Category Archives: Happiness

Way 27/Day 27: Make it a great year: Realize that sometimes it really is “you” and not “them”

This is a trait to which we’re all susceptible. It’s someone else’s fault.

Eve blamed the serpent.

Adam blamed Eve and God (That woman that YOU put here…)

So, apparently, it’s human nature to have difficulties and look outside for the fault.

That’s often the case. We do indeed all live surrounded by difficult people. We each just happen to be one of them for everyone else.

If you have a pattern – or two, or three – of difficulties that crop up across places and people, yup, maybe that has more than a little something to do with you. Have a look at those and discern where you have a habit of behavior that is contributing to those problems. No doubt someone (or several someones) have tried, often unsuccessfully and perhaps at risk of being counter-attacked, to point these out to you.

Take some time to simmer on this and see if what emerges helps you make it a great year for you (and the people around you).

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

Way 26/Day 26: Make it a great year: Live “as if”

How many people do you know who are postponing what they supposedly want to do/be until some mystical, mythical event has transpired, or a change has happened?

They’ll get in shape…once they start smoking.

They’ll get along better as a family…once the last kid is through those messy teen years.

They’ll get back to reading/art/gardening when…something.

They’ll be able to take better care of themselves when the job/relationship/weather cooperates.

…and we all know that when the weather cooperates or the teenager grows up and goes to college, there will be some new reason that makes perfectly good sense, for why the couple barely speak or the smoking continues or the brain hasn’t been challenged by a new author in ten years.

Make it a great year by living as if:

Today, act as if your family gets along.

Today, act as if you are already taking better care of yourself.

Today, act as if you are actually preparing for some major change by doing one concrete, specific thing that gets you closer to that goal.

Make it a great day. Do that 366 times and you have a great (leap) year.

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

Way 25/Day 25: Make it a great year: Follow your own advice (or keep quiet)

Many people are really, really good at giving advice. (That doesn’t meant they are necessarily good at giving good advice, though!) Some of them keep their advice to themselves, but most people have pretty strong opinions about what other people ought to do –the way they drive, how to handle relationships, how to overcome bad habits…you name it.

If you think about the pattern of advice you either give or keep to yourself, you might notice a particular pattern, or a couple of patterns, are dominant. “Lighten up,” you grumble inside about a cranky boss, a whiny coworker or perpetually dissatisfied family member. “Get over it and move on; it’s probably for the best,” you urge the friend with the broken heart, the family member who didn’t get a promotion…

Maybe the advice is meant for you.

Often the traits that drive us craziest about others are the things we struggle against within ourselves.

Make it a great year; reflect on your own (perhaps silent) advice for others and how it fits something you need to take of within yourself.

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

Day 24/Way 24: Make it a great year: Give people the benefit of the doubt

One way to reduce your stress, reduce the stress you inflict on the people around you, and generally make life a lot smoother: try really hard to assume – unless you have firm evidence to the contrary – that most people are just doing the best they can. The person who messed up your iced tea order, the cranky person behind the counter, the person who mixed up items on the shelves at the grocery – just assume that, for reasons we cannot know, they were doing the best they could.

This means that: you can let go of being angry. Maybe they messed up, and maybe it’s inconvenient, but it wasn’t deliberate and it wasn’t intended to be hurtful. You can try to make it right without being mean. You can let go of being judgmental and then feeling guilty about being judgmental. You can go from leaving the store with steam coming out of your ears thinking, “What is WRONG with them?” and instead wonder with compassion, “Wow, I wonder what’s going wrong for them.”

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

 

Way 23/Day 23: Make it simple.

Make it a great year – simplify…something.

People like to have things complicated. Oh, we say we don’t – we read “Real Simple” and make anti-clutter books bestsellers and have all sorts of gadgets with all kinds of apps that are supposed to make things simpler. It seems, though, that a lot of the time we’re putting a lot of complication on top of what could be simple.

Pick something and just make it simple. Maybe it’s your breakfast routine, maybe it’s streamlining housework. Really simplify it – don’t just incorporate a lot of gimmicks. Experiment. Be flexible. Check to see how simplifying in that particular realm works for you. If having the same menu every week for the work nights makes life easier and no one is crying over having to suffer through pizza every Friday, well…does it make things from grocery shopping to planning the evening a bit simpler? Maybe you’re not going to be Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg and adopt a personal uniform to wear every day, but on the other hand…is there an opportunity there to make things simpler?

Every decision takes mental energy. Our brains automatically seek to put things on “auto-pilot” to reserve focus for critical issues. Find ways to cooperate with that survival-friendly function and free up energy, deliberately, for something more compelling than “What to wear?” or, “Gee, what do we feel like eating?”

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

Day 22/Way 22: Make it a great year: Invite your 8-year-old self to visit

In the 2000 Disney movie The Kid, Bruce Willis’ character’s 8-year-old self magically drops into his life. The child is not impressed with his grown-up self’s shallow but successful life. The boy wants to know: where’s their truck? Their dog? And isn’t there supposed to be a lady here?

“So let me get this straight, I’m 40, I’m not married, and I don’t have a dog??? I grow up to be a LOSER,” the 8-year-old shouts to the 40-year old version of himself.

In other words, where are the things I/we wanted when we were kids? Why are you making me settle for so much less (it’s a fancy house in a la-de-da neighborhood with a snazzy sports car, etc., but apparently not fun)?

Would your 8-year-old self be happy with how things turned out? Would you be disappointed?

This is different from the regrettably named “bucket list,” which is a list of things people want to experience before dying. The 8-year-old wasn’t thinking about dying; the 8 year old was dreaming about living. What would your 8 year old self want to say to you about your life? Would your 8 year old self buy any of your reasons (excuses?)? It’s an imaginary conversation that might be worth your while.

…and where IS that dog?

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

Way 21/Day 21: Make it a great year: Laugh out loud

Depending on the article you pick, children laugh 300-400 times a day (little kids – four or five years old) while adults laugh (again, depending on source, 4 to 18 times a day). Is being a grownup really so awful compared to being a little kid?

Laughing releases endorphins – the body’s natural painkillers and a mood lifter. Sharing humor with other people (not laughing at them) builds connections via shared fun. Throw in some oxytocin, the effect of being in the moment (mindfulness without all that concentration on being mindful) and a lot of other psychology and neurobiology – well, it’s just good for us.

Laughing at people – or being laughed at – is, however, literally poisonous. The habit of feeling and expressing contempt changes the brain to make disdain and a cruel, critical attitude become an ever-easier choice to make. Being the object of contempt batters the human immune system; over time, the person is more susceptible to disease and will experience more, and longer, bouts of even minor illnesses. So for happiness – laugh with, not at, others.

Be around happy people. Let yourself laugh.

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

Way 20/Day 20: Make it a great year: Mentally stretch

We humans get into ruts.

We decide very early what we’re good at and not good at – probably not accurately. Who knows how many kids decide (wrongly) that they are “not good at math” when the problem is that some well-intended grownup mistakenly tried to force them to understand a concept before their brain was ready for it. Being able to reverse operations, for example (which we need for subtraction) requires children have reached a particular level of brain development, often not attained until age 7.   This is why subtraction used to be 2nd grade material. Abstract thinking – such as in algebra – is attained somewhere between 12 and 14 (if ever – everyone doesn’t get there), so for most kids, doing pre-algebra before that can be pretty discouraging.   After all, if the grownups think you should be able to understand it, and you can’t, well, it can’t be that the grownups are mistaken (or so the child infers). The child decides he or she is dumb. This is not fair.

This sort of experience leads to us cutting ourselves off from whole areas. We have a bad experience in one class and decide history is boring (how can that even be???) or that we “can’t do art,” whatever that might mean.

Make it a great year. Stretch your brain. Try to learn something new; tackle something you once decided you “can’t do” based on some old lesson gone wrong.

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

Way 19/Day 19: Be creative

Not the “creative type?” Not “artistic?”

Well, if you believe you were created in the image and likeness of God, then you must believe that you also have a small, human version of God’s infinite capacity to create.

Creativity requires skill, freedom to express that skill, and the ability to think outside the box and then narrow those options down to select the one(s) to use. A landscape painter views the landscape: so many choices in terms of perspective, detail, what to emphasize, what to change, what to omit. It takes skill and mental flexibility to narrow those choices and begin executing a landscape painting.

Not everyone’s creativity expresses itself in art. Maybe yours is in cooking, or developing tactical plans, or training programs, or solving engineering problems. All these pursuits require skill, flexibility and the freedom to execute your decisions.

Sometimes people develop a creative block. This can be from fatigue, severe stress, and/or becoming afraid of making a mistake. In the latter, the person has become so focused on the final result being perfect that it’s impossible to move forward because every step might be “wrong.” In these cases, I have often recommended to clients that they indulge in creative play in an area outside their expertise. This way their ego is not invested in the end result. Seriously, even if you are an accomplished professional, can you really take making a sock puppet (or clay animal, or finger-painting or decorating cookies – whatever you might choose) seriously? It’s an old sock, for crying out loud…have fun. Allowing creativity to flourish in one area can lead to it spreading to others.

Have fun!

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

 

Way 18/Day 18: Realize that sometimes YOU know better

In the film Love and Mercy, based on portions of Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s life, it is apparent that early in the Beach Boys’ success, when the stress of performing, producing, writing – and a history of abuse – were weighing heavily on Brian, that he knew what he needed. He knew and struggled to express to those around him that he needed to pull back – to reduce external stressors and focus on what was most critical. The pressures from others – his family, investors, hangers-on, his manipulative and exploitative father, and, later, the unethical therapist who became a sort of Svengali/mooch, all professed to “know better” what he needed – led to increasingly intense psychological suffering.

(I don’t know how accurately the film represents any of the characters and am describing the characters as portrayed in Love and Mercy, not on the real people)

Sometimes we know better than other people. It’s hard to discern, sometimes, the voices of those who really have our best interest at heart and those who have their own agendas foremost. Too, some people are well-intentioned and, knowing what would be best for them, presume that it must also be best for others.

Seek wise guidance. Perhaps the greatness of the year comes from careful discernment on what is actually right for you.

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.