ALEX: Emiliya, thank you so much for joining us. We have got some very excited people to take part and ask you questions about positive psychology and what a nice pretty slide of you, the flourishing center, and your certificate in positive psychology right now on the screen so people can find out more about you, so everyone welcome. We’ve got several people live on the call. A bunch of people wrote in saying “bummer I can’t join” so I had them write in questions and we’ve got more questions than we’re going to have time for today, which is a great that people want to know more about this. Everyone just to give you a brief introduction this is Emiliya Zhivotovskaya. Emiliya was a guest on one of my podcasts and I met her over a year ago in a mastermind group that I was a participant in where I first was exposed to the idea of positive psychology.

I met Emiliya she was teaching us some tools and interventions and I almost started crying in the first workshop and said Emiliya I got to know more about this.It’s going to help me, it’s going to help my kid, and just last weekend was our final weekend in the certification process. It’s been an amazing [amazing] program. I know people are going to want to know more about it, but Emiliya just to introduce you first I’d love for you to talk about what positive psychology is, how you got into it, and what you do today. Training and using it as a coach and then we’ll go into people’s questions.

EMILIYA: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me here Alex. It’s such an honor to connect with all these incredible people on the line and always so fun to be stuck together with you. So my masters is in positive psychology and I’m currently getting a PH.D in mind body medicine. Back in 2006 when I first started my masters at UPENN in positive psychology I was really drawn to the field because I knew that I was passionate about self-help, about spirituality, about all of these kind of personal developments topics and prior to that I did a psychology student as well as I loved psychology and I loved studying with science and the brain and the body and but the whole field of psychology was focused on what was wrong with people. So at the time I found this odd that I was going to become a traditional psychologist and sneak happiness in the backdoor cause the kind of topics I was really jazzed up about was not just kind of help people be less depressed, I wanted to help your everyday person become happier, become more fulfilled, help them decide their passion, have positive relationships.

So that’s what drew me to-I felt very honored that I found out about this field of positive psychology that actually was taking science and research which I was really passionate about, and it was using that rigorous approach to with the type of topics I was really interested in such as strength and gratitude and both. So I was very lucky to be part of their second graduating class, and since then I have used positive psychology formerly as a speaker as a trainer as a coach. I do everything from one-on-one work with people to small groups to key notes and what you participated in with me Alex is our positive psychology certification program and we were very very blessed to be one of the fastest growing certification programs in positive psychology in 2015. We’re in 6 cities all across the country. Also starting a program in Canada in the next couple of months as well so we feel very blessed at this field of positive psychology first.

There’s just so many people who are fascinated that there is a science to happiness, to well-being, to flourishing and that they can learn these skills for themselves, they can learn these tools for their clients and our students are using positive psychology in the most awe inspiring ways and so that’s just a little bit more about me and what I do in my PH.D that I’m currently working on is mind body medicine because I’m as equally obsessed with the body as I am with the brain and positive psychology and mind body medicine work really well together because they’re both saying ‘just because you’re not sick doesn’t mean that you’re healthy’ and that what we really want to learn is a mastery of the mind, a mastery of the body so that we can both prevent illness but also build well-being.

ALEX: Nice! As you know Emiliya my final project, and as everyone in this group knows my final project in the certification for applied positive psychology was to combine my cleanse with positive psychology tools and every 2 weeks we spend talking about a different tool or theory or intervention that I’ve been studying with you. We’ve talked about strengths, we’ve talked about flow, we’ve talked about meditation, we’ve talked about a whole variety of things and every tool has brought us such great discussions and people are really passionate and excited about these ideas, so I’m so glad to have you on here as a way for people to ask you directly their questions to go deeper. Because as I told you I was so excited to learn that in this course, in this cravings cleanse, we have several women with their own PH.D, several women who are healers, doctors, therapists in their own life, and how excited they are to learn more about positive psychology and use it to help themselves and then help other people with it too, so we are spreading the positive psychology word, it’s great. So I figured we could just jump right in to questions now, so if you’re listening in on your phone please press *2 to get a chance to talk with Emiliya.

I might chime in every once in a while but this is really your opportunity to ask your questions or even share your experience of using any of the positive psychology tools and how it’s helped you in this cleanse. So go ahead and press *2 on your phone or type in a question or comment on the computer and I will go ahead and read one of the questions that people sent in [in] advance, people who weren’t able to attend. So I will start with a question from Jodi. Jodi had a question regarding cravings and fear. She wrote: “I’m someone who’s always working on something that I’ve never done before. I like to be the one to create, implement for the first time and then leave it to others to carry on. I found that the down side is that breaking new ground comes with fear and anxiety. What if I fail? What if I’m not good enough? Why did I think I could do this? Through the cravings cleanse I discovered that I eat and binge and crave foods when I’m in this state. Are there any suggestions for dealing with fear, of the unknown, the anxiety in a healthier way?”

EMILIYA: Wow. What a powerful [powerful] question and thank you so much for sharing this. I’ve got a couple of thoughts that first come to mind and one of the foundations to our program is we teach this model that self-awareness enables self-compassion which enables self-care. There’s one critical piece of self-awareness here that I want to communicate to you. Is this Jodi? Is this Jodi that wrote in? I want to make sure.

ALEX: Yes, Jodi.

EMILIYA: Ok so Jodi is that we have this idea and this physical response in our body to willpower called self-regulation and it’s our willpower and self-regulation which is called ego depletion, meaning that we have an energy reserve in our body that’s actually fueled by glucose and when we do things that require discipline willpower or things that require energy it actually depletes us. So one of the challenges I think Jodi is going to have to look into with a difference between a my body is actually burning up glucose and there’s a reason why I’m craving food because literally I’ve got my brain taking initiative which is actually one of the things that kind of depletes us.

I know that I read your book Alex, I know that your listeners get so much from you about how to listen to what your body is trying to tell you, but I think the first step is going to be distinguishing that and if it is-I’m always amazed by how hungry I get just by working at my computer writing something I’m always like “I’ve just been sitting here. How am I starving?” It’s because our brain uses glucose for fuel to do those type of things so if that’s the type of craving then you want to figure out a healthy meal, healthy snack, that can actually feed the physical need for more fuel. It doesn’t have to be Pixy Stix and it doesn’t have to be cookies. It’s actually better when it is a complex carbohydrate or a protein or a fat that really helps the brain out. As for the fear there are many [many] [many] tools for dealing with the emotion of fear.

The first that I mentioned is there’s a vulnerability to the unknown and vulnerability often shows up in our body as an uncomfortable emotion in our throat, in our heart, in our gut, and when we are in stress mode we know that the body is going to-when we’re in stress mode the countertuit would be the calming response, and the calming response in our body is stimulated by the Vagus Nerve and the Vagus Nerve is this amazing nerve; it is, some people call it the Buddha nerve. It is the nerve that that’s responsible for relaxation and it innervates in the front of our throat, the front of our chest, and the front of our belly. Usually when we get that vulnerable craving it’s usually just like emptiness that like in the front of our face in our throat we want to swallow we want to feel that kind of like sense of comforting in the front of our body. That’s one of the ways that we can calm ourself down. Sure you can eat you can chew. When you actually think about eating, even the process of swallowing, swallowing and peristalsis, the process of by which the body is moving food down is actually a rhythmic pattern.

It kind of like your heart beating; it’s like ‘bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum’, is the way that the body moves food along, but it’s not the only way that we can stimulate the relaxation response or stimulate our Vagus Nerve in our body so one of the best ways to actually first calm down is to breathe; is to breathe into the emotion and to breathe it out. You can put one hand on your heart one hand on your belly and do low belly breathing that when you create your own rhythmic pattern in your stomach and you can actually stimulate your own Vagus Nerve, you’re stimulating your relaxation pattern in your body you get your body a little calmer cause remember something new, something unknown is going to stimulate fear because fear is an emotion we feel when we think something bad is going to happen. We need to counter that by helping the body calm down, trust, and feel safe. Other things you can do for that front body is like give yourself a hug, hug a pillow, lay in the fetal position, even some things that are so simple like a heating pad to the front of your chest, the front of your foot, the front of your belly, anything that calms you down.

Think of what you would do for a child. You swaddle them right, when they’re kind of like they’re afraid. Those are some physical things and they work pretty immediately. Then once you do the physical response and there is a really long response there’s such a good one so I’m kind of studying just this one. I know people can get many things out of it. Once you get the body a little bit calmer then you can talk back to your thoughts. Then you can remind your brain “I’ll handle it. I’ve handled lots of risk taking situations before. I cannot guarantee that it’s going to work out perfect, but I can be guaranteed that I will handle it. I’ve handled anything that’s come my way before and therefore I’ll handle this”, or if your brain is giving you worse-case scenario outcomes when you’re in that stress response you can’t think best-case scenario. You can’t think of what’s most likely going to happen cause literally your brain is imagining those worst-case scenarios, it’s seeing it in different colors in your mind, so it’s our job to calm ourselves down and one of the ways that we can do that is through this deep breathing calming response and then we can talk back to our thoughts.

ALEX: That was an awesome answer. I love all this. I was so excited to learn from you the Vagus Nerve. I really recommend that everybody do like do 10 minutes on Google of the Vagus Nerve. V-A-G-U-S. From Emiliya I learned that how I was putting myself to sleep when I was having trouble with insomnia which was on my stomach was my body’s like innate intuitive knowing that I was stimulating and calming myself down the Vagus Nerve by sleeping on my stomach. Now it was not good for my back but it was helping me fall asleep during that time. There’s really great ways to again help calm your physical response so thank you for bringing that up because that’s not an area that we talked in the cleanse. Next question.

EMILIYA: I just want to say one more thing real quick about that. It’s one of the reasons why when you go to get a massage frequently they’ll have you start face down first is because you put your head in the cradle; wouldn’t it be great if it came with a head cradle? [Laughs]. You put your head in the cradle and you lay down and that helps calm the person down so they get really centric with their massage.

ALEX: Ooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Nice, I didn’t realize that. Great. I’m going to go to bed tonight on my massage table. Now I’m done, thank you. You just solved my back problems. [Laughs]. So Connie wrote in a great question, and again press *2 on your phone if you’re listening in and want to have a chance to chat with Emiliya. This is a great opportunity, but I will go ahead and read other questions that came in. Connie wrote: “I would love to have a better understanding of flow. How intensely involved does one need to be to have a flow experience? How can I increase my amount of flow experiences?” I love this. I love flow. Thank you so much for writing that question in Connie. Ok Emiliya go with flow.

EMILIYA: Mmmmm. Firstly I’m grateful to be with you guys right now because I get a tremendous amount of flow in doing this work with you and I will use my current flow experiences as an example to show you how you can understand the mechanisms of flow a little bit more. So the question of how intensely do you have to be of sort is a subjective experience meaning it’s not a one size fits all model, it’s not what you did over the special the little “DO-DO-DO-DO” comes out, a little flag comes out and you’re officially in flow. People will fulfill flow in different ways depending on what they’re experiencing in themselves, and so one of the ways in which we identify flow is it’s a very delicate balance between the task at hand and your strengths and abilities.

Right now one of the reasons that this is a flow experience for me, one where I’m not feeling bored, or one where I’m not feeling anxious, is because I’m very present with you guys on the call and I feel like my strengths are meeting the tasks at hand because I get to share what I love and share what I know, but in a way that’s also challenging. If I just like tune out and decide to stare out my window and look at how a pretty day it is, I’m going to miss the question, right? I’m going to think can you repeat that? So obviously I don’t want to do that and so this experience is actually a flow experience for me in the sense that my attention is focused deeply. So flow is about the focus of attention and if you can use that self-awareness to sort of check in with yourself and figure out what is the task I want to do and how I can I make it more of a flow experience. When you use your self-experience you can figure out am I bored with this task or is that task making me feel anxious.

One of my favorite things to do is try to take an anxiety related task and make it more of a flow experience like figuring out what’s making me anxious.

If you take the type of scenarios that we know-some of the components of game, of game theory, you can use that approach to your tasks, so what makes a game a game? There’s a time limit. There’s rules. There’s a reward at the end. So that’s one thing. You can do that with just about any task that you’re doing. You can take a boring task such as washing the dishes or doing the laundry or anything can be turned into a flow experience in that sense. Then of course one of the most life enhancing ways is to take the things you are passionate about and give yourself the opportunity to do them. Many people will find that flow experience when they create, when they make, when they paint, when they write, but key is that we need to eliminate distractions.

If you Alex are sitting there and you’re about to write a blog if you want to get into a flow state, you’re not going to get into a flow state if your email is on, your Facebook is on in the background, if there’s other things that are going to keep interrupting your flow, so what many people do is they first need to think of flow as an attention regulation and try to eliminate distractions because they have the opportunity to really be in that flow state.

ALEX: Nice. Excellent. Oh! We’ve got a hand up. Ok let’s see we got- Hi, it’s Alex and Emiliya. Who’s this?

CONNIE: I’m on the line this is Connie. I don’t know if someone else was on the line also. I asked a question and that was a wonderful answer. I felt flow so much as I was working in my passionate job, but now that I’m retired I haven’t as much so that was so helpful. Thank you.

EMILIYA: You’re welcome Connie. Yeah, the challenge is working for yourself is you need to create your own confinement, your own restrictions that are balanced, so that the opportunity to create it for yourself might look like creating time constraints like ‘ok I’m going to do this for this time period’ or ‘I’m going to do that for that period’ in a way that requires a little bit more discipline than when you literally only have an hour to do something cause someone’s going to pull you into a meeting if you don’t get it done right, so they get kind of artificially created for you.

CONNIE: Very helpful. Thank you so much.

ALEX: You’re welcome. Ok. Excellent. So go ahead and press *2 on your phone if you’d like a chance to speak with Emiliya and I might have something to add. Another question came in from Abi in the U.K. She wrote: “I’m interested in how positive psychology values can help you look at past childhood experiences and an understanding our early wounding. Sometimes I think it’s important to understand where our patterns come from in order to change them, and other times I think there’s a risk of getting caught and stuck in the old story rather than just moving forward. Can positive psychology tools value both approaches?”

EMILIYA: Absolutely. Positive psychology absolutey is not -it’s not a happy-ology, not just focusing on helping people look forward [forward] [forward]. That would be like driving a car forward without ever looking at your rearview mirror. You obviously want to drive your car and take an occasional glances in your rearview mirrors which are to check in how you’re driving or check in to what’s around you, however you wouldn’t want to drive your car forward by only looking in the rearview mirror right? That would not be a very healthy or safe way to drive a car and so what we’re trying to do is offer people that they find some balance an intricate, a simple balance for that process or for that approach so that they don’t have to be stuck in the past, and there are many ways of doing so. I know that there’s coaching and positive psychology go very closely hand in hand because coaching is one of the best applications of positive psychology and positive psychology is what gives coaching a backbone, a real solid foundation and basis for the types of things that we do.

So when I work with people as a coach in working through some of the painful wounding and some of the patterns at task we want to use the past to inform of us in the present and inform us in the future and so whether that be simple things like doing some unconscious work that I’ve drawn from mind, body, and medicine and other places where we can have a conversation with your inner child. You can write a letter to them. You can do imagery work to sort of help create a safe and comfortable space with those different patterns within ourselves or you think our self-awareness self-compassion self-care model you can literally save yourself. I’m aware that this is a pattern that is not my pattern. Like even just recently I was working with a student who was she actually chose not to come to one of the last classes that we had and she goes “I don’t do well with last things. I don’t do well with saying goodbyes” and she said my parents had left me when I was a kid, they had tricked me.

I just have really strong abandonment issues that come up around things that have to do with the goodbyes, I don’t do goodbyes well. As a coach I’m not there to suddenly figure out how to help her become better with goodbyes or make her show up to anything that doesn’t feel comfortable for her. Instead what we did together was we celebrated and we actually talked to her inner child from a perspective of like well isn’t it great that you are an adult now and you can make decisions for yourself about where to go and what to do that feel really good and comfortable for you? And we celebrated that her awareness of that issue, of the fact that it does challenge this inner child worked for her. Right now the best way for her to deal with it is actually is for her is to just say ‘I don’t go to the last thing, I don’t go to graduations, I don’t go to the last spots because they feel safer for me’. One day she might actually choose to decide to say to herself. She might decide to stay to herself, you know I really do want to be able to go to this last thing and we can figure out how she would go about doing that, but the key is to be able to know, at the very least, know where this tendency is coming from whether you decide to indulge in it or give in to it, or you choose to do something about it. Another thing we did in that moment for her quote on quote inner child work is we is I just encouraged her to really visualize and imagine that time in her life when she was such a young girl life did not feel safe. Her parents abandoned her and how she could remind that inner child within her that she is safe and her adult self is taking care of her and these little image reward processes work really [really] powerfully, and it’s not enough to just focus on the past and one of my favorite [favorite] quotes from my teacher Martin Seligman who’s the founder of positive pyschology I remember I heard him once say ‘childhood is overrated’ and I thought to myself that is the most profound thing I ever heard cause I come from psychology which has focused a lot on childhood.

It was so relieving for him to sort of say. He didn’t say that it’s not important, he didn’t say childhood doesn’t matter, he didn’t say never look back at your inner wounding. He just said it’s overrated. It makes me chuckle but that’s kind of how I find it more empowering to think of. Are you guys there? Can you hear me? Did I lose you?

ALEX: Sorry I had myself on mute. [Laughs].

EMILIYA: No worries. I was like oh no did the call disconnect?

ALEX: No I’m good. That was so helpful. I know for myself I was also in counseling several times throughout my life from middle school when my parents were divorcing through my own divorce and at a certain point in each, with each counselor and they were really good guides I thought I’m done rehashing the past. I want tools to move forward. I want to learn from the past. See I didn’t know that there’s a turn for this but I want my post-traumatic growth now. I’m ready to move on and in positive psychology I found, and so many people in this cleanse have found there are tools, there are ways to frame the past and appreciate and find some passion for what happens to us and find some compassion for ourselves, and then move forward with strength, so that was such a good question Abi so thank you for chiming in.

EMILIYA: May I add just really quick to that post traumatic growth statement?

ALEX: Yes!

EMILIYA: I just want to say that we in our culture tend to hear a lot about the concept of post- traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, yet it’s a common thing for people to hear about and what the research shows is that when people face trauma, one standard deviation from the mean above is that, I’m sorry, one standard deviation from the means above and below, most people experience resilience. Most people do not get post-traumatic stress disorder. That’s the 2 standard deviations below the meaning, meaning just about 13% of the population, a very little amount actually have post-traumatic stress disorder; and a small fraction of the population actually get post traumatic growth where they actually use the trauma as the fuel for where they’re going in their life, and then other people they get through it and they move on and their life is kind of returns to a baseline level of satisfaction and they kind of keep on keeping on and I think it’s really important for us to hear and know that because so often when you only hear about one, you just assume that that’s how things should be as opposed to recognizing that most of the time they’re actually not.

ALEX: Perfect. Great. Ok. So we’ve got a couple more questions that people wrote in [in] advance. If you’re on the call and I see there’s a bunch of us here go ahead and press *2 on your phone to ask a question or even share how the positive psychology tools have helped you in this cleanse. I think it’d be great to share all that. We got a question from Cassandra. She wrote: “My question is how can you increase feelings of worthiness or of being deserving of anything? [inaudible 31:16] self-care beyond the very [very] basics? I don’t want to be presumptious, but I sell myself short. To and short”. Oh Cassandra thank you for writing that in. She wanted to say cause she was asking about increasing feelings of worthiness and feeling deserving.

EMILIYA: Mmmm. Wow. Well first thing is it’s not a one size fits all model so I’m going to throw out a couple of suggestions that I would like Cassandra to play around with each of them, kind of think of it as a dress rehearsal you’re in the fitting room and invite you to try one on, [inaudible 31:49] see how it fits, if it doesn’t fit, try another. Part of it is first being able to catch your non-deserving thoughts so I would invite her to spend a little bit of time journaling or listing how the non-deserving shows up in her life. Does it show up when she has a thought like “oh but I can’t have that”, or “such and such can do that but I can’t do that”. Noticing how does the non-deserving show up and that can include listing thought and also listing beliefs. It can be very helpful to first write down what are the sentences that she might have heard growing up or might still continue to hear now that are reinforcing that pattern.

Like people who ask for what they need or greedy or I can’t have A, B, and C until I have, I can have C, D, and F until I have A, B, and C first so if you can catch what the thoughts are that are associated with that, that’s going to be a powerful way to enable you to actually shift yourself, cause once you can catch the previous thoughts you can figure out how to replace them with the new thoughts.

Then being able to create mantras and affirmations or the new belief that you want to hold. It’s really important that those affirmations be both grounded in reality, meaning grounded in facts and to be able to also believe it. So for example if her thought is ‘I don’t deserve this’, or ‘I can’t have that’, and she just goes “of course I can, I deserve everything”, well if she doesn’t believe that thought fully it’s not going to be as helpful for her and to talk back to it in a way with a more realistic statement that really passes her gut test and her heart that it really feels right. The sentences that we teach our students for what we call self-CBT or preventative CBT cognitive behavior therapy is to say something to yourself that starts with a sentence ‘that’s not true because’ or another way is seeing that is. So for example if her mindset is “I don’t deserve this, or I don’t deserve this good thing that’s happening” and if she can catch that thought she can talk back to it and say another way of saying that is that I am deserving of it, that I do deserve it,

I just don’t allow myself to have it, or that’s not true because there’s no reason for me not to deserve something like this. I’ve worked really hard, so that’s kind of the more cognitive approach, the more positive psychology approach to this, a more energetic approach, a more energy medicine, mind body medicine around this is to really think of it as a root chakra issue so we have our chakra system our emotional body that goes from the base of our spine all the way through the crown of our head and when people are basing worthiness issues it’s usually a root chakra issue and the root chakra is all about I have a right to be here, I don’t have to earn my stay, and I don’t have to earn these good things. Why are these good things happening to me? Because I’m human and I am designed just because, and so some people find a lot of healing in working through those deserving issues to ask themselves ‘would I want my daughter to think she doesn’t deserve this, would I want my best friend to think she doesn’t deserve this’, and you can start to laugh at those thoughts and laugh at how silly it is that we have this belief that we have to earn our stay on the planet.

Like you don’t see dogs apologizing for their stay going “Oh I need to earn my stay here”. Animals and humans we can be just at ease with being in the world and so really working on healing that root chakra by grounding, by centering, by reminding your body ‘I am safe, I deserve these things, I don’t have to earn my stay, I am complete, as I am right here right now’.

ALEX: I love that you brought in the root chakra to this idea. It’s part of the system of medicines that come from Ayurveda, the sister science of yoga, all of which Emiliya has so much experience in. She’s also a yoga teacher so she really brings together all of these different modalities. I think what’s so interesting about the root chakra and how it plays in with our food cravings. That’s what I always come back to with this. How does this unknown or unseen force in our lives, how does that play out in our day to day activities or in our cravings? What does it cause in us? And the root chakra it’s really like a base of the spine. It is our bottom for skrill and it’s really associated with our reproductive system, with our sexual organs, and as you said our physical needs for safety and security. I’ve seen, I used the Ayurveda body types which I’ve rebranded as the cravings type, but they’re basically the Doshas, the Ayurvedic Doshas, that this when our root chakra doesn’t feel safe, we have some work or some awareness to bring there that protein is great, it’s that grounding food that just grounds us and our body and that sugar just takes us out of it. Sugar just takes us up into our head, it’s very scattering, whereas the protein rich foods are more grounding and rooted.

EMILIYA: I would also add to it that it’s really interesting in terms of like a bigger picture view of our relationship to food that many of the people that I worked with in the past with whom have had eating disorders or other relationships to food that they start to cut themselves off. It actually literally un-centers us because our root chakra is our, when you think of roots of a tree, it’s that feeling of being disconnected and so many people who have when they first come to me and they’re struggling with anorexia or they’re struggling with bulimia or compulsive eating, there’s usually a root chakra imbalance where it’s like they’ve been disconnected from their relationship to food, and just basically first connecting with like wow I’m eating earth, I’m made of earth, and when I poop and when I pee returns to the earth and remembering that we are animals. It’s not-it can be really [really] healing for that part of our body and that when we disconnect from the food that we eat we disconnect from our root and then when we disconnect from the pleasure that food brings us we also disconnect from our root chakra. Our second chakra which is about the right to feel.

ALEX: Ooh I like that. I like that so much. Ok we got one more question that came in [in] advance and if you’re here on the call live please take this opportunity, press *2, get a question ready and I’ll read this last question that was written in from Suzanne. Suzanne wrote: “What one small change can I do on a daily basis to create or maintain a more positive psychology?” I know that opens up so many options Emiliya, but Suzanne is just looking for one thing she could begin to do on a daily basis to maintain this positive psychology wisdom that she’s been developing through the cleanse.

EMILIYA: Mmmm. Yes it is hard to identify just one cause as I said sometimes it’s not a one size fits all model and what I would invite Suzanne to think of is how can she does some things that is paired with a practice she already has. Say for example if you already have a meditation practice you can meditate on relaxation, when you are done ask yourself “how do I want to show up in the world today?” and that can be a powerful question, powerful meditation that powerful thing to add to your meditation. If you already have a journaling practice I would invite you to journal about something that you’re grateful for and really focus on trying to savor those things, try to get at least 3 new things every day, or variations in using things like savoring and getting really specific with the details about what it is that you are grateful for.

Another variation let’s say that you already are somebody who enjoys forming acts of kindness for other people that is one of the most powerful ways to increase our happiness, our life satisfaction because it gets us to this other centric place where we’re focusing not just on ourselves but really focusing on connecting with other people and so that intervention can be a really powerful one as well. There’s lots of interventions. It’s not a one size fits all model, but the key thing is to be able to find something that feels both natural for you, something that you really value, something that you don’t just do because you feel guilty if you didn’t. For example for some people I would say be a great thing to exercise and to move your body every day, but if exercise is for you a place of guilt for not doing it or this this thing you tell yourself not to do you’re not going to get as much bang for your intervention buck if you go down that route as you would if you did something else.

ALEX: Ok I like that, but look for what you’re already doing and how you can expand on that. That’s really one of the smartest ways to go about implementing consistently any habits, is to look at what your already doing well and build on that. That’s great [great] advice. ‘Am I adding too much, not making another ‘to do’ that’s going to feel like a burden [Laughs] after the first couple of tries.’ That’s wonderful. Emiliya before we go I just want everyone to have one last chance to raise their hand or type in on their computer. I see we got folks from Minnesota, a couple of different places in New Jersey, Nevada, New York, you have one last question that you want to ask or have you just wrote in your questions and we’ve got one last one. Great! Felicia from Las Vegas hello!

FELICIA: Hi! I was getting really excited when you were talking about how to break down pasts that make us anxious. I was curious if you could elaborate on that. You got kind of cut off as you were talking about it.

EMILIYA: Great. Can you say that again Felicia? You’re saying like processes for dealing with the emotion of worry anxiety?

FELICIA: Yeah like I’m going back to grad school in the fall and I can find deadlines to just cause me to go into an anxious kind of snowball effect.

EMILIYA: Mmmm. Awesome. Great. So a couple of things that first help you understand your worry and your anxiety that I think can help you navigate it a little bit more. First thing you want to understand is that your brain is wired to want to protect you, and left to its own devices it’s just going to have this running tally worst case scenario thought, watch out for this, what if this happens, what if that happens, what if this happens, what if that happens. I call it a mental chess game where your brain literally is trying to like if I go here this will happen, if I do that, that will happen, and the first thing to do is just to acknowledge that as a part of your wiring. It’s a part of our evolution, we’re all wired for it. Then you can figure out what do I want to do with this thought. How can I support this thought? To do something that’s more life enhancing rather than like diminishing, so you can ask yourself how does this thought serve me.

Is it helping me right now is it not? The other thing that’s more of a brain principle that’s really helpful to understand is that when you are thinking about these worst case scenarios, your brain is actually living and experiencing them. So your brain does not really know the difference between what it sees and what it thinks about. It’s actually a very stress overlap when we do brain scans where people are thinking about something rather than imagining it. I’m sorry imaging it and thinking about it rather than actually seeing it. So when you are imagining all of those deadlines, your body does not understand those deadlines are not here right now. When you’re imagining not meeting those deadlines, your body does not understand that those things has not happened yet. That’s one of the reasons why those feelings can feel so intense and those images can be so powerful. It’s our job to calm our body down. It’s our job to say to take that what if thinking and remind our self ‘ok I don’t know if that’s going to happen, it hasn’t happened yet, and how is this thought hurting me?’

If it’s going to help you problem solve about the future, great. Use it as information about that. If it’s not and it’s not an appropriate time for your brain to be offering you that literally tell your brain, ‘thank you worst case scenario brain I really appreciate you pointing out all the ways that I might flunk out of grad school and all these other things, but I’m ok.’ It’s that ‘but I’m ok’ that you really [really] helpful, because again think of it as you have a part of you that has a full time job and it’s full time job is to protect you, and so you want to take it for that but doesn’t mean you have to engage that line of thinking. So there’s 2 real types of worrying. There’s the ‘what if this happens, what if that happens’ kind of worrying and then there’s the what I call worst case scenario thinking where like it’s a snowball effect, where it’s like ‘I’m going to miss this deadline and then I’m going to fail the class, and then I’m going to fail out of school, and then I’m not going to build my career, and I’m always going to be doing what I’m currently doing, and then nobody’s going to love me, and I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life’ and so on and so forth.

That kind of worst case scenario thinking. If anybody on the call is like ‘shit I do that’ but you’re not alone is a different type of worrying and that requires a different skill. It’s so awesome when my clients come to me and they’re having that kind of like snowballing effect of thoughts. What I have them do is lift out the worst case scenario thoughts, like one after the other after the other, like a big purge of worst case scenario thoughts and then afterwards we then make a list of best case scenario thoughts. So if that’s the worst case scenario what would be the unrealistically best case scenario? When you actually look at the likelihood that anyone of those worst case scenario thoughts are to come to fruition, they’re not likely to be true at all.

In fact, the only way that you might flunk out of college is if you or out of grad school is if you fail lots of classes; not even if you fail one class right? It’s really an unrealistic thought so we go to unrealistically positive thoughts like ‘I’m going to be so and so at the top of my class like Oprah’s going to come and interview me and then I’m going to become famous’ blah blah blah and you kind of do the unrealistically best case scenario so that you can see that neither are true and usually you can calm your brain down enough to go to what’s most likely going to happen. It’s a little bit of an advanced technique it’s kind of hard to explain in like 30 seconds but it basically has to do with like helping your brain come back to reality when it’s caught up in this snowballing effect of worst case scenarios.

FELICIA: Wow. Thank you. That helps a lot. [Laughs].

EMILIYA: You’re welcome. My pleasure. I either just helped a lot or I tremendously confused you and so I apologize if one is the case than the other.

ALEX: [Laughs].

FELICIA: That definitely helps.

ALEX: Ahhh, thank you so much for that question and thank you Emiliya for your insight. Thank you for being here today with everyone. I am so excited for people to have a chance to know more from you and again I encourage everyone to go check out Emiliya’s website, it’s just Emiliya.com or check out the certificate in positivepsychology.com which I’m showing up here in the slides. That is the program that I just finished this last weekend and I have a little bit more reading to do, a couple more tests to take and then I get my certificate. I’m very excited, but Emiliya has like gave us permission to start spreading the word early so I’ve been sharing that with you anyway and Emiliya thank you so much for your time here. I hope that this-I know that this really helps people get clearer-

EMILIYA: I think that we lost you again.

ALEX: Oh no. Hello?

EMILIYA: You’re back. You’re back. Hi.

ALEX: Ok. Hi. I’m just excited. Thank you so much for sharing all of this with everyone. Sorry about the technical issues but we’ll be sending out a recording to everyone and if you have a chance to go check out the certificate and positivepsychology.com if they want to learn more about how they can work with you and check out what you’re doing.

EMILIYA: Thank you so much.