Happiness Hacks

Devoted, constant, and committed – all my clients would list loyalty as one of their highest values. Loyalty to their mothers, fathers, spouses, kids, friends, work, and the world in general. They are the listeners, supporters, lovers, givers, cheerleaders, and fans. They are the caregivers for their aging parents. They are the backbone of their families, relationships, and workplaces. The dark side of this loyalty to others is the exhaustion, the never-ending to-do list, the never feeling good enough, whole enough, satisfied enough.  The anxiety. All this month we are exploring the unique values of someone with High Functioning Anxiety and how they silently struggle with these values.  Last week we talked with Brittany Berger about anxiety and productivity. This week I am talking about how those of us with HFA value loyalty.   Here is the irony: some of the kindest, gentlest, giving people in the world never quite feel kind, gentle, or giving enough. Want to know why? They are so busy devoting themselves to

Go Go Go is addicting.  During this social distancing time, I keep hearing people say that we can finally stop hustling and use this time to get in touch with ourselves. The problem with that thinking is it implies that hustling is something that was forced upon us.  But in reality, hustling is something we choose to do as a coping mechanism against our uncomfortable feelings of sadness, grief, anger, doubt, and uncertainty.  For those of us with High Functioning Anxiety, these mechanisms can lead to even greater levels of anxiety. We all rail against hustle culture while at the same time actively embracing it. This coping mechanism has become a valued cultural norm to point where we even glorifying it.  So what would it be like to stop embracing the hustle culture altogether? My guest today has raised a one-woman battle against hustle culture and her addiction to it. Brittany Berger is the founder of Work Brighter, a digital media company that helps productive unicorns go beyond working smarter to a version

Let me check Instagram one more time.  Maybe I got an email? I haven’t checked for 10 minutes.  My glass of what is almost empty. Let me go downstairs for a refill. Stretching would be good right now, anyway.  Well, that break took a lot longer than I had planned. I got sucked into pulling some weeds while talking to my husband and then decided to make a snack.  Oh geez, I forgot to actually refill my glass.  Okay. Back at my desk. Before I start writing, let me check Instagram one more time. Anything new in my inbox? This was me trying to write this podcast episode–avoiding and procrastinating. For me, this is all part of the process.  All this month we have been talking about avoidance and anxiety. We talked with Jaquette Timmons about avoidance and money, Erica Drewry about our relationship with food, Bailey Parnell about social media, and Andrea Owen about avoidance, anxiety, addiction.  Today I want to wrap the month up and talk about the connection between avoidance and High Functioning Anxiety and give

Is it too early to pour a glass of wine?  I'm just going to have one drink while I read my book outside.  Okay, well, one more while I cooked dinner.  Oh, a glass of wine would taste so good with this pasta.  I think I'm just going to do half a glass.  Well, there's just a little bit left in the bottle. I'm just going to finish that up… And then at 3:00 AM, waking up with a headache and unable to go back to sleep, my monger starts chiming in: Why did you drink so much? What were you thinking? Why did you do that – again? Before I took a long, hard look at my drinking, this was what I put myself through most days of the week. Alcohol and anxiety tend to go hand in hand. We drink to decrease our anxiety and then because it feels so good, we drink too much and the result is an increase in anxiety.  Today, we're continuing our month of avoidance and anxiety by talking with Andrea Owen about the connection between avoidance and alcohol.  As a recovering alcoholic and life coach, Andrea has

Social media is one of my personal favorite methods of avoiding and as you can imagine it has only gotten worse in recent weeks. I often find myself obsessively making the rounds on social media: Twitter to Facebook to Instagram to email and back again. Stories about being isolated at home, questioning the seriousness, tips for cooking during a crisis, hoarding TP... UGH!  This has to stop! This is a conversation I was having with myself even before the pandemic crisis. It has only gotten worse since the shelter in place orders went down.   Social media is an amazing catch-22 – it calms your need to be vigilant while simultaneously making you more anxious.  All this month we have been exploring the ways that avoidance shows itself in relation to anxiety. So far we have talked with Jacquette Timmons about avoidance and money and Erica Drewry about avoidance and food.  Today we are talking Bailey Parnell about how we engage in avoidance through social media. I am so excited to bring you this eye-opening convers

Chocolate, ice cream, chips, cheese balls, Ho-Hos, and Junior Mints. My list was packed with all the necessities for surviving a global pandemic–at least all the necessities for one who emotionally eats.  When the governor of Ohio announced that he was closing all non-essential businesses, my first thought was: Oh no! Do we have enough food? I did a mental scan of our fridge and our pantry, wondering if we had enough to make it through a couple of weeks, if not longer, under lockdown. I immediately opened an Instacart account and started making my list.  I was going to be ready for what was coming. All this month I am talking with experts in a variety of areas to pull back the curtain on our avoiding ways and how we can make small manageable changes to bring intention to our lives.  Today I am talking with Erica Drewry about avoidance and how it plays out with food.  Erica is a registered dietitian and Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor in Columbus, Ohio. For the past 11 years, she has been the owner of Ali

There is one thing almost everyone does when their anxiety gets high.  They avoid.  Whether through food, alcohol, social media, or money–we avoid.  All this month I am talking with experts in these four areas of avoiding. We’re pulling back the curtains on our avoiding ways and how we can make small manageable changes to bring intention to our lives.  We're kicking this off this month talking with Jacquette Timmons about money.  Money and avoidance go hand in hand. Money is a very loaded topic for people in general, but especially those with High Functioning Anxiety. We avoid dealing with our money. We avoid talking about money. We engage in overspending or being overly controlling about money. All of these patterns come from one place – avoiding our intentions and feelings about money.  Jacquette Timmons is a national investment expert and financial coach. She is the founder of Sterling Investment Management, a New York-based investment education and financial coaching firm. She has worked in the inves

Habit is one of those words I have a negative reaction too.  Like a lot of people, I have tried to create healthy habits and tried to be super militant about maintaining them, only to fail miserably.  What are we supposed to do? On one extreme we have the voice of the Monger who is constantly beating us down for this failure – not exactly motivating – and on the other, we have our BFF who encourages to rebel against anything habitual.  So, yeah, the word habit brings up all kinds of stuff for me.  This is why I wanted to talk to Sarah Von Bargen of Yes and Yes, the “lifestyle blog for smart, funny people.” Sarah is an expert in setting and keeping habits. She writes and teaches on Yes and Yes about setting habits, money, happiness, and about recognizing self-defeating behaviors and taking action on them anyway.  One thing that struck me about this interview with Sarah was her emphasis on small manageable changes – the opposite of my old pattern around habits. Healthy habits are not about all or nothing. It’s

When my mom told me she wouldn’t be visiting for Easter this year – choosing to visit a friend instead – I experienced a flood of emotions.  I immediately felt disappointed and sad. Easter isn't a big deal in our family – we don't even go to church – but I was still looking forward to seeing her. I was bummed.  And then my Monger started sounding off: “What's the big deal? She’s allowed to go to visit her friend and it isn’t like you are a deeply religious family or anything. You are so uptight and rigid! This shouldn't make you sad.”  The rest of the day when I would feel sad or disappointed the voice of the Monger would swoop in and tell me that my feelings were irrational and I would feel terrible about myself.   But here is the thing: feelings happen. It doesn’t matter if the feelings make sense or not. You are still having them and that is more than okay, no matter what your Monger is telling you.  Today, we are continuing this month’s deep dive into the F word.  In episode 119 I intr

Here is a common scenario in my world: I had a lot to get done – back to back client meetings and deadlines looming. My anxiety was through the roof! I kept telling myself, “you need to acknowledge your feeling,” knowing that it helps when I am stuck in anxiety. But it wasn’t working. I kept coming up sad and overwhelmed. No matter how many times I tried I wasn’t getting any relief. At the end of the day – meetings over, deadlines met – I was still spinning with anxiety. I realized I had gone through the whole day without really feeling anything. Every time I had gone through the motions of naming my emotions they were quickly hijacked by my Monger saying, “Feeling sad is a waste of time. You don’t have time for this nonsense. Move on and focus!” This is a common experience for many of my clients. We shame ourselves for feeling our feelings. We tell ourselves that we don’t have enough time for them. That we won’t get anything done by feeling things. Or, worse, we fear that allowing ourselves to experience our

We have all heard this story:  A woman has hit rock bottom. She is burnt out and is experiencing her dark night of the soul. Cornered by life, she feels like she has nowhere to turn.   And then, miraculously, she has some major ah-ha moment–lightning strikes and everything is fixed. Birds sing, everyone breaks out into song, and the struggle is gone.   I used to be addicted to these transformational stories.  These stories gave me hope that permanent change was possible. That one day I would be healed. I would be perfect.  The truth is, these stories of sudden transformative change keep us trapped and miserable. They feed us the lie that if we are still it is because something is wrong with us. They tell us that we haven’t suffered enough or that we haven’t been good enough to be transformed. My guest today, Shannon Siriano Greenwood, went through burnout–she hit her rock bottom and was able to climb back out. But her story is far from simple. It isn’t wrapped in a bow and it isn’t a song and dance number.  S

For many years I believed that I could fix my High Functioning Anxiety  I thought that if only I could find the right way to do it, that if I just found the right hack, I could be healed.  But this isn’t how it works. The truth is that we will never be done with our High Functioning Anxiety.  There isn’t a hack that can fix everything. Yes, we can loosen its grip and live a life without it controlling everything but it takes work.  High Functioning Anxiety is an on-going issue and learning to live with it is a daily process.  In December we talked about the 3 characters that play in our minds – the Monger (inner critic), the BFF (the voice of false self-compassion), and the Biggest Fan (the voice of kindness and wisdom) – and about how when we hear our Monger talking and berating us, or our BFF judging other people or sabotaging us, the goal is to bring in the voice of Biggest Fan.  All this month we have been talking about how to do that.  In the past 3 episodes, I introduced A.S.K. and talked about the 3 st

No matter how hard we try to keep up the veneer of perfection, every now and then we make a mistake.  Mistakes happen and when they do, we can be absolutely horrible to ourselves–telling ourselves things like: I'm such a failure, I deserve to be fired, I am a terrible parent.  Sometimes we can even rationalize our way back to knowing that it was a small mistake that truly doesn't matter in the long run.  But then there are the times when we really mess up. When we legitimately make a mistake in a way that really matters. We go against our values, we drop the ball, we let down our spouse.  What happens when we really mess up and can't just rationalize our way out of it? When our inner voice isn't making a mountain out of a molehill? When our inner voice is taking an actual mountain and adding a shame blizzard of epic proportions? How do we ever get past this? What's next?  This episode is about the big mistakes. It's about the concrete steps you can take to move through those situ

To deal with the Monger, you have to get out of your head and get into your body. Most of us live predominantly in our heads. We literally aren’t even aware that we have a body unless it starts to hurt, and then we just take a pill to make it better. Our Monger takes up a lot of space in our heads, so the more time we spend in our heads, the more we stay out of our body and the louder our Monger gets. Last week I introduced A.S.K. and talked about the first step: Acknowledge your Feelings. If you missed it please go back and give it a listen.  This week we are talking about the second step: Slow Down and get into your body.  When we hear our Monger talking and berating us or our BFF judging other people or sabotaging us, the goal is to bring in the voice of Biggest Fan.  One key to channeling your Biggest Fan is getting into your body. When we can slow down and get into our bodies, we change our perspective. By changing our physical presence, we can see more options and the last step – Kindly pull back to se

Today, we are starting our month-long discussion of A.S.K. with the first step of the system: Acknowledge Your Feelings.  But first, I have a confession: I dislike 3 step self-help systems.  Not because they don’t work but because they overly simplify very nuanced and individualized processes.  This can be challenging for people with High Functioning Anxiety. We love rules. We love a guide–a simple system that we can follow to the exact letter, making everything feel better.  A.S.K.–my very own 3-step system for reducing your anxiety–appears to do that. It seems to offer a simple solution to our struggles with anxiety. But, as you will hear this month, there is complexity below the surface this seemly simple solution.  This is why I encourage you to think of the system of A.S.K. as the bare minimum–the basic foundation, from which you can jump off of to make this process your own.  After 2 years of teaching these concepts, I wanted to revisit them and expand on what I talked about previously, adding in some

I have often fallen for the trap of thinking that a new system–a new calendar, a new journal, a new app–was all that I needed to keep me organized and bring order to the chaos.  But all around me are piles of half-filled calendars, abandoned bullet journals, and long lost apps–the evidence of well-meaning systems that I started only to later abandon. I know that it isn’t a flaw in the systems that’s the problem. It’s my own lack of commitment to these systems that is the problem. I know this truth, and yet I still struggle to live in that place. It is so much easier to just blame the freaking system. In January we are inundated with the new year, new you message. It is a time when starting a new system for change is particularly alluring. And all this month we have been taking a different look at how change works.  We’ve covered: setting New Year’s resolutions without succumbing to the hype, working through our challenges so that we can live a life that is true to our values, what Mr. Rogers can teach us ab

Do you ever feel like you're repeating the same lessons over and over again? Do you feel like the stuff you worked on 5, 10, or even 20 years ago has a way of coming back, even though you thought you'd found the solution?  There's a very good reason for that and, no, it’s not because you're broken. It’s because change isn’t one and done. It’s ongoing. It’s because of a concept that I call Spiralling Up.  It can often feel like we are relearning the same lesson over and over, but really we're experiencing a different level of that lesson–new situation, new challenges at a new level of insight.  Change is like ascending a spiral stare case that presents us with new challenges the higher we climb. It’s not that we are relearning an old lesson, it’s that through life we are being presented with a new and higher level of that lesson.  In this episode, we're going to look at how change works and specifically how the concept of Spirally Up can be applied to the life long project of grow

Have you ever sat in a movie theater and been blown away by a single quote? One little line just floats into your brain and holds on for dear life? This happened to me last Thanksgiving watching the new movie about Mr. Rogers, It’s A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood, and I have been thinking about it ever since. In the scene, Lloyd Vogel, a cynical journalist who has been assigned to do a profile on Mr. Rogers, is calling to set up their first meeting. He is shocked to have Fred Rogers answer the phone. Not his assistant, not his handler, Mr. Rogers himself. Lloyd, not wanting to waste the time of an important person, suggests they set another time to talk. Surely Mr. Rogers has more important things to do.  And here is what blew me away: In response to this suggestion, Mr. Rogers says, “What do you think is the most important thing in the world for me right now? To speak on the phone to Lloyd Vogel.”   When I heard this line I audibly gasped. The quote got me thinking: How often do I miss conversations or i

Today, I want to share a cautionary tale. A few days ago I said to my husband: “Maybe we should shake things up this year. Do something crazy. Sell our house, move to Hawaii… SOMETHING BIG.” He looked at me blankly. “What about our families?” he asked. “What about our friends? What about your business? Besides, I like it here. I like our life. We do big things in little ways all the time.” And it hit me–I had yet again got sucked into the New Year, New You crap– “When-Then Syndrome.”  I had been reading the inspirational memes on social media–people planning on moving to exotic locations, quitting toxic jobs, losing weight, getting in shape–and my Inner Monger was getting louder and louder.  All of these promises of a new and perfect life were making me feel like I wasn’t enough–like I was missing out.  I was getting drawn into comparing myself to all the people who were making BIG change and I was twisting it into a ‘you are not good enough’ mantra. I was stuck in a cycle of comparisonitis. I let that reali

Eating too much sugar? No problem! In January I will cut back. Not working out? No problem! In January I will hit the gym. Postponing our plans for change looks great under the glow of the holiday lights. But when we wake up each year on January 1st, hungover from too much celebrating, realizing with dread, that all of our plans for change in the New Year need to magically start RIGHT NOW, it is a very different story.  All of the plans that we have been putting off until the New Year are suddenly very real and very pressing. We need to get it together and act before our Monger catches on. The deadline had arrived. For people with High Functioning Anxiety, the days leading up to the New Year are days full of possibility. Set the resolution, do the prep work, and, poof like magic, we will be different people.  No wonder we are so depressed come the first week of January when we realize that the change we want is only going to happen with work and that the work is going to be hard.  We were so focused on how am