How to Speak Clearly When Things Get Heated

Posted on by helpingsoul

 

A Practical Approach to Assertive Communication, Updated for What I Have Learned in the Years Since I First Wrote About This

A substantial revision of an earlier 2014 post titled 6 Tips to Improve Communication with Difficult People. The skills are largely the same. The framing has matured.

In 2014, I wrote a blog post called 6 Tips to Improve Communication with Difficult People. The skills in it were sound. The framing was a product of its moment, and there is one thing I would change before anything else.

The word difficult, in that title, located the problem entirely in the other person. The reader was the reasonable one. The other was the difficult one. This framing was popular in self-help writing of the era, and it has not aged well, for two reasons.

First, almost no one is purely difficult. The person who feels difficult to you is usually someone whose own nervous system is activated, whose own communication patterns developed in their own history, and who is responding to you according to dynamics that include both of you. Naming them as difficult flattens what is actually a co-created pattern.

Second, the framing implicitly excuses the reader from examining their own contribution. The communication you are struggling with is rarely produced by the other person alone. Your response patterns, your tone, your timing, your assumptions about what they meant — all of it is part of what is happening. Naming them as the difficult one closes off the more useful question, which is what would shift if you changed something about how you are showing up.

So this refresh begins with a different framing. The skills below are for any conversation that has become activated, whoever is producing the activation. The goal is not to learn to manage difficult people. The goal is to learn to communicate clearly when the conditions for clear communication have started to deteriorate — which can happen with anyone, including yourself.

Where assertive communication comes from

Most of us did not learn assertive communication in our families. We learned other things. We learned to suppress our own thoughts and feelings to keep the peace. We learned to manage other people’s emotional weather to keep ourselves safe. We learned to say yes when we meant no, to swallow what we needed to say in order to stay connected to someone we feared losing. We learned to be invisible when visibility had been costly.

These patterns were not failures of character. They were survival adaptations. The child who learned to suppress her own voice did so because her voice was unwelcome, mocked, criticized, or punished. The body that learned to swallow what it needed to say was protecting the relational connection that the child needed to survive. The adaptations made sense at the time. They worked. They kept the child safe.

As adults, the same adaptations cost us. The voice that learned to suppress itself in childhood continues to suppress itself in adult relationships that could actually receive it. The body that learned to swallow needed words continues to swallow them with the people who could actually hear them. The conditions have changed. The system has not yet updated.

Learning assertive communication as an adult is the work of updating the system. Slowly. With practice. With the recognition that the skill was suppressed for survival reasons and is being rebuilt now under different conditions. The skill is learnable. The work is real. And the relationships in your life that can survive your assertiveness will become stronger as you develop it. The ones that cannot will reveal what they actually were.

Regulate first

Before any technique, before any acronym, before any specific words you might use, the most important element of assertive communication is the state of your nervous system. Words spoken from activation almost always fail. The technical content of what you said may be perfect. The delivery, shaped by the activation in your body, will land as something different. Your face will signal something other than what your words say. Your tone will carry the urgency that came from the activation rather than the steadiness that effective communication requires. The other person, sensing the activation, will respond to that rather than to your content.

The single most important thing you can do before initiating an important conversation, or in the middle of a conversation that has begun to get heated, is to regulate. Not perfectly. Just enough.

If you can, take the conversation somewhere quieter. Walk away if necessary and return when you are calmer. There is no rule that important conversations have to happen in the moment of activation. Most are better when both parties are regulated.

If you cannot leave, take silence in the conversation itself. Three deep breaths, slow, with the exhale longer than the inhale. Four counts in, seven counts out, three cycles. About a minute of silence. Silence is allowed. It often produces a different conversation than the one that was about to happen.

Notice your own body. Is your chest tight? Your jaw clenched? Your breath shallow? These are signs the system has moved from social engagement into mobilization. From this state, the words you say will not land the way you want them to. Regulate first. Speak from steadier ground.

The skill itself — what I called PASARR in the original

With the regulation in place, here is the structure of an assertive exchange. The original post called this PASARR — Pause, Acknowledge the Truth, Stay True to Self, Ask for a Request, Repeat, Repair. The acronym still works as a memory aid. The content of each step is essentially the same now as it was then, with some refinement.

Pause

Before you respond to what was just said, take a moment. Notice your own reaction. Notice what wants to come out of your mouth. Notice whether what wants to come out is actually what you mean to say, or whether it is the reflexive defensiveness, justification, or compliance that your earlier conditioning trained you to produce.

The pause is short. Sometimes only a few seconds. But it is the space in which choice becomes possible. Without the pause, your response is automatic. With the pause, you can choose.

This is a learnable skill in its own right. People who have spent decades responding reflexively often need to practice the pause many times before it becomes natural. The early attempts feel awkward. The other person may notice the silence and ask if you are okay. You can say yes. You are just thinking before you speak. This is allowed.

Acknowledge what is true

If the other person has said something that contains accurate information, acknowledge it. This is not capitulation. It is not agreeing with the entirety of their position. It is acknowledging the specific kernel of truth in what they said.

If your partner says you have been distracted lately, and you have been distracted lately, do not deny it. Say yes, I have been distracted. Tell me more about what you have been noticing. This acknowledgment de-escalates the dynamic. It signals to the other person that you are not going to fight them on every point. It also clears space for the actual conversation, which is usually somewhere underneath the surface complaint.

If your boss says your work has been below standard, and you can identify one specific instance where this is true, name it. *You are right about the report I turned in last Tuesday. That was not my best work. The presentation I delivered on Thursday, on the other hand, was strong.* Specificity matters. Generalized criticism becomes more workable when met with specific acknowledgment of what is true and specific clarification of what is not.

If the other person has said nothing accurate, you do not have to invent something. But often there is something accurate in even the most charged communication. Finding it is part of the work.

Stay true to yourself

Use I statements. Not the cliched I-feel-when-you-do-this format that has become a parody of itself, but the genuine practice of speaking from your own experience rather than reporting on the other person’s behavior as if it were the only fact in the room.

Instead of *you never listen to me*, try *I have been feeling unheard in our conversations this week*. The difference is significant. The first is a global statement about the other person that they will resist. The second is a report from your own experience that the other person can engage with.

This is harder than it sounds, especially when the activation is high. The instinct in difficult conversation is to focus on what the other person is doing wrong. Learning to redirect that energy toward what you are actually experiencing is part of the practice.

Ask for what you want

After acknowledging what is true and speaking from your own experience, name what you would like to be different. Specifically. Concretely. In a way the other person can actually respond to.

*When you are late and do not call, I find myself worrying and getting angry. Would you be willing to text me if you are going to be more than ten minutes late?* That is a specific request that the other person can say yes or no to.

*You need to be more considerate* is not a request. It is a vague criticism. The other person cannot do anything specific with it. They will respond defensively because the statement does not give them a path to action.

Specific requests, made from a regulated state, with acknowledgment of what is true and speaking from your own experience, are the actual mechanism by which relationships shift over time.

Reflect and repeat

Ask the other person to share what they heard. Not as a test. As a way to ensure mutual understanding. *Can you tell me what you are hearing me say?* They will often paraphrase back something slightly different from what you meant. This is information. You can clarify. They can clarify what they meant when they said the thing that activated you. Over time, the gap between intent and impact narrows.

Repair

If the conversation has gotten heated, if either of you has said something that landed harder than intended, name it. *That came out sharper than I meant it. Let me try again.* Repair is one of the most powerful tools in any relationship. The capacity to recognize when something has gone off track and to gently bring it back is what distinguishes relationships that endure from relationships that gradually erode.

Repair does not require either of you to be the one entirely at fault. It just requires the willingness to attend to what is happening between you and to try again with more care.

A note on what makes this hard

Reading these steps, you may notice that none of them is complicated. The skills are simple. They are also profoundly difficult to do in the moments when they would help most.

This is because the moments when you would most need these skills are also the moments when your nervous system is most activated. The pause is harder when you are flooded. The acknowledgment of truth is harder when you feel attacked. The I statements are harder when the urge is to focus on what the other person is doing wrong. The request is harder when what you really want is to be understood without having to make a request.

This is the work. You practice the skills in low-stakes moments so that they are partially available in high-stakes moments. You catch yourself, sometimes after the fact, and reflect on what you might have done differently. You return to the practice. You get better, slowly, over years.

And in the meantime, you are not failing. You are practicing a skill that most of us were not taught and that takes most adults a long time to develop. Patience with yourself is part of the work.

Where to begin

Pick one upcoming conversation that you anticipate being difficult. Before it happens, rehearse what you want to say. Use the structure: pause, acknowledge what is true, speak from your own experience, ask for what you want.

Notice your own state before the conversation begins. If you are activated, take five minutes to regulate first. Walk. Breathe. Place your hand on your heart and your belly. Do not begin the conversation until your system is closer to baseline.

Have the conversation. Notice what worked. Notice what did not. Notice where the practice was easy and where you reverted to old patterns. None of this is failure. It is data.

Repeat with the next conversation. Each one builds capacity for the next. Over months and years, the skills become more available. The relationships that can hold your developing voice will deepen. The relationships that cannot will reveal themselves.

And the felt sense of speaking your truth, in a moment that requires it, from a regulated state, with care for the other person and care for yourself, is one of the most powerful experiences available to a person who has spent decades silencing themselves. It is worth the practice. It is worth the awkward early attempts. It is worth the patience the work requires.

In love and dignity, speak the truth — as we think, feel, and know it — and it shall set us free.

— Melody Beattie

Further reading: Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Anger. Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability and difficult conversations. For the companion piece on detachment with love, see The Art of Detachment with Love on courageous-arts.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

Where Does the Playful Spirit Go?

Posted on by helpingsoul
Baboon laughing

An essay on laughter, play, and the slow rediscovery of what gets squeezed out of adult life

This essay is a revisit of an old 2013 post on the same theme. The earlier version was a list of benefits. This version is a longer reflection on what gets lost when we stop playing, and what becomes possible when we begin again.

“Of all the gifts bestowed by nature on human beings, hearty laughter must be close to the top.” — Norman Cousins

“A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” — Proverbs 17:22

Laugh out loud. Play. Be silly. Joke around. Have fun. These are some of the words I think of when I watch children play. Years ago I wrote a blog post about laughter and the lightness of children’s play, and the question that has stayed with me since is the one I asked then. Where does that spirit go?

Some days I see a child make ordinary life into a moment of joy and I am reminded of the answer. The spirit does not actually leave. It gets buried under the weight of what we begin to think is more important — the deadlines, the responsibilities, the bills, the lists of things we have not yet done, the conviction that adulthood is not the time for silliness. The playful spirit does not die. It gets covered over. And what changes is not the spirit itself but our capacity to access it.

One afternoon recently, walking through the neighborhood, I saw a small girl turning an ordinary sidewalk into an entire world. She was with her grandfather and her mother. She tagged her grandfather. She spun toward her mother. She skipped, twirled, and laughed at her own laughter. She made a destination out of nothing, simply because she was moving through the world the way children move — with imagination treating every step as material for delight. Her family was laughing along with her. Other adults on the sidewalk were smiling without quite realizing they had begun to smile.

I watched her for a moment longer than was strictly polite. She was, in some ways, more accomplished at being alive than most of the adults around her. She was not earning her joy. She was not waiting until her tasks were complete. She was not making sure she deserved to enjoy herself. She was just enjoying herself, fully and uncomplicatedly, in the most ordinary moment possible.

And I wondered again. Where does that go? When does it get traded for the somber-faced productivity that most of us mistake for being a competent adult?

Laughter as medicine

There is older literature on this question that has held up beautifully across the decades. Norman Cousins, the journalist who used humor to recover from a serious illness in the 1970s, wrote in his book Anatomy of an Illness about the specific finding that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter gave him at least two hours of pain-free sleep. He pursued this discovery deliberately. He watched Marx Brothers films. He read humor. He treated laughter as a clinical intervention, and his recovery surprised the physicians who had not expected it.

Cousins’s work was anecdotal but it pointed the way for more rigorous research that followed. Laughter does measurable things. It releases endorphins. It reduces stress hormones like cortisol. It improves immune function. It increases blood flow. It helps regulate emotions. It strengthens relationships. It diffuses tension in conflict.

Albert Einstein, of all people, understood this. He kept extensive notebooks. Some were filled with mathematical equations. Others, less famously, were filled with jokes. He took breaks to laugh. He understood — perhaps because his mind was working so hard in such serious territory — that the brain works better when it is allowed to breathe. The same insight, less articulated, has been carried by every culture that has held space for ritual humor, for the trickster figure, for the holy fool, for the necessity of comic relief in tragedy.

And it is not only humans. Marina Davila-Ross, a researcher at the University of Portsmouth in England, has shown that chimpanzees use laughter to strengthen social bonds. The vocalizations chimps make during play — short, rhythmic sounds — are not random. They serve the same function laughter serves in human social groups: they signal safety, they invite continued connection, they create the social glue that holds bonds together over time. Laughter is not a uniquely human invention. It is something we inherited from a long line of primates who used it for the same reasons we use it now.

What laughter is doing in the nervous system

Contemporary research on the nervous system, particularly the work of Stephen Porges on polyvagal theory, gives us another way to understand what laughter is doing in the body. Porges describes a part of the autonomic nervous system that handles social engagement — the felt sense of being safe in connection with other people. He calls this the ventral vagal system. When it is active, the body is open. Breath is easy. The face is animated. Eye contact is comfortable. The voice has prosody. And the body is available for the spontaneous responses, including laughter, that mark genuine human connection.

When this system is not active — when the nervous system is in a state of threat activation or chronic shutdown — laughter does not come easily. People in chronic stress states often report that they cannot remember the last time they really laughed. They produce polite social laughter on cue. The deep belly laughter, the involuntary kind that takes the body over, is absent. The system that produces it is not online.

This is one of the clinical observations I have made repeatedly in my work as a therapist over the years. The absence of laughter in an adult’s life is often not a personality trait. It is a symptom. It is the body’s report that the social engagement system has been offline for a long time. And the restoration of laughter, when it happens, is often one of the most reliable signs that nervous system regulation is genuinely returning. Clients who have not laughed in years begin, sometimes shyly, to find themselves laughing again. The first time it happens they often look surprised. The body has remembered something it had forgotten.

What the research has not quite captured

The research on laughter tends to focus on what laughter does — the benefits, the mechanisms, the measurable outcomes. What it does not always capture is what laughter is. Laughter is, in its deepest sense, the sound a body makes when it is willing to be moved by the world without trying to control the response. It is the body saying yes to being delighted. It is the body trusting that the moment is safe enough to let the diaphragm shake.

This is why laughter is so closely connected to relationships, to safety, to the felt sense of being seen by another person. We laugh more easily with people we trust. We laugh less easily, or not at all, with people in whose presence we feel exposed or evaluated. Children laugh more than adults because children’s nervous systems are not yet carrying the accumulated armor that adult life teaches us to develop. They are not constantly assessing whether laughter will be received well. They simply laugh.

Adults who have spent decades in environments that did not welcome their joy — critical families, demanding workplaces, relationships in which lightness was treated as immaturity — often arrive at midlife genuinely uncertain how to play. The instinct has not been killed. It has been carefully suppressed for so long that activating it feels foreign. The same person who laughed easily at five may find at fifty that laughter requires conscious permission and even then arrives reluctantly. The body remembers how to laugh. The system that gives the body permission has been overruled for too long.

How to begin again

If you recognize yourself in this description — and many adults in my practice do — the work is gentle and slow. You cannot force laughter. You cannot make it arrive by deciding it should. What you can do is make small moves that put your nervous system in environments where laughter becomes available again.

Spend time with people who laugh. Not people who tell jokes, necessarily. People who laugh easily, who find ordinary moments funny, who can be in the kitchen together and crack up about something neither of you can quite explain afterward. The body learns from other bodies. Your social engagement system was built, originally, through the eye contact and shared smiles of the people who held you as an infant. It can be re-tuned, in adulthood, through the eye contact and shared smiles of the people you choose to be around now.

Watch something funny on purpose. Not as a self-improvement project. Just because you want to laugh and you have given yourself permission to want it. The current era has good options that the original 2013 version of this post could not have anticipated. Bridesmaids. Ted Lasso, which is gentle and warm and tends to produce both laughter and tears, sometimes in the same scene. Schitt’s Creek, which became a touchstone for many adults during the pandemic precisely because it modeled a kind of family warmth and absurdity that many people had been missing. Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Stand-up specials from comics whose voices feel like company. The classic films from the original 2013 list — A Thousand Clowns, Patch Adams — are still there for those who want them. Add what speaks to your particular humor.

Notice the absurd. Adult life is, when you look at it without the filter of seriousness, often genuinely ridiculous. The way we line up obediently for things. The earnestness with which we sometimes respond to small inconveniences. The peculiar ways our bodies behave when we are not paying attention. Comedians make their living by pointing at exactly this. You can do it for free in your own day. The amount of comedy in ordinary life is roughly infinite for anyone who learns to look.

Be silly with someone safe. Not in service of being funny. In service of remembering what it feels like to not be performing competence for a moment. The grandparents who play horse with their grandchildren. The partners who do voices for the cat. The friends who break into spontaneous dance moves in the kitchen for reasons neither can later explain. These are not childish behaviors. They are the behaviors of nervous systems that have remembered how to engage with each other in the absence of evaluation.

And laugh at yourself. Not the cutting self-deprecation that is actually self-attack disguised as humor. The real version. The genuine recognition that you, like every other human, do absurd things and that those things are sometimes funny. Tripping over nothing. Walking into a room and forgetting why. Saying the wrong word at the wrong moment. These are part of being a body in a world. The willingness to laugh at them is the willingness to be human without requiring yourself to be flawless.

A gentle reminder

Some days the laughter will not come. The work will be heavier. The body will be tired. The losses will be too close. This is also true and also human. Forcing laughter on a day when grief is what is present is not the work. The work is making room for whatever is true, and on days when laughter is true, letting it have its full place in your body without apology.

If you have been doing hard inner work — therapy, processing trauma, working through grief, navigating significant change — you may have found that the seriousness of the work has temporarily covered over your access to play. This is common and it is not permanent. The work is not opposed to laughter. They are companions. Some of the deepest moments in my own clinical practice have involved laughter — clients who reach a hard truth and then begin to laugh at the absurdity of having carried it for so long without naming it. The laughter does not diminish the truth. It honors it.

Joy and seriousness are not opposites. They are different colors in the same range. You do not have to wait until your life is fully repaired to laugh. You can laugh in the middle of the repair. The laughter is part of how the repair happens.

Final thought

If a child can turn a sidewalk into a moment of joy, you can turn five minutes of your day into something lighter. You do not have to earn this. You do not have to deserve it more than you do.

Find one thing today that makes you laugh out loud. Not a polite social laugh. The real kind. The kind your body remembers from before you learned to suppress it. The diaphragm shaking. The breath catching. The sense afterward of having been, briefly, fully alive.

Your nervous system will thank you. And the part of you that has been waiting, since you were a child, to be allowed to play again, will notice that you have come back for it.

Further reading: Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness. Marina Davila-Ross’s research on primate laughter at the University of Portsmouth. Stephen Porges, The Polyvagal Theory. For the clinical companion piece on laughter and the social engagement system, see thecourageousself.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

Happiness Is Not a Mood: What Thirteen Years of Reading the Research Has Changed in How I Understand Joy

Posted on by helpingsoul

A revisit of an old post on happiness — what I had right, what I had wrong, and what thirteen years of research has changed in how I understand joy.

In 2013, I wrote a blog post called Optimize Brain Function and Create Happiness. It was a list of twenty-five things — meditation, journaling, gratitude, exercise, kindness, supplements with specific dosages, positive thinking, eye contact, power posing, and so on. The post did well at the time. It captured what was current in the cultural conversation about happiness then. And reading it now, more than a decade later, I see that some of what I wrote has held up beautifully and some of it has not.

This post is a revisit. Not a replacement of the original — that one is still there if you want to look at it. A genuine rethinking of what I have come to understand about happiness in the years since I wrote it. The work I do as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist has changed me. So has the field. Some things that seemed straightforward in 2013 are more complicated than I knew. Some things I did not yet understand have become central to how I think about wellbeing.

Here is what has changed.

What I had right

Small changes still matter. That was the heart of the 2013 post and it remains true. Daily practices, repeated over time, produce more change than dramatic interventions. The brain and the body respond to consistency more than to intensity. A short daily meditation done for months produces results that a long retreat experience does not match. A gratitude practice of three things, written down most evenings, accumulates into a different relationship with one’s life over a year.

The basics still matter. Movement, sleep, hydration, time in nature, reduced exposure to chronic stress, regular meals — these are not glamorous interventions. They are the conditions under which the nervous system can function. Without them, no amount of mindset work will reach the underlying physiology that determines so much of what we call happiness.

Other people matter. The 2013 version of the post emphasized surrounding yourself with positive people, and that observation has been deepened rather than overturned by subsequent research. The single most consistent finding in happiness science over the past two decades is that the quality of your close relationships predicts your well-being more reliably than almost any other factor. Not the number of relationships. Not their visible success. The felt quality of being loved, seen, and known by the people closest to you.

What I had wrong

I framed happiness as a choice, full stop. “Happiness is a choice,” the original post said. It is not entirely wrong, but it is not entirely right either. Happiness involves choices, certainly — daily practices, attention to what fills you, willingness to engage in relationships that nourish you. And it is also significantly shaped by genetic factors, by current life circumstances, by physiological conditions that no amount of choosing can override, by trauma history, and by the social and economic conditions in which a person is trying to live.

Telling someone who is depressed that happiness is a choice often produces shame rather than help. The choice framing works for people whose baseline state is already pretty stable and who can benefit from small adjustments. For people whose baseline state has been compromised by depression, anxiety, chronic stress, unprocessed trauma, or serious medical conditions, the choice framing can be actively harmful. It implies that their suffering is, in some way, their own fault. It is not.

I included specific supplement dosages. I would not do that today. Blog posts are not the right place for supplement recommendations, both because the research has shifted on most of what I listed and because the legal and ethical standards around supplement advice have tightened appropriately. Anyone considering supplements should talk to their doctor or to a licensed nutritionist who can assess them as individuals rather than reading dosing recommendations from a blog post.

I listed twenty-five things. That was the format of 2013 blog writing, and lists still have their uses. But for a topic as layered as happiness, the list format can flatten what is actually a deeply nuanced subject. The list suggests that happiness is the sum of these twenty-five practices done consistently. It is not. Happiness is more relational, more physiological, more contextual, and sometimes simpler than a list of practices can capture.

What the field has learned since 2013

Sonja Lyubomirsky, who is one of the most influential happiness researchers working today and a Distinguished Professor at UC Riverside, has spent the past decade refining what she calls the architecture of sustainable happiness. Her work shows that happiness interventions do produce real change when sustained over time — but the change is more durable when the interventions are matched to the person doing them. Gratitude practices work better for some people than for others. Acts of kindness produce more benefit when they are varied rather than routinized. The how matters as much as the what.

Most recently, Lyubomirsky has published a book called How to Feel Loved, co-authored with Harry Reis of the University of Rochester. The book, released in early 2026, makes a striking argument grounded in decades of research. The single most reliable difference between happy and unhappy people is not money, success, or even health. It is whether they feel loved — felt loved, in their bodies, in ordinary moments, by the people closest to them. “To feel that the people in your life truly get you, value you, and love you,” Lyubomirsky and Reis write, “is what makes life worth living.”

This finding has changed how I think about happiness. It also resonates with the trauma and attachment work I do daily in my practice. The people who struggle most with happiness are very often people who, for reasons rooted in their earliest relationships, do not feel loved at a felt-sense level — regardless of how much love is actually present in their current lives. Their nervous systems were calibrated by early conditions to filter out the love that is being offered. The work of becoming happier, for these clients, is not a matter of adopting more positive practices. It is the work of slowly developing the capacity to feel love when it arrives.

Barbara Fredrickson, at the University of North Carolina, has shown through decades of research that positive emotions, even brief ones, produce measurable changes in cognition, social behavior, health, and resilience. Her broaden-and-build theory describes how moments of positive affect open the mind and build durable resources over time. More recent work from her Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab has focused on what she calls positivity resonance — the felt sense of shared positive emotion between two people in conversation, in eye contact, in the simple moments of being together. These small shared moments are not decorative. They are the building blocks of the longer-term well-being that all the other practices try to produce.

What I would tell my 2013 self

Keep the small practices. They matter. Add to them the recognition that happiness is not primarily a matter of individual optimization but of relationship — to your own body, to the people in your life, to whatever you understand as larger than yourself.

Stop treating happiness as a target. Treat it as a byproduct of a life lived in close connection to the things and people that genuinely matter to you. The targeting itself, paradoxically, often gets in the way. People who aim directly at happiness frequently miss it. People who orient their lives toward meaningful work, close relationships, and genuine presence often find happiness arriving, more or less on its own, in the spaces those orientations create.

Be honest about what is not yours to fix. The chronic depression rooted in unprocessed trauma. The anxiety that has somatic components requiring medical care. The deep loneliness that small practices alone cannot reach. These conditions deserve respect, not optimization advice. The right response is often professional support — therapy, medical care, sometimes medication — rather than another daily practice.

And know that the small practices are still worth doing. The gratitude. The breath. The walk in the morning. The person you love. The work that means something to you. The thirteen years that have passed since the original post have only confirmed how much the small things matter — and how much they need to be set within the larger context of relationships, conditions, and the genuine work of becoming oneself.

Where to begin today

If you are reading this and looking for one practice to begin, here is what I would suggest. Once today, pause and notice one small thing you genuinely appreciate about someone in your life.

Not a polite thought. An actual felt sense of appreciation. Then, sometime today, tell them.

Briefly. Specifically. Without needing them to respond in any particular way.

This single practice, repeated regularly over months, produces more measurable change in wellbeing than almost any other single intervention I know. It builds the very thing that

Lyubomirsky and Reis identify as central — the felt sense of being loved, which arrives when we extend love in ways the other person can receive. Each act of specific appreciation is a small revision of the relational climate of your life. The climate, over time, is what we call happiness.

That is what I have come to understand. Happiness is not a mood. It is a relationship. With yourself. With others. With the conditions of your life. The work of building it is real, and the work is slower and more relational than the lists suggested. And it is genuinely worth doing.

Further reading: Sonja Lyubomirsky’s research is available at sonjalyubomirsky.com. Barbara Fredrickson’s Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab at UNC is at peplab.web.unc.edu. For the clinical perspective on how nervous system regulation underlies the capacity to experience happiness, see my companion piece on thecourageousself.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

 

FORGIVENESS

Posted on by helpingsoul

april wright therapy forgiveness

“The act of forgiveness is the act of returning to present time.”  ~ Caroline Myss

Like almost everything else, forgiveness begins at home. Self-forgiveness is a form of self-compassion, and without it, we flog ourselves for every little wrongdoing. In addition, we come to treat others the way we treat ourselves. Listen to your judgments of others, and remind yourself that you’re actually projecting your judgments of yourself onto them, probably unconsciously operating the way you were programmed in your family of origin. Everyone makes mistakes all day long. Own yours! Apologize when you can, then start over with a greater understanding of what you did wrong. When you begin to forgive yourself for your imperfections, you begin to change positively from the inside out. And when that happens, forgiveness naturally flows outward to others.

But forgiveness for ourselves–or from another–is not a natural process. It’s not something either “should” do; it happens when we are ready. Like in any dynamic development, glimmers of forgiveness may emerge unexpectedly, then, just as suddenly, recede. Stay open but keep moving forward. If you’ve hurt another, move forward with forgiveness.  If it’s not received well, don’t compound it with impatience. Let the other come towards you when she or he is ready. Meanwhile, give yourself permission to forgive your past mistakes. Remember, forgiveness doesn’t happen all at once–it comes in stages and may never feel complete.

Forgive only when your heart tells you it’s the right time. Forgiving prematurely can hurt you further because forgiving too soon denies the truth. You are on your own timetable. Take your time and stay present. Just remember that waiting too long, holding onto anger, can be toxic to your body, mind, and spirituality.  Holding tightly creates resentment that keeps you sick and stuck. Suffering doesn’t make you a better person. In fact, it demonstrates self destructive behavior.  Treat yourself with kindness and it will prelude to others. Obsessing over the past won’t heal your heartbreak, but forgiveness of yourself and others can restore you both.

Taken from Mirror of Intimacy:  Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence

Exercise Is Not Just For The Body Anymore

Posted on by helpingsoul

boost brain function with exerciseThe benefits of exercise are mind-blowing.  They can range from increasing memory not only for your muscles but also for your brain and all in between.  Get inspired to start moving by reading the many ways working out can improve mental well-being, relationships, and an overall happier and healthier life.

1.  Adapt easier to change

Once you begin a routine of exercise the benefits are reaped even after a break.  Thirty minutes of endurance or strength training 3 times a week affects muscles on the cellular level first before any physiological results are seen.  Thus after exercise is stopped and muscles begin to atrophy, the cellular level memory remains intact and can remember previous learned motor sensory to achieve faster results upon onset of exercise again.

2.  Reduce stress

A brisk walk or weight lifting stimulates the central nervous system and increases the neurotransmitters including dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and acetylcholine which our body releases to adapt more efficiently to stress.  The intense concentration for coordinated exercise such as dance, tennis or rowing precipitates a type of distraction that may reduce anxiety even further.

3.  Relieve depression

Exercise is like taking a happy pill.  It’s a form of mediation which facilitates an altered state of consciousness.  Playing tag can reignite that inner child and boost mood.  Press that fun button and get that body moving again.

4.  Increase self-confidence and body image

Physical activity gives a sense of mastery and control.   Seeing results of your hard work gives a sense of gratification.  Not only are the improvements seen in your body but also running that mile faster or lifting more weight than before.

5.  Inspire others

Exercising with a buddy is an instant motivator.  You are more apt to exercise because your partner is there waiting.  They hold you accountable for your actions and vice versa.  Not only are you encouraged to show up but when you are running side by side, you are more apt to push just a little harder.  There’s nothing wrong with a little friendly competition.

6.  Make new friends

There’s no better way to make new friends than at a pick-up game of soccer, a group class at the gym, or joining a running club.  Exercise is just more fun with someone else.

7.  Anti-aging

Working out can help prevent telomeres from shortening. Telomeres are like the plastic protector at the end of your shoe laces but for your chromosomes.  Telomeres protect genetic data and determine how we age and get cancer.  When we age, cells divide and telomeres shorten.  Overtime, telomeres reach a point where they can no longer divide and become inactive.  This process is associated with aging, cancer, and a shortened lifespan.    Research shows that aerobic exercise can help delay shortening of telomeres and add years to your life.  So go ahead and take those stairs instead of the elevator knowing you are doing your body and cells good.

8.  Decrease onset of Alzheimer’s

Staying physically active maintains good blood flow to the brain and supports new brain cells.  Research shows regular exercise such as tai chi, yoga, even gardening can increase blood flow to the brain which reduces brain cell loss.  Exercise also stimulates mental activity especially when done with a partner.  The social interaction and decision-making process of planning your route or coordination of a good game of softball provide added brain benefits.

9.  Improve learning

Researchers who published a study in the 2011 Archives of Internal Medicine determined that even mild exercise improves cognitive functioning compared to folks who did not exercise.  Learning a new sport or activity like ballroom dancing can increase the amount of gray matter in your occipital lobe, the area of the brain associated with visual memory.  A 2004 Nature article stated that those who learned how to juggle increased the amount of gray matter but when they stopped the new gray matter vanished.  So learn a new move, improve your learning and memory and keep practicing!

The positive effects of physical activity out way any negative, self-sabotaging excuses.  Exercise doesn’t have to be at the gym to be beneficial.   All you have to do is access that inner child and get that body moving again.  You might just lose a few pounds and gain improved relationships, memory, and confidence.