15 Habits of Unhappy People and What to Do About Them | CBT Therapist Aid

Hey there everybody, and welcome to this video on 15 Habits of Unhappy people and what you can do about it. I'm your host, Dr. Donnellice Snipes. The first habit we're going to talk about is holding onto dwelling or stewing on negative emotions, on anger or anxiety. If something happens and it triggers your anger and, and you sit there and you just stew in it and you think about how angry you are at somebody, it's sort of akin to sitting in a car with stuck in the mud and just revving your engine. All you're doing is wasting your gas and digging yourself further into a hole. Anger and anxiety are important feelings. There are fight or flee emotions. Our body triggers those emotions when it thinks that there might be a threat. If something happens that makes you feel angry or anxious, notice it non judgmentally and then get curious and say, okay, what's triggering this and what can I do to do about it? How can I solve the problem? When you feel anger, for example, your body dumps a bunch of energy because it wants you to fight the threat. And so it gives you the energy to get up and go, okay, number one, is there a threat? And number two, what can I do if there is a threat to address it. So the energy you feel, the turmoil you feel when you feel angry or anxious, that's all that energy bubbling up inside going, I'm here to help you fight or flee. You know, what are you going to do with me if there is no threat? If you decide, you know what, this was really not something that I needed to get upset about and I'm choosing not to stay angry about it. That energy is still there. So it's important to practice some deep breathing, some relaxation exercises to basically bottle it back up, if you will, until you might need it. But stewing on that anger, nurturing it just drains your energy. Dirty discomfort goes along with stewing on anger, but dirty discomfort is all of the other feelings that come along when you start feeling angry, anxious or depressed. So maybe you feel wake up in the morning and you feel depressed and then you get angry about the fact that you're having another depressive episode and, and you feel guilty about the fact that you're having another depressive episode. Because you know when you have depressive episodes, you can't do the things that you really feel you, quote, should be doing with your family and you start piling on guilt and anxiety and anger and stuff all, all on top of this depression. Every one of those emotions requires energy and every one of those emotions weighs you down dirty. Discomfort is something that Steven Hayes talks about in acceptance and commitment therapy. But being angry about being angry or being angry about being depressed is compounding your problem. Instead, noticing how you feel non judgmentally, being mindful, maybe even unhooking from it, and saying, I'm having the feeling that I'm angry right now. Okay, let's look at what are the thoughts that are contributing to that feeling? What are the thoughts that are telling me that I am experiencing some sort of a threat and what can I do to improve the next moment? Recognizing that in life pain is going to occur. Physical pain, emotional pain, it's going to happen whether it's depression or anxiety or just, you know, you pulled a muscle in your back. We have to learn to work with those feelings instead of try to completely eradicate them when they happen. You say, okay, how can I live my best quality quality of life and have this issue going on right now? For a lot of people, it's easier to think about in terms of a physical pain at first. So like I said, if you pulled a muscle in your back, okay, you're probably not going to be playing tennis for a little while. And tennis is really important to you. You may not be picking up your child or your grandchild for a little while until it's healed. How can you interact with, with your grandchild? How can you play with your dog? How can you exercise and have a pulled muscle in your back? It's possible. You just need to figure out the workarounds and get creative. Instead of feeling guilty about it, recognize. And we're going to talk about guilt in a moment. Because a lot of times guilt comes from mind reading. Bottling up emotions. Many of us grew up in households where it was not safe to feel, it was not safe to express our emotions. We would either be ridiculed or punished or sometimes ignored. So we learned how when we felt an emotion, it was like, okay, I'm angry. I'm going to put it in a box and I'm going to shove it back here in the closet and poof, I'm fine. You're really not. You can compartmentalize or bottle it up, but eventually those bottles have to be uncorked. It takes energy to keep the lids on all of those bottles. And when you bottle up enough emotions, eventually there's going to be some sort of earthquake that causes them all to just burst wide open. Bottling up. Not bottling up emotions doesn't mean that you have to become Mount Vesuvius every single time you get Upset, there's a time and a place. It's not proper or appropriate, for example, to yell at your boss or to yell at your significant other in public or what have you. When you feel an emotion, distress tolerance skills are really important. So you can get into your wise mind. When you feel that overwhelming surge of anger or anxiety, that's adrenaline, that's cortisol, that's all kinds of stuff surging through your veins. That's your fight or flight response, dumping that energy. Your blood glucose is going up. Okay, you have all that energy. When you have all that running through your body, your brain literally is not able to think. It's in what I call it an adrenaline haze. But it's not able to process information nearly as well. So it's important to be able. When you feel an intense emotion, be able to use your distress tolerance skills to endure it for the moment and down regulate. We're not ignoring it, we're not bottling it up. You're down regulating it so you can think more clearly and say, okay, this really sucks. What can I do about it? I have several videos on the YouTube channel on distress tolerance skills that can be very, very helpful. But once you decide, once you calm down, get into your wife's mind and you decide, how can I improve the next moment? What can I do to address this? Then using that energy that your body gave you to fight or flee, to address it, that may not mean right now, it may mean when you get home tonight, you and your significant other can sit down and have a discussion about whatever it was that really ticked you off that day. So when we experience emotions, sometimes we need to put them on hold. But it's important to process them. It's important to clear off that shelf at the. Ideally, at the end of every day, if you compartmentalize something, all right, by the end of the day before you go to bed, how are you going to process that so it's not just sitting there waiting to erupt. Number four, emotional reasoning. A lot of people who are unhappy engage in a lot of emotional reasoning. I feel depressed, therefore there must be something to be depressed about. I feel anxious, therefore there must be something that's fixing to go wrong. Emotional reasoning starts with a feeling and then looks for supporting facts. Factual reasoning starts with a thought or even a feeling. And it says, okay, I feel anxious. Is there a reason to feel anxious? Fact based reasoning looks for facts both for and against the feeling. What thought am I having that's contributing to this anxiety or this anger? And what are the facts for and against it. That is so, so important to not get too caught up. When we feel depressed, we tend to notice things that make us more depressed. When we feel angry, we tend to notice things or perceive things as more threatening or dangerous or disruptive than when we feel happy. So emotional reasoning also colors our perceptions of things. We need to step back. Number five, overanalyzing the past, the present or future situations can keep people unhappy. If you overanalyze the past, okay, first thing, the past is past. It's done. You can't change it. Give it up. You're not going to be able to change it. You can learn from it, you can keep from doing it again, but you can't change it. Our past does impact us in the present. And for a lot of people, feeling empowered to choose how their past continues to impact them in the present can be very liberating. Instead of continuing to feel hopeless and helpless, they feel empowered to make a choice that, okay, I had a crappy childhood. However, I am not going to let that continue to trigger my anger. I'm not going to continue to hold that anger and let it drain my energy in the present. And that's important. We also need to recognize that what we did in the past, we did. We were different people. We need to take into consideration the entire context, how old we were, what resources we had, you know, all of the factors that went into that situation. Arm. Arm. Chair. Quarterbacking is super easy when you're in the moment. It's super hard. So not don't look back and think, well, I should have seen that, or look back and go, well, that person should have done something differently. It important to consider the entire context if you're going to try to analyze a situation now. There are times to analyze. For example, when I work with adult children of addicts and alcoholics, a lot of times we'll look back and analyze what was going on back there when caregiver was not paying attention to you when they were passed out all the time. The child often interprets it as, it's my fault this is happening. It's my responsibility to take care of things, and so on. And those become core beliefs. So as adults, we look back and using an adult reasoning and an adult mind, and the more experiences they've had looking back and going, was it really about you? And most of the time, if not all the time, the person with the addiction, their failures to meet the child's needs wasn't because they didn't care about the child. It's because they just couldn't care about anything. They were so overwhelmed with their own stuff. So there is a time to analyze the past. But over overanalyzing, continuing to go back and hoping that you'll come up with a different answer this time can be counterproductive, if not destructive. Overanalyzing the present can also have similar consequences. It keeps you from being mindful of what's going on. If you are interacting with somebody and you're like, well, what did that mean? I wonder what that meant. Was that a microaggression? I wonder what that meant. And instead of hearing what the person's saying, you're so busy trying to analyze what's going on that you, you miss the big picture. And it is not uncommon for people to overanalyze in the present if they have a trauma history, because they're what we call hyper vigilant. And that part of their brain says you need to be on high alert, which causes them to kind of overanalyze things in order to protect themselves. If you find that you overanalyze a lot, especially if you're overanalyzing the present, then examine whether you have a trauma history that needs to be addressed. And people who overanalyze the future often have a lot of anxiety. They're worried about what's going to happen, what's going to happen if. And they can go down a complete rabbit hole. My son, for example, is very guilty of this. Sometimes he will take one event and completely catastrophize it and over analyze it. And I'm like, son, you can't anticipate the chain of events that for sure that's going to happen over the next five years. Quite honestly, we have difficulty predicting what's going to happen tomorrow, let alone five years from now. Is it good to plan? Yes. But at a certain point, there's a point of diminishing returns. You can analyze it, figure out what you need to do, make a plan, and maybe even make a plan B. But then set it aside. And if you need to come back and try to revise it, do it periodically, not every day. You know, if something significant changes, then you may need to revise that. For example, your plan for retirement in the future. A lot of us fret about whether we'll have enough resources to retire and we'll be able to afford it, and we'll be able to do all that stuff. So we may analyze what we think we're going to need and create a plan and set it aside and then all of a sudden, whoops, the market took a dump and we've got record high inflation. What I thought was going to be enough to sustain me isn't going to be anymore. So I need to adjust that plan. But. But I didn't go back every six months and figure out, well, is this still right? I said, here's my plan, and if anything major happens, then I will go in and adjust it. Number six, all or nothing thinking. And the next few are what we call negative thinking styles or cognitive distortions. But people who are unhappy tend to have a habit of thinking in extreme terms. And every person does this. Nobody ever does this. Listen to yourself. Listen to your words. If you notice that you're using extreme words, modify them. A lot of people do this, or often this happens. Try to for one day, just try for one day paying attention to your language and instead of using extreme words, using changing them and restating them in more moderate terms and see how it impacts your mood. Additionally, with all or nothing thinking. If you say you never empty the dishwasher, okay, look for exceptions. Think back, was there a time that the person ever emptied the dishwasher? And if the answer is yes, then, well, they did it at least once. So it's not all the time. Then we need to get curious and go, what was different about that one time that they did it and not the others? So that goes into behavior modification. But all or nothing thinking is rarely accurate. So we want to use more moderate terms and look for exceptions. Look for exceptions to the extremes. Number seven is mind reading or assuming. One of the sayings that I was taught when I was growing up was that assuming makes an ass out of you and me. And assume is a s s u m e. So anyway, it's not nearly as funny if you, if you actually explain the joke. But mind reading is when you assume you know what the other person is thinking or feeling about a particular situation. And guilt. Oh, my gosh, assuming contributes to so much guilt. Because a lot of times we assume that somebody is going to be hurt or mad at us or disappointed if we don't do something a certain way. And in reality, they may have been happier that we took care of ourselves, or they may have recognized that we were in a depressive episode and they're not holding it against us. They're not angry with us because we didn't go to their ball game or whatever. They recognize we did the best we could, so they're not angry. We are assuming they're angry, and that's making Us feel guilty or angry at ourselves. Assuming is so toxic. You can also see assuming in relationships. When people try to finish each other's sentences and get it wrong, that creates conflict. Make sure that you ask, if you think a person is feeling a certain way, ask them, how do you feel about this? Instead of assuming, it will relieve so much tension and so much guilt. And if they say, yes, I'm angry, then you can open up a dialogue and say, okay, I'm really sorry. How can we fix this? Okay, you know, it's part of assertiveness is making sure that you have the facts instead of, you know, the guesses. And assuming is also kind of tied up with emotional reasoning because if you can't do something and you feel frustrated about that, you feel angry at yourself for not being able to do it. You may assume that other people are similarly angry with you when in reality, again, they're going, well, guess you can't do that today. No harm, no foul. Number eight, personalization. When we take things as about us. This person was in a bad mood today. Must be my fault this thing happened. Must be my fault my child is not doing well in school. It must be my fault. It must mean I'm a horrible parent. Now, that's a combination of all or nothing thinking or extreme thinking and personalization. Personalization can be toxic. Sometimes it is about us. Sometimes we did do it. But a lot of times other people's reactions and situations actually don't have everything to do with us. We may have contributed, but other people contributed to situations. Or somebody may be in a bad mood and it doesn't have to do with us. So we want to make sure that we explore what are three other reasons why my friend Sally may have canceled our lunch date today. It's not that she doesn't like me or want to go to lunch with me. What are three other possible reasons this may have happened? You know, because maybe I just got a text from Sally, Sorry, can't make it. Maybe next week. Well, if I personalize, then I could say, oh, she doesn't want to spend time with me, or she'd rather spend time with somebody else. That's going to make me unhappy. So it's important to examine what are other explanations. It may not be the time to, you know, call her up and go, well, why did you cancel lunch? You can talk about that later. That goes back to using distress tolerance skills to handle our emotions and address them at appropriate times. Pessimism and catastrophizing is another habit of unhappy People, people who are unhappy when they look, they're looking through often a trauma colored lens, but regardless, they're looking through a very unhappy film, an unhappy lens and at the world. So they're seeing things that are. They're seeing the glasses half empty, they're seeing the day as partly cloudy. They're seeing unhappy things. And when something good happens, it's scary. So they may be starting to wait for okay, when's that other shoe gonna drop? Good things don't happen to me. Or they may just expect the worst. They get ready to go in for a job interview and they're like, well, this is going to suck. That sets people up mentally to create a self fulfilling prophecy, so it may actually suck. They pay attention more to the things that are going wrong instead of the things that are going right now. There's toxic optimism. You don't want to put on a happy face and go, everything's going to be fine. But pessimism can be toxic too. You need to embrace the dialectics and recognize that yeah, this probably isn't going to go 100% perfect. But what went well, and I think a lot of us can think back to particular things like the birth of our child or our wedding day where we had a vision for how it was supposed to go and it didn't go that way. Now we could be pessimistic about it and only remember the bad stuff. We could be pessimistic going into it and going, well, I have this vision so there's no way this is actually going to play out. Or we can hope for the best and adjust when things start going a little bit wonky. Pessimism often keeps people. A lot of times people use it because it protects them from being disappointed. But, but it also protects them, if you want to use that word, from really experiencing happiness. Because pessimism says bad things are going to happen. That triggers that fight or flight response and can keep them restrained. Isolation and withdrawal is another habit of unhappy people. Now some people are introverts and they enjoy having some time alone. However, isolating from other people because you cannot tolerate their input because you don't trust them, can be very lonely. And when we don't connect with other people in some way, a particular hormone called oxytocin, which is our bonding hormone, goes low and that actually impacts other hormones like dopamine and serotonin. It doesn't mean you've got to connect with people all the time. Like I said, some people are introverts and they want a certain Amount of connection, but not as much as an extrovert, and that's okay. But complete withdrawal can be detrimental to mental health. Comparing yourself to other people is also a habit of unhappy people, because there's almost always going to be somebody out there that is better at something than you or has more of something than you. So continuing to compare yourself to them, you're always going to feel like you fall short. Ideally, you compare yourself to what you were yesterday. You know, are you better at this than you were yesterday? I'll take running, for example. I trained for a marathon one time, and I could compare myself to the people who run marathons and they've been doing it for years, and they can run a six and a half minute mile and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I would see my times and my distance and I'd compare myself to them and I'd be like, I'm never going to get there and what's the point? And I'd start to feel defeated when I switched my attitude and instead started comparing myself to myself. Am I 10 seconds faster per mile than I was on the last run? Yes. Score. Progress. Micro progress. I'm recognizing that I'm improving to the best of my abilities. And that way I am not comparing myself and always falling short. It actually gives me an opportunity to succeed. Life imbalance is another habit of unhappy people. Unhappy people tend to devote most of their energy to one area of their life. And then when that goes bad, other things that normally might be important to them have all eroded. So think about somebody who devotes, you know, 80 hours a week to work, and then all of a sudden they get fired or laid off. You know, work's not going well and they step back. And because they've devoted, like every waking hour to work, their family may have gone off in different directions and they may have missed it. There's a song by Cat Stevens called Cats in the Cradle. Very, very old song. But in that he talks about regretting life imbalance because he devoted so much time to work that he missed his kid growing up. Life imbalance. May create a situation where we put all of our eggs in one basket, so to speak, and then if that doesn't go well, we feel completely defeated. It also can remove other sources of happiness that can buffer against failures, create a pie chart, and recognize you've only got so many hours in a day, so many hours in a week. How much time and energy are you going to devote to the top 10 things that are important in your life? And that includes one of those has to be self care and try to figure out what that looks like and identify if you are suffering from life imbalance. A lack of sufficient quality sleep significantly negatively impacts health as well as mood. The research is just undeniable on that. When you're not getting sufficient quality sleep, your circadian rhythms are often out of balance, which impacts your sex hormones like testosterone and estrogen and progesterone, and it impacts your neurotransmitters, it impacts your immune system, and it impacts your cognitive abilities. When you don't get good sleep, your brain can't clear out adenosine, which is kind of the garbage that's left over at the end of the day. And so you wake up and you still feel tired. Think of a factory. At the end of the day, the factory shuts down, which is kind of like us going to sleep. The janitorial staff comes through and clears out all of the garbage and the maintenance staff comes through and tunes up all the machines and oils everything. So the next morning everything's ready to go, humming along. But if you come in and those teams didn't do their job, or if the, or if the factory never shuts down, then the garbage starts to pile up and the machines start to get more out of sync and things just don't work as well. It's harder to get anything done because there's all kinds of crap in your way and nothing is nearly as efficient. Poor nutrition is also a habit of unhappy people. Unhappy people often eat high fat, high sugar foods and even sometimes high alcohol foods. Often it is a craving they experience that is subconsciously designed to self medicate because high fat, high sugar foods promote the release of serotonin and dopamine and sometimes some of your other feel good chemicals. Poor nutrition, however, or good nutrition, let me say, provides the building blocks for your body to make all of the neurotransmitters and the hormones and the products needed to keep those machines humming along. If you're not eating a good diet, then you're depriving your factory of the raw materials it needs to make the end products. That doesn't mean you have to cut out all of the high fat, high sugar foods. Ideally you would, but it doesn't mean you have to. But it is important to make sure you're also getting some healthy food in there that has color to it and, you know, didn't originate in a chem lab somewhere. And finally, finally, mindlessness. We talk a lot about mindfulness, being aware of what's going on in the present moment. But a lot of us get so caught up living in autopilot that we fail to notice the positive. And then we feel like it's just all work and no play. Makes Jack a dull boy, if you will. Think about, you know, pay attention for a day or even a week at how much stuff you do on autopilot. For example, in the morning, I get up and I go into the kitchen and I make my coffee and I sit down and I read the news and I pet the dog and I feed the donkey. And there's stuff I do every morning, but I don't think about doing it anymore. It's just automatic. My body almost knows exactly what to do without me having to think, okay, what do I do next? That's mindless behavior. And when we are in that mode, we're almost in a. We're almost turned off, if you will. We're almost in an automatic mode. So we're not noticing the positive. We're just putting one foot in front of the other like a robot. And that can lead to significant unhappiness because we fail to notice the roses and the bunny rabbits and the sunshine and whatever it is that makes you happy. Practice being more mindful. And I encourage people that I work with to start out with anchor points. It's easier to remember. You can either put a push notification in your phone or you can do it when you get up in the morning, at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner, and before bed, noticing what's going on around you. The negative and the positive. You know, I can be sitting at home and I can notice the fact that, hey, I need to do some laundry and I've got this over here that needs to be done and ooh, I ought to dust. But I can also notice that, oh, look how sweet the cat's sitting on the bed. And whatever else I notice. Mindfulness brings your full attention to everything in the present moment. And it's kind of like running a warm bath. Instead of just paying attention to the negative or not paying attention to anything at all and just randomly stepping in a bath, you are adjusting the temperature. And the happy things are kind of like the cold water that make the hot water more temperate or more tolerable. You can deal with the distress if you've got happiness that goes with it. I don't love dust. I don't love toys all over the floor. I do love my animals. And yes, I could have it where we had a pretty dust free environment and no toys on the floor. But that would mean we didn't have small children or animals in the house. And that's not okay with me, because small children, well, and big children and animals are integral to the things in. In my rich and meaningful life. I would never give that up. And we kind of joke around my house that cleaning our house is kind of like brushing your teeth and eating Oreos at the same time. You can't get it clean as fast as it gets dirty, but you try. You at least try. I hope this has given you some techniques to think about for breaking some habits that might contribute to you feeling unhappy.