Is there always a silver lining?

As a kid, my mum was a big fan of getting me to look on the bright side.....mopping away blood from a hugely scraped leg she’d tell me that at least it wasn’t broken!

We’re all familiar with the wishful thinking idea of the silver lining in our clouds and the cute idea of making lemonade with the lemons life chucks us, BUT, when we are hit with tough times it doesn’t turn out to be quite as simple as that, does it? 

In our last blog we wrote about how the ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Training) framework can help us to better live with unhelpful emotions.  (Heavy thoughts?) 

ACT does not suggest that positive thinking is the ultimate answer to your troubles.  Instead we’re encouraged to look for, and appreciate what is indisputably good, even during a really terrible time, and allow those things to give us some comfort.   We may then be better able to accept our situation.

When my Dad died I was devastated, but I tried very hard to appreciate the hugs of my family and friends, the taste of meals that were cooked for me, and little cute moments my kids provided. When you’re having a very difficult time it can be hard even to do this but the results of research in this area suggests it’s well worth trying.

Noticing positive things around us can be a first step towards activating our internal resources and character strengths.  Start small – if you can notice how good your coffee tastes and how lovely the sun feels on your skin you are appreciating beauty around you and you can perhaps feel some gratitude for those moments of pleasure.  You can try to notice that brief sense of gratitude and hopefully it can help broaden your ability to appreciate what is still good around you.  When we use our character strengths, in even the littlest way, we give a boost to our sense of wellbeing and it can also give us more energy to cope with all that’s going on around us.

So is there always a silver lining?  Sadly, no.  There isn’t a magic wand that clears away the dense fog of tough times; but allowing ourselves, indeed deliberately trying, to look for positive experiences can help give us the strength to accept what is going on and keep functioning rather than be consumed by it.

Flourishing Mothers were inspired by Russ Harris and Barbara Fredrickson

Heavy thoughts? Feeling rattled? Then ACT.......

Did you know we have around 40 thoughts per minute? And linked to many of these thoughts are a vast assortment of emotions, both pleasant and unpleasant? No wonder at times we all feel overwhelmed by the noise in our heads and feel that emotionally, our day is a roller-coaster!

It’s pretty hard to prevent thoughts and feelings. And worse, as humans we’re programmed since cavemen days to have a bias towards the negative – we were on high alert for imminent danger (that lion attack!) and accompanying emotional responses such as fear. Even though nowadays there is a negligible risk of a lion walking through the front door, we are still biologically attentive to disappointment, frustration, sadness, shame, anger and fear…and the list goes on. Instead of battling the lion, we battle ourselves.

So, if we can’t always block our challenging thoughts or prevent our unhelpful emotions, we need to work out how to live with them - without acting on them, stopping doing things we love or living the way we want to, in line with our values or goals.

A well-researched framework used by Coaching and Positive Psychologists is ACT (an acronym for Acceptance and Commitment Training). ACT mixes mindfulness and acceptance strategies from psychology. We encourage our clients to notice their thoughts and emotions, but to let them come and go without “fusing” and becoming entangled with them in an unhelpful way.

Here’s an example of how 3 steps in the ACT process can work for mums.

Scenario: You’ve organised a park play date with some local mums but one thing has led to another and you’re late!

Mummy Self-Talk: “I can never get out of the house on time! I’m so annoyed with myself! I’m a useless mother!”

Step 1.  Diffuse. Reduce the power of painful or unhelpful thoughts. Notice your thought, then distance yourself from it.

• More helpful self-talk: “There I go again, calling myself a useless mother. That old story ….”

Step 2 - Expand. Notice your emotion. Label it. Make room for it by imagining a vast space inside you comprising this emotion and every emotion you experience (including the pleasant ones), in effect, watering it down.

• More helpful self-talk: “I’m feeling annoyed. That’s OK. I’ll take some breaths and this feeling can float in the balloon all my emotions, good and bad.”

Step 3 Engage. Start to direct your attention outwards to what you were doing and remember why you were doing it – how is your activity important to you?

• More helpful self-talk “I’ll grab the keys, my daughter and her shoes as I really want her to have fun at the park and to enjoy a catch up with the other mums who are going.”

In our day to day lives, when we mindfully focus on the task at hand, and when we allow thoughts and emotions to come and go without struggling with them - we enjoy our days more, and allow ourselves to do things that are important to us both now and into the future.

Best wishes from Flourishing Mothers

Flourishing Mothers were inspired by the work of Steven Hayes and Russ Harris

Let’s do a bit of “future-telling”!

At 5pm on a Tuesday afternoon, in 2 years’ time, where will you be? 

What will you be doing?  What will you be feeling happy about?  What will you be proud of?  What will you be excited about?  Do you ever wonder? 

The truth for most of us is that we’re generally so busy each day doing what we need to do for our families, our jobs, our health etc., that we don’t take much time to plan for the future.  We probably all have to do lists in various formats but do you have a plan for achieving your hopes and dreams over the next few years?

Knowing what is important to us, being able to express what we hope for and dream about doing and achieving, helps us to recognise our values and experience meaning in life.  This is important, because as we wrote about in our last blog (What's the meaning of life anyway?), feeling a higher level of meaning is linked to higher levels of wellbeing and engagement.

A great exercise to try from Positive Psychology is the “Letter from the Future” which is all about discovering and acknowledging your hopes and dreams.  Your dreams for the future can give you the impetus to set some more concrete goals for yourself and help you to notice opportunities in your daily life that might help you achieve what you wish.

Creating your letter from the future

Here’s the procedure.  Choose a date some months or years ahead.  Then imagine that life has gone rather well.  Things have turned out the way you wanted them to.  You have generally been able to do the things you want and have behaved in the way you would prefer.  Write yourself a letter telling yourself about the developments in your life.  Try to imagine how your life would feel if you were successful and fulfilled.

It doesn’t have to be written!

I know that not everyone enjoys writing so please don’t be turned off by the concept of a letter.  This activity can be done in various ways.  One of my clients recently recorded a “voice message from the future”.  She found chatting into her phone felt much more natural than writing or typing.  Instead as speaking or writing you could also draw, paint or collect images.  The important thing is that you’re finding a way to express your vision of how things are at a specific moment in the future.

We hope you find your letter enlightening and encouraging!

Best wishes

Flourishing Mothers

Adapted by Flourishing Mothers from the work of Anthony Grant and Jane Green