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The post What is Mindfulness? first appeared on Specialized Therapy.

The post What is Mindfulness? appeared first on Specialized Therapy.

The post Reducing Body Sensations Related to Anger first appeared on Specialized Therapy.

The post Reducing Body Sensations Related to Anger appeared first on Specialized Therapy.

Relationships can be challenging in many ways. A common type of difficulty found in relationships is nurturing a balance between priorities and demands.
Priorities are those aspects of life that are important to you and that you want to invest time doing. Priorities are important in that they help us develop interests, a sense of identity and promote reliability. An example would be when someone prioritizes an exercise workout after work. If you spend too much time on your priorities, though, it could put a strain on your relationships as other people may feel neglected or unimportant.
Demands are things that are important to other people and that they would like to see you spend time on. All relationships have demands. Whether implied or overtly stated, the people who are important to us have expectations of how we invest our time. An example would be a spouse wanting time to talk about their feelings. If we only spend our time catering to the demands of others, most likely will feel increased stress and become resentful.
Therefore it is really important to find a balance between priorities and demands in relationships. With balance, you and the people who are important to you will feel fulfillment in the relationships. One strategy to promote this type of balance is to incorporate mutual validation into your daily communication. For example, if you were asked to cook dinner after a hard day of work, you could say something like ‘I know it’s only fair that I pull my weight in cooking tonight, on my end, I’ve had a really hard day, maybe we could get take out and I will plan to cook this weekend?’ By incorporating this communication strategy, you are nurturing a balance between your priorities and the demands of others.
Improving interpersonal effectiveness is a topic incorporated in the DBT group provided at Specialized Therapy Associates. Should you have any interest in this group, please call 201-488-6678 for details.

The post Demands in Relationships: How to Balance Priorities first appeared on Specialized Therapy.

The post Demands in Relationships: How to Balance Priorities appeared first on Specialized Therapy.

Mindfulness and eating are two things that we benefit from when we properly manage them. Mindfulness is defined by paying attention to the present moment without analysis or judgment. This sounds like a very simple concept but is hard to apply in our demanding lives. Yet the benefits of mindfulness can include: helping us better control and manage overwhelming emotions, distinguishing thoughts and judgments from our true emotional experience, and balancing reason with emotion when making important decisions. Practicing mindfulness can often be associated with meditation, but we can practice mindfulness in our daily lives by applying mindful attention to daily activities.

One daily task in which mindfulness can be practiced effectively is when we eat food. By putting mindfulness in practice while eating you not only get to practice the skill, but you will also hopefully increase your enjoyment of the food as well as become better in tune with your digestive responses so that you reduce the likelihood of overeating. Below are some suggestions on how to apply mindfulness practice to eating:
• First and foremost, try to make the activity free of distraction (don’t watch TV or look at your phone while practicing this mindful activity)
• Next, instead of a meal start with small pieces of food: a handful of grapes, almonds, or baby carrots.
• Before eating the first piece of food, take a few moments to notice and describe (without judgment) the piece of food you are about to eat using your sense of touch, sight, and smell.
• After getting a full feeling for the piece of food, place it in your mouth and notice and describe using your sense of taste.
• Chew the food slowly but consistently and notice the change of texture as you break it down. Aim to chew at least 20 to 30 times.
• After you swallow the food, try and notice any sensations as it travels through your digestive system.
The purpose of this exercise is to be absorbed in the act of eating without paying attention to distracting thoughts or judgments. It is always best to assess how well you practiced mindfulness after you complete the activity. When you finish the mindfulness eating exercise, ask yourself whether your thoughts stayed focused in the moment or whether you got distracted. If you did get distracted, were you able to redirect your mind back to the activity?

As with all skills, the ability to be mindful improves with practice. Mindfulness is a topic incorporated in the DBT group provided at Specialized Therapy Associates. Should you have any interest in this group, please call 201-488-6678 for details.

The post Mindfulness and Eating: How to combine them first appeared on Specialized Therapy.

The post Mindfulness and Eating: How to combine them appeared first on Specialized Therapy.

Tips on Nurturing Resilience

1. Foster a positive attitude: Optimism and resilience are strongly related. Although optimism may be an individual’s subjective disposition it can also be learned. It is important to promote realistic optimism, however, as fantastical positive thinking can be a form of denial.
2. Let go of rigid thinking patterns: Moving away from seeing things as all good or all bad can promote better acceptance and recovery from distressing events.
3. Face fears: Avoidance and escape strategies in reaction to fear increase anxiety; facing fears build self-esteem. Thus nurturing resilience.
4. Nurture active coping skills: Instead of being passive in the face of challenging times, actively facilitate behaviors that will help you cope (call friends, develop healthy habits, promote positive self-talk).
5. Establish a supportive social group: Even if it were possible to manage things on your own, why would you want to? A great deal of emotional strength and resilience can be attained from close relationships with people and organizations.
6. Recognize and apply your unique strengths: Every person has the capability to nurture resilience. By acknowledging your character strengths and using them effectively, you can endure any challenging situations life throws at you.

Reducing vulnerability to overwhelming emotions and nurturing emotional resilience are topics incorporated in the DBT services provided at Specialized Therapy Associates. Should you have any interest in DBT, please call 201-488-6678 for details.

The post Nurturing Resilience to Life Challenges first appeared on Specialized Therapy.

The post Nurturing Resilience to Life Challenges appeared first on Specialized Therapy.

1. Practice for Deep Breathing:
Breathing slower is a skill that is easier to use in the moment to help reduce anger. All this skill requires is breathing out more slowly than you breathe in and gradually increasing your exhalation. Additionally, deliberately pushing your stomach out when you breathe in and letting your stomach fall when you breathe out is another way to reduce the rapid respiration that accompanies feelings of anger.

2. Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR)
This skill involves the systematic tensing and releasing of various muscle groups as a means of disconnecting the impact of anger on the body. An easy way to start practicing progressive muscle relaxation would be to make a fist (tensing the muscles in your forearm), hold tension in this muscle for 10 to 15 seconds, and then slowly release your fist noticing the difference between how the muscle felt when it was tensed as to how it feels now; being aware of the sensations of warmth and relaxation. You can then move onto other muscle groups practicing a few seconds of muscle tension followed by a release of tension.

3. Lowering Your Body Temperature
People tend to use phrases such as ‘steamed up’ ‘boiling over’ and ‘feeling flames’ when describing rage. This is due to the fact that your body does actually heat up when you are angry. Lowering your body temperature is therefore an effective strategy in managing the physical sensations of anger. Some ideas to do this include: taking a cold shower or swimming in a pool; holding ice cubes on your cheeks, wrists or back of your neck; rinsing your face in cold water; and sitting in any cool environment.

4. Releasing Energy Associated with Anger
It’s hard for intense anger to be maintained if your body is exhausted, so anything you can do to release the energy associated with anger is going to help reduce its intensity. Doing exercises such a running, doing push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, long hikes and/or gym workouts are options. Although this depends on a person’s age or overall health, anything that increases your heart rate and works your muscles will be helpful. Doing household tasks such as vacuuming, scrubbing floors, cleaning windows, mowing the lawn and/or shoveling snow are also effective ways to expand energy.

Emotion regulation skills are topic incorporated in the DBT group provided at Specialized Therapy Associates and Fx Med Center. For further information on how you can control anger, call us at 201-488-6678.

The post Four Ways to Reduce the Physical Sensations of Anger first appeared on Specialized Therapy.

The post Four Ways to Reduce the Physical Sensations of Anger appeared first on Specialized Therapy.

Improve Eating Habits

The food you eat affects you both physically and emotionally. Foods with high sugar content can make people feel temporarily energized. This usually comes at the price of a rapid decline which can leave a person feeling excessively tired or depressed. Eating a moderate amount of a wide variety of foods every day can provide balanced energy and improved mental health.

Being Mindful of Stimulant and Depressant Intake

Many people drink coffee (a stimulant) to increase their energy or have alcoholic beverages (a depressant) to increase their feelings of calmness. Over time excessive use of these substances can increase a person’s tolerance and have adverse emotional consequences. Also, it is important to be mindful of the consequences of using these substances and modify behavior if needed.

Increasing Physical Exercise

Many studies have found a link between optimal mental health and physical exercise. Likewise, lack of physical exercise is a common behavior pattern related to depression. Increasing physical activity has both physical and mental benefits.

Getting the Appropriate Amount of Sleep

Most people will recall feeling irritable, distressed and indecisive when they don’t get enough sleep the night before. Improving the quality of sleep is the cornerstone of functioning effectively.

Attending to Physical Illness

It is pretty much impossible for a person to feel emotionally healthy if they are not feeling physically healthy. The strategies listed above are the best ones to reduce the potential for physical illness.

Reducing Physical Tension and Pain

Muscle tension and pain can result from and have a negative impact on mental health. Learning progressive relaxation strategies, mindfulness and self-soothing skills are strategies to reduce physical pain and tension.

Reducing vulnerability to overwhelming emotions and improving emotional regulation are topics incorporated in the DBT group provided at Specialized Therapy Associates. Should you have any interest in this group, please call 201-488-6678 for details.

Our sister company, Exceptional You, also incorporates a physical activity/health element into their health and life coaching programs. Should you be interested in that, please call 844-477-STAR(7827).

The post Six Ways Physical Activity Can Help Fight Overwhelming Emotions first appeared on Specialized Therapy.

The post Six Ways Physical Activity Can Help Fight Overwhelming Emotions appeared first on Specialized Therapy.

What we know

While research is still trying to determine all the different factors of social anxiety, there is a universal consensus that the core of social anxiety is related to the fear of being evaluated by other people. Many people who have social anxiety fear that they will say or do something in a social situation that will cause them to be seen in a negative light. Furthermore, there is evidence to show that positive evaluations from others in social situations can also feed social anxiety: Being evaluated positively can lead some people the feeling that expectations have been raised for them and they will need to meet higher standards of social performance in the future.

People with social anxiety disorder tend to believe that there are high standards for their behavior and that they will not be able to meet these standards. As a result, when in social situations, people with social anxiety focus their attention on their own behavior and social performance. Unfortunately, this excessive type of self-directed attention increases physical symptoms of anxiety (e.g. flushed face, sweaty palms, nausea) which can then lead to more worry about being negatively assessed by their peers.
One way to break the cycle of self-focused attention is to redirect attention to the external environment. One of the DBT skills, mindfulness, specifically related to noticing and describing, can help in this regard. People can utilize their senses to observe what they see, hear and feel in their external environment as a means of redirecting attention away from themselves. Applying this skill of mindfulness will require consistency, but it can help greatly reduce the perpetual cycle of social anxiety.

Overcoming anxiety

Additionally, a major part of overcoming social anxiety is to decrease the related avoidant behaviors and the DBT skill of acting opposite to feelings can be effective in this context. Avoiding things that you fear, when they are not actually dangerous, will only increase your fear. Likewise, when people with social anxiety avoid interacting with other people, they are only increasing their social anxiety. Therefore, coming up with small behavioral steps to begin to approach social interactions will begin to break the incapacitating hold of social anxiety.

Mindfulness and emotional regulation are topics incorporated in the DBT group provided at Specialized Therapy Associates. Should you have any interest in this group, please call 201-488-6678 for details.

The post Using DBT Skills to Reduce Social Anxiety first appeared on Specialized Therapy.

The post Using DBT Skills to Reduce Social Anxiety appeared first on Specialized Therapy.

Power Poses

In “Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance”, Harvard Business School professor Amy J.C. Cuddy shows that simply holding one’s body in expansive, “high-power” poses for as little as two minutes can lead to lower levels of cortisol (the “stress” hormone that can cause impaired immune functioning, hypertension, and memory loss) in an individual. Additionally, utilizing these power poses was found to lead to increased feelings of confidence and a greater tolerance for risk.

In their article, published in Psychological Science September 10, 2010, Cuddy and her co-authors, Dana R. Carney and Andy J. Yap of Columbia University, detail the results of an experiment in which forty-two male and female participants were randomly assigned to a high or low power pose group.
Subjects in the high-power group were manipulated into two expansive poses for one minute each. First, they were told to have their feet on a desk with their hands behind head; then they were advised to stand and lean on their hands over a desk. Those in the low-power group were posed for the same time period in two restrictive postures: sitting in a chair with arms held close and hands folded and standing with arms and legs crossed tightly. Saliva samples taken before and after the posing measured testosterone and cortisol levels. To evaluate risk tolerance, participants were given $2 and told they could roll dice for even odds of winning $4. Finally, participants were asked to indicate how “powerful” and “in charge” they felt on a scale from one to four.

The Results

Controlling for subjects’ baseline levels of both hormones, the study found that high-power poses decreased cortisol by about 25 percent and increased testosterone by about 19 percent for both men and women. In contrast, low-power poses increased cortisol about 17 percent and decreased testosterone by about 10 percent.

Although the findings in this study could be considered anecdotal, there is something to be gained by adopting body language congruent with a desired emotional change. Therefore, the next time you are feeling nervous, ask yourself “how would someone who is confident hold themselves” and adjust your body language accordingly. This change may not eliminate the feelings of nervousness, but by holding yourself in a manner opposite to that emotion, you are at least not feeding that feeling. A behavior strategy in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is to act opposite to an overwhelming emotion (e.g. if you are feeling depressed, act on this feeling by being social and active; two behaviors that are not depression driven) as a means of emotional regulation. This study expands upon that principle to show that simply adapting body language opposite to our feelings can improve our emotional health.

If you think DBT therapy may be a good fit for you or would like to learn more about STA’s DBT group, give us a call at 201-488-6678 or visit our DBT page online.

The post How Changing Body Language Can Help Your Mood first appeared on Specialized Therapy.

The post How Changing Body Language Can Help Your Mood appeared first on Specialized Therapy.

Radical Acceptance

Radical Acceptance (a concept used in Dialectical Behavior Therapy) means fully and completely accepting reality as it is and acknowledging that often things are beyond our control. The idea behind acceptance is that it helps reduce emotional suffering while increasing effective problem-solving.

Acceptance is not a passive way of giving up, ironically, it’s a way to move forward.
It’s not always easy to accept those things that you disagree with or that are not what you expected. If things do not go how you want them to, it can be very easy to focus all of your attention on how unfair reality is. However, if you accept that there is no choice in the situation you are dealing with, you can strategize on how you can handle it or make alternative arrangements. Not accepting leads to more suffering or feeling ‘stuck’ – acceptance allows you to move on.

A Willing Attitude

Acceptance requires a turning of your mind toward a Willing attitude as opposed to a Willful one. This is done through (a) being aware of how your body feels, (b) being aware of your thoughts, and (c) relaxing your body to enable new information and new awareness to enter your consciousness.
Some strategies to promote acceptance include speaking or writing down the aspect of reality that you’re having trouble with, looking at the consequences of accepting this reality (both the negative and the positive), and allowing yourself to mourn the reality that you hoped for. If you are feeling stuck, try to assess what you might not be accepting. Allow yourself to think about a different reality. Experience your disappointments and anger and then allow yourself to move forward into a new reality.

Radical Acceptance is a topic incorporated in the DBT group provided at Specialized Therapy Associates. Should you have any interest in this group, please call 201-488-6678 for details.

The post The Benefits of Acceptance to Emotional Health first appeared on Specialized Therapy.

The post The Benefits of Acceptance to Emotional Health appeared first on Specialized Therapy.