The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

I imagine being a parent with a brand new baby and getting almost no sleep at night, and he had that little teeny voice, that very small, whiny voice that's so delicate and adorable during the day, but in the middle of the night, it's a pain in the butt. You have to feed then diaper, then feed then diaper, then you realize you have the clothes to wash. You have to do the grocery shopping. You wish your husband, or you wish your wife would do more, and you've got to manage a job, a career, and your circuits are overloaded. Your mental circuits are totally on overload. There just aren't enough hours in the day to get everything done, and you're just pulling your hair out. Add to that, you may have decided to go back to school to advance your career, and you've got your elderly parents to take care of. And of course, you want to exercise daily because you want to get rid of the baby fat, or you want to make yourself feel fit because summer's coming, it's so easy for any of us to get into that mode where we feel like we're mentally drowning. And also, it doesn't have to be these big things. It can be very small frustrations that can set us off.

For example, the other day, I felt anxiety creeping through my skin, and that's very rare for me because I have so many skills. I'm very lucky to be in this career. So I took a closer look at this. What caused this anxiety? Why this huge rush? Well, during the day, I had had a two-hour break. That's wonderful. I can get a lot of work done. I needed to call insurance companies for clients. So these are the medical insurance companies. So I said, Oh, good, I can take care of all of this busy work and move on. You know, feel real accomplished. I got on the phone and called the first insurance company, and I went through the menus, and I'm used to going through, and I finally get to where I need to be. I get a woman with a lovely, syrupy voice, and she tells me that I have the wrong number. I'm on the chiropractic line, not the mental health one. So that gave me a feeling of, you guessed it, frustration. So I start all over again. And this happened over and over again. I would go through all of the phone menus. One time I ended up with a Japanese Supply Company, and I'm thinking, oh my god, what are they selling? Another point, I was on hold for 10 minutes. And I just said, This is it. I can't stay on hold any longer. My frustration meter is just popping here. It's off the charts. So when you invest so much time to complete something and nothing gets done, you can get amazingly frustrated over really petty stuff. This is not a big crisis in my life.

So how do you manage your own mental overload? Each one of us, privately, needs to have methods to manage overload, mental overload, and we're not taught this. So if you're screaming to yourself, I just can't handle it anymore. Everyone wants a piece of me, or it's too much my life is so out of control, then stay tuned, because later in the show, I'll be talking with a thinking expert, Jean Moroney Binswanger, and she'll give us all some tips on how to handle an overloaded life.

And right now, I want to turn to our after-hours sign and listen to a woman who feels terrible and anxious.

"I feel terrible. I feel anxious. If you can give me any advice, I will be happy."

Okay, listen to the pacing of your voice too. It's very slow, and so I suspect that that feeling terrible means that you feel depressed, you have some hopelessness, you feel like there are no solutions. I'm not hearing someone that's revved up and really super anxious, like, "Oh my god, what do I do? What do I do?" It's not that type of energy that I'm hearing from you. Now, notice what I'm doing. I'm doing detective work. That's what each one of us needs to learn for ourselves. And again, none of us are taught this. So you don't want to beat yourselves up for not knowing how to decode your own emotions, not knowing how to read your own mind, but it's a learnable skill. In fact, it's a fascinating skill, and it's relatively easy once you have the right resources.

So many of us say, "I feel terrible, I feel anxious, and I don't know why. I just don't know why." And they take that "I don't know why" as an end point. It dead-ends their thinking. Instead, I always tell my clients when you hear your own mind saying, "I don't know why I feel this way. I just don't know why," don't take that as the end point. Take that as the starting point of your thinking. The starting point of therapy is you start with an "I don't know," and you get to an "Aha, I get it. I know." That's where you want to go. So you can start asking yourself questions. Why am I feeling this way? The anxiety means uncertainty or self-doubt. So where are my pockets of uncertainty or self-doubt? Where are my big pockets of uncertainty? Am I uncertain about how to make choices in my life? Have I made a string of bad choices? Then you move to the next—you would do a lot of work on that—I'm shortening that, but you move to the next emotion, terrible. What do I mean by terrible? That's a negative emotion. Do I feel guilty, sad, angry, ashamed? What negative emotion? I'll continue with this after the break.

For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to DrKenner.com and please listen to this.

Here's an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance by Drs. Kenner and Locke:

Emotions alone are insufficient to make the thousands of decisions and guide all the actions that have to be made over many years in order to sustain a passionate, intimate, romantic relationship. Love can be sustained, but only by an active mental process—the process of thinking. Thinking is conscious and volitional. You must think about and plan what actions are needed to make your relationship with your loved one prosper in both the short and the long run, and then take the requisite action. One executive put it this way: "I simply decided to start treating my wife as if she were my most important client." That might not sound overly romantic, but I recognized the way I was wired, and this approach has worked exceptionally well for me. What this individual did was to consciously make his wife important.

You can download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com, and you can buy the book at Amazon.com.