Author: Ann Dunnewold

Ann Dunnewold, Ph.D. is a Dallas psychologist whose mission for her work is: 1) to raise awareness about the undercurrent of unrealistic expectations on women, 2) to offer an anchor against getting swept away by expectations, for ourselves and for others, and 3) to offer tools for mind-body balance in life. She is author of Even June Cleaver Would Forget the Juice Box: Cut Yourself Some Slack (and Still Raise Great Kids) in the Age of Extreme Parenting and co-author, with Diane Sanford, Ph.D., of Life Will Never Be the Same: The Real Mom's Postpartum Survival Guide.

Take it to heart?

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“Take it to heart.” Usually, we hear this phrase applied to feedback, aka criticism, offered by others. We feel like a bigger person if we can listen openly to negative words from someone. Seems to me to be another of those casual phrases that do us more harm than good and deserve a hearty “who says?” challenge.

Way back in grad school, 30 plus years ago, I learned that feedback is effective only when solicited. It’s pretty hard to take in and process effectively something that we didn’t ask for and probably don’t want to hear. We all do better when we seek information to help us improve, rather than have it foisted upon us, in any of the typical forms: fights with loved ones, criticism disguised as ‘help,’ yearly job evaluations. It seems to me that this phrase, “take it to heart”, runs counter to human nature. The phrase implies that a grown-up wants to listen to feedback. Truthfully, I don’t think many of us really yearn to hear that we need to do something differently–even when we know on some level that we do. And challenging ourselves to “take it to heart” implies that we just need to suck it into our inner most being. We impose an expectation that criticism is always true and valid and valuable.

(That always sounds like an absolute. And if you’re a regular reader, you know my ideas on absolutes.)

My challenge is aimed at that last phrase about criticism. Criticism/feedback may be necessary to growth. But is it always true, valid, valuable? Many of us believe that it is. Rather than “take it to heart,” I suggest “take it to mind.” Don’t just expect that, because you are an adult striving to do your best in life, that you have to accept negative words right into your core. Think on feedback. Evaluate it. Test it out, dwell on the accusations or challenges for awhile. See if the words fit your perception. Write about it. Check it out with a friend or therapist. Where is the truth–the helpful portion of the words? And where is the anger or defensiveness or misperception on the part of the giver? What might have more to do with them, who offer the criticism, and less to do with YOU? Incorporate what is valuable, and let go of the rest.

It’s okay–even extremely healthy–to take some time to sort out what comes your way. You don’t have to “take it to heart” to be a functional person.

Calling My Readers, You Amazing Women

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A Flash Mob Dance Video was organized by Kim MacGregor. Kim created this as a tribute to her best friend Erika Heller who died of colon cancer last year at age 31. Each and every telephone conversation they ever had, Erika would end by telling Kim, “You’re an amazing woman”! Well, Kim wanted to do something special to honour her friend and this is the result.

Kim’s goal is to reach 1,000,000 viewers – please help her reach her goal and pass this on to all the amazing women in your life. I received it from two amazing women this week myself. Only 448,856 women to go when I posted it.

Enjoy!!!

P.S. It’s not usual that I simply re-post something I’ve seen online, but I’ve only been home for two days, have barely opened all the mail, and this was the only way I could manage a post this week.

Do nothing–like me this week.

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The benefits of doing nothing are priceless, given our rapid pace of do, do, do. Most of our daily tasks are repetitive and mind-numbing. Like laundry or dishes, these constitute an endless list in life, needing done again as soon as you finish. Our bodies are so used to this perpetual hamster wheel that the “flight or fight” response stays constantly revved up, leading to sleep problems, stress-related illnesses, anxiety and panic, to name a few. Lately, I’ve been lauding the health benefits of meditation, and this week I am lucky to develop my skills at the Chopra Center Seduction of Spirit Retreat. I’m sure that “doing nothing” will be hard work.

funny pictures - Doing nothing is very hard work. You never know when you're finished.
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Practice a bit of down time of your own this week. Even three minutes daily to stop and breathe is beneficial. In the words of the Tao-Te Ching, verse 48:

In doing nothing there is nothing left undone.

How often do we get to claim that? I’ll bring you a full report soon.

A self-care holiday?

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The Irish have St. Patrick’s Day, and many of us non-Irish-types grab the coattails for inspiration. This year, are you in need of a celebration with less of a stretch? Then it’s time for National Mom’s Night Out(NMNO)! Inspired by Rachel Wright, author of Mom’s Night Out: Even Inmates Get Time Off For Good Behavior, the 5th Annual NMNO is March 17th. What a good excuse to practice skills I love to recommend, essential for all women: self-care, fun, and connecting with friends. So grab your BFFs, plan a relaxed or raucous evening, and enjoy the good excuse. You especially need it if your life feels like this, smothered in love:Funny Pictures - Cute Kittens
“Get Momma a Drink.”

Remember, it’s not selfish, it’s self-preservation.

International Women’s Day

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March is Women’s History Month, and today is International Women’s Day, devoted to celebrating the economic, social, and political achievements of women, past, present, and future. In fact, this year is a banner year, being the centennial celebration (1911-2011.)

My favorite saying about women in history is “well-behaved women rarely make history.” Translate this adage through the lens of this blog: women history-makers were excellent at disputing cultural shoulds.

Any woman who has ever made history began by rehearsing in her head, debating and talking back to the status quo, asking “who says?” before finally moving into execution of her famous act. The kind of questioning that I live by, and hope to encourage through this blog.

Many ill-behaved women have made history by challenging cultural ‘shoulds.’ Rosa Parks didn’t listen to the bus driver order her to give up her seat to a white passenger. Elizabeth Blackwell and Maria Montessori became the first women physicians(U.S. and College of Rome, Italy, respectively). Who says women had to be nurses? Sally Ride was the first woman in space, topping the accomplishment of a Ph.D. in astrophysics! Who says women can’t do math? And to think that women who applied to be astronauts in the early days of the U.S. space program had to wear high heels and hose during qualifying tests (pre-panty hose, that would mean a garter belt, too!) That brings to mind another adage about women in history: “Don’t forget Ginger Rogers did everything (Fred Astaire) did backwards . . . and in high heels!”

Psychologist James Prochaska has determined that there are stages in the intellectual process of change, steps we must engage in before we can finally act. These stages are precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance. Stroll through the lists of women in history, and imagine the challenges to traditional thinking that were necessary precursors to action. I’m guessing that considerable time was spent contemplating those changes, revising a few assumptions, before these women came close to preparation and action.

We need to cut ourselves some slack if our process of talking back to the status quo, in society or our own heads, takes some time. Find your own pace, time to contemplate and prepare. And maybe, in honor of International Women’s Day, forget being well-behaved and make a little history of your own today. Join the ranks of the history-makers by revving up the chorus of ‘who says?’ in your life.

Talk back–and tell me how you honored the tradition of the day.

Feelings: trusted signals?

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“Trust your feelings”–truth or fiction?

We’ve all heard this old adage. We use this phrase to urge others to act on gut feelings, usually suggesting that the recipient will “just know” the answer they need. These cultural underpinnings imply that actualized, emotionally healthy persons wisely let feelings be a guide.

Since my mind constantly locks onto these discrepancies in our use of language, I issue a hearty “who says?”

Sometimes, yes, we do want to trust our feelings. However, like so much of our thinking, this phrase is dangerous if we lock into feelings in a black and white way. Feelings aren’t always an indication of “Truth.” Feelings aren’t always effective guides. Take two of the most common feelings: guilt and anxiety.

In most cases, guilt is not factually-based in wrong-doing. Most of our guilt is driven by inaccurate beliefs, largely fueled by a powerful “should.” “I should be happy, I wanted this baby” when you’re overwhelmed by depression, grieving the freedom of pre-baby life. “I should spend more time on X,” when in actuality you find X boring–or you’re doing the best you can to allocate time to X. “I should feel thankful for Y,” when you’re overwhelmed by stress and having difficulty focusing on the positive. We plague ourselves with guilt for not feeling some prescribed way, rather than trusting a favorite adage of mental health professionals, i.e. that “feelings just are.” Maybe it’s ok to be where we are. Maybe we don’t need to second guess our experience.

Anxiety is an even more powerful signal that we seem to cast as reality. If I’m worried about something, we reason, there must be real danger. We give anxiety such power, translating the biochemical process of stress revving through our bodies as a signal to be heeded. Just like guilt, irrational beliefs (e.g. “it will be a catastrophe! Everything will be ruined!”) abound. Much of the time, worry and anxiety are based in conditioned responses. Our bodies habitually respond with this runaway action. As Rick Hanson says, maybe the tiger in the bushes isn’t really a tiger. We’re paying on that debt we may not owe. We’re anticipating future angst, to use a Bible verse (Matthew 6:34) shared with me this week: “Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.”

I preach (and try to practice myself) to first stop and evaluate, and then hopefully, to dismiss anxiety and guilt. Is this a real worry? Do I truly have anything to feel guilty about? Call it what it is: energy spent in a direction that is not necessary or helpful. “It’s just anxiety–not reality.” “I have no need to feel guilty–I’m doing the best that I can do.” Talk back to those feelings, saying what you would tell a friend. Offer yourself self-compassion, which I’ve taught for years as self-care, and now has credibility, with mention in The New York Times.

The majority of the time, there’s no magic message in anxiety and guilt. Let those feelings go.

The Zombie epidemic

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You know the experience of mindlessness: you arrive at your destination, with a sudden flash that you simply don’t recall the drive. Or you walk into a room in your home and come up blank on your purpose. Or my personal Achilles’ heel: you are cooking dinner and suddenly realize you’ve polished off half a box of crackers. Multi-tasking, that supposed skill essential to accomplish ALL, feeds right in to mindlessness.

The autopilot mindset that is mindlessness is rampant. Cultural forces (from ever-present technology that fosters work addiction to sleep deprivation) threaten to suck out our brains like so many zombies. You know this is true when the comic strip Doonesbury devotes a whole week to the topic, as it did January 31 through February 4. (Enjoy it by clicking here.)

Why is this a problem? Extra calories and pounds, accident potential, and the frustration of standing in a room wondering what you were going to do next aside, so what? Why not drift through life, oblivious?

The opposite of mindlessness is mindfulness. Mindfulness connotes awareness, attention, and remembering. Implicit in healthy mindfulness is an attitude of acceptance and lack of judgment. It is popularly talked about as ‘being in the now’ or ‘living in the moment.’ Mindfulness directly translates into what Oprah calls “living your best life” or Gretchen Rubin, in The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun, calls “living the right life.”

Mindfulness enables us to:

  • see and accept what is
  • be less self-obsessed
  • experience the richness of life in each moment
  • act more purposely to get what we want
  • smooth interactions with others

Mindfulness makes us less likely to drift through life at the whim of random forces. With mindfulness, we can fully live our lives, the master rather than the servant; the driver, not the driven.

Mindfulness, while seemingly not innate given cultural pressures, isn’t hard. It doesn’t take much time–but it does take practice to develop the skill. In the words of John Teasdale, founder of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy: “mindfulness isn’t difficult. What’s difficult is to remember to be mindful.” Your grandmother was talking about mindfulness when she said “stop and smell the roses.”

To develop this skill, just truly notice. Check in with your five senses: touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing. Where are you? What is your body doing? What are you feeling? What are your thoughts? If you sense your sixth sense, trust that intuition as well. Let these perceptions register–remember that just 20 or 30 seconds at a time can enable your brain to develop this skill.

Here’s the hard part: offer yourself acceptance, not judgment about where you are, what you are feeling in each moment. Speak to yourself as nicely as you would a loved one. Acknowledge that we are always doing the best that we can do. Embrace your humanity. It’s just what is. Take a deep breath and move forward with change, if needed, ever mindful of controlling what you can and letting go of the rest.

Best way I know to forestall the Zombie apocalypse.

Never enough time

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If you’re like me, in travels around the web, you click here (or on any of a million blogs), glance at the length of the text, and make a quick assessment: nope, not enough time to read this now/today/ever. I’ve gotten feedback that my posts are too long. Guilty as charged, at times. Often, as I’m trying to condense, I feel like I’m channeling my dad, writing his weekly sermons. Here’s a fact to fight that impulse to click on: My posts are ~500 words. This is the amount the average adult can read in TWO MINUTES.

I try to remind myself of that, as I struggle with the sense that there’s never enough time.

When my older daughter was not even two, she held up a crystal clear mirror to my warped sense of time. Rushing out the door with me, she said (in her toddler pronunciation, unable to say her Rs), “Huwwy, huwwy, Mommy, it’s bad to be late.” Was that really what I wanted to instill in her, a catch-up pace of life?

Impact #2 came years later, from Dallas Morning News columnist Steve Blow. A constant champion of sensible thinking, Steve challenged a colleague who drove like me: always racing to beat the lights, weaving in and out of traffic, certain that this was an essential and valuable time saver. One day, Steve (a confessed granny-type driver) followed the other guy all day, driving in his usual conservative style. By day’s end, the rushed driver had saved approximately two minutes.

Think you must always hurry, or all will be lost? Think you don’t have time to work on change (patience, exercise, clutter–name the goal)? Here’s a few two minute or less investments, quick and dirty ways to improve life while battling the perspective that “I have no time”:

1) Check out “Do Nothing for 2 Minutes.” A mini-meditation guaranteed to calm. (Thanks, Ninotchka, of “Cease, Cows, Life is Short.”)

2) When stressed and feelings prevent your brain from doing what’s best (leading to speaking in anger, overreacting, etc.), tap the fingers on your right (or dominant) hand for 45 seconds. This activates the left hemisphere, the locale of reason in your brain, and helps you switch gears and calm down.

3) Throughout the day, take 2 minutes each hour for slow deep breathing. Definitely leads to lower stress hormones (and better sleep) by day’s end.

4) “Take in the good” for 20-30 seconds. Our brains are wired to attune to the negative. Stopping for this brief time and letting a good experience or memory sink in, beginning the process to rewire the brain more positively. (Thanks again, Rick Hanson!)

Who says you don’t have time to change your life? You can invest a minute at a time.

(For more great time quotes and graphics, check out Our Funny Planet. Thanks to them for this graphic. And we won’t even begin to consider whether time exists–or is an illusion. Just leave that to the physicists.)

A Valentine’s Day reminder

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Happy Valentine’s Day! It’s a holiday–so expectations, ever threatening, ramp up again. Remember the five simple rules of happiness: Rule #5 is “expect less.” Pretty hard to do when every other TV commercial is for diamonds and every other aisle in the grocery store looks like this:

This holiday has the potential to suck us into classic all-or-nothing, black and white thinking (that we humans are so prone to): either my loved one does X, or s/he doesn’t love me. Tuning into the underlying intention is good medicine. Even if your sweetie is not a mind reader, it’s good to embrace whatever is offered. Even this epitome of “less,” an innovation in gift baskets that I’d not seen before (and made me laugh out loud):

Hmmm, what chocolate goes best with beer? Perhaps this chocolate bar with bacon that I recently discovered–downright divine. May the sampling commence.

(And if you’re sweetie-less, challenge the automatic thinking that you deserve a capital L on your forehead. Who says presence of a partner is essential validation of wonderful you? Treat yourself today!)