Blog Posts

Coping with Covid Stress

Sat, 05 Feb 2022 18:19:16 +0000

I was happy to contribute when the founders of Autoimmunewellness.com asked me to write a blog post about managing stress as we enter the third year of the pandemic. Of course my first thought was "Third year?! How could that be?" One of my own stress management techniques involves underselling to myself: it is just barely two years since the pandemic began in the U.S. if you count March 2020-February 2022. But of course, I understand those who say we dealt with it for almost all of 2020, all of 2021, and now we are into the third calendar year of the pandemic.

Although the blog post was written for an audience coping with autoimmune illness, the practical strategies are useful for anyone. Click here to read more.

How to Change Your Behavior in 3 Easy Steps: Finally Celebrate the Change!

Sun, 30 Jan 2022 20:21:33 +0000

There are at least three ways to celebrate your change: rewarding yourself, measuring your progress, and using feedback to revise your plans.

The power of rewards

Don’t underestimate the power of rewards. We know that people learn best when they are rewarded (reinforced) for their successes rather than punished for their failures. One of the best ways to celebrate your behavior change is to reward yourself. It is important to acknowledge that you have done something difficult. It might be as simple as telling yourself “Good job!” Or asking someone else to tell you the changes they’ve noticed in you. But sometimes you just can’t beat a tangible reward. But what should it be?

How to choose rewards

If your behavior change involved healthy eating, you won’t want to reward yourself with an ice cream sundae, no matter how much that would feel like a reward to you. Better to use a non-food reward (or a healthy food reward) if you have been working on healthy eating and exercise. Maybe a new piece of exercise equipment or sneakers? If you’ve been working on changing your yelling behavior, maybe a good reward would be a massage or pedicure to mark how hard you’ve worked and how stressful it has been. Whatever you choose, have it be something that you don’t always have/give yourself, so that it feels special.

Measure your progress

As part of your celebration, it is also smart to acknowledge what exactly has changed. For some people, measuring progress is as easy as stepping on the scale and seeing the weight loss they aimed for. Or noticing that they are now able to walk a mile as compared to the half mile they used to be able to do. But for others, using journals during the Practicing the Change phase will be important here. Did you used to yell at your kids once a day and now you are down to once a week? That’s a huge accomplishment! But perhaps you know that even yelling once a week is something you want to cut back on. So, you may need to revise your behavior change plan.

Using feedback to revise your plan

This is the time to ask yourself what worked and what didn’t work in your original plan. Perhaps you’ve noticed that it is easier for you to stick with your new healthy eating and exercise plan during the week, but the weekends are tougher for you. So, what do you need to do going forward to make the weekends time for progress too? If you haven’t had as much success as you wanted in losing weight or increasing your exercise time, is it time to consult a nutritionist or a health care provider? Maybe for the parent trying to cut back on their yelling they’ll notice that taking a deep breath before intervening keeps them calm, but at the end of a busy day even a deep breath doesn’t help. If there are some times that you still feel unable to control your yelling behavior would some coaching or therapy help you figure out why you are still triggered to yell?

Feel free to contact me using the Contact Us button or email me at doctorash@mac.com if you’d like some help revising your behavior change plan.

How to Change Your Behavior in 3 Easy Steps: Second Practice the Change

Sun, 30 Jan 2022 20:18:01 +0000

If you took your time during step one, you've prepared a realistic plan for change that focuses on one key behavior at a time. And you've set manageable goals. For example, perhaps you have decided to focus on improving your health by adding a healthy behavior each week for the next four weeks. Or maybe you want to improve your relationship with your children by reducing the times you yell and increasing the times you have fun together. As you practice the changes you are making, it is important to keep track of what exactly you are doing.

Self-monitoring

A simple behavior, symptom, and mood diary can be very useful at this point. This can be as straightforward as a piece of paper, or a notebook, or the notes feature on your phone. Write down what you are eating, how much water you are drinking, what exercise you are engaging in, how well you slept the night before, and what symptoms you are observing. Or maybe write down "I yelled at son and felt sad about it" or "the kids and I played a board game, laughed together, and I felt good about myself as a mom." The things you keep track of will depend on exactly what you've decided to do. But keeping track of your behaviors and how you feel will help you to gauge your progress.

The power of writing

The simple act of writing down what you do makes you more conscious of your choices. If you know you have to write down "three oreos," you are more likely to cut back to just one! And when you write down "increased my water intake by 30 ounces," you can feel proud of your progress. You might even add a line to your journal every day that simply asks "what did I do well today?"

The power of progress

A month into your plan you will be able to look back at your journal and ask what improved and what did not. Maybe you will find that you are consistently rating your sleep as good by the end of the month. Or maybe your joint pain will have steadily decreased. Maybe you used to yell at your kids a few times a day, and now you yell only a few times a week. Even if your sleep is still troubled, or your joints still ache, or you still yell, if you can see that there has been some progress you will be more likely to continue your healthy behaviors plan.

Learn from your mistakes

Self-monitoring also allows you to learn from your mistakes. Did you have sugar cravings several days in a row? Did you want to yell at the kids multiple times every day? Did you give in every time? Or were you able to tell yourself "That's just my mind wanting that. That's ok. I don't have to change that thought into a behavior." If you surf that urge, you can eat a piece of fruit when you have a sugar craving. Or go for a walk when you want to yell. You will start to see that not all cravings have to be given in to. Then reward yourself by saying "good job making a healthy choice!" That reward increases the chance of resisting the craving the next time it happens.

Obstacles

It is very possible that you will not show yourself enough patience. Remember that behavior change is hard. And it is a process that takes time. What you want to see is incremental change over time. You do not need to be perfect. Instead of looking at your behavior change in black and white terms, look at it in shades of grey. If you started out eating hardly any fruits and vegetables and at the end of week one you've consistently added fruit to your breakfasts, you've made progress! If the next week you're able to add a vegetable to every lunch, you've made even more progress. Recent research shows that making a new behavior a real habit can take 2-8 months! So be patient with yourself.

Tricks and Tips

Setting up triggers can help you cement a new behavior. Let's say you want to remember to meditate daily and you are already good about brushing your teeth. Make brushing a trigger for meditating. Put a note that says "Meditate!" right next to your toothbrush so that brushing triggers you to meditate. If you already eat as a family, add a board game to Friday night dinners to increase positive parent/child interaction time.

Making sure you have plenty of social support can also help you practice your behavior change. If you didn't set up a good social support network when you were preparing to change, now is the time to do it. And if you did, now is the time to lean on your supports. Who is the person who will give you a pep talk when you want to give up your behavior change plan? Which friend will go for a walk with you every day to help you remember to get gentle exercise? Or do you need a coach who will check in with you regularly to help you monitor your change?

Practice, practice, practice

There is really no substitute for simply keeping at it. Maybe you don't feel like walking today. Can you do it anyway? Or if you didn't walk yesterday, can you make sure to get back at it today? It is easy to give up when things get hard, but if instead you pratice, practice, practice, the behavior change will come. But remember, it will not happen overnight.

Feel free to contact me by clicking on Contact Us below or emailing me at doctorash@mac.com if you’d like to set up a few coaching sessions to help you monitor and practice your behavior change. And check back soon for the third step of behavior change: Celebrate the Change.

How to Change Your Behavior in 3 Easy Steps: First Prepare to Change

Sun, 30 Jan 2022 20:16:27 +0000

What’s the biggest mistake people make when they want to change their behavior? Jumping too quickly to the behavior change. That’s right, today I am giving you permission to keep overeating, keep biting your nails, keep yelling at your kids, keep doing whatever it is you want to stop doing.

New Year’s resolutions fail because we jump right to the behavior change without laying the groundwork for our behavior change to succeed. So today I am going to share with you a few things you can do this week to lay a strong foundation for whatever change you want to make.

Preparing to Change

Why is it important to prepare to change? It’s just like painting the living room walls: if you just slap a new coat of paint on the walls it will look good temporarily. But to really make a long-lasting change to the room you need to spend time wiping down the walls and baseboards for dust, repairing the holes and cracks, laying drop cloths, and taping off areas that won’t be painted. When you spend that time preparing, your paint job will look a lot better!

The Crucial First Step in Preparing to Change

Are you sure you have control over the behavior you are trying to change? If you are trying to talk nicely to your kids rather than yell, then you do have control over the behavior. If you want to eat more fruits and vegetables, you have control over the behavior. If you want to stop biting your nails, you have control over the behavior. But if you are trying to get your kids to stop misbehaving, or you want your whole family to lose weight, or you want your husband to stop biting his nails, you do not have control over those things.

Find Your Motivation

Behavior change is hard, so you have to be really motivated to change in order for it to stick. Maybe you know from the way you feel or the way your last set of lab tests turned out that you are not healthy. The thought of living a healthier life where you have the energy and stamina to play with your kids or grandkids could be your motivation to eat healthier. Or maybe your child cowered in fear the last time you raised your voice, and the idea of a warmer more trusting relationship is your motivation to yell less often.

Make a Realistic Plan

Once you have your motivation, you need to set a realistic plan. What exactly will you change and when will you do it? The research shows that we increase our chance of succeeding if we focus on only one big (or small!) change at a time. So ask yourself, what change do I most want to make? Or what change do I think I can most easily do? Is there something I could do today? For the person trying to get healthier, a realistic plan might be to add a healthy behavior every day for a week: talk to your doctor about what things will make a difference given your health history, increase water intake, start buying organic fruits and veggies, increase fruit intake, increase vegetables, get to bed an hour earlier, walk ten minutes a day, or start a yoga or meditation practice.

Can I Really Do This?

The self-efficacy research tells us that when we wonder, “Can I do this?”, we need to remember the other times we succeeded at something hard. What worked for you then? What were the obstacles you overcame? Having a growth mindset means telling yourself “I can do this!” Some people succeed best when they spend a lot of time researching and reading about how others have done a similar task, and then they like to jump in. Others do better with a more gradual approach, perhaps making one small change a week for four weeks.

More Tips for Success

After making sure you have control over the behavior, finding your motivation, setting a realistic plan, and finding a growth mindset, there are a few more things you can do to set a good foundation for changing your behavior.

Use positive language about your behavior change (I’m adding healthy fruits and veggies to my diet vs. I’m giving up donuts)
Make a public commitment to change (tell someone your plan, or join a support group of others making a similar change)
Get the instruction you might need to change (positive parenting isn’t easy, especially if it wasn’t the way you were parented)
Remove temptation (throw away the cigarettes)
Change your environment and support network (find a friend who will walk with you every day)
Engage in relapse prevention (what’s the thing that might make you stumble and what can you do to prevent that from happening?)

Knowing we want to change is the easy part. Actually making the changes are hard. Feel free to contact me at doctorash@mac.com if you’d like to set up a few coaching sessions to help you prepare to change. And check back soon for the second step of behavior change: Practicing the Change.