 Welcome to Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes. Each week we record the podcast during a Facebook Live broadcast in which Doc Snipes presents information and tools to help you start living happier. Our website, docsknipes.com, has even more resources, videos, handouts, and workbooks to help you apply what we talk about. After each podcast, the accompanying video, text, and worksheets will be published from members on docsknipes.com. Additionally, each week we have a members-only educational group, followed by a question and answer session with Doc Snipes, to help you apply the tools to yourself and start living happier faster. The Doc Snipes podcast will be providing listeners and members the same tools and information Dr. Snipes gives her clients. Go to docsknipes.com to learn more. In today's presentation we're going to talk about dialectical behavior therapy and emotional regulation techniques. This is going to be a five-part series, so I want you to pay attention to what we're going to talk about in each particular section, and obviously the sections will be divided up so you can come back and review them at your leisure. We're going to start out by talking about the basic premises of dialectical behavior therapy. Then we're going to move into learning about the HPA axis and that's basically your stress response system. Then we're going to go on to understanding what emotion regulation is as opposed to emotion dysregulation and discuss why emotion regulation is important and how it can help you reduce your distress. And then finally we're going to wrap up by exploring emotion regulation techniques. So let's start at the beginning. What are the basic premises of dialectical behavior therapy? Dialectical theory says that everything is interconnected. Reality is not static and a constantly evolving truth can be found by synthesizing differing points of view. So what does that really mean though? So interconnectedness really means that whatever you're doing impacts everything else and the response of everything else impacts you. So when you walk into an environment that is maybe chaotic and noisy, you think of a really busy restaurant or something, that is going to impact you differently than if you walked into the library most likely. So you want to pay attention to not only the interconnectedness in yourself but also the interconnectedness with the environment. Now within yourself, your emotions, your thoughts, and your physical being are all interconnected. Think back to a day that you were not feeling so well. How did that impact your mood and how did that impact your thoughts? Were you as attentive? Were you as patient? Were you as you know, villain the blank? Generally when we're in pain or when we're sick our mood tends to be a little bit more irritable and cantankerous if you will. So paying attention to that and just understanding that if you wake up in the morning and you don't feel well or you wake up in the morning and your back hurts or you've got a headache that you're probably already starting out with some stressors built up. You're not going to be as patient and tolerant. So prepare for that. Likewise our thoughts impact our feelings and can impact how we actually feel and maybe we don't think about that too much but if you're having a lot of negative thoughts, if you're having a lot of stressful thoughts, how does that affect your emotions? Well I kind of gave it away. You probably tend to get a little bit more stressed and irritable and edgy emotionally but physically what happens when your thoughts start to become more negative? A lot of us take stressful thoughts and we feel them in our body. We get headaches, we get neck tension, we get back aches, we get belly aches, we you know crave certain foods. So it's important to understand that your thoughts impact your emotions and also your physical being. Now so let's take that back to the beginning. If your thoughts make you feel painful or make you feel icky, how is that going to affect you know your physical feeling? How is that going to affect how you think, how you feel and how you interact with others? So it's a system and it keeps going and it's a constant feedback loop and it can either be a negative feedback loop or it can be a positive feedback loop. And that is up to you but it's important to be aware of how you feel, what you bring to the table and figure out what your next best step is. One activity you can do focuses on interconnectedness and think about how your relationships impact your mood and how your mood impacts your relationships and obviously general relationships is going to be different than a relationship with a particular person. But I want you to focus in this particular activity more on a particular person or do it several times for different people because when you interact with certain people, most likely, your feelings and moods and things tend to be more positive, enthusiastic, happy whereas when you interact with other people it might be more stressful. For example, where I used to work, my immediate supervisor was just a gem of a man and sometimes I'd interact with him and it would be stressful but that's just part and parcel of him being my supervisor. But it was not a big deal. Now his supervisor, our CEO, was a very intimidating woman so my mood when I'd go into talk with her was very different and much more, I don't want to say professional but it was much more serious and a little bit freaked out whereas if I had to go into talk talk to Richard I would just go over and knock on his door and I'd be like, hey you got a second. So the way you interact with people impacts how they interact back with you as well. So I mean Richard was always much more relaxed with me. I don't know if I would have been more relaxed with Maggie if she would have been more relaxed with me but understanding that we impact other people. If you go into a room and you're just in a god-awful mood and you're grumpy to everybody how are they going to respond to you? Most likely they're not going to be all kinds of joy and happiness. So if they respond in a similar fashion or they ignore you because they just don't can't handle that negativity right now how does that impact your mood? So you impacted them and they in turn impacted you and they said I don't want anything to deal with that. Another thing to consider is how your environment impacts your mood and your mood impacts your environment. If you're in a really dark, dreary, smelly, closed up, disorganized place, obviously those are my buzzwords, if I'm in a place like that it tends to make me a little bit more cranky and I have difficulty focusing, I get sleepy. I prefer to be in environments where it's bright and cheerful and there's a lot of activity and that makes me feel more energized and somewhat happier. Likewise when my mood is not so good I tend to focus less energy on keeping things organized and worrying about if the lights are turned on. So I can create that dark depressing environment if my mood is depressed because I'm not wanting or caring to devote the energy to turning on lights. So thinking about that, if your environment can impact your mood, if you're in a funk, maybe it would be helpful to improve that space, whatever that means for you. For me that means turning on lights, making it brighter, getting some background noise going on, whatever it means for you but being aware of the interconnectedness of that. How does your health or energy impact your mood and how does your mood impact your energy? So we talked about that at the beginning. If your energy is low or if you're not feeling good, when you wake up you're just like, oh I did not sleep well. Then how do you think the rest of your day is going to go? What's your mood going to be like? It may not be cranky but I know those days I wake up and I'm tired, I didn't sleep well, I don't feel well. I'm just kind of blah at the very best. So my mood is not one of health and energized and all that kind of stuff. How does your mood impact your health and energy? And we talked about that a little bit on physical. If you are in a happy mood you tend to have greater immunity. They've actually done studies and found out that people who tend to be more stressed out and more depressed get sick more often. If you are in a happy mood you probably feel more energetic whereas if you're in a bad mood you probably feel like you're carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders and it's just trudgery to move through each step of the day. Again considering how that impacts you it may be worth looking at paying more attention to taking care of your health and your sleep. And finally how do your thoughts impact your feelings? We talked about this already but thinking about it with specific thoughts. If you tell yourself I'm not good enough how does that impact how you feel? How does that impact your mood? If you tell yourself I'm lazy, I'm a slob, I'm never going to amount to anything how does that impact your feelings? Likewise if you turn that around and you go you know I'm all that in a bag of chips and I can get this done and I'm smart and I'm competent and you know just give yourself a pep talk it generally brings your mood up. But feelings can also impact your thoughts so if you're having a bad day unfortunately the way we're wired when you're in a negative mood you tend to notice the negative things so if you're in a bad mood you're tend to going to tend to be more pessimistic. If you don't check that and say you know what no I'm not going to notice all the negatives I'm going to notice a positive for every negative I pay attention to. That way you balance it out a little bit and it tends to help improve your mood a little bit if you actually force yourself to focus on some of the positives. Take some time doing this activity and really pay attention to all the things in your environment in your relationships and in your thoughts and feelings and health and how they interact because the cool thing is if you improve one area it's kind of like pulling a string on a on a blanket and it kind of unravels if you improve one area then you can unravel the negativity and distress in multiple areas at the same time there's going to be a reciprocal effect. So to think again about how thoughts impact your feelings think about a time you dreaded doing something doing your taxes doing your laundry whatever it is for you what was your mood like most of us if we're dreading something aren't in the best of moods how patient and tolerant were you toward other people were you kind of edgy and irritable and just shut up and go away so I can get this done. When you were acting like that how did others seem to react to you and how did their reaction affect you you know if they ended up snapping back at you how did that impact you and when you're in that kind of mood when you're dreading doing something and you're just kind of dragging your feet what's your environment like paying attention to what kind of vibe you're setting off not only for others but also for yourself are you creating an optimistic empowered environment. Once you've thought through that then think again about how is the scenario different when you're looking forward to something now I don't think any of us ever look forward to doing taxes well maybe you do if you're going to get a big refund but there are things that most of us don't look forward to so how can you change those situations that you're kind of dreading to make them less unpleasant you may not be jumping for joy to go out and do it but how can you make it less unpleasant for example when I had to take my graduate entrance exams that's not necessarily everybody's favorite task to do for some reason I enjoy doing those and I looked at it as a challenge to see how well I could score and if I could beat you know what I expected my score was going to be so I turned it into a game for myself. If you're going to a family gathering that you expect to be somewhat unpleasant how can you make it less foreboding what can you think about focus on who at the family gathering can you spend time with that maybe you would enjoy seeing again what can you do with the family gathering that can help you avoid whatever the unpleasantness is because the unpleasantness probably surrounds two or three or a few people not everybody there and everything going on so try to figure out things that you can look forward to it's not going to make it a complete panacea you're not just going to love going to do it but it will make it less drudgery so your mood will be better if your mood's better you're probably going to put off a happier vibe if you will which will make the relationships and make whatever that situation is go a little bit easier and it won't drain all your energy because when we dread things we tend to spend a lot of energy thinking to ourselves I wish I didn't have to do this and being angry about the fact that we've got to do something we don't want to do so find the positives find something you can look forward to in every situation reality is ever changing that's the second tenet of dialectical theory what that means is what's true right now may not be true in the next moment so you know let's look at some examples if you've ever started exercising and gotten gotten stronger so what was true for you back in February may not be true for you now because you may be able to lift 15 pounds more have you ever gained or lost weight and changed a clothing size so your reality six months ago was that you wore a size whatever but your reality right now is that you wear a different size reality changed it's not anything to get all excited about is just accepting reality in the moment now we can also apply this to people have you ever known someone who was attentive and kind and you know maybe you were really good friends who suddenly started being neglectful and irritable now what's that about are they still attentive and kind in this current reality and in the current reality you've got to figure out what is going on with that person so you may decide that in the current reality maybe they are having a lot of family troubles or maybe they have gone down into an addictive sort of set of behaviors and they are not able to be the same person they were six months ago or even a month ago that's the current reality and you need to make your decisions on whether to interact with that person based on the current reality in order to protect your own emotions and feelings think about how your needs have changed over the last five years you know five years is a long time what i thought i wanted and i needed five years ago was very different than what my goals and wants are right now so thinking about that and finally truth can be found by synthesizing different points of view so the easiest one is to think of a disagreement you had with somebody and what was your perception of what was going on what was their perception and was reality somewhere in the middle give you an example i have teenagers at home and i will come home and they will have said they've done their chores and i will look around and i will say uh no you haven't now my reality is different than theirs they think they have i think they haven't so what is the difference in the truth well the truth is they did what they felt they needed to do i saw things that i thought they needed to do that they didn't do so reality was the fact that we both um had our own truths and combining them in the middle and then talking about what does this look like because ultimately i'm the one who judges their chores so my truth is more important um in that particular situation but thinking about different people's perceptions when my son was very very little you know i would tell him to clean his room and his definition of clean has always been different than mine i'm a freak about floors i'm a freak about baseboards and he was more like shove everything under the bed and into a pile and it's clean and i'm like no that doesn't work so talking about what your different truths are what your different definitions of certain words and certain experiences are this is also the reason when law enforcement goes to a crime scene they interview multiple witnesses and each witness saw something a little bit different because everybody's perception everybody's truth is a little bit different it doesn't necessarily mean they're lying it means they saw paid attention to or interpreted what happened a little bit differently so it's up to law enforcement in the courts and what have you to determine what the actual truth is by synthesizing all those points of view another example think about a time you had to make a decision about something you were totally torn on like whether to take a job or not so if you play devil's advocate you're basically synthesizing two different points of view you're synthesizing the this is not a good idea point of view and the this is a great idea point of view to come up with reality which is generally somewhere in the middle where it's a good idea but there are going to be some drawbacks another thing you can do is think about a time you had to make a decision and your heart told you one thing but your head told you something else so what i want to do but what i need to do two different realities within the same person you know you can feel a little bit torn a lot of times but taking listening to both of those voices if you will hearing them out and then combining them and going okay now what is the best choice of action based on my ultimate goals and objectives so it's important to remember when we go into trying to control our emotions and trying to feel better and trying to understand what impacts us and makes us happy or sad and how we affect other people that everything is interconnected your feelings thoughts and physical health all impact each other your mood and behavior impact your environment and your relationships and all of those in turn impact you so think about how your kids impact you think about how your spouse impacts you think about how your boss impacts you and think about how you impact them and how it's kind of a give and take relationship you have the ability to control your thoughts your emotions are your body's natural reaction to a threat or you know something good when you have happy emotions it makes you want to do it again but you can control your thoughts which impact your emotions you can control your physical vulnerabilities so things that make you more irritable like pain or lack of sleep for being hungry you can control things in your environment to a certain extent I mean sometimes you're going to be in places where the environment's the environment but you can try to improve it at least your little aspect of it and you have the ability to control your relationships how you interact and with whom you choose to interact reality is not static it is what it is in in this very moment it is what it is now in five minutes it may be different and then it'll be what it'll be but we need to understand that reality can change and will change even if we don't want it to needs wants and situations can change dramatically over time so reality figuring out what's actually going on in this very moment is based in finding the truth that truth can be found by synthesizing differing points of view at that exact moment so in situations involving other people put yourself in their shoes or heaven forbid you might even ask them tell me what is it you're thinking here and explore their point of view instead of trying to convince them that your way is right or your perspective is right put yourself in their shoes and go let me understand where you're coming from and then you can start working on synthesizing your truth your truth and their truth in situations involving only yourself examine it from a logical perspective of how it will help you achieve your long-term goals and from an emotional perspective of what will ultimately make you happier synthesize both of those to figure out what the best choice is that will help you reach your long-term goals and be happy at the same time thanks for tuning into happiness isn't brain surgery with doc snipes our mission is to make practical tools for living the happiest life of yeah thanks for tuning in to happiness isn't brain surgery with doc snipes our mission is to make practical tools for living the happiest life affordable and accessible to everyone we record the podcast during a facebook live broadcast each week join us free at docsnipes.com slash facebook remember our website docsnipes.com has even more resources members only videos handouts and workbooks to help you apply what we talk about new resources are added weekly during the first half of 2017 we're offering introductory memberships lock in the 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