Family MattersPractical Parenting Blog

3 Emotional Painkillers

Man holding his face in his hands in pain

In Holistic Approach to Emotional Pain, I explained why pain is not a punishment and we do not need to fight it. I also explained how the use of physical or emotional “substances” only makes us feel the pain longer and disrupts the function of the natural pharmacy we have in our body, which is in charge of flooding our system with “painkillers”.

In this post, I will share 3 “emotional painkillers” that will make pain go away faster.

1. The Rating Technique

The first emotional painkiller is used frequently by nurses and doctors. When you are in a hospital, before giving you your painkillers, the nurse will ask you to rate your pain from 1 to 10 and use this as a guide to determine your dosage.

This makes you develop an awareness of your feeling. If you say that the pain is a 9, the nurse will give you more painkillers and you will feel a bigger relief from them. If you say the pain is 3, the nurse may ask if you can wait a little longer and give you nothing for an hour.

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Smile and Have a Nice Day!

Teenage in a beanie girl smiling happily

My youngest sister sent me a gift recently. It was a book called Cave in the Snow: Tenzin Palmo’s Quest for Enlightenment by Vicki Mackenzie. Gal, my husband, started reading it before me and I am reading it now 20-30 pages behind him. Every time he shared a suggestion from the book with me, I tried it. Tenzin Palmo suggested to the readers to find peace and happiness in different ways. Since I am in the happiness business, I have dedicated my life to finding techniques to increase happiness, methods to teach these techniques and ways to help others find their own techniques, so I welcomed her suggestions.

One of her simple methods was to smile. You smile widely (for no reason) and keep smiling through 3 deep breaths. Repeat this 6 times a day. That’s it. 3 breaths, 6 times a day, smiling. To start, you can put a pencil between your teeth, and this will hold your mouth in a smiling position.

Simple, right?

Tenzin Palmo said we’d feel a difference in 6 days, so I decided to try her technique myself.

It took exactly 1 day to feel a difference. The second day was even better, the third day was even better. If you are a mindful person and good at rating your moods, you will notice small changes every day. After a week, the improvement stopped and my happiness state was high and uplifted.

Try it. What have you got to lose (except some anger, sadness and fear)?

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Kids under Stress: How to Deal with Stress the Easy Way

Baby boy looking worried

In Kids under Stress: Diagnose Stress Symptoms without Psychiatrists, I covered easy ways to diagnose symptoms of stress in children, without having to go to psychiatrists that are very likely give your child medication that might prevent them from developing coping mechanisms and might damage them for life.

Once you have confirmed the stress, you will want to know how to deal with stress and start helping your child. So here is a list of easy solutions you can use at home to help your child cope. No Psychiatrists. No Medication. These methods take the same time to work as medication does, are just as effective and have no side effects, so they are much better in the long run.

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Kids under Stress: Diagnose Stress Symptoms without Psychiatrists

Boy looking worried. Worrying too often can be one of many stress symptoms

Stress is the epidemic of the modern world. All health concerns are associated with stress and as time goes on, stress goes up and stress symptoms show earlier and earlier in life. I was shocked to discover that psychiatrists now prescribe drugs to children as young as 3 years old!

Yes, instead of teaching children to deal with the feelings they have, which is what emotional intelligence is all about, we give them drugs that prevent their body from coping and developing the mechanisms to cope with stress.

Use of drugs to manage stress prevents the body from producing chemicals to calm the body. Over time, the stress increases and we have to increase the use of drugs to cope with natural and healthy life processes. Sadness, disappointment and anger are all healthy feelings, essential for our survival. The use of drugs to suppress them sends a message to the body that they are not healthy feelings for us and makes us helpless and powerless.

As a parent, I have a strong desire to keep my kids away from therapists (yes, even doctors, as much as I can). Why? Because for some reason, kids who are in therapy for a long time form the belief that something is wrong with them. As a life coach and special education professional, I can tell you that working with disabilities and learning difficulties is much easier than working with a child that thinks something is wrong with him or her.

Read Kids under Stress: Diagnose Stress Symptoms without Psychiatrists »

Addictions: Are you Addicted to Your Beliefs?

Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? - Rumi

When we hear the word “addiction”, we think of bad things. Most people think of drugs and alcohol, when in fact, we are all addicted to something even if we don’t drink alcohol or take illegal drugs. If every addiction were illegal, we would all be living outside the law.

Addiction is actually an idea. It’s the thought that we cannot live without something. When we are addicted to something, it is because we think/feel/believe that the thing we are addicted to is essential to our survival and the fear of living without it is greater than the fear of the consequences of consuming it.

That was a full on concept, but please read it again:

When we are addicted to something, it does not mean we don’t understand the consequences of consuming it. It means that the fear of not consuming it is greater.

This is why it is hard to fight addiction. Our subconscious mind is stronger than our understanding of the consequences so let’s stop talking about the consequences, because they will never be the reason we stop believing anything.

Research on addictions has found that consuming something (like drugs, alcohol or sugar) is not enough to become addicted to it. We consume it when we have a void, because it allows us to manage better with that void. People who connect well with others, are in a happy relationship, are active and have a good social life are less likely to become addicted. Therefore, the way to help everybody overcome addictions is not punishing them for finding a solution that gives them (brief moments of) comfort, but helping them create the connections they need to replace their addiction.

It is important to understand that we are not only addicted to substances, but also to thoughts and ideas. Even substance addictions are based on strong beliefs. In a research on alcohol consumption, participates were given water to drink, but were told they were drinking alcohol. They behaved later on as if they were drunk, showing impaired coordination, giggling and even throwing up, just because they BELIEVED they were drinking alcohol.

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How to Control Anxiety: 35 More Tips

Every Tomorrow has two handled. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith - Henry Ward Beecher

Anxiety is one of the most debilitating feelings we can have. We are anxious when we imagine a negative future. We do this in our head, triggering many processes in the brain that make us feel helpless and lost. Therefore, learning how to control anxiety can be very important in living a happy and healthy life.

Last week, I shared 25 tips on how to calm anxiety. Here are 35 more tips on how to control anxiety, which I hope you will find useful and easy to follow.

How to Control Anxiety Tips (26-59):

26. Tell yourself “I am safe” whenever you feel unsafe. Remember that anxiety is all in your head. Teach your head to say it whenever anxiety happens and it will do it after enough practice.

27. Set goals. Make sure to write them down. Having goals and having anxiety is the same process. We go into the future and in both of them, in our mind, but with goals, we imagine a positive future!

This post is part 3 of 3 in the series How to Deal with Anxiety

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How to Calm Anxiety: 25 Easy Tips

When we fill out thoughts with right things, the wrong ones have no room to enter - Joyce Meyer

In What is Anxiety, I explained the process of creating anxiety. Today, I want to start describing how to calm anxiety with simple, everyday tips anybody can do.

It is important to remember that Anxiety is a thinking process that we do in the present of imagining a negative future. Anxiety is the modern evolution of the “fight or flight” response. We are not certain about the future and we predict a horrible one. Most of us are very bad fortunetellers, but still most people try fortunetelling in hope that the future will somehow change from being scary to being great, if only in our mind.

It won’t, unless we change the way we go through that process, and actively, with intention, change it!

In this post and the next, I will share with you 59 tips on how to calm anxiety. Each of those tips can do the trick for short time and if you continue doing them, they will become a habit. All you need are 2-3 tips that you feel conferrable with and alternate them.

Some of the tips are very much applicable to children, so teach your kids to develop strategies to manage and calm their anxiety as soon as possible. Research shows that kids as young as 3 years old already experience anxiety, and if they live in a very anxious house, they will master anxiety very early in life.

In schools, we see many anxious kids and this can be very exhausting for the body. Think of your body in “fight or flight” mode 30 to 40 times a day. An anxious child becomes so sensitive that every word said around them becomes a lion or a snake. The road from here to developing full-blown anxiety disorder is not too long.

This post is part 2 of 3 in the series How to Deal with Anxiety

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Common Stress Causes

2 monkeys baring their teeth

In 3 Strategies to Find Your Sources of Pressure, I explained why it is important to recognize the sources of our pressure in order to eliminate stress in life and gave three strategies to find the stress causes in your life. If you have used these strategies, you are ready to use this list of common stress causes to refine your findings.

1. Lack of sleep is a major cause of stress.

2. Craving is a small source of pressure. Whenever you say to yourself, “I have to eat/do/be something”, you are putting pressure on yourself.

3. Addictions are a huge cause of pressure. Why? Because when we don’t have that thing we are addicted to, our brain goes into panic attack. Addiction can be to food, drinks (alcohol, coke…) to people, routines. If you want to know if you are addicted, try leaving without that thing for 3 weeks and see how the pressure builds up.

4. Caffeine is a big source of addiction. When our body has overdoes of Caffeine (coffee, tea, coke and chocolate) it will become edgy. If you want to recognize how much it affects you, stop any caffeine for 3 days and notice how nervous you are because your body goes through withdrawal symptoms.

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How to Deal with Anxiety: What is Anxiety?

If you live in the past, you will suffer depression. If you live in the future, you will have anxiety. If you live in the present, you will be content. Lau Tzu

What is anxiety? Anxiety is one of the biggest problems of our society today. Research has found that it is one of the main reasons for sickness, relationship problems, crime and failure. People who are anxious have a bad physical reaction to thinking about the future.

Everybody feels anxiety sometimes. It is a natural reaction to what is perceived as danger – an evolution of the “fight or flight” response. While for most people, experiencing anxiety in small doses is normal and healthy, for others, feeling anxious about the future or about situations over which they have no control may cause real interference with daily living.

The problem is with the frequency of the fear and the perception of danger, when in fact there may be no real danger. When people experience mild anxiety, we call it “worrying”. When the fear takes over and blocks the person from living a normal life, we call it “Anxiety Disorder”.

Think about it this way: anxiety is when your mind goes towards a possible, horrible, bad, unpleasant future and you react to it NOW. No one is anxious when they think about getting compliments, or having a great time. We are anxious about something that MAY go wrong in the future.

This post is part 1 of 3 in the series How to Deal with Anxiety

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How to Eliminate the Top 7 Parenting Struggles

Father holding his young sons

Last month, I wrote about the top 7 things parents struggle with: emotions, social pressure, information overload, money, relationship and physical body. I think that if parents knew how to manage these things in their life, it would be easier and more enjoyable for them to parent their children to be happy, healthy and successful. Here are 7 tips to improve your skills in each area and eliminate the respective parenting struggles.

How to manage your emotions

Whenever you have a strong feeling and feel you are about to burst, stop! Examine the feeling, ask yourself “what is that thing I am feeling now?” giving it a name will slow you down and move you from your primitive brain – the fight or flight mode to the “thinking” mode. It will make sure you are more composed in your relationship with your children.

Read How to Eliminate the Top 7 Parenting Struggles »

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