Why You Won't Stick to Your Diet

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Imagine your doctor tells you that your cholesterol level is too high and that you should never eat another donut. Will that donut become a smaller part of your life or will your desire grow as you feel deprived of the pleasure of the donut? I think you know the answer to this question – as you consider going for a donut.

In contrast, if you change your lifestyle and choose to eat more fruits and vegetables exercise and generally try to be healthy, then donuts lose their pull. Eating donuts becomes incompatible to your goals and eventually it becomes incompatible to who you are. Your image of yourself has changed and you rarely feel deprived of donuts.

You probably have a long list of behaviors you would like to change—a list that you have had for a long time. You wrestle with the behaviors, sometimes taming them only to see them raise their ugly heads once again. It is better to search for incompatible behaviors that you can build that will ultimately push out the behaviors you want to eliminate.

Instead of trying to stop being anxious, find ways of behaving courageously by looking for challenges you can manage. Instead of trying to stop being depressed, find ways to be more active, generous, or grateful. Instead of trying to change an important person in your life, change your approach to that person. Set goals that are easily achievable and don’t expect to always succeed! In fact, quit trying to always succeed – oh, that’s right, it’s hard to quit.

Imperfect You In An Imperfect World

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Are you controlling? By controlling I mean, do you feel compelled to control the outcome of every situation. It is stressful for you to feel that the situation is out of your control? Is it difficult for you to wait in a long? Does it drive you crazy to wait for a table in a restaurant?

The need to control the environment news can reflect low frustration tolerance. Frustration tolerance is something that we learned as a child. Some children's parents do not give them sufficient frustration to learn how to manage such feelings. The tension that comes with frustration is something to be avoided thanks rather than something to be tolerated.

Do you find yourself becoming angry when presented with a frustrating situation? Do you blame others for frustration that is beyond anyone's control? If so, you must examine the messages you give yourself. For instance, do you tell yourself that the tension is unbearable? Examine that thought. Is the tension unbearable or simply unpleasant? By telling yourself that it is unbearable, you are lessening your ability to manage the tension.

Sometimes, the effort to control emerges in perfectionism. You struggle to allow yourself to make mistakes. You punish yourself errors in judgment. In this case, the frustration comes from not being perfect. You have not learned to tolerate your own imperfections. Some folks go to great lengths to avoid any appearance of imperfection.

Whether you are tolerating an imperfect environment or your own imperfections, you must be able to accept that imperfections are part of everyday life. When you do this, you will find that the tension becomes more manageable and your mood is lighter.

Protecting Your Self-Worth

It hurts to be attacked. Words of judgment and condemnation undermine your self- worth. Some are more sensitive to judgment than other. Some need to be more sensitive to feedback from others, but others are overly sensitive to other’s judgment. It is as though they have an antenna that detects disapproval from the slightest gesture, comment or lack of attention.

Giving others permission to define your worth can be damaging to your mood. Learn to hold on lightly to other’s judgment while holding on strongly to your worth. If you made a list of your strength and weaknesses, which would be longer? Make an effort to focus on your strengths on a daily basis to reinforce your self-worth.

When others say hurtful things to you, recognize that they may be reacting to other events in their lives rather than giving you accurate feedback. It may help to examine hurtful interactions and try to imagine all of the factors which could contribute to what you believed the other individual was saying about you. This exercise will help to avoid personalizing other’s neutral gestures as feedback to you.

Three Steps to Reduce Worry

What is worry. If worry is concern for the future, then that doesn't sound so bad. We should be concerned for our future. Worry is a focus on a negative outcome for the future. Worry carries with it the belief that the future will not only be bad, but it will be overwhelming. Worry can consume us.

To reduce worry, you must take control of your thoughts, not let them control you. Here are three steps to reduce catastrophic thinking that fuels worry:

Step One: Become aware of your tension level. Tension can provide you with a signal that you are worrying. Tension is your body's way of gearing up for a future battle.

Step Two: Ask yourself whether your thoughts are focused on the past, the present or the future. Worry focuses on the future. Worry questions, "What is coming next?" Some folks spend so much time worrying about the future that they fail to appreciate the present. The saying, "Stop and smell the roses" addresses this shortcoming.

Step Three: Allow your worry to lead you to the worst outcome. Now determine whether that outcome is actually overwhelming. Certainly, you can imagine many unfortunate outcomes, but is the outcome completely overwhelming? Sometimes it seems to be. We imagine certain illnesses or losses to be overwhelming. But the reality is that people live through those situations that we imagine to be overwhelming. Imagine yourself surviving this worse-case scenario.

You would think that imagining the worse-case scenario would simply fuel the worry, but the opposite happens. Confronting the darkest outcome helps you to put it in its proper perspective. Now you can ask yourself what the chance of this outcome happening is? You can see other possible outcomes that are less dark. You can begin to see yourself as a survivor of whatever the future holds in your life.

We're Number One- Depression

Report Shows Tennessee Has Highest Depression Rate

A new federal government report shows Tennessee had the country’s highest rate of people with a major depressive episode in the past year.

The report, released Thursday, listed 9.8 percent of Tennesseans age 18 and older had such an occurrence. Hawaii had the lowest, 5.0 percent.

The report was developed by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration based on 2006 and 2007 surveys on drug use and health. The agency is within the Department of Health and Human Services.

Tennessee also ranked high in some other categories, including tobacco use and use of illicit drugs other than marijuana.

*From the Memphis News

Fighting Depression and Anxiety: Taking Responsibility For Your Mood

As the economy tanks and our lives become increasingly stressful, it is easy to blame anxiety and depression on outside forces acting on you. It feels as though external events are controlling your mood. Even the weather seems to impact your anxious and depressed mood on a dreary day.

By giving control to outside forces three things happen:

1. You are released from responsibility for your mood.
2. You cannot be judged for your mood.
3. Your mood cannot be expected to change unless circumstances change.

The problem is that such beliefs create helplessness. Helplessness then leads to passivity. No battle is won when we believe that the outcome is out of our control. Even under overwhelming circumstance, we need to believe that we can affect the outcome.

By taking responsibility for your mood,

1. you improve your mood by using active problem solving, even when a solution is not easily had.
2. you build hope for a brighter future by believing your circumstance can change in the future.
3. you tell yourself that you are a warrior who will do all you can to survive any circumstance and come out a happier person.

Helplessness and hopelessness presume that the outcome is going to be negative. Remind yourself daily that no outcome is known until it arrives.

Depression and Anxiety: Where's the Cure?

When enter treatment for a medical condition, you want a cure. Same with depression or anxiety; you want your therapist to prescribe a cure. In most cases, you don't really care what the treatment is, you just want to know that there is an end to the pain.

While this thinking is common, it may actually be the wrong way to think about change. If you are 100 lbs. overweight, then it is unwise to consider how to lose 100 lbs. That is an overwhelming goal. Instead, you want to set smaller, more achievable goals. Instead of a goal of losing 100 lbs., it is better to choose a goal such as eating fewer carbs and increasing fruits and vegetables, taking a walk three times this week, etc. Why are these better goals than losing 100 lbs.?

Goals are better when they are achievable within a short period of time. Goals are achievable when they are in reasonably easy reach and you can measure whether you have met the goal. We measure progress toward goals when we have set specific enough goals and are accountable.

Back to mood disorders. When you think in terms of a cure, then the goal becomes vague and is difficult to measure. As an alternative use these guidelines to set goals:

1. Imagine being cured of your mood disorder. List ten changes that would be reflected in your behavior if you were not depressed or anxious.
2. Take one of those behaviors and think of five steps that could be taken toward behaving this way.
3. Rank the five steps from the easiest to the most difficult. If they are all too difficult, then think of a couple easier steps that can be taken (for instance, imagine changing your behavior in your mind rather than actually acting on it).
4. Now take a step today. Goal-setting should not be an exercise in fantasy, it should translate into action. Take that action today.

A psychologist, B.F. Skinner managed to teach pigeons to play ping pong (click here if you don't believe me). How did he accomplish this? By breaking down this goal into small bits of behavior. If it works for pigeons, it will work for you!