, I actually didn’t have any problems any more. The situation at work was pretty much ok, and the personal life was going fine but i still was smoking. And this time it was not anymore about the stress reduction. All these reasons were replaced by the simple joy you get from lighting up a cigarette on holidays, at the bar, on a hallway during the dinner at a friends. And these few puffs (well, to be honest, it was round 200 of them a day if we say that it takes 10 puffs to smoke a cigarette and I had round 20 a day) was just a joy. Well, was, until one day I noticed that to get up these stairs leading to my flat on the 5th floor became pretty much impossible, not talking about running to the bus or trying to catch a nephew in the garden.

And one day I simply stopped. Quit for good. What I realized was that smoking is nothing more than a release of energy you have. It is a physical action which gets out the various energy you have inside. Some people smoke, others drink, some take drugs, but the others go running, paint or take a walk more often. So why this particular action, smoking, is the one you have to choose for your energy release?