Reading Notes

Coping With Compulsive Behavior

  • “Compulsive behavior” is an umbrella term that can refer to both substance addiction and other repeated unwanted behaviors
  • What is compulsive behavior
    • Can’t stop
    • Results in net-negative consequences
    • Prevents you from doing the things that you want to do
    • Note that behavior that you feel bad about, but isn’t causing you trouble otherwise isn’t necessarily compulsive behavior
  • 2 approaches:
    • Harm Reduction:
      • Reduce consequences of compulsive behavior
      • Make sure that relapses cause as little harm as possible
      • Planning for harm reduction can be difficult if you’re trying to abstain
      • Plan for what to do after relapse
        • How are you going to deal with feelings of guilt and shame w/o bingeing?
        • How do you keep a slip from turning into a disaster
    • Abstinence
      • Reinforcement
        • Restructure environment so that it reinforces abstinence instead of the compulsive behavior
        • Find substitutes for compulsive behavior
        • Self-reward
        • Use social groups to reinforce abstinence
      • Burning bridges
        • Make an absolute commitment to yourself that you’re not going to do the behavior
        • List all the people, places and things that make the compulsive behavior possible and make plans to avoid those
        • Publicly pre-commit to abstinence
      • Building new bridges
        • Find other sensations to compete with the sensation that the compulsive behavior gives you
      • Alternative rebellion
        • Some of the motive behind compulsive behavior can be a desire to rebel
        • Find alternative means of rebellion that are less harmful
      • Adaptive denial
        • Don’t argue with yourself
        • Instead, try to rationalize the urge to perform a compulsive behavior as an urge to do something else
        • Procrastinate on the compulsive behavior
      • Abstinence sampling
        • Pick a period of time and commit to not indulging in the compulsive behavior for that period of time
        • If your life doesn’t get better, then maybe the behavior isn’t as harmful as you thought it was
        • If your life does get better, then this should motivate you to continue abstaining
        • Important to make the time period long enough to show benefit
    • Addict mind, clean mind, clear mind
      • Addict mind
        • Impulsive
        • Single minded
        • Rationalizing
      • Clean mind
        • Denies addiction
        • Naive
        • Risk-taking
        • Oblivious
        • Feels invincible - like you’ve “beaten” the addiction
      • Clear mind
        • Abstinent & vigilant
        • Ready to do what it takes to prevent compulsive behavior

Dealing With Relationship Conflict

  • “Weaponized weakness”
    • Express needs through passive-aggressive self-flagellation
  • One can still contribute to relationship problems without overt aggression
  • One major reason that conflicts escalate is because both sides feel like they have to exercise their right to respond
  • “Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?”
  • Takes courage to de-escalate
  • Imagine how you’d react if a stranger behaved this way towards your loved one - now why are you behaving in the same way?
  • Look back over the past three or four arguments and ask yourself what you did to make things worse
  • Identify your emotional triggers
    • Anticipate what you’ll do when (not if) your partner hits them
    • Plan your response
    • Figure how to resist the urge to escalate the situation
    • Remember your goal: to not make things worse
  • Once you’ve separated yourself from the conversation, use crisis survival skills to deal with the pain

Introduction to Emotion Regulation

  • Regulating emotions is difficult
  • Emotions should fit facts in duration, intensity and type
  • Should still be able to work towards goals and maintain one’s values while experiencing emotions - emotions should have impact, but not be debilitating
  • Primary vs. secondary emotions
    • Primary emotions are the instant response to a given situation
    • Secondary emotions are all the other responses
    • Primary emotions can be useful
    • Secondary emotions tend not to be useful
    • Use mindfulness to deal with secondary emotions
    • Recognize and allow yourself to feel your primary emotion

Understanding and Naming Emotions

  • Emotions are the key to decision making
  • People who lose the ability to feel emotion lose the ability to make decisions
  • Without emotions, we can’t decide which things we want
  • So why do people run into trouble with emotions?
    • Some people are just naturally more emotional than others
    • Many people don’t know how to cope with emotions
    • Everyone can have trouble with emotions when they’re in crisis
    • Environment might reward you for being emotional
  • Myths about emotion regulation
    • If you don’t get emotional, you don’t care
    • Trying to change how you feel is impossible or inauthentic
    • Willpower can conquer emotion
    • There is a way that one “should” feel about a situation
  • Dialectical approach to dealing with myths
    • You can care without getting emotional or angry
    • You can regulate your emotions without changing your core personality
    • Emotions are easier to manage than you think
    • Cannot control emotions by telling yourself not to feel something
  • DBT’s model for describing emotions
    • Prompting event: what causes one to feel the emotion
    • Vulnerability factors: what amplifies the emotion
    • Interpretation: beliefs and assumptions about the prompting event
    • Face and body changes: how the emotion feels in the body
    • Action urges: what actions do you feel like taking in response to the emotion
    • Body language: what would an outside observer observe about your emotion
    • What you say and do in response to the emotion
    • Aftereffects of emotion
  • Very large dictionary of emotions

Changing Emotional Responses

  • After you’ve identified the emotion that you’re feeling, ask yourself, “Does it make sense?”
  • Many emotional responses come from our thoughts and interpretations of an event, not the event itself
  • Can we get people to be happy by changing their distorted thoughts?
    • Not all cognitive distortions make people unhappy
    • Not all unhappy interpretations result from distorted thinking
  • 6-step process of checking the facts
    • Figure out which emotion you want to change
    • Describe the event prompting the emotion as factually as possible
    • Describe your interpretations, thoughts and assumptions
    • If you feel there’s a threat, label the threat
    • If the threat happens, what’s the worst case scenario that could result
    • Does your emotion’s intensity, duration and type fit the facts?
  • If your emotion does fit the facts, you need to apply problem solving skills
    • The problem is the situation, not your emotional response to it
  • If your emotion does not fit the facts, you need to do apply “opposite action”
    • Think about the thing that you most want to do
    • Do the opposite of that
    • Keep doing it
    • You don’t have to like it, just do it anyway
    • Opposite action will work, but it will also feel like the hardest thing in the world
  • Very large dictionary of emotions, part 2

Reducing Vulnerability to Emotions

  • ABC PLEASE
  • Accumulate positive experiences
    • Short Term
      • Try to do one pleasant thing every day
      • Thing has to be actually pleasant to you, not something you’re “supposed” to find pleasant
      • Pay attention to your pleasant activity - actitivity should have your sole focus while you’re doing it
    • Long Term
      • Figure out what your values are
      • Make goals that fit with those values
      • Make progress towards those goals
      • Choose one goal to work on at a time
      • Make a little bit of progress towards that goal every day
  • Build Mastery
    • Do something that gives you a sense of accomplishment every day
    • Doesn’t have to be a big thing
    • Can be as simple as cooking or cleaning
  • Cope Ahead
    • Try and anticipate unpleasant situations
    • Decide which skills you’re going to use and write down how, specifically, you’ll use them
  • Physical ailments
    • Get treatment, or find ways to mitigate them if treatment isn’t possible in the near term
  • Eat right
    • Eat enough
    • Eat well
      • Make sure you’re getting all the nutrients that you need
      • Living entirely on Pop-tarts and Skittles is probably a bad idea
    • If you thing emotional issues may be correlated with diet, try keeping a food journal
  • Avoid mind altering substances
    • If you do choose to take mind-altering substances, be careful
    • Start with small doses
    • Don’t mix different things
  • Sleep
    • Follow a consistent sleep schedule
    • Avoid naps longer than 10 min
    • Even if you can’t sleep, just lying down and resting your brain can be helpful
    • If you can’t fall asleep after 30 min in bed, evaluate whether you’re calm or anxious
      • If calm
        • Do something non-engrossing until you feel tired
        • Burn off excess energy without increasing arousal
      • If anxious
        • Splash cold water on your face, and then go back to bed
        • Meditate
        • Get some background noise
        • If you can solve the problem making you anxious quickly, solve the problem
        • Practice coping ahead
    • If you have nightmares
      • Choose a recurring nightmare
      • Write down as detailed a description of it as you can
      • Think of a way to prevent the scary or traumatic things in the nightmare
      • Visualize the dream with the change
      • Rehearse the changes before going to bed
  • Exercise
    • Consistency matters more than intensity