Tag: Christine Carter

Happiness Tip: Let Someone See Who You Really Are

These days, you can have both an actual life AND a life you present to others that’s been optimized for your audience. There can be what really happened, and ALSO what happened as captured on Instagram or Facebook or Snapchat. There’s how you really look, and how you look after you whiten your teeth or crop out that belly fat. There’s how you actually feel after a workout (sore, depleted, out-of-shape?) and what you post about your latest exercise class (OMG! I am so sweaty and inspired after SoulCycle!!)

Although you may not go out of your way to create a complete facade of awesome for your online persona, the lure of wishful thinking is real. Slowly, the filtered colors (lark? lo-fi?) of a funnier, sexier, more intelligently-lived life can take over.

Online, it’s a perception game. But is that game bleeding over into your offline life? What happens when you fib to your coworker about how great your weekend was (why not be consistent with what you posted on Instagram?) when actually, your weekend sucked and you’re feeling pretty depressed and anxious. So what?

You may not want to reveal that you and your significant other had a major fight over the weekend, but if you pretend that you are okay — and you’re not — you’ll probably make the people around you feel worse, too. Research shows that when we accept and let ourselves feel (and even express) what is going on emotionally for us, our overall happiness increases and depression decreases. (Ironically, research shows that people who regularly suppress difficult emotions tend to experience more negative emotions overall.)

A consistent benefit of letting ourselves feel what we feel is that our relationships tend to improve. Click To Tweet

A consistent benefit of letting ourselves feel what we feel is that our relationships tend to improve, sometimes dramatically. For example, the less often that people report suppressing their emotions over a two-week period, the better they tend to feel about their relationships over the course of three months. This sort of authenticity predicts the tendency to avoid destructive behavior in intimate relationships. More than that, it predicts greater relationship quality overall.

Why?

Because authenticity creates intimacy. Research shows that people in romantic relationships are most intimate with and most committed to romantic partners who see them as they see themselves; connection and intimacy in our relationships depend on our feelings of being understood. In other words, when our romantic partners see us the way that we see ourselves — which they can only do if we don’t hide our feelings or pretend to be better than we are — our relationships last longer and are more fulfilling.

Take Action: This week, show someone who you really are.

Join the Discussion: What benefits have you experienced from showing people who you really are? When has pretending backfired for you or someone you know?

* * * * *

If you want closer friendships and better relationships, consider joining my Brave Over Perfect coaching group. This is a great time to join, as you’ll get two themes for the price of one.

All three Habits & Resolutions call recordings and resources will stay up until the end of February. We’ll kick off March with some of the best research-based advice related to relationships and marriage. Learn more or enroll now.

4 Ways to Keep Passion Alive

Research shows that with a little elbow grease, romance can last a lifetime. This week, put some energy into your relationship. How can you best improve it?

Do you need to dedicate more mind/heart space to your partner?
Do you need to foster more admiration, fondness, and appreciation?
How frequently do you “turn towards” your partner?
What special family celebrations, traditions, and routines do you have? Can you add more?

This video is the 3rd in a series about the science of great relationships from The Raising Happiness Homestudy. Check out the rest of the Homestudy here .

If you would like to download the audio version of this video to listen to in your car or on the go, click the link below.
DOWNLOAD THE AUDIO VERSION HERE.

If you’d like to delve a little deeper, I hope you’ll join my Brave Over Perfect group coaching!

In our next theme, we’ll be talking about relationships and marriage, which are foundational for finding meaning and joy in our lives. Join us to practice some science-based ways to improve your relationships.

Group coaching is a highly effective alternative to individual coaching. We do three recorded calls per theme (cost is $20 per theme). Learn more or enroll now.

Resolutions Slipping? 5 Quick Ways to Stay the Course

We all understand that when we first attempt to drive a car or ride a bike, we’ll make mistakes. Behavior change is no different; it’s a process of slipping, learning from the mistake, and trying again.”

— John C. Norcross, Changeology

Unless you are some sort of superhero, you will not be able to establish a new habit perfectly the first time. Research indicates that 88 percent of people have failed to keep a new resolution. In my experience as a human being and a coach, 100 percent of people trying to change themselves lapse back to their old selves at least some of the time. So what to do if you’re struggling?

1. Don’t get too emotional about your slip or succumb to self-criticism. Instead, forgive yourself. Remind yourself that lapses are part of the process, and that feeling guilty or bad about your behavior will not increase your future success.

2. Figure out what the problem is. This may be blazingly obvious, but in order to do better tomorrow, you’ll need to know what is causing your trip-ups. What temptation can you remove? Were you stressed or tired or hungry–and if so, how can you prevent that the next time? Figure it out, and make a specific plan for what to do if you find yourself in a similar situation again. What will you do differently? What have you learned from your slip?

3. Beware the “What the Hell” effect. Say you’ve sworn not to check your email before breakfast, but you’ve been online since your alarm went off…three hours ago. You’re now at risk for what researchers formally call the Abstinence Violation Effect (AVE) and jokingly call the “What the Hell” effect. If you’ve already blown your plan today, why not go hog wild? What the hell–you can begin again tomorrow, right? Wrong. The more damage you do during your binge, the more likely you are to slip again the next day, and the less confidence you’ll have in yourself that you can change. So as soon as you notice you’ve slipped, go back to your plan. Double down, friends, double down.

4. Rededicate yourself to your resolution (now, in this instant, not tomorrow). Why do you want to make the changes that you do? How will you benefit? Do a little deep breathing and calm contemplation of your goals.

5. Above all, comfort yourself. To boost follow-through on our good intentions, we need to feel safe and secure. When we are stressed, our brain tries to rescue us by activating our dopamine systems. A dopamine rush makes temptations more tempting. Think of this as your brain pushing you toward a comfort item . . . like the snooze button instead of the morning jog, onion rings instead of mixed greens, or that easy taxi to work rather than the less-than-comfortable urban bike ride. So sometimes the best thing that we can do to help ourselves unplug is to preemptively comfort ourselves in healthy ways. What makes you feel safe and secure–and doesn’t sabotage your goals? Perhaps you need to seek out a hug or take a walk outside.

What are you struggling with? Post a comment and I’ll try to help!

If you want support establishing a new habit, it’s not too late to join our Brave Over Perfect Group Coaching. Our January/February theme is about setting and keeping the right resolutions. It’s only $20 to join us! You’ll get instant access to previous call recordings and an invitation to our next live call. We also have a thriving online community, worksheets, and online resources. Learn more or enroll now.

Cheers to making this your happiest year yet!

by Christine Carter

The Power of Taking Time Off

Do you work around the clock, just because you can?

If so, you aren’t alone. These days we check our smartphones (and laptops) constantly to abate our anxiety that we are missing something. Are we supposed to be responding to something urgent at work? What if someone called about something really important? Constant device checking looks a lot like an addiction (or obsessive-compulsive disorder). One study found that many people respond to “phantom phone vibrations”—they think they feel their phone vibrating even when it isn’t.

And even if we aren’t addicted or don’t check our emails and texts and feeds compulsively, often our mental health is still, in fact, at stake. Certainly our productivity and satisfaction with life are. For example, Harvard University’s Leslie Perlow’s intervention with the Boston Consulting Group executives was nothing short of transformative. She required that participants establish “Predictable Time Off” (PTO)—time when they would not check their email or work remotely from, say, the family dinner table.

Work satisfaction and, ironically, productivity shot up for the BCG executives, dramatically. Before establishing PTO, only 27 percent were excited to start work in the morning. After PTO, 51 percent were. Before, less than half were satisfied with their job, but after, nearly three-quarters were. Satisfaction with work-life balance went from 38 percent to 54 percent. And people found their work to be more collaborative, efficient, and effective; for example, just establishing PTO made 91 percent of the consultants rate their team as collaborative, up from 76 percent when they were checking their email at all hours of the day and night.

Unplugging isn’t easy, but it is necessary. Click To Tweet

Perlow explains:

Busy managers and professionals tend to amplify—through their own actions and interactions—the inevitable pressures of their jobs, making their own and their colleagues’ lives more intense, more overwhelming, more demanding, and less fulfilling than they need to be. The result of this vicious cycle is that the work process ends up being less effective and efficient than it could be. The power of PTO is that it breaks this cycle, mitigating the pressure, freeing individuals to spend time in ways that are more desirable for themselves personally and for the work process.

Unless we want to feel overwhelmed and exhausted, we need to unplug.

A lot. Specifically, we need to carve out times and spaces that are insulated from checking behaviors. This can be very, very hard when it doesn’t come as a company mandate, as it did at the Boston Consulting Group. But even though it might be difficult, and requires some courage, I promise, it’s worth doing.

This post is from a series about gaining control of your time, attention and energy in my online course, Science of Finding Flow, an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less.

by Christine Carter

Habits Are Everything

You might know how to be happy, but can you do it?

Watch a video of any elite athlete or performer before a big game or show, and you will likely see one thing: their pre-performance habits, the things that they do every single time in exactly the same way.

This is because habits are everything. Not just for game-day, and not just for elite performers. For normal people like you and I, for raising our children, for being happy in our relationships, for being happy as individuals.

Our routines and habits allow us to access a part of our brain that runs on relatively little gas. The newer (in evolutionary terms) part of your brain—your smarty-pants pre-frontal cortex, the area that sets you apart from the family dog—works pretty well. But it requires effort and willpower to make it tick. The more you use it throughout a day, the less reliable it becomes. Low blood sugar? Your decision-making will falter, whether you realize it or not.

Good thing there is a back-up plan in the older part of your brain: your basal ganglia, a primitive knob of tissue deep in your noggin that acts as your own personal auto-pilot. It controls your breathing, and swallowing, and that weird way that you sometimes drive to work while sort-of unconscious.

Your basal gangla is, among other things, your habit center. And once it is programed, it requires no effort on your part to accomplish truly amazing feats. (Really. Charles Duhigg, in his inspiring book The Power of Habit, gives a detailed account of the way Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps won his world records by honing his habits.)

This means that when we are too tired to think—as we often are—we default to our habits. Which made me realize: Our habits are our most critical cornerstones for happiness.

I have long advocated finding habits and routines that actually work. It doesn’t have to be the most efficient or productive routine; it’s simply one that makes us feel good, or at least it doesn’t make us feel bad.

We need a dinnertime routine that creates feelings of gratitude rather than annoyance, for example, and a morning routine that doesn’t make us want to lay our heads down and cry before we even get to work. We also need bedtime routines for ourselves and our children that don’t leave us exhausted and irritable.

An important caveat: Cultivating habits and routines doesn’t mean that we go through life mindlessly. I mention this because mindfulness—when we consciously pay attention to what we’re thinking, feeling, and experiencing in the present moment, without judging our thoughts and feelings as “good” or “bad”—is a research-tested way to reduce our stress and, generally, be happier.

How can we be mindful about things we do habitually?

Well, consider how we breathe. On the one hand, our breathing is on auto-pilot—we aren’t thinking, “Okay, now I need to breathe in! Now breathe out! And in! And out!” At the same time, though, we can pay attention to our breath as a part of a meditation or another relaxation practice.

So when we make something a habit—say, washing the dishes right after dinner—we don’t need to become mindless about it—we can still pay attention to the way the water feels on our hands, for instance, or even appreciate the fact that we have dishes and food to eat off of in the first place. Habits can make something relatively routine and effortless, but not necessarily mindless. In fact, I find it much easier to be mindful about something once it is a habit—once I’m not trying to figure out what I’m going to do, or how I’m going to do it, or even IF I’m going to do something.

So our habits can routinely make us feel grateful, or joyful, and they can prompt us to pay attention and be mindful. But HOW?

I have spent years pondering this question, subjecting my clients and readers to my habit tracker and methods for getting into better routines.

Habits are a critical component of the happiness equation. It is one thing to know what to do to be happy (or to raise happy children, or to create a happy marriage) but it is quite another thing to actually be able to do those things. You know that you should exercise and meditate and eat kale, for example. But do you often do those things? Perhaps the missing piece is a habit.

by Christine Carter

3 Resolutions to Make You Happier

I do understand why people don’t like New Year’s resolutions: they can be a source of failure, year after year. Folks often pick resolutions that are inherently unrewarding, that necessitate relentless hard work, or that remind them of their mortality in a way that makes them feel small instead of grateful.

This year, make the right resolution. Make the wrong one and you won’t keep it; you’ll just add another habit to the “fail” list. This year, pick just one resolution that research shows will make you happier. Here are are three of my favorites:

1. Spend more time with friends. Study after study shows that we tend to be happier when we feel connected to our nearest and dearest, when we feel like we are a part of a group or a clan. Even introverts don’t like to feel lonely; this may seem like the science of the blazingly obvious, but it bears repeating. Do you frequently feel isolated or lonely? Make a resolution to routinely reach out to others.

2. Every day, find a way to give something to somebody. My favorite happiness booster is to give thanks: to a higher power for the abundance that surrounds me; to my dad for taking my kids to ice cream; to my husband for all the ways he makes me giggle. Equally good is to give something else—a helping hand, a compliment, a much needed $5 bill—even if it is just a tiny act of kindness. In a world that is more focused on getting than giving, a New Year’s resolution to do one kind thing each day is a pretty radical act. When we make giving a habit, we make gratitude and kindness central themes in our lives. In so doing, we transform our lives with joy.

3. Get more sleep. The science around this is clear: You’ll be less stressed, less sick, and less grouchy in the New Year if you get more shut-eye. Try increasing your sleep 10 minutes a night for a week, and then another 10 the next week, and so on until you are regularly getting your eight hours.

It is miraculous to me that people can change themselves simply because they want to. New Year’s resolutions are an amazing act of creation, an art form where the canvas is the self.

Want more advice for keeping New Year’s resolutions? Enroll in Brave Over Perfect Group Coaching. Our January theme is all about setting and keeping the right resolutions. Get instant access to three live coaching calls (and call recordings), a thriving online community, worksheets, and online resources. Use the code BESTYEARYET to enroll for just $10.

Learn more or enroll now. Cheers to making 2019 your happiest year yet!

by Christine Carter

Why New Year’s Resolutions Work

Thinking of making a New Year’s Resolution this year? This quick, research-based explanation by Dr. Mike Evans of why New Year’s Resolutions are a great way to make positive changes is an essential watch!

And those tools Dr. Evans mentions at the end? I’ll give them to you! Join my Brave Over Perfect Coaching Group. Gain support in forming a new habit or would like to be a part of a community of people on a similar journey. We’re kicking off the year talking about New Year’s Resolutions and how to create new habits for ourselves. Use the code BESTYEARYET to enroll for just $10. Learn more or enroll now.

by Christine Carter

3 Signs You Won’t Keep Your New Year’s Resolution

Like most self-help authors and coaches, I love New Year’s Resolutions.

Weeks ago I started asking my kids what theirs were going to be. I have a fantasy that January 1st will be THE day we launch headlong into our new-and-improved lives. I LOVE a fresh start, and there is nothing fresher than the first week in January.

But I know better.

By strongly “encouraging” my friends, family and readers to make New Year’s Resolutions, I’m failing to recognize that people don’t just make resolutions and then the next day spring into lasting action. I may wish this was possible, but research shows that it probably isn’t.

For the last four decades, behavior change researchers James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente have written extensively about how people actually do change.

According to Prochaska and DiClemente, people change in stages. They go from not even really considering making a change, to contemplating making one, to preparing to make the change…and THEN (and only then) do they spring into action. The actual behavior change (like starting to exercise, or going on a diet) is not the first stage of change, but the fourth.

Here’s the long and the short of it: To be successful in a New Year’s Resolution, you need to be in that fourth stage of change. What stage are you in?

1.) You sorta want to make a change…in theory…but in your heart of hearts, you know you don’t intend to make that change just yet. Or maybe you don’t really want to make the change, but someone else is pressuring you to make a New Year’s Resolution. Maybe your doctor has mentioned that she’d like you to lose weight, or perhaps your husband wants you to go to church more often. You can see their point, and you aren’t entirely opposed to the idea, but…just reading this you can feel your resistance rising.

You probably know this, but you aren’t ready to make a New Year’s Resolution. If you do make one at this stage, you’ll probably fail. You’re in the first stage of change, which is called “Pre-contemplation.” Prochaska, in his book Changing to Thrive, details three primary reasons that people get stuck in this stage; perhaps you can recognize one of these reasons in yourself:

You don’t know how to make the change you’d like to make.

You’re feeling demoralized by previous attempts to make similar changes and don’t want to fail again.

You’re in denial — you tend to defend yourself or rationalize your behavior when others suggest you make a change.

If you are at this stage of change, instead of making a New Year’s Resolution this year you’ll do better (again, according to Prochaska’s research) to make a list of all the good reasons, or “pros,” to make the change. How will you benefit? How long can you make this list of “pros”? Just start contemplating these things for now.

2.) You’re thinking about making a change, but you’re still worried about the drawbacks to doing so. Perhaps you’re considering starting a meditation practice, and you are aware of the benefits. But you also are pretty sure that you don’t have enough time to be regular about it, and your back hurts a lot when you’ve tried meditating before. Or maybe you’d like to cut back on your drinking, but you hate the idea of being the teetotaler at the party–you’re afraid the people you’re with will think you’re uptight and unfun. Your doubts are keeping you from getting started.

I’m in this stage of change in thinking about cutting gluten out of my diet once and for all. I’m aware of the benefits for someone like me (I’m very sensitive to gluten — the angry rash on my face makes this quite clear) but a life without sourdough bread doesn’t quite seem worth living. Yet. Right now it’s easier for me to really think a lot about going fully gluten-free, without actually doing anything. By thinking about something (but not taking action) I feel like I actually am doing something about the rash on my face (even though I’m not). This is safe, because I don’t risk failing, given that I’m not actually doing anything to change.

If this is you, you’re in the second stage of change, “Contemplation.” Before you take action or commit to a resolution, you’ll need to deal with your list of drawbacks to the change, or the “cons” that are holding you back. If you’re worried you don’t have enough time to meditate, for example, you’ll need to convince yourself otherwise. Can you find five minutes in the morning? How can you convince yourself that this will be worth it? Finding the benefits of making a change for others can be enormously helpful in this stage. How will your friends and family benefit from your change? How can you use these benefits to assuage your fear about how others will perceive your change?

3 Signs You Won't Keep Your New Year’s Resolution #NewYearsResolutions Click To Tweet

3.) You do truly intend to change, but you still feel some dread about it. You’re out of denial, in that you recognize that you really do need to change — or you’ve solved the problem of not knowing how to make a change (for example, by joining my Brave Over Perfect coaching group). Your list of benefits is longer than your list of drawbacks. The only thing you have to surmount now is fear of failure. This third stage of change is called “preparation.”

The way to move from here into action is to take an honest look at how the change you are preparing for can truly make your life better. How do you think and feel about yourself as you are right now, if you never change the behavior in question? Maybe you are often stressed, and you’re seriously thinking about getting in an exercise habit to combat this. Without more physical activity, you think of yourself as sedentary and out of shape, and you feel stressed and anxious. Now, imagine yourself having made the change you are looking for. How will you think of yourself differently? Most importantly, how will you feel?

Sometimes, on New Year’s Eve — or in life — we feel pressured to commit to changes we just aren’t ready to make. If you aren’t ready to spring into action, there’s no harm in that. Please realize that you have more options than either making a resolution (and probably failing, if you aren’t in the fourth stage of change) or doing nothing at all. All you need to do to grow is to move from one stage of change to the next!

Already made a resolution, but now it seems like you might not be ready to leap into action? Please check out my Brave Over Perfect Group Coaching. January is all about setting you up to cultivate a lasting habit. You’ll get real results! Use the code BESTYEARYET to enroll for just $10. Learn more or enroll now.

by Christine Carter

Parenting Video: The Neuroscience of Happy Memories

You can definitely try this at home! There are three steps to Rick Hanson’s “Taking in the Good” technique:

1. Teach kids to notice the good things that are all around them. Practice actively looking for the positive: Those flowers we planted in the fall are blooming; our neighbor was so nice to help us with a difficult project; school was particularly fun today. Regular gratitude practices, as discussed here, help with this. The key, according to Hanson, is to “turn positive facts into positive experiences.”

2. Draw out—really savor—those positive experiences. This aspect changed the way my kids and I do our “3 good things” practice at bedtime. The idea is not just to hold something positive in our awareness for as long as possible, but also to remember the positive emotions that go along with them. Now my kids list something that is good about their day (e.g., they had fun with their friends) and we really think about how good it felt to be playing and enjoying friendship. This evokes what was rewarding about a “good thing,” and helps use our brain chemistry to strengthen connections associated with the memory.

3. Let it all sink in. Have your kids imagine that the good thing you were just talking about “is entering deeply into [their] mind and body, like the sun’s warmth into a T-shirt, water into a sponge, or a jewel placed in a treasure chest in your heart,” as Hanson puts it.

This practice is based on Chapter 4 of Rick Hanson’s fabulous book, Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, & Wisdom (New Harbinger Publications, 2009). You can find a synopsis of this chapter in Greater Good here.

If you would like to download the audio version of this video to listen to in your car or on the go, click the link below.
DOWNLOAD THE AUDIO VERSION HERE.

This video is the 4th in a series about high impact happiness routines from The Raising Happiness Homestudy. Check out the rest of the Homestudy here .

by Christine Carter

Making the Holidays More Meaningful – and Less Materialistic

Last year about this time, an Instagram photo showing a mountain of shiny wrapped presents – nearly as large as the seven-foot Christmas tree behind it – went viral. I love Hanukkah and Christmas (we celebrate both in our family); at the same time, all the gift buying and present bragging is cause for worry.

Kids who grow up to pursue wealth and material possessions tend to be less satisfied with their lives. They’re not as happy, and they experience fewer positive emotions each day. Research finds materialism in students is also associated with lower-quality relationships and feeling less connected to other people.

There are two things that tend to influence how materialistic kids are.

The first is obvious: Consciously or not, we adults socialize kids to be materialistic. When parents – as well as peers and celebrities – model materialism, kids care more about wealth and luxury. So when parents are materialistic, kids are likely to follow suit. Same thing with advertising: The more exposure kids get to advertising, the more likely they are to be materialistic.

Materialism is worth combating, especially over the holidays. Click To Tweet

The less obvious factor behind materialism has to do with the degree to which our needs are being fulfilled. When people feel insecure or unfulfilled – because of poverty or because a basic psychological need like safety, competence, connectedness or autonomy isn’t being met – they often to try to quell their insecurity by striving for wealth and a lot of fancy stuff. Because of this, relatively poor teenagers ironically tend to be more materialistic than wealthy ones. And less nurturing and more emotionally cold mothers tend to have more materialistic children.

So materialism and the behaviors that go with it – desiring and buying brand name clothes and luxury items – can be symptoms of insecurity and a coping strategy used to alleviate feelings of self-doubt or bolster a poor self-image. But if what kids are really seeking is greater happiness and fulfillment, materialism is a terrible coping method. At best, it will only provide short-term relief; in the long-run it is likely to actually deepen feelings of insecurity.

Materialism is worth combating, especially over the holidays when it seems to reach a fever pitch in our culture.

I think the best way to combat materialism over the holidays is to prioritize connection with friends and family and neighbors. My teens would rather be with their friends than anyone else most of the time, but this is the time of the year when we insist on family first.

For example, the weekend before Christmas, my cousins always fly in from Massachusetts and Washington and Florida for a big extended family Christmas party, complete with a funny “Yankee Swap” (aka “white elephant” gift exchange). My mom makes spritz cookies with the kids, a tradition started in Germany with her mother. We light the candles of the menorah and say prayers each night during Hanukkah, something my husband’s Jewish family has been teaching us.

All of this is about renewing our sense that we are a part of something larger than ourselves. Let me not mince words here: This sense that we are connected and part of a larger whole is the single strongest predictor of happiness that we have. It is true that the holidays have become depressingly commercial in our culture, with a massive focus on what each individual will get and what kids want in terms of material gifts.

But we can choose to focus on relationships instead of individual gift lists this holiday season. Not surprisingly, people who focus on family or religion during the holidays report higher levels of happiness than those who don’t.

Originally posted on US News & World Report, December 2017

Do you need support finding more meaning in your life? I hope you’ll consider joining our Brave Over Perfect coaching group. Learn more or enroll now. Cheers to making 2019 your happiest year yet!