PLAYING-IT-SAFE

Have you ever been struggling emotionally and a partner, colleague or caregiver overlooked you or made you feel worse? “I would have never let that happen,” is uttered or implied. Or an important other misses your emotional needs altogether and just focuses on themselves. When this invalidation or dismissal happens in a key relationship or two repeatedly over years, it can create a trauma of omission. It's about what you are not getting so you don't know you are missing it. One learns: “No one is going to help me when I feel like a failure, excluded or down. I have to turn my feelings off on my own.” Abandoning your inner emotional life in service of what others are comfortable with or what your professional culture rewards.

In this episode, you will learn about chronic misattunement and how, instead of playing-it-safe by avoiding or placating, you can learn skills of self-care and how to ask for your needs to be met with the people that matter. Attunement is to show interest in another's world. How they've been impacted by something they've experienced and what that experience means to them. I interviewed Kelly Werner Ph.D., who kindly shares her understanding and approach to struggles driven by chronic misattunement. 

Key Takeaways

• What is chronic misattunement?
• Playing-it-safe moves related to chronic misattunement
• How chronic misattunement shows up in relationships
• A.T.T.U.N.E (acronym) Process to heal from chronic misattunement

(*) Show notes and resources of this episode

(*) Receive free weekly science-based, compassionate, and actionable skills to stop ineffective playing-it-safe

(*) Figure out your playing-it-safe profile in 5 minutes and identify the key thinking strategies that keep you living in your head

(*) Learn ACT skills for anxious achievers by taking Dr. Z. ACT courses

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Have you ever gone to the emergency room?

Have you ever thought of how emergency doctors face stress?

Have you ever considered how an emergency doctor manages anxiety as part of their work life?

Today, I’m sharing with you the interview with Dr. Mark Hoffman, M.D., a board certified emergency physician, with over 30 years of practice.

It was a treat to hear from Dr. Hoffman on how he:

• Manages stress when taking care of multiple patients at once
• Makes decisions when working with patients with acute conditions
• Deals with interpersonal stress
• Performs a “mental triage”
• Juggles all tasks-medical and administrative-during his work shifts

Are the best E.R. doctors the best jugglers?

What can we learn from them?

What can you learn from them?

(*) Show notes and resources of this episode

(*) Receive free weekly science-based, compassionate, and actionable skills to stop ineffective playing-it-safe

(*) Figure out your playing-it-safe profile in 5 minutes and identify the key thinking strategies that keep you living in your head

(*) Learn ACT skills for anxious achievers by taking Dr. Z. ACT courses

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Can’t make up your mind about marrying your girlfriend or not? Can’t make up your mind about the TV you need to buy? Can’t make up your mind about staying or quitting your job?

If the prospect of making a decision makes you feel overwhelmed and paralyzed, then you need to listen to this episode!

In this episode, Dr. Sally Winston, Psy.D. and I discuss the processes behind making a decision and what keeps you stuck when having to make a choice. Quite often, when facing these dilemmas, we play-it-safe by overthinking, dwelling, or ruminating, and end up putting ourselves into analysis-paralysis: thinking a lot about a choice without taking action. If you’re in the habit of not making a choice, you may be dealing with chronic indecisiveness, which is more than ordinary indecisions. 

Key Takeaways

• The processes behind chronic indecision
• How to nurture experiential knowledge
• Wise mind
• The limitations of pros and cons
• How to nurture a wise mind

(*) Show notes and resources of this episode

(*) Receive free weekly science-based, compassionate, and actionable skills to stop ineffective playing-it-safe

(*) Figure out your playing-it-safe profile in 5 minutes and identify the key thinking strategies that keep you living in your head

(*) Learn ACT skills for anxious achievers by taking Dr. Z. ACT courses

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How often do you assume the worst-case-scenario when facing a difficult situation?

When was the last time someone invited you to a party, and you started worrying about it months in advance?

Do you stress about situations that have not happened yet?

Anybody can learn how our minds work and how to work with them. When we are dealing with worries, anxieties, fears, we all play-it-safe. You might be playing it safe. If you get stuck thinking of doom and gloomy scenarios, you may find yourself asking others what to do in order for you to not make any more mistakes.

In this episode, I interview Dr. Sally Winston, Psy.D., an anxiety expert. She and I discuss different skills to manage those thoughts - the future-oriented ones - and those moments in which you get stuck in imagination. 

As you listen to this episode, you will learn actionable skills to stop worrying about what might happen and live fully in the moment. 

Key Takeaways

• What is anticipatory anxiety
• How to handle those moments when your imagination hijacks you
• Three different levels of fear
• The difference between rumination and planning
• How to shift from “what if” to “what is”
• Dr. Winston’s metaphor of how to handle uncertainty
• The opposite of uncertainty … is not what you think it is …
• Metacognitions
• Productive thinking versus unproductive thinking

(*) Show notes and resources of this episode

(*) Receive free weekly science-based, compassionate, and actionable skills to stop ineffective playing-it-safe

(*) Figure out your playing-it-safe profile in 5 minutes and identify the key thinking strategies that keep you living in your head

(*) Learn ACT skills for anxious achievers by taking Dr. Z. ACT courses

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is part 2 of my interview with Todd Kashdan, Ph.D.

Key Takeaways

• How to persuade others skillfully
• How intolerance and speed of uncertainty feed into rigid thinking
• The connection between persuasion skills and acceptance and commitment skills
• The difference between task-oriented problem solving and relationship problems
• What is cognitive diversity and how it plays in our group interactions
• How to use cognitive defusion when dealing with interpersonal difficulties
• Why viewpoint diversity is good
• How to spark curiosity, not fear
• How to build stronger alliances during conflict

(*) Show notes and resources of this episode

(*) Receive free weekly science-based, compassionate, and actionable skills to stop ineffective playing-it-safe

(*) Figure out your playing-it-safe profile in 5 minutes and identify the key thinking strategies that keep you living in your head

(*) Learn ACT skills for anxious achievers by taking Dr. Z. ACT courses

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

• Have you ever played-it-safe by keeping your opinions to yourself?
• When was the last time you felt afraid of social rejection that you did not say what you really thought about a topic in fear of rocking the boat?
• How often do you play-it-safe by placating and going along with others' opinions so you are liked by others?

Group thinking, agreeing quickly with others, avoiding sharing our opinions, or making sure we don’t rock the boat are the many ways in which we play-it-safe when dealing with fears of rejection, not being liked, or not belonging in a group. But how do those playing-it-safe moves work in our relationships with others and our relationship with ourselves? When is it effective to minimize interpersonal conflict, and when is it not? How and when do we examine our beliefs about how things should be? How do we avoid cognitive rigidity?

In this conversation with Dr. Todd Kashdan, Ph.D., he shares his research on persuasion, healthy dissentment, group thinking, and skills to handle conflict that go beyond assertiveness training. 

Key Takeaways:

• How group thinking leads us to “underseen” or “overseen” social situations or any other matters
• What is healthy resentment
• Skills to handle cognitive rigidity
• The basics of the science of persuasion
• How intolerance of uncertainty plays a role in our thinking
• Why people in disadvantage still support leaders that don’t favor them
• The case of Evo Morales, the former president of Bolivia, and how group thinking created a different image of his government

(*) Show notes and resources of this episode

(*) Receive free weekly science-based, compassionate, and actionable skills to stop ineffective playing-it-safe

(*) Figure out your playing-it-safe profile in 5 minutes and identify the key thinking strategies that keep you living in your head

(*) Learn ACT skills for anxious achievers by taking Dr. Z. ACT courses

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Have you ever been caught in a spiral of self-criticism? When was the last time your inner critic took over your day? 

We all have stories we’ve created about ourselves - some of them positive and some of them negative. If you suffer from low self-esteem, your story may include these types of narratives: “I’m a failure,” “I’ll never be able to do that,” or “if only I were smarter or more attractive, I could be happy.” 

Dealing effectively with your inner critic doesn't happen overnight, but if you learn compassionate, evidence-based and actionable skills to handle all those stories, to relate to them skillfully, you can learn to accept yourself as you are and not as who you wish to be.

Key Takeaways

In this conversation, Dr. Joe Oliver, Ph.D. and I discussed:

• What is self-esteem
• How to handle self-criticism
• Defusion: thanking your mind
• How to notice when you’re entangled with your mind
• How to notice and catch your playing-it-safe moves
• The story behind his book
• Dealing with the monsters of the negative stories with dignity and respect

(*) Show notes and resources of this episode

(*) Receive free weekly science-based, compassionate, and actionable skills to stop ineffective playing-it-safe

(*) Figure out your playing-it-safe profile in 5 minutes and identify the key thinking strategies that keep you living in your head

(*) Learn ACT skills for anxious achievers by taking Dr. Z. ACT courses

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Resilience is usually understood as the process and the outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences (American Psychological Association (APA)).

In the information era, being exposed to all types of stressors is the norm and not the exception. We may struggle to learn how to deal with a world that moves fast, pressures us in many different directions, and a world in which hundreds of things are outside of our control.

In this podcast episode, I discuss with Dennis Relojo-Howell the ways in which he became resilient and the different ways to nourish resilient practices.

Dennis is a social entrepreneur, speaker, and resilience researcher, originally born in the Philippines. In 2014, he founded Psychreg, an award-winning media project dedicated to keeping everyone informed about psychology, mental health, and wellness.

In this conversation, Dennis shared:

- How he overcame growing up in a stressful environment

- How he learned to pursue what matters in the midst of social stressors

- How he uses creative writing as a resilient practice

(*) Show notes and resources of this episode

(*) Receive free weekly science-based, compassionate, and actionable skills to stop ineffective playing-it-safe

(*) Figure out your playing-it-safe profile in 5 minutes and identify the key thinking strategies that keep you living in your head

(*) Learn ACT skills for anxious achievers by taking Dr. Z. ACT courses

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

60% of people dealing with depression are likely to be dealing with anxiety. If you're anxious, you are also likely to be depressed.

In the case of fear-based struggles, it is much more common to struggle with different types of fears than a single one. So if you’re dealing with attacks, it’s also possible that you're dealing with chronic worry, or if you’re dealing with chronic worry, it’s also possible that you’re struggling with fears of public speaking. 

Traditional CBT focuses on treating a disorder such as social anxiety or depression. The problem with focusing on a single disorder is that the root cause of those struggles is not addressed.

A core characteristic of ACT is to focus on teaching you psychological skills to increase your well-being, mental health, and the quality of your life. Instead of focusing on a diagnosis, ACT tackles the drivers of that particular diagnosis; therefore, ACT by nature is what is called a process-based model.

In this conversation Joseph Ciarrochi, Ph.D. and I discuss:

• The different psychological processes that are part of any struggle we deal with.
• The relationship between psychological processes and evolution.
• The importance of variation, selection, retention and context as drivers of changes
• The challenges of letting go of “all those stories about who we are.”
• The importance of paying attention to our physiological responses when getting stuck

(*) Show notes and resources of this episode

(*) Receive free weekly science-based, compassionate, and actionable skills to stop ineffective playing-it-safe

(*) Figure out your playing-it-safe profile in 5 minutes and identify the key thinking strategies that keep you living in your head

(*) Learn ACT skills for anxious achievers by taking Dr. Z. ACT courses

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Self-criticism is a classic playing-it-safe move. We criticize ourselves as a way to think that we're going to be able to control the situation, control ourselves, and control circumstances in order to feel safe. How does it really work for you when you spend hours and hours criticizing yourself? How does it really work when you try to motivate yourself by being harder and harder with yourself? 

But what if instead of spending hours and hours of criticizing, negatively judging, and putting yourself down, you learn skills to treat yourself with kindness, gentleness, and care as you would treat others?

In this episode, I interview Dr. Dennis Tirch, Ph.D. Dr. Dennis Tirch founded the Center for Compassion-Focused Therapy in the USA. He has been described as one of the country's foremost experts on CFT and the psychology of compassion.

Dr. Tirch is the author of 6 books and numerous chapters and peer-reviewed articles on mindfulness, acceptance, and compassion in psychotherapy.

With Dr. Laura Silberstein-Tirch and others, Dr. Tirch is currently developing a research protocol involving behavioral science and CFT for treating anxiety, worry, and fear-based difficulties through compassionate courage cultivation.

(*) Show notes and resources of this episode

(*) Receive free weekly science-based, compassionate, and actionable skills to stop ineffective playing-it-safe

(*) Figure out your playing-it-safe profile in 5 minutes and identify the key thinking strategies that keep you living in your head

(*) Learn ACT skills for anxious achievers by taking Dr. Z. ACT courses

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.