Tips for Making a Change for the Better!

If you are contemplating making a change for the better, perhaps losing weight, improving your eating habits, getting help for anxiety or depression, or resolving issues in a relationship, you are at a stage of awareness.   But what you need to really move forward and begin doing rather than thinking about change is a level of emotional arousal and emotional energy. Use emotional energy to garner the momentum you need to make the change.  We know from research that knowing facts about a problem or dilemma is not enough to create behavior change. So stir things up a bit.  Here are some suggestions:

Create your own promotional materials.  Film yourself YouTube style and monitor your progress with a succession of videos.  Or paint or draw or create posters that are unique to your goals, post them at home and work and ramp up your emotional energy.

Start a group or join a group. There is a reason why joining and participating with a group of people with similar goals is a successful endeavor for many.  Participation can be emotionally energizing via the support you get from others in the group.

Use meditation, visualization and imagination. Take time out each day be in the moment, to reflect, visualize your goal and imagine how you will feel.   The emotional release you may experience may help you to move forward with the needed momentum so that you will be successful in reaching your goal.

Related articles

• Mindfulness-based Anger Management Online via Skype (psychologytoday.com)

Are you a Victim?

When you experience a health crisis – whether it’s being newly diagnosed with a disease, experiencing overwhelming stress from dealing with a chronic disability or recovering from an injury, feeling angry may be a normal response.  However, ongoing anger is not a healthy response to the stressor and may keep you from healthy management and feeling better in the long run.   Chronic anger may add to your stress levels, increase the cortisol in your system, which in turn contributes to more inflammation and poorer health. The key is to learn and then act on the knowledge that there are normal and healthy anger responses and there are also unhealthy anger responses.

In addition to denial, what is another common and unhealthy anger response? In addition to denial, which I discussed last week, is a type of anger response that involves seeing yourself as victim of your circumstances, your disease, and even your overall health status. Taking on a role as 'victim' may not seem like an anger response, but it is in essence, blaming externals for your course of illness and treatment and denial of your own agency in the process. This passive denial approach to disease and illness management was in many ways, considered appropriate and a normal adjustment as few as 25 years ago. The older medical model of ‘compliance,’ inferring that the healing professional knows everything and the patient (victim of the disease or accident) must only listen and follow directions in order to heal and become whole again, was a largely accepted viewpoint in medicine for many, many years.  We now know that for most patients, the best approach to disease management involves ‘adherence’ to the treatment plan. 

Adherence involves the patient actively learning, discussing and contributing to decision making with his/her health professional.   As a result, research shows that for most, this leads to higher motivation and better success in managing their disease.   For example, if diabetes management is your issue, then together with the health care professional, you establish your goals, how you’re going to achieve them and how long you will take to meet each objective.  Having this kind of agency and ownership of your treatment plan will help you overcome feelings of anger and be successful in the long run. So then, what is one of the best ways to overcome feeling victimized?   Become an active patient, willing to learn new things, ask questions, speak up about your denial, fears and your hopes and work together with your health care professional to improve your health and your wellbeing.

The mind-body connection

Current research fully supports the notion that  psychological treatments of people who seek help in a medical setting can make a significant difference in their overall health.  In the 1980's, estimates were that approximately 25% of visits to a primary health care practitioner are for psychological and mental disorders, masked by physical symptoms. This estimate has increased to 30-50% today. And estimates today suggest that more than 60% of emergency room visits involve a psychological component.  We also know that up to 80% of medical patients overall, struggle with various levels of psychological distress. What does this all mean?  Most importantly, statistics now clearly demonstrate that illness is not only physiological and that the psychological component is an important contributor to health, well-being and therefore illness.  The biological, psychological and social are intertwined in a complex and powerful manner.  What can be done?  Physicians and physician's groups need to continue to increase efforts to include psychologists in their treatment plans and willingly refer when the patient might benefit from psychological intervention.  And patients need to increase their awareness of the mind-body connection, examine their own psychological struggles, talk to their health care providers about their physical and psychological status and ask for help and psychological support when they need it.

Core Assumptions About Illness

When a person is diagnosed or is struggling with an ongoing illness, how the family adapts, manages and copes with that family member and the illness, arises from core beliefs based on generational perceptions, values and explanations for illness.  Within the family culture, any illness and healing process represents two sets of core beliefs: 1) beliefs of the family members; 2) beliefs of the ill patient.

Most people have rather firm convictions and beliefs as to why disease occurs as well as why one person is afflicted and another is not.  Even though science may provide the intellectual explanation of the disease process, core beliefs including values and spiritual matters typically arise to provide another level of explanation, justification or rationale regarding the disease.

Within the family, explanations for the illness may include spiritual beliefs such as judgment (God is punishing), hope (prayers for healing) and acceptance (it’s God’s will, meditation and mindfulness).  In some families, there is a core belief that illness is shameful. For the ill family member, this may results in feelings of guilt, resentment and despair.  Another approach in some families is that of denial, in which members of the family willingly deny (frequently out of fear) the diagnosed member expression of his experience, his fears or procedures undertaken.   Family beliefs may also be based on scientific studies and understanding (he should have taken better care of himself) or psychological reasoning (she gets so stressed out it’s no wonder she got the disease).

In addition to one’s family influenced beliefs, individual core beliefs also come to the fore when illness enters a family member’s life. Individual core beliefs may be based on ethnic and cultural belief systems as well as familial systems.  We tend to turn to personal core beliefs in times of crisis, struggle, difficulty, uncertainty. For example, an adult daughter may think:  “My father is very ill;” “good daughters care for their ill parents”

Researchers have found that core beliefs about the meaning of one’s own diagnosis of illness vary a great deal across diseases and even within one disease.  For example, the person diagnosed with diabetes may think that it is simply a disease that is caused by too much sugar in one’s diet and as an opportunity to make some positive changes; another person, diagnosed with diabetes, may immediately catastrophize and think of the worst possible outcome (I’m going to die; God is punishing me). Researchers are beginning to realize that these individual core beliefs about one’s illness may more accurately predict adherence and long term self care surrounding the diagnosis.