 Hi, and welcome to today's presentation on understanding vulnerabilities brought to you by lceus.com. Over the next hour or so, we're going to define vulnerabilities, identify some of the most common vulnerabilities, their effects, and ways to prevent them. Now this is going to be a real, brief overview. Each of these vulnerabilities will have its own presentation in the future. Why do we care? Well, vulnerabilities are situations or things that make it more difficult to deal with life on life's terms, which can cause things like depression, anxiety, or what we call stress. Another thing to understand about vulnerabilities is they make it easier for you to overreact or get stuck. Think about the last time you were sick and something went wrong. You may have overreacted to it because it was just like, really, I can't do one more thing or I don't feel like dealing with this right now. So you overreacted to it. Building your vulnerabilities and planning accordingly, which means mindful living, can help you a lot in your recovery because when you're not feeling 100%, you can go easier on yourself and have some compassion. Depression occurs if you feel helpless or hopeless. So if you still keep trying to do stuff despite having a bunch of vulnerabilities, you may not feel effective at it, or you may not make as much progress as you want, which can lead to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. Anxiety occurs if you feel powerless or out of control. So maybe you're doing all the right things or it seems like you are, you're doing everything your therapist tells you to, or your doctor tells you to, or wherever you're getting your information from, but you're not getting any better. Well let's look at the big picture and see if there are some things that we're missing, because when you're doing all the right things and it's not having a positive effect, it can lead you to feel powerless, out of control, stressed out that you know, maybe things aren't ever going to get any better, which I've found to be very rare. Most of the time when we take a look at the big picture, we can find ways to help make things a little bit better. Addictive behaviors increase when you feel a need to escape because of stress, anxiety, depression, or physical pain. In this understanding that if you let your vulnerabilities creep up so you start feeling stressed out, helpless, hopeless, depressed, anxious, the chance of relapsing into an addiction or engaging in addictive behaviors becomes a lot more likely. So vulnerabilities is the easy way. It's like during flu season, when you get your flu shot and or you know, every time you go into the grocery store, you wipe down your buggy with one of those little disinfecting wipes, that's preventing vulnerabilities. You're taking steps to prevent getting bugs that you didn't need to get. So your immune system isn't overwhelmed. So we're going to start with pain just because, you know, we'll start in one place and then we'll move. But a lot of people have pain and expecting to go through life, to go through every day, not feeling any pain is not realistic for anybody. But if you have chronic pain or if you're in a situation where maybe you just had surgery or you sprained your shoulder or whatever the case may be and you're going through a period where you've got ongoing intense pain, it may have some effects. I know when I'm in pain, I recently hurt my shoulder. So I can tell you that even without sleep problems, I tend to be a little testier when I'm in pain because it just drives me crazy that A, it hurts, but B, my body's not cooperating. You know, I like to be, I'm a little controlling, but it also causes sleep problems. I sleep on my belly and every time I would put my arm up under my pillow, it would hurt just incredibly. So I wasn't sleeping as well. So when you're not getting enough sleep and you're in pain, it makes it a little bit harder to deal with life because everything seems harder. Everything is just, you're kind of in a fog, which makes it harder to concentrate, which can make you have an irritable mood. Because if you're tired and you're in pain and you can't concentrate, you may be cranky. You see how all this really makes sense? This is not brain surgery here. Understanding all of this and understanding that medications that your doctor may prescribe that are opiate based are depressants and can worsen all of the above symptoms. So if you're taking something like oxycodone or hydrocodone, be aware that it can make your depressive symptoms worse, make you more tired, you probably won't have problems sleeping, but you may have difficulty waking up. So talking with your doctor about other alternatives, if these medications need to be taken for a longer period and if they're causing you problems in your daily life. Also explore non-pharmacological interventions. TENS units, transcutaneous electronic nerve stimulation, sounds really ominous, but you put little patches and I think, oh, I can't think of a company that has them out right now. Shaquille O'Neal was advertising them. But you can actually buy them at Walmart now for single use or for short term use, but you can get other units. If you have ongoing chronic pain, maybe you have a back disorder or for me, like my shoulder, put the little patch on. It sends little electronic stimulation. It's not shocks and it bombards the nerve ending so you don't feel the pain. It can't take those pain messengers because it's too busy trying to answer the door because something keeps knocking. TENS units are great. They are portable. They help a lot. They help relax the muscles. They don't do everything, but it's one option. Hydrotherapy, like spas can help. Massage, yoga, exercise. You would be amazed when you think exercise causes pain. Yeah, if you do too much, it can. Our bodies are meant to be in balance though. The right side and the left side and the front and back. And if you have imbalances or if you have some muscles that are too tight, you can cause pain. If your hamstrings are too tight, it often causes low back pain. If you have an imbalance between your chest muscles and your back muscles, you may end up having back pain. Balancing out those muscles and or just stretching them can go a long way to relieving pain in the long term, not just for that very moment. There are a lot of things that you can do. Heating pads, those are also excellent. And my favorite is always ice, but I'm weird like that. Any of these can be used in a lot of different situations to make pain less bothersome. Does it make it completely go away? No. And there are a lot of different sort of self-hypnosis types of things that you can do to deal with pain. One of them is to focus on another part of your body. Your shoulder really, really hurts. So focus on your stomach or your head or just generally how it feels in the room instead of focusing all your attention on your shoulder, which is probably going to make it hurt worse because you're paying attention to it. Let's distract yourself. I tend to not be able to focus enough on that, but I distract myself with something else like online Scrabble games or reading or going out and playing with a dog. If you're just sitting still, you're more likely to focus on whatever pain is currently bothering you. Poor nutrition. Your body needs building blocks to recover from injury. It needs all those amino acids to fix the muscles that are injured or to repair the tissue or do whatever it needs to do. Your body needs building blocks to keep your immune system strong so you don't get sick. When you're sick, most people are not fun to be around when they're sick because they're cranky and everything else. And it's harder to get everything done when you feel like your head is going to explode. So keep your immune system up. Help your body recover from injury as quickly as possible. And to make the neurotransmitters, those chemicals in your brain that are responsible for reward pleasant feelings, pain control. Neurotransmitters actually help with pain control. And just generally helping you sleep and function. How can you improve your nutrition? Water. Water is great because it gets a lot of the toxins out of your body. And when you feel dehydrated or when you are dehydrated, you can feel tired, sluggish, foggy-headed, have difficulty concentrating. It may not be a neurochemical imbalance. It may be that you are just way dehydrated. A lot of us are. So try to drink 60 ounces of water per day. Just get one of the water bottles and carry it with you everywhere. You'll find yourself mindlessly sipping on it. If you don't like the taste of it, put a little lemon in it. That helps quite a bit. Use a salad plate instead of a dinner plate and have three colors on your plate at each meal. And condiments don't count. So mustard and ketchup and relish. That's not three colors on your plate. If you have a brown, that's probably either going to be a meat or a grain. If you have a red, that's probably either going to be a meat or a fruit. And then ideally a green. It's hard to get a green on your plate at every single meal. But try. At least two of the meals. Breakfast is hard to find green things that are really yummy at breakfast, except for maybe kale. And try to eat smaller meals every few hours. Smaller meals every few hours will keep your blood sugar more stable, which will also keep the blood sugar in your brain more stable, which helps you focus better. Sleep, one of my favorite topics. Lack of sufficient quality sleep leads to a whole lot of problems. If you've ever come back from a vacation and felt like you needed time to recover from your vacation, you probably weren't getting enough sleep. Does that mean that you should try to sleep your vacation away? No. But be aware that if you're not getting enough quality sleep, an amount does not equal quality. If you're not getting enough quality sleep, it's going to have multiple effects. You're going to feel pain more. You're going to have more difficulty concentrating, staying awake, being energetic, those sorts of things. Sufficient quality sleep means six to eight hours for most people every day. Drug and alcohol induced sleep is rarely good quality. So having a few beers before you go to bed, probably not going to have good sleep that night. Taking sleep aids generally is not conducive to having good quality sleep. So what do you do? The best thing is to create a sleep routine. When we have children, we do this with them. And then I don't know why we quit doing it with ourselves. But we do. Children, you say, OK, little Johnny comes home from school. He goes out in plays. We eat supper. He takes a bath. We read a story. He goes to bed. That cues his brain in to start releasing serotonin to relax. Then serotonin is converted to melatonin, which helps him get sleepy. And then he goes to sleep. The sunlight also helps with this. So during the winter, when there's not as much sunlight, it's so much more important to make sure that during the daylight hours, during the waking hours, you're in a bright room. Preferably sunlight, but you're in a bright room to help your body know when it's time to be awake and time to be asleep. So part of your sleep routine can be dimming the lights and then have something that you do. You eat dinner and then have one or two things in succession that you do in the evening after that to tell your body it's time to start winding down. Does that mean you have to go to bed at 10 o'clock every night? No. Most adults, that's just not going to happen. You want to try to go to bed around the same time, somewhere between 9 and 11, ideally, if your goal is 10, but somewhere around there. And then do the same thing. So if you take a bath or shower and then you go to bed and you read a book for 30 minutes, make sure you do that even when you're on vacation, even when you're doing other things so your body knows, oh, it's time to sleep. Other things that can help with sleep, temperature. The ideal sleeping temperature is allegedly 72 degrees. I like mine a little cooler. Keeping out any extraneous noises, television, radio, neighbors, some people like to have white noise. They put on headphones so they can hear water rushing or whatever to drown out some of the sounds of the world outside. I personally don't like sleeping with something on my head. Make sure your bed clothing, your sheets and stuff are clean and they don't stink. If they're stinky, it's gonna be harder to sleep. If you're like me and it's bad, but I do it anyway, and you let the animals sleep in bed with you. You want to change the sheets more frequently so you don't have pet dander, but also you may find that they're waking you up. I have a big body pillow I put on my bed and they sleep on the other side and they've been taught to respect the boundary and they don't come on my side of the bed. These are all things that you can consider when you're looking at am I getting enough quality sleep. Illness, when you're sick, you're sick. Your body needs the energy to get better so be compassionate with yourself. Try to eat as well as possible. You may not feel like eating four course meals and having a protein at every meal may not be what sounds really good to you. Try to eat a little bit that's healthy and not pig out exclusively on ice cream and cookies. Be compassionate with yourself. If you don't feel like it, don't do it unless you really have to. Illness disrupts your sleep. If you can't breathe, you're probably not gonna sleep really well. So if you've got a sinus infection, probably not gonna sleep well, which is gonna make you exhausted. Your foggy headed and difficulty concentrating can be either from not getting enough sleep or the medications that you're on or just having a sinus infection. Understanding this, there may not be much you can do about it, which, you know, all these things make me irritable. When I'm in pain, I'm foggy headed and I'm tired, I'm not real nice to be around. And when I say compassion, normally I say compassionate with yourself, but be compassionate to other people too. If you're not pleasant to be around, don't subject people to you. They don't want your germs and they don't want your attitude. So what can you do? Can you work from home? If you just don't have the energy to work, don't, if there's any way possible to make that happen. If the laundry doesn't have to be done today, then let it go till tomorrow until you can rest up. Take small little naps. Do whatever you can to help your body use most of its energy on getting you better. Brain changes and we're still on physical. Look at all these vulnerabilities that have nothing to do with counseling yet. Brain changes can be hereditary. You may have been born and have a neurochemical imbalance because we know that depression is hereditary. It may be from an accident, you had brain trauma or as a result of addictive behaviors. The cool thing is addictive behaviors if the brain was normal to begin with, it can usually recover after a period of time. Now, does that mean everything goes back to what it used to be? Not necessarily, your brain may find workarounds, but your body wants to survive and your brain wants to be whole. So if you give it enough time and the right tools, our brains really like to go back to the way they're supposed to be. Changes in the structure of the brain have all kinds of effects, including impairment of memory, concentration, and mood. So if you have a brain injury or is hereditary, obviously you're gonna be working with your doctor and probably a physical and or occupational therapist. When we're talking about addictive behaviors where the neurotransmitters have gotten all out of whack, eating a good quality diet to give your body the necessary building blocks to rebuild itself and fix itself as good, adequate quality rest so your body can devote time to fixing your brain. It's not thinking about walking and everything else, just get the rest. And medication as needed in order to help balance out the neurotransmitters so the brain can function and carry out those signals that say this is rewarding, this makes me happy, oh, it's time to go to sleep and do what it needs to do because your brain is your main control center. It's your CPU. If it's not working optimally, then the whole rest of the system is probably not going to be either. Individual vulnerabilities. Now, happiness is not a vulnerability. So it's all your negative emotions, anger, anxiety, depression, grief, guilt, jealousy, resentment and inability to self-soothe. When you are experiencing these and they are natural emotions, we feel things. We're sentient beings, we're supposed to feel things. The cool thing is we don't have to act on it. When you get angry, you don't have to lash out. When you get anxious, when you get afraid, you don't have to run away. You can feel it without acting and then decide how to best handle it. Different things trigger all of these feelings for different people. So part of dealing with it is understanding what triggers your anger? What triggers your anxiety? Not your mothers, not your kids. What triggers your anxiety? Your depression. What do you have to grieve over? And there are more things to grieve over than death. There are losses. And there are these sort of existential losses, like not having the childhood that you thought you should have. You didn't grow up in Beaver Cleaver's household. Jealousy, resentment, where are those coming from? And what can you do about them? And inability to self-soothe. Feeling the feelings takes energy. Takes a little bit of energy. Many people get stuck nurturing these negative emotions, nurturing this anger, nurturing their grudges. And they expend an inordinate amount of energy holding on to this negativity. You'll be amazed at how much energy you have to focus and how much less you care about seemingly negligible stuff if you're not holding on to all this negativity. So when you're feeling negative, it causes the brain to keep the fight-or-flight reaction going, which takes energy and prevents the happy, calming neurotransmitters from being excreted. If you're saying there's still a crisis, then your body's not gonna go well, time to relax. So you're staying in this revved up state constantly. Think about sitting in a car, in the driveway, in park, and having your foot on the gas, and you're just revving that engine as high as it'll go. After a while, the engine block's gonna get too hot and it's gonna crack. Well, you know, same sort of thing for us. You don't want your engine block to crack. So we need to develop coping skills to deal with these emotions. You may not know everything that triggers your anger, but when you get angry, what helps you calm down? If you don't have anything, we need to find something. Insert positive, rewarding experiences. It's not all about just getting rid of negative emotions. It's about providing times for happy emotions. I drove into work the other day and there was the cutest little bunny rabbit right outside my front door. I love bunny rabbits. Taking time to notice small things that make you happy. Get plenty of rest so your body can make the happy chemicals and it can recover from being stressed out. If you've ever looked at a president, picture of a president before they went into office and when they left, you see how much they age. They're not getting a lot of rest. They're under a lot of stress. You can see the effect that all of these things have on the human body. You can only imagine what's happening inside. So get plenty of rest, eat a healthy diet and exercise. Exercise releases serotonin, which is one of your happy chemicals. It also helps you balance out those muscles and stretch them out so it reduces pain and it can help improve sleep. Cognitive vulnerabilities. The way you think about things has a big effect on how it makes you feel. If you think everything is always bad, then you're gonna be stressed. If you think everybody always leaves, then you're going to have difficulty in relationships. This is called a global internal stable attributional style. The global and stable is the most important part to remember for vulnerabilities. It means everything, not just this one instance or this one person and stable means always. It's not changeable. There's nothing I can do about it. So it's always gonna be miserable. Every time I wash my car, it's going to rain. Well, so that makes me not wanna wash my car unless I need it to rain, then I'll wash my car. If you can change your attributional style and you can't look at everything as always good either because it just doesn't happen that way. When anything that happens reflects on you as a person, it also adds extra stress. Every time I do this, it gets messed up. So I am incompetent. Changing the way you think about it is helpful. When a child misbehaves and we say you're a bad boy, that means he is a person, is a bad child, not I disapprove of the behavior you just did. So we need to focus on things as specific and ultrable. Yes, when I do anything that has anything to do with mechanical, it's probably gonna be a disaster. Because I know when it comes to mechanical stuff, I just don't have the attention to detail. But that doesn't make me a bad person. That means I shouldn't be able to work with electricity. That's one thing. It doesn't mean that I'm bad at everything. It means I'm bad with electricity. Things are specific. What are you not good at? What happened? Was the specific situation or condition that this happened under? And what can you do to change it? Identify what is good about you as a person. Find some internal, stable attributions that are good about you, whether you're compassionate or you're consistent, whatever the case may be. And remember to explore the difference between what makes you good as a person versus your skills. You may be a great person, but you may be completely inept at certain things. Does that make you a bad person? No. So focusing on what makes you good and trying to eliminate extreme words like everything, always and never from your vocabulary will help you make things instead of being global and constant, being specific. If you have an extremely external or internal locus of control, you're probably going to feel a lot more stress. External locus of control means you believe everything is controlled by fate and there's nothing that you can do. That makes most people feel pretty powerless because it means that they got to deal with the hand they're dealt and there's nothing they can do to change their life. On the other hand, internal locus of control, if you're too much internal, then you think you can change everything and guess what, you can't. You can't change other people, you can't change the weather. There are a lot of things that you just have no control over. So you wanna find a happy medium between external and internal. In recovery circles, we talk about serenity. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, those things that just are not changeable. The courage to change the things I can because I can't affect some things in my life and the wisdom to know the difference. So many of my clients come in to see me and one of the greatest sources of frustration is the fact that they can't change somebody or somebody who won't change for them. And the fact of the matter is we can't change other people. We can change how we deal with other people but we can't change them. They're only gonna change when they are good and darn well motivated to. So identify what things in your life you can control and how to use your energy for them. And that means increasing the positive things and decreasing the negative things. And then those things you can't control, figure out how you're gonna cope with them. I mentioned rain earlier. Every time I wash the car it seems like it rains. Well, okay, so if we haven't had rain in a while and my garden needs to be watered, maybe I'll go out and wash the car and worst case scenario it'll rain in water my garden. Trying to look at the silver lining can also help you with your interpretation of things. Another experiment you can try just to see how this works. Take a coin and flip it. If it lands on heads, you have to act like everything's perfect. You put on rose colored glasses and you are obnoxiously positive the entire day. Everything you wanna find the silver lining. If it lands on tails, you can be Oscar the Grouch. And everything, the glass is half empty. It is partly cloudy. It is all the negative stuff. And then at the end of each day, write a journal about how much energy you spent and how it felt and how exhausted you are or tired and see if it makes a difference in the way people interact with you and the way you feel at the end of the day. Most of the time, I mean, obviously you're exaggerating it. So as you become more midline and really try to look for the positives, most of the time you'll find that you notice a lot more positive things when you're trying to look for the positives and you notice a lot more negative things when you're trying to look at the negatives. Low self-esteem. Self-esteem is how you feel about who you are compared with who you think you should be. Low self-esteem can cause people to feel helpless or not deserving of love or success. So one of the things you wanna do is figure out, make a list of, here's who I think I should be. These are all the reasons who I should be and all the reasons I don't think I'm good enough. And then make another list of all the characteristics of what you are right now. Then compare the two lists and figure out in that ideal you list which of those are not important because some of them may not be important at all or not worth your energy at this point because you've got other things to replace them. Then decide what to do about it. If you think, for example, that in your ideal self, you are the most patient person in the world and in your real self, you don't have much patience at all, that's something you can work on. Sure, if in your ideal self, you think you should be a millionaire and in your real self, you're not, how important is that? How much is that going to affect your happiness and how much energy is it worth to you? And what other things make you feel rich in your current life? So back to those negative perceptions. You can do the coin toss thing here. Seeing the world as a negative, depressing, out of control or scary place makes life a lot more difficult because you see everything as a potential for hurt or distress, so it makes you not wanna do anything. Look for the silver lining. When you start to think about something as negative, when you start to have a negative thought or say something negative, follow it up with a positive. At first, you're gonna say that negative thing, it's gonna come out. Follow it up with a but and add the positive because butt negates everything before it. So if you look outside and it's raining and you're like, oh, it's raining today and I was having a good hair day, but at least the garden's getting watered or at least my car is getting washed, whatever the case may be for you. And look for exceptions. What are, if you feel like things are bad all the time, look for exceptions for when you've been happy. Poor organization and time management also can cause problems because it causes stress. It leads you to be over committed and feel rushed or harried. And it can also cause you to forget to do things which leads to conflict with other people. So make a list of must do's at the beginning of the week. Now this is not everything, a litany of everything that you want to get done. These are must do's. If they don't get done, something's gonna happen. For example, most of us have to do laundry at least once a week or we end up not having underwear. So that's kind of a must do unless we plan on going shopping. Make a list of those. Other things that can wait like mowing the grass, it would be nice to mow the grass this week, but if I don't get to it until early next week, you know, it's not gonna be the end of the world. So figure out, write down a list of everything that you think you've got to do and go back and cross out the things that don't have to be done in the next five or seven days. Now you're starting to whittle it down to the must do's. Of that list that you have left, what can you be delegated to someone else? What can you have your kids do or your spouse do? Stop saying yes right away. If somebody asks you, Sally, can you? Don't say yes, say let me check my schedule. We have a joke around the office and the house because when people will ask me, Dr. Snipes, can you or mommy, can you? I cut them off right when they're at can you. I'm like, no, nope, can't do it. And does that mean that I won't do it? No, not necessarily. But it's my way of highlighting the fact that some things you can do yourself. And my way of highlighting the fact that sometimes I can't do everything and it's also just kind of funny because when you first say that to somebody and they're like, can you and you cut them off and you're like, no, can't do it. They're like, you told me no. It's good practice to get used to not saying yes to everything all the time. And then identify and address time sucks. These are things that you start doing when you plan on spending five minutes doing it. And before you know it, it's like two hours and five minutes. Facebook, email, if I start cleaning, especially if I start organizing, oh, I can lose days organizing. So identify and address time sucks. One way you can address it, for example, Facebook, a lot of people have that problem. Set a timer when you start doing it and when the timer goes off, you're done doing it. I find that for my son particularly, I set the timer on the stove when he starts playing video games. Then he's gotta come downstairs and turn it off. I won't turn it off for him, but if he has it right next to the computer, he turns it off and it's kind of like hitting snooze on your alarm in the morning and then you don't end up getting off. So set an alarm and set one that you have to get up and go turn off so it interrupts the behavior. Poor communication skills. Keep you from stating your needs clearly if you're afraid of what somebody would say. May cause misunderstandings and can hurt your relationships. You may develop resentment. You may forge a relationship based on a complete misunderstanding. There's a lot of reasons that it's important not to expect people to read your mind and to effectively communicate what you hear, the other person's saying, but also your own wants and needs. So learn about effective verbal and nonverbal communication and don't just assume you understand what the other person's talking about, ask them. Especially in American society, we spend so much time trying to think of our response that we often don't listen to what the other person's saying as soon as we've finished talking, they're giving their response and we're already thinking about what we're gonna say next. Stop that. Nobody was ever killed by a little bit of silence. So say what you gotta say, listen to the other person, paraphrase what they said. So what I'm hearing you say is, and then start thinking about what your response is going to be. It slows down the communication a little bit, but that's not always bad. Emotional boundaries. People who have weak emotional boundaries are afraid to identify how they feel or they take on the feelings of everybody around them. So if they walk into a room and I've had situations where I've walked into businesses before and the feeling of unhappiness was just palpable. It was like, ooh, nobody wants to be here. People with weak emotional boundaries would start feeling that and start embodying that. Other people will say, yeah, no, no, I'm having a good day, I'll just come back later, thanks. It's important to understand that you have the right to be happy, even if other people aren't. And likewise, if you are sad and everybody's around you as happy or they tell you, well, book up, you don't have to. If you're sad, accept that emotion and figure out how to deal with it, but you don't have to take on, you're not a chameleon. And everyone else's bad mood isn't your fault. If somebody's in a bad mood, it could probably actually has nothing to do with you. So taking on their emotional boundaries, this is something we're often taught when we grow up in dysfunctional families, where it's not safe to have our own feelings. So we're very hyper-vigilant. That means we pay attention to how everybody else is doing in order to make sure that we're in sync with them. And it's not always a good thing to be in sync. So examine why it's not safe to feel how you feel, to say, I'm happy, golly. And if you don't like it, tough tiddly winks. I'm one of those people, I'm a morning person. And I'm not always well-received first thing in the morning. It's important to understand that, you know, I'm in a good mood. And there are, you know, six other people on the wing that I'm working with that are going, don't talk to me until I've had my coffee. That's okay. I'm not gonna get up in their face and, you know, rub their nose in the fact that I'm awake and cheerful. But I'm also not gonna get into a bad mood and go, oh, what did I do? I'm gonna be like, okay, you know, fine. When you're in a better mood, come on and see me. And then start paying attention to your wants, needs and feelings. External validation is a common topic in counseling. A lot of people have learned for whatever reason that they need other people to tell them they're okay. And they can't say, I'm all that in a bag of chips. And if you don't like it, you can hit the bricks. It's important to be able to say that. It's important to be able to validate yourself and go, I'm a good person. And if you don't like what I did or what I said, I'm sorry, or maybe I'm not, but those are my feelings and my opinions. Not everybody's gonna like you. So if you require everybody else to tell you you're okay, you're gonna set yourself up for depression and anxiety. So identify why you are a good person. Why would somebody wanna be your friend? And then look at why you need other people to tell you you're okay and work on that. If you feel insecure about something, how can you work on that? So we've gone over a whole lot of things and hopefully you've identified two or three areas that you might be able to tweak a little bit over the next few weeks in order to reduce the amount of energy you're spending on stuff that doesn't need to be spent. Reduce your vulnerabilities so you can be happier and healthier and less prone to depression, anxiety, and addiction. Addressing vulnerabilities frees up energy so you can deal with other stuff that comes your way. Eliminating vulnerabilities can help you feel less stressed, exhausted, and overwhelmed. Persistent vulnerabilities are often a first relapse warning sign. And when we talk about relapse, a lot of people think automatically addiction, but that's not it. It's addiction, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, any of them is a sign of returning back to a prior way of acting, thinking, or behaving. So persistent vulnerabilities that we talk about are hungry, angry, lonely, and tired. You're not giving your body enough nutrients. You're not effectively dealing with your emotions. You are not self-validating. You're lonely, so you're looking for others to tell you you're okay. And tired, you're not getting enough sleep. It's important to be mindful of when you're vulnerable and take positive steps to address it in order to ensure that you maintain recovery. So if you're sick, know you're sick. If you get up in the morning, be mindful. Do a check in and go, how do I feel today? And if the answer's great, then wonderful. If the answer is I didn't sleep well and my allergies are bugging me, know that you may need to be a little bit compassionate with yourself. If you just totally get up on the wrong side of the bed, see if you can find things to do to help your mood. Maybe there are certain songs you listen to or a comedian you can listen to on the way to work. But also don't put yourself in situations where you're gonna increase friction by being around a lot of other people if you're having a really bad day. We all get up on the wrong side of the bed occasionally and sometimes I'll just come in the office and I'll be like, I am grumpy as I'll get out today. If you need anything, I'll be in my office. I go in my office and I shut my door. Letting people know ahead of time that it's not the right day to start poking the bear unless you absolutely have to. So be mindful of these things, give yourself a break, understand where it's coming from, and you'll find that things go a lot easier when you're paying attention. You can earn CEUs for watching this presentation and many others like it at allceus.com.