My Best Self 101 Blog
Do you like to draw, dance, or play an instrument? Did you know that when you engage in creative activities such as those that it can help your mood, emotion, and physical health? Amazing, right? Our lives are full of stress, worries, and so many other things. When we take the time to focus on a creative activity that we like, it can help our overall well-being
When I asked Tara what she loved about ballet, she told me, “I was good. I wasn’t as good as Gelsey Kirkland, but I was good. It was something I was able to have confidence that I could do and I knew I was good at it. I’ve never put that much effort into anything in my life.” Her relationship with ballet was clearly a very emotional and fulfilling one: one that gave her confidence in herself. She described ballet as an art that grounds you and connects you so deeply through your body that you can’t focus on anything else. In other words, Tara experienced flow through ballet.
Chronic stress, anxiety, burnout—these have been buzzwords the past couple years and much of the advice out there focuses on how to get rid of them. Personally, the past few years of grad school and starting a counseling career on top of the rest of my life have felt like a hurricane . . . I’ve tried avoiding, resisting, escaping, distracting, procrastinating—these don’t work for long, and often make it worse. And now I’m down to the last resort, this radical approach of not trying to make it go away—befriending the anxiety.
At the end of the day, do you ever have a hard time thinking about what went well for you? Because life can be hard and unpredictable, it’s easy to dwell on what goes wrong within a day. As humans, we have something called a negativity bias. This hinders our recollection of positive experiences, which, according to research, seem to actually occur 3 times more frequently than negative experiences. The good news is that we can apply something called savoring . From the MBS 101 savoring module, “savoring involves mindful awareness of positive experiences to prolong and amplify their value.”
In my experience, once I identified and described my frustration, I found that it no longer seemed so overwhelming or even real. In describing my emotion, I had to take a step back from my emotion and instead observe it with curiosity. I was no longer concerned with this tangible “thing” that I could see in my mind’s eye, and it no longer seemed overwhelming. If anything, it seemed like a particular zoo animal that I had paused to observe, but I was ready to move on to the next creature.
Everyone encounters grief at various points in their life, even though each person's circumstances are unique. Although grief is a universal experience, no one has quite figured out the best way to navigate through it. That's because grief is an impossibly complex response to losing someone or something you held in great value. In other words, grief – while painful – is necessary, and one of the cornerstones of being human.
While there’s no easy method for dispelling grief, there are a number of strategies that can allow you to grieve in a more healthy, productive manner. As you process your own loss, try to make use of the following grieving tips from My Best Self 101 that have helped so many others before.
What did I learn from delving into optimism? It’s not enough to just have specific hope for things; having an overall worldview that’s positive and encourages growth is just as important as believing in your own merits and effort. Trusting in a perspective that doesn’t allow us to become helpless to what happens to us is really important when it comes to optimism, and it certainly isn’t just believing in sunshine and roses around us. When we feel stuck, optimism can be a powerful tool that enables us to seek for the view that encourages us to move forward.
I’m not sure how or when it started, but as I think back on my life I can remember many times I have been very cruel to myself. As you might guess, this is a very unhealthy way of living. Even so, I assumed what I experienced was pretty normal. I heard other people talk about how they are hard on themselves. As I graduated High School, people around me noticed how my own thoughts were affecting me and got me help. I finally understood that my self critical way of thinking was wrong. Luckily, I soon discovered positive psychology, my way of improving myself again. I have tried many positive psychology strategies to improve my own well-being, all of which have helped me in different ways. As I experimented with positive psychology strategies, I found mindful compassion to be one of the most helpful strategies when it comes to my self-deprecating thoughts.
