Apples for the Mind E-Book

Tom Nehmy

• Herausgeber: Formidable Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 245

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

20 True Things You Need to Know

You can create abundant wellbeing and skyrocket your personal effectiveness.

Finally, a psychologist reveals the most important things you need to know to prevent problems, enjoy optimal mental health, and reach life-changing peak performance.

If you’ve ever wanted to truly transform your life, this book is the answer.

We know “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”—but what provides a psychological edge?

Award-winning clinical psychologist Dr Tom Nehmy reveals his most potent insights—his apples—from years of cutting-edge work in scientific research and guiding thousands of people to enhance their lives.

By applying what you learn in this book, you will:

• Experience abundant wellbeing by focusing on six key factors
• Release perfectionism and focus on what really matters
• Slam the door on depression and anxiety
• Discover simple, powerful techniques to make good decisions—every time
• Bust through myths about stress, and use it to your advantage
• Learn crucial psychological skills that prevent problems from even starting
• Have the courage to seek out challenges and fulfil your potential

Clear, actionable habits based on science, wisdom, and knowing what makes people tick.

Welcome to your new toolkit for an awesome life.

Leseprobe

Don’t forget to claim the templates and downloads that go with thisbook!

To help you put many of the ideas in this book into practice quickly, I have created some easy-to-use bonuses. They are free to download and use.

Grab themat:

tomnehmy.com/applesupgrades

Copyright © 2019 Tom Nehmy, PhD

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, in whole or in part, without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the publisher via the website below.

Formidable Press

www.formidablepress.com

ISBN: 978-0-6485004-0-7 Paperback

ISBN: 978-0-6485004-2-1 Hardcover

Legal Notice

The Purchaser or Reader of this publication assumes responsibility for the use of these materials and information. The Author and Publisher assume no responsibility or liability whatsoever on the behalf of any Purchaser or Reader of these materials and information.

The names, details, and circumstances of those mentioned in this publication have been changed to protect their privacy. Examples have frequently been aggregated and anonymised. This publication is not intended as a substitute for the advice of health care professionals.

This book has been prepared in Australian English.

To Jasper

Contents

Chapter 1: Wellbeing is More Important Than Happiness

Chapter 2: There Are Six Key Ingredients to Wellbeing

Chapter 3: Be Courageous, Not Perfect

Chapter 4: Emotions Are Natural and Are Designed to Help Us

Chapter 5: Emotions Don’t Control Your Behaviour, Your Choices Do

Chapter 6: Psychological Muscle is the Foundation of Self-Control

Chapter 7: Anxiety Can Turn into Calm and Confidence

Chapter 8: Frustration and Anger Can Be Harnessed

Chapter 9: Depression Is a Vicious Cycle Waiting to Be Broken

Chapter 10: Thoughts Affect How You Feel but Are Often Inaccurate

Chapter 11: Learn and Live the Helpful Thinking Process

Chapter 12: The Debating Method Creates Superfast Helpful Thinking

Chapter 13: Managing Stress Is About Having The Right Amount At The Right Time

Chapter 14: What You Take from Your Challenges Will Define You

Chapter 15: What You Focus On, You Amplify in Your Awareness

Chapter 16: Your Most Important Relationship Is The One You Have With Yourself

Chapter 17: Ask for Help When You Need It

Chapter 18: You Are More Powerful Than You Think

Chapter 19: Do What Matters (To You)

Chapter 20: Expand Your Capabilities

Epilogue: What’s Possible?

Acknowledgements

Author Request

Chapter 1

Wellbeing is More Important Than Happiness

As David sat across from me, he looked spent.

Despite having a successful business, money in the bank, a loving wife and two gorgeous kids, his life had become a blur of irritability and stress. Even when he had quality time with family and friends, he felt the pleasure had gone. His wife complained that he was no longer the man she married, and David agreed.

How is it that David came to be sitting on my therapist’s couch?

It had nothing to do with a traumatic childhood or an imbalance in his brain chemistry. He had simply followed the life plan so many of us assume we should: if we work hard, be a good person, have a family, earn money, happiness will follow. But the happiness that David assumed would follow eluded him. He felt deflated, defeated, and ripped off. If he had done everything right, why didn’t he feel good? He met society’s definition of success but still something was missing. Didn’t he deserve to be happy? The mistake David made was to confuse happiness—feeling good—with wellbeing.

Pursuing good feelings alone does not equate to fulfilment. Meeting society’s expectations for a successful life does not always feel good. Pursuing happy feelings is not the same thing as cultivating wellbeing, which is the heart of our deep enjoyment of life.

Throughout my career as a clinical psychologist, I’ve made these and other crucial observations. The essential lessons I present to you here are the result of my discoveries over fifteen years, working with literally thousands of clients: in my private practice, my workshops, and subsequently my wellbeing program, Healthy Minds (www.healthymindsprogram.com).

Time and again, I saw people, like David, who had been sold the same happiness myth and were bewildered to find their spark for life had dimmed. Others were existing within a meek middle-ground where they were not experiencing a psychological problem per se but also were not fulfilling their potential and operating at peak performance. The strategic focus on wellbeing that I developed to help my clients, then expanded into the Healthy Minds program, has worked for thousands of people who felt stuck, let down, or frustrated with life. Not only did it help them overcome problems, it was also a doorway to greater functioning.

I was able to help David recover. He went from being stuck to having a life that was more satisfying and healthy than before. His focus quickly shifted from struggling to achieving new goals.

The methods I used to help David and many other clients who came to me with symptoms of anxiety, depression, and chronic stress, focus on a specific set of skills and concepts that don’t merely return people to their prior good-enough functioning, but helps them to reach new levels of wellbeing and effectiveness in all aspects of life.

I noticed that even when people were functioning fairly well, these concepts could be applied in a proactive way to create even higher levels of mental health and peak performance. Because being very well is associated with higher motivation, engagement, energy levels, clear thinking, and creativity.

By switching his focus from attaining positive mood states to his overall wellbeing, David was able to recover his good feelings while also creating enduring mental health, higher performance at work, and resilience in the face of life’s inevitable challenges.

Of all the crucial components to wellbeing that I taught, each of which I will explain in the pages that follow, the one most commonly lacking was a clear understanding of psychological skills. While people readily understood the importance of factors like diet and exercise in being generally healthy, the concepts underlying a balanced and healthy emotional life were simply not common knowledge. Concepts that I took for granted like realistic, helpful thinking; how to manage emotional impulses; building flexibility; understanding stress; and self-compassion, were not well known to my clients at the beginning of therapy. Unlike daily physical health routines, these important daily mental health skills and habits tended to be unfamiliar and poorly understood.

As I noticed more and more clients grow into effective self-managers of their wellbeing, I became preoccupied with a captivating question: what if we could target these key psychological factors in advance of the life events that might drive someone to therapy? What if the clients in front of me had been taught the skills and knowledge I was about to teach them before their problem arose? And if we did teach these skills in advance, would it prevent the onset of the core symptoms of psychological problems and lead to greater quality of life? These questions bugged me relentlessly as I contemplated the possibility that so much suffering could be avoided.

Initially, my busy professional life carried on, but still this idea would not go away. The knowledge that proved so effective in the therapy room was being denied to the majority of the population who would never find themselves on a therapist’s couch. What would happen if we routinely taught people to become effective self-managers of their mental health and wellbeing? Was broad psychological immunisation possible?

It was only when someone very close to me was seriously affected by mental ill-health that I was spurred into action. While I had always had empathy for my clients, seeing first-hand the devastation caused by a lack of these psychological skills affected me in a deeply personal way. Now I desperately wanted to know if it was possible to stop episodes of psychological disorders from occurring in the first place. Overnight, my intellectual curiosity and arm’s-length theorising had turned into a personal and professional mission: to test and trial a new, skills-based approach to preventive psychology.

In society overall, there is a huge gulf in our general knowledge about building and maintaining our physical health compared to our mental health. We know to bend our knees when we lift heavy objects, we wear seatbelts to keep ourselves safe from physical injury in our travels, and we brush our teeth to prevent decay. Even if we don’t always do what we should do to keep our bodies healthy, we at least have that basic knowledge. Yet our broader social consciousness seems to lack knowledge about protecting our mental health. It’s as if we are experiencing the psychological equivalent of not brushing our teeth.

For the majority of people, if they made a New Year’s resolution to become fit and healthy, or to complete a goal such as running a marathon, they would have a sense of the daily behaviours required to reach their goal. Whether they actually do it or not is an entirely different matter, but at least they would have some basic knowledge of what they should do.

But what if the New Year’s resolution was to be as mentally healthy as possible, to develop a psychological edge to be at their best? My concern is that most people would be unaware of the daily behaviours required to get there.

Consider this. The type and strength of different emotions are central to our quality of life. Yet how many people do you think could give well-informed answers to the following questions?

Where do emotions comefrom?What’s theirpurpose?How can I manage my emotionswell?What does a healthy emotional life looklike?

Sadly, I think most people would struggle. Today’s generation of young people was born into a world with a booming self-help industry and greater access to media and information than ever before. We are surrounded by buzzwords, good intentions, and awareness-raising. Political correctness, safe-spaces, and trigger-warnings abound. Diligent, protective parents raise their kids in an increasingly protected world. Yet our collective mental health has never been worse.

If, like me, you have grown frustrated with simplistic and clichéd recommendations to “think positive”, “believe in yourself and you can do anything”, or “just choose to be happy”; then you have probably been waiting for a more genuine, sophisticated, and realistic approach.

I have dedicated the past decade of my professional life to uncovering the core processes associated with mental health and wellbeing so we can rise above the tokenism and buzzwords to deliver truly effective psychological knowledge on a large scale.

I have reviewed over 700 research papers from around the world on what has and hasn’t worked in preventing various mental disorders, and understanding how psychological problems develop. I have worked with thousands of young people teaching them sophisticated psychological skills and wellbeing strategies, and painstakingly assessed their mental health compared to control groups over time. My scientific research has been published in major international journals1 and reflects the very latest developments in what we know about human psychology.

I have also learnt that when good psychological knowledge and a strategic focus on wellbeing is applied in a consistent, proactive way, it leads to peak performance. More than just preventing and overcoming problems, the principles of being well help us to do well. Enhanced energy, improved focus, healthier relationships, and a more clear, aware mind are just a few of many ways personal development creates a pathway to thriving. By taking powerful concepts out of the therapy room and systematically applying them for the purpose of personal growth, we open the door to higher functioning, broader horizons, and more exciting possibilities.

My personal mission now leads me to share the crucial insights I have gained over this long journey with you. Each chapter encapsulates steps you can take that have helped the thousands of people I’ve worked with to create emotional balance, peak performance, and lifelong wellbeing.

The keys to robust mental health and enduring high functioning are specific, repeatable, and can be readily applied in your own life, starting today. If you keep turning these pages and are willing to apply what you’ve learnt, I’ll support you in creating a higher level of wellbeing to enjoy your best possible life.

1 For example: Nehmy, T. & Wade, T. (2015). Reducing the onset of negative affect in adolescents: Evaluation of a perfectionism program in a universal prevention setting. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 67, 55-63.

Chapter 2

There Are Six Key Ingredients to Wellbeing

When people say they want happiness, what they really mean is they want greater wellbeing. Our wellbeing is the baseline state of good functioning and contentment that we return to as we negotiate all the ups and downs of a worthwhile, interesting, and meaningful life. Unlike a focus on temporary mood states, wellbeing is more stable and broad, and creates the foundation for our quality of life. In this sense, being mentally healthy is about more than just your mind.

Worryingly, the field of personal development and our society as a whole is undergoing a popular revival of a dangerous concept: pursue good feelings and everything will work out fine. Feeling happy is promoted as the ultimate goal.

In the 1980’s, society was swept up in the self-esteem movement which assumed that if we just praise people enough, they will feel good about themselves and therefore will feel happy and won’t get depressed or encounter other psychological problems. But the self-esteem movement did not deliver the expected benefits because it didn’t accept and deal with the reality that to be human is to be imperfect, that we all have strengths and weaknesses, and even people of good character and ability will sometimes make mistakes and perform poorly (and vice-versa).

This failure was made clear by subsequent rising rates of depression. If feel-good feedback was the key to sustainable happiness, shouldn’t we have observed a decline in rates of depression? Some psychologists have argued that indiscriminate praise, which became particularly evident in parenting and the school environment, is one of the reasons depression rates rose: it created “learned helplessness”. No matter what kids did, they got the same result. They were always told their performance or ability was wonderful, when inevitably, it wasn’t always wonderful. This meant that kids lost a mechanism of reliable feedback from the authority figures in their lives that could help them identify their strengths and weaknesses, and learn how to deal with challenges effectively.

We have also since discovered that self-esteem is moderately correlated with narcissism. In the selfie-taking, social media world in which we now live, seeking positive feedback for temporary good feelings seems to be more a vicious cycle than a real solution to the desire for happiness.

More recently, a wave of “happyology” has proliferated not only in the personal development literature but also in parts of professional psychology and mainstream education. The word “positive” now seems to precede every noun, as if proclaiming something to be positive immediately sheds its negative aspects and magnifies its virtue. Positive psychology, positive education, positive workplaces, positive parenting.

Some aspects of these approaches have conferred benefit. But here again, good intentions have missed the mark: in wanting to discover more of something good we have rendered ourselves less able to deal with the reality of the wonderful but imperfect world around us. By focusing on generating good mood without teaching the specific skills of dealing with so-called “negative” emotions, this trend has alienated those people for whom positive emotions do not seem readily accessible. It has created an assumption (whether intended or not) that stronger and more enduring positive mood states are the hallmark of personal development success. Happiness is promoted as the end goal. Like an all-night party venue with buzzing neon lights, positive mood states should be open and available to us at any and all hours of the day, non-stop.

Ten Steps to Happiness!

Think positive and all your dreams will come true!

The alluring but deceptive premise is that 24/7 happiness is even possible. Being “up” in mood all the time is simply not how our brains are designed to work. The regular experience of good feelings is healthy and desirable, but emotions, by their very nature, are transient and temporary. If someone arrived in my practice and told me they feel up in mood all the time, I would think, is this person experiencing a manic episode? Is this a drug psychosis? Do they have a serious neurologicaldisorder?

It’s not normal to feel happy 24/7

The notion of feeling good all the time denies the reality that it is not normal to be happy 24/7. Emotions, by design, should be temporary and transient. The happyology approach implies that experiencing negative emotions means we’re not there yet. We are somehow less than what we could or should be. But if feeling good is the end goal, then what about all the soul-testing journeys that make up a deeply purposeful, well-lived life but do not consist of abundant positive emotion?

In addition to being unrealistic and unnatural, perpetual good moods, like perpetual safety, would be boring and dull. Pursuing things that matter carries the hope of great rewards but also the risk of disappointment and loss. Anxiety and excitement are never far apart. This is the true yin and yang of our deep personal psychology, too easily glossed over when we pursue good feelings for feeling good’s sake. As we are enriched by life’s challenges and rewards, so too is the tapestry of our emotional lives woven together with varying and contrasting emotional states, as if from a vast palette of colours.

Real life includes both positives and negatives

Shit happens.

This crude, simple message was made into a bumper sticker because it’s true. Unless we live cross-legged meditating in a cave, things will happen in daily life that challenge us and cause us discomfort. It is impossible to live a meaningful, fulfilling, and goal-directed life without experiencing some negative emotions. Life outside the cave means encountering challenging times that don’t always feel good and circumstances over which we do not have total control.

But challenges aren’t inherently bad. Being challenged just means being taken out of our comfort zone. A job promotion to a more demanding role might take us out of our comfort zone and is therefore challenging. Having to make a speech at a wedding might take us out of our comfort zone and be challenging. Likewise, losing a job and having to regroup and find other employment usually takes us out of our comfort zone, and is a confronting and challenging problem to overcome. None of these things is immediately conducive to feeling happy, yet they are each common occurrences that are important in that they can contribute to increased capability, enhanced relationships, or a better future. By successfully negotiating these challenges we can actually enhance our wellbeing and personal effectiveness.

Rather than working against us, circumstances that generate discomfort and occasional negative emotions are actually a vital part of learning and growth that we wouldn’t want to be without. As I will present to you in this book, a good formula for personal development is to be exposed to challenges that expand our comfort zones, and our personal capacity to deal with future challenges, in a graded and gradual way.

Profound personal growth requires both comfort and discomfort. Robust mental health requires both positive and negative emotions. And wellbeing provides the foundation and resources to make each of these possible.

You can create greaterwellbeing

Being truly mentally healthy requires a focus on wellbeing—our broader biological, social and psychological health—as opposed to trying to capture and hold onto feeling states which by their very nature are temporary and transient.

Wellbeing is about more than just your mind. It is about more than just feeling good. Rather it is an holistic and integrated view of many important factors that collectively determine our level of functioning and quality of life.

Where many people see personal psychology as being intangible or some kind of genetic luck-of-the-draw, readers of this book will learn that mental health is no more esoteric than learning how to change the oil in your car: it usually involves a specific and logical set of steps that are learnable and repeatable.

A helpful way of thinking about wellbeing is the Healthy Minds Wellbeing Wheel.

Take a look at the Wellbeing Wheel graphic above. Each segment is a major contributor to overall wellbeing. As we go around the wheel clockwise starting from the top left, consider what rating out of 10 you would give yourself for each of the wellbeing segments. At the end of this chapter, you will have a chance to rate and review each segment as it pertains to you right now.

Primary Relationships

The primary relationships segment refers to the people you live with, spend most of your time with, and/or who are closest to you in an emotional sense—for better or worse. Relationships provide a huge amount of context to our experiences of life, and influence our wellbeing greatly.

Mental health researchers generally look at three key factors in assessing wellness or disease: biological factors, psychological factors, and social factors. Each of these influence psychological outcomes greatly. This is known as the bio-psycho-social model. However, the social part of the biopsychosocial model is the one that tends to be under-emphasised. Key relationships have a significant bearing on our experience of everyday life.

So, what would a highly rated (healthy and fulfilled) primary relationships segment look like? It would mean the people we live with are people we get along with and preferably love and respect. The people we spend most of our time with in terms of family and close work colleagues would treat us well and these relationships would be largely free from major conflict. Ideally, all of those people we allow in our inner circle would treat us with kindness, acceptance, and compassion.

If you have a partner or spouse, this relationship will generally have a large impact on your wellbeing, especially if you live with them. But if your marriage is marred by conflict, jealousy, and distrust, then this will negatively affect your score.

If your work and personal relationships are generally great, that might feel like a 9, but if you cringe at the thought of going home to a conflictual relationship with your partner, that sounds like a 5, so maybe you’d go with a 7 overall. Get the picture? The specific number you end up with is subjective, which is totally fine because this is just for you and won’t be used to compare yourself to others.

Biological Needs and Bodily Health

Our diet, the amount of sleep we get, consuming enough water and not too much caffeine or alcohol are essential aspects of wellbeing. On the extreme end, very poor diet or the excessive consumption of unhealthy foods and drinks will result in serious physical health problems including illness and chronic disease. Some people are also highly sensitive to foods such as sugar, caffeine, wheat, and dairy, and therefore experience mood swings, and peaks and troughs in their energy levels.

One of the most common deficits in this segment is a lack of water. Ensuring you limit your intake of sugary, caffeinated, or alcoholic drinks, and having plenty of water is a simple first step that most people could take to improve this segment. Not convinced that this will impact your wellbeing? Feel the difference in your alertness, energy levels, concentration and fatigue when you are hydrated versus dehydrated, and you will quickly see that this is an important factor.

You may want to include sex as a biological need in assessing this segment. For many people a satisfying sex life makes a significant positive difference to their mood, satisfaction, and stress levels.

If you have a healthy diet with no significant health issues you might want to score yourself a 9.5. But if you haven’t had a check-up with your doctor in years or you’re aware of a family history of cancer but have never done a screening test, you’ll want to knock a couple of points off.

When assessing diet for this segment’s score, keep in mind that healthy eating will contribute to a higher score, but obsessive healthy eating or calorie restriction is not ultimately healthy and will reduce your score. Overall, small improvements in habits such as sleep, diet, and regular health checks (for example) can have a big impact over time.

Exercise

Exercise gets a whole segment for itself. Why? Because it has such a big influence on mood management and stress relief. Research has found that for some people, vigorous exercise several times a week can have a major mood effect similar to or greater than that of antidepressant medications. It discharges stress, increases our physical capacity for daily life, and causes the release of endorphins that make us feel good. For any mildly depressed client I see, the first thing I usually get them to do is to increase their activity levels, and one great way to do this is to simply exercise.

When you assess your wellbeing related to exercise, think about how often you get your heart rate up. Do you walk or exercise regularly to a degree that gets you puffing? Is your fitness level functional? That is, are you able to do all the daily tasks in your life without excessive strain or fatigue? Exercise will also positively affect sleep, metabolism, and will lower risk for many potential health problems.

Psychological Skills

It is probably not surprising that the psychological skills segment is the one people find the most difficult to rate. The psychological skills that have a pervasive influence on our emotional lives are not commonly known and understood in the way bodily health factors (such as diet and exercise) are. On many occasions I have found myself sitting opposite a “stuck” client in my clinic, thinking to myself unless this person found her way to my therapist’s couch, what other opportunity would she have had to learn the psychological skills she needs? The answer was “none”. And herein lies the great opportunity we are now faced with: to identify the core sophisticated psychological skills we know help people greatly, and take them out of the therapy room and into schools, companies, and books to help as many people as possible learn how to manage their psychological wellbeing before they find themselves needing therapy.

The psychological skills I am referring to include concepts like helpful thinking, techniques for managing emotions, relating to ourselves in an encouraging and compassionate way, being flexible, understanding and prioritising personal values, being willing to tolerate discomfort, and more. The chapters that follow will teach you these concepts and how to simply and effectively apply them to your everyday life.

For now, give your rating based on your best impression of:

How well do you manage strong emotions? Do you feel like you can make good decisions when having a strong emotional reaction to something? Do you find, in hindsight, that your responses fit the situation well or do you over- or under-react? Do you get stuck in states of negative emotion or do you tend to bounce back quickly?How accurate is your thinking? Do you tend to predict disaster that never seems to eventuate? Or do you under-estimate risk? Would your friends describe you as level-headed and flexible?How do you relate to yourself? Are you harsh and hard-hearted in your self-talk? Or are you an encouraging coach who employs constructive criticism but also acknowledges what you do well?How would you assess the quality of decisions you make? If someone was viewing your life as a movie, would they say you have navigated life well? Would they say have demonstrated an ability to learn from the past, and become wiser over time?

It doesn’t matter if your rating feels like a guess—that’s all it needs to be. Just by reading this book, your psychological skills segment will start to improve.

Fun, Interests, and Social Life

A healthy life is a balanced life. And no matter how driven or focused you are, part of being human is the need to take time away from work and goal-directed activities. We need to recuperate, focus on pleasurable things for their own sake, and enjoy social connections and activities.

Remember the “social” from the bio-psycho-social theory of wellness and disease? Apart from your primary relationships, this segment also nurtures that human need to feel connected to and supported by others.

If it feels like something’s missing, if you’d like more social contact in your life, or you feel the need for a hobby or an interest outside of your usual work or family roles, your score will be lower. If you have all the social engagements you need, regularly engage in pleasurable activities, and have something that captures your imagination beyond the routine tasks of your life, then your score will be high.

Values, Meaning, and Purpose

In contrast to short-term aspects of wellbeing, which can be readily influenced by daily behaviour, is the big picture of our lives. This pertains to who we are, the roles we play, and why we are here. What gets you out of bed in the morning?