Do you have alert fatigue? Alert fatigue is when you get notifications — such as Facebook notifications or email alerts — that pop-up on your smartphone, iPhone, or desktop.
If you get these alerts all day long, chances are you may be suffering from alert fatigue.
There’s one simple solution to alert fatigue that will have you feeling better immediately — and help you sleep better at night.
Aaron Swartz, 26, an Internet developer and activist, committed suicide last week. The tech world has since been ablaze commenting and speculating on his life… and his death.
While many people point to the cause of his death connected to the overzealous prosecution by U.S. District Attorney Carmen Ortiz, it’s unlikely that a single thing led to his decision. If Aaron Swartz was like most of the 100 people every day who take their own lives in this country, the biggest thing that likely led to his death was untreated or under-treated depression.
Which comes as no surprise to people who knew him and have written about him. Nor after reading his own struggles with depression earlier in his life.
His passing is indeed a tragedy. But it’s time to realize that he lived and thrived in a technology sub-culture that mostly doesn’t understand — or care much — about mental illness.
Sometimes a therapist just isn’t that into you. After all, a psychotherapy relationship isn’t just about teaching cognitive-behavioral therapy techniques, or analyzing dreams. It’s about a human connection between two people — one person in need, and the other person who is there to act as a wise guide, teacher, and supporter through a process of change.
Most therapists are pretty good at what they do. But even a good therapist may not always be the right fit for you. It’s similar to when you interview for a job where you feel like your resume is a perfect fit for the company, yet you don’t get the job. Perhaps the interview didn’t go as well as you thought, because the employer isn’t just looking for the best candidate — they’re looking for the person who will be the best fit for the team at the company.
Therapists aren’t always self-aware enough to acknowledge that sometimes they may see a client who isn’t the best fit for them (and bad therapists will never acknowledge such a thing). Hey, they’re human and sometimes they miss their own signs.
So here are five sure signs that it may be time to dump your therapist, and find one where the fit is better.
Ahh, the holidays. Christmastime is here, and many will be traveling this week to rejoin loved ones and family members. We’ll be traveling too, as we often do during the holidays, to visit with long-distance family.
Wouldn’t you like your holidays to be a bit smoother? Me too. So here are some tips to help smooth over your holiday stress and make this time of the year more enjoyable for you and those you’ll be visiting.
Well, it’s a little late for this one. If your trip isn’t yet planned, I can’t help you. But this is good information for next year, as sometimes people wait until the last minute to plan their travel or where exactly they’ll be and when, when visiting the family. These tips can also help you reduce stress about holiday travel.
I think people get into trouble here not with forgetting to plan, but forgetting to plan the important things. Who’s family will you be spending Christmas eve with? Christmas morning? When will you see Aunt Phyllis? Sure, you can let all of this work itself out at the last minute, but the more you set expectations ahead of time, the less stressed you’ll be (and the less likely it’ll result in some unexpected family drama or hurt feelings).
Planning also means being specific and direct with those you’ll be visiting with. Say, “We’ll see you Christmas day around 2 pm and we’ll be happy to join you for dinner!” rather than, “Well, I’m not sure what we’ll be doing, let me call you on Christmas and let you know.”
So what if the presents aren’t wrapped perfectly? So what if the turkey is dry (or burnt!)? So what if you forgot to pack your nice shirt or the shoes that match your dress?
We spend an inordinate amount of time — especially around the holidays — stressing about small details while missing the bigger picture. I don’t believe the mantra that “it’s all small stuff,” so you shouldn’t stress about anything. But pick your battles. If you’ve wasted all of your stress energy on the fact that the potatoes were a little overcooked, you may not have any reserves left to go bail Uncle Andrew out of jail when you get an unexpected phone call from the local police.
Little things, big things. Pick the one you want to really expend that energy on. Because believe it or not — you have a choice about what you let affect you. If you want to stress about the potatoes, that’s your choice.
Spending quality time with your friends and family at this time of the year might be the most important thing to you. Or perhaps it’s shopping for them. Or perhaps it’s making Christmas dinner. Or perhaps it’s planning your awesome New Year’s Eve party.
Whatever your passion, whatever it is that matters most to you in this life, make time and focus on it. We often spend so much time focused on others during this time of the year, we often forget to take a few minutes — even if it’s just a few! — for ourselves.
The holidays can be especially difficult for those with eating concerns, whether it’s binge eating, anorexia, bulimia, or just plain old over-indulging (in both food and/or drink). As we recently noted, holidays can be perilous times for overeaters.
Your best tools to combat these concerns is planning ahead of time, limiting your time spent exposed to these kinds of triggers, and enlist the aid of a trusted family member or friend to act as your eating (or drinking) buddy to ensure you stick to your healthy eating and drinking behaviors.
You don’t have to be a Christian to appreciate and enjoy the Christmas holidays. But if you don’t have any particular affiliation with Christmas, you can always help others who do — by offering to volunteer to cover a work shift, babysit, or even volunteer at a local food bank or such. While for some it’s about the specific Christmas holiday, others celebrate the spirit of giving and selflessness.
Whatever you do, try to remember the reason you’re making the trip, visiting with family, or taking time off of work. It’s not to drive yourself to an early death, it’s to share in quality time with your fellow human beings.
Research also shows that by giving to others — such as making a donation to charity or to your church — makes people feel better. So if you want to lift your spirits a bit this Christmas, make sure you give to your favorite charities.
Too many people over-commit their time, energy or efforts at this time of the year. Ooops! Despite our wishes otherwise, there are still only 24 hours in a day, and 7 days in a week. We can’t be everywhere at once, and contrary to popular believe, you cannot always do everything you want to do.
Prioritize your commitments and responsibilities to others, putting the things that matter most first. If your family comes first (as it does for most), make sure that’s reflected in how you spend the next week. If there’s any time you can take more time off work (unless you happen to be in retail, sorry!), it’s the next two weeks.
Whether or not you’re religious, all of us should at the very least be mindful. Being mindful simply means spending some time in contemplation and reflection to better understand what it is you’re doing and why you’re doing it. We instantly react to a family member’s familiar stinging criticism with defensiveness, without thinking about our response. Take a minute to consider what they said and consider answering in a more noncommittal, or even in a completely opposite manner.
If you’re a fan of Seinfeld, think of the “Opposite George” episode, where George Costanza decides he’s just going to start doing everything the opposite of his usual self would do (see video clip below).
I’m not sure we all have to do the complete opposite of what we are doing today, but it is beneficial to consider some of the motivations behind our automatic actions and reactions to others. Make a commitment to be more mindful, to really think about what it is others are saying, and make an effort to not just re-act, but act in a way that is the result of at least a moment’s consideration.
Other Holiday Coping Articles
Two stories published in the past week by our news team gives me reason to be a little pessimistic about the gains we’ve made in terms of educating folks about mental health concerns.
The first article entitled, Depression Stigma Higher in Medical Students, examined mental health attitudes amongst medical students — you know, those folks who should be the most open-minded about these disorders that have significant roots in the brain. Of course, from the title of the article, you already know the study’s findings.
In a survey of 505 medical students, researchers found that not only do the future doctors have higher rates of depression than in the general population (not surprising, given the stress of medical school), but they have something a little less expected — higher rates of stigma about depression too.
With another hurricane on the warpath up the East Coast of the U.S. this week, many people are scrambling for shelter and safety. Evacuations are taking place, and while everyone is rightfully focused on their physical safety, our emotional health is at risk during times of increased stress too. There are ways you can better cope emotionally with an impending hurricane — to brace yourself emotionally from the significant amounts of stress you’re about to endure.
One of the most important things to keep in mind is that a hurricane is a fairly short natural event. For most people, it means having to deal with a couple of days of moving out of the area and then moving back. While the effects of the hurricane may endure much longer — especially if your home was damaged or destroyed — the actual hurricane itself tends to move fairly quickly through each region.
The impact of having to deal with the significant damage of your home or even losing it altogether can be much greater than the stress of getting out of the hurricane’s path. People who lose part or all of their home go through a typical grief reactions — grieving the loss of all that they’ve accumulated or built.
As though medical school wasn’t difficult enough, now new research suggests that internship is even more difficult.
In a study of 740 medical students who were on internship, researchers (Sen et al., 2010) found that nearly 4 percent of the students met the criteria for depression before their internship started.
That number jumped to over 25 percent of students when the researchers measured their depression level at four points over the course of the internship year. That’s right — 1 in 4 medical students on internship suffer from serious, clinical depression.
One of the holy grails of modern psychology is figuring out what makes people happy. The thinking goes, “If we know what makes people happy, people can then do more of that thing and increase happiness in their own lives.” Makes sense.
We’ve noted previously how an experience — such as a vacation or going out to dinner — is more likely to increase happiness than buying a material gift. The reasoning behind this is that experiences create (hopefully fond) memories, which can be later recalled and enjoyed again. While you may also enjoy a gift, it just doesn’t seem to have the same impact that an experience does.
But research published last week demonstrates that this finding be more complicated than we originally thought.
We’re often told, “You should sleep on it” before you make an important decision. Why is that? How does “sleeping on it” help your decision-making process?
Conventional wisdom suggests that by “sleeping on it,” we clear our minds and relieve ourselves of the immediacy (and accompanying stress) of making a decision. Sleep also helps organize our memories, process the information of the day, and solve problems. Such wisdom also suggests that conscious deliberation helps decision making in general. But new research (Dijksterhuis et al., 2009) suggests something else might also be at work — our unconscious.
Previous research suggests that sometimes the more consciously we think about a decision, the worse the decision made. Sometimes what’s needed is a period of unconscious thought — equivalent to “sleeping on it” according to the researchers — in order to make better decisions. Here’s how they study this phenomenon:
[… In a] typical experiment demonstrating this effect, participants choose between a few objects (e.g., apartments), each described by multiple aspects. The objects differ in desirability, and after reading the descriptions, participants are asked to make their choice following an additional period of conscious thought or unconscious thought. In the original experiments, unconscious thinkers made better decisions than conscious thinkers when the decisions were complex.
The researchers suggest that unconscious thought, contrary to the way many of us think about it, is an active, goal-directed thought process. The primary difference is that in unconscious thought, the usual biases that are a part of our conscious thinking are absent. In unconscious thought, we weigh the importance of the components that make up our decision more equally, leaving our preconceptions at the door of consciousness.
So this is all fine and good, but how you do take laboratory findings and adapt them to a real-world experience to show that unconscious thinkers think better (e.g., with less distortions or biases)? One way to do this is to look at sports, because our weighting of different components is done beforehand and individually — not as an artificial variable manipulated by the researchers.
Each week over a period of 6 weeks, the researchers took 352 undergraduates from the University of Amsterdam and asked them to predict the outcome of four different upcoming soccer matches. Participants expertise about soccer was measured, and then they were asked to predict the result of each of the four upcoming soccer matches.
[Then] participants were divided into three experimental conditions. In the immediate condition, participants saw the four matches on the computer screen and were asked to provide their answers in 20 s[econds].
In both the conscious-thought and the unconscious-thought conditions, participants saw the four matches on the computer screen for 20 s[econds] and were told they would have to predict the outcomes later on.
Conscious-thought participants were told they had an additional 2 min to think about the matches. Unconscious-thought participants were told they would do something else for 2 min and performed a two-back task designed to occupy conscious processing.
A second experiment was conducted on another group of undergraduates to replicate the findings and understand more about the underlying process.
What did they find?
These experiments demonstrate that among experts, unconscious thought leads to better predictions of soccer results than either conscious thought or quick, immediate guesses.
Experiment 2 sheds light on why this may be so: Unconscious thinkers seem to be better at using the appropriate information to arrive at their estimates. Unconscious thinkers who had more accurate knowledge about the single best prediction criterion (world ranking) made better predictions. This was not true for conscious thinkers or for immediate decision makers.
Just to emphasize this finding — if you’re an expert and you had extra time to think about your decision in the area of your expertise (conscious thinker) or had to make a quick decision, you made worse decisions than those who were unconscious thinkers. The researcher hypothesize that conscious thought can lead to poor weighting in decision-making — the more you think about something, the more your biases interfere with good decision-making.
Unconscious thinkers in this experiment appear to weight the relative importance of diagnostic information more accurately than conscious thinkers did.
As always, these results must be taken with a grain of salt. The experiment was conducted only on undergraduates and may not generalize to other age groups or people with different educational backgrounds. Furthermore, other research has not found a significant performance difference between unconscious thinkers and conscious thinkers, and unconscious thought is not always the mode to rely on when faced with a complex decision (e.g., you can’t use this for gambling and certain kinds of information).
But for certain kinds of decisions — those that are complex and where you have some expertise — “sleeping on it” may be more helpful than spending minutes or hours of conscious thought on it. The brain makes good unconscious decisions, when we let it.
Reference:
Dijksterhuis, A. Bos, M.W., van der Leij, A., & van Baaren, R.B. (2009). Predicting Soccer Matches After Unconscious and Conscious Thought as a Function of Expertise. Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02451.x.
I love it when I come across a 15 page journal article that basically boils down to, “Relationships can be hurt by stress.” Really? Who knew!
But of course, I oversimplify (and get ahead of myself).
Neff and Karney (2009) wanted to understand how couples relate to one another in marriage over time, and whether there were specific personality factors or relationship styles that might predict more stability in a relationship, even during stressful times. Would couples become more reactive (e.g., react more intensely) to everyday relationship’s ups and downs while under increased stress?
In order to study these questions, the researchers conducted two studies. The first study looked at data from the daily diary of 146 newlywed couples over a course of 7 days. The second study examined the 7-day diary of 82 newlywed couples over the course of 4 years.
Before completing the daily diaries for a week, couples were also asked to individually fill out psychological measures on a number of specific topics, like their marital satisfaction, specific aspects of their relationship, self-esteem and attachment styles. Couples were also interviewed by the researchers to determine what their stressful life events were.
An attachment style is a psychological term for how we relate to our significant other on three psychological dimensions — relationship closeness, anxiety, and dependence. For example, an item measuring relationship anxiety might be, “I often worry that my partner will not want to stay with me.” This attachment style has been shown in previous studies to be connected to how couples deal with stress in their relationship.
Neff and Karney found that spouses — especially wives more so than husbands — experiencing greater amounts of stress reacted more strongly to the normal daily up-and-downs of relationships. This occurred regardless of their amount of self-esteem or their relationship attachment style. So having low self-esteem or an insecure attachment style did not inoculate the relationship or provide a buffer against stress, as one might expect.
The second study confirmed the common wisdom that the greater the stress in our lives, the more reactive we are to the normal ups and downs of our relationship. When under increased stress, we feel perceived slights, for instance, by our significant other more acutely. Or we hear something more in the tone of their voice when they ask us to take out the trash.
Ability alone, as the researchers note, does not ensure that you’ll be able to respond appropriately in your relationship. In may be necessary but not sufficient to have good relationship skills, because you may not be able to draw upon those skills when under increased stress. The researchers also found that a person’s relationship abilities — like relationships themselves — wax and wane over time. They are not these static skills that exist in some vacuum. In times of stress, this research suggests that we can’t always call upon our positive relationship or communication skills — the stress can overwhelm us and our abilities.
Relationships exposed to high stress for a long amount of time are bound to falter, no matter how well each individual’s relationship skills. During such times, we are more likely to see the relationship as being negative, not realizing the impact the stress is having in the validity of our evaluation — it colors our perception of the relationship itself. Remove the stress, and people’s positive relationship skills can once again — and usually do — take over.
This study is important because a lot of past relationship research has examined relationships in a kind of environmental vacuum — they didn’t take into account daily life stress or stressors when they studied the relationship. We now have a better understanding of how stress can impact a relationship, and how it can neutralize a person’s positive relationship abilities or relationship attachment style.
The take-away for couples is simple — each individual needs to learn to deal with stress in positive ways outside of the relationship (through activities to minimize the buildup of stress in the first place, regular exercise, and other stress-relief activities). No matter how well you function in everyday life, all the skills in the world may go to hell in a hand-basket when stressed out.
Reference:
Neff, L.A. & Karney, B.R. (2009). Stress and reactivity to daily relationship experiences: How stress hinders adaptive processes in marriage. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(3), 435-450.
PS – As an aside, I couldn’t help but be amused that while reading this article, I constantly confused the reference to spouses not as “intimates” (as the researchers did), but as “inmates.” What does that tell you about my relationship skills? 🙂