This article first appeared in the May 24, 2021 issue of Women’s World Magazine! 

This article first appeared in the August 17, 2020 issue of Women’s World Magazine. 

Do you, or someone you know, have trouble making decisions?  It could be as small as deciding what to wear in the morning, or big, like whether to buy a house or continue to rent.  You may spend countless hours going through pros and cons in your mind, asking others for advice, or simply putting off thinking about it.

Difficulty making decisions is associated with two of the three Monkey Mindsets, intolerance of uncertainty, (thinking you need to be 100% certain of your decision), and perfectionism, (the belief that making the wrong decision would be catastrophic).  Both of these mindsets are impossible standards to meet and create unnecessary agony, anxiety and avoidance when making decisions. 

By contrast, those who have an easy time deciding can tolerate the uncertainty and are comfortable with less-than-perfect outcomes. You can learn to do this. Here are three simple steps to follow when you are stuck with a difficult decision.

• Make a pros and cons list on a piece of paper and set a timer for 5-15 minutes. By using a timer, you are restricting the endless looping of pros and cons that you have likely been doing in your head.
• When the timer goes off, set it again for five minutes, the maximum amount of time you have to make the decision. Spending more than five minutes means you are falling back into the trap of attempting to be certain that you are making the right decision.
• If you have not made a decision when the 5-minute timer goes off, flip a coin. Yes, I am 100% serious! Flip a coin and whatever it says, stick with this as your decision.  Maybe it sounds crazy to do this, but it is not as crazy as avoiding making a decision because you are operating out of two flawed monkey mindsets.

Once your decision is made, you are no longer stuck, and you can move forward. If your decision brings the results you hoped for, good. If the decision did not work out, also good!  You’ll have an opportunity to practice coping with the outcome. Flexibility and resilience are two of the most important commodities in life!

Be sure to watch the 3 minute video below this post to learn 3 simple tools to help you manage your time and feel less stressed.

Here is the definition of “Holiday”, by our trustworthy Wikipedia:
 
A holiday is a day set aside by custom or by law on which normal activities, especially business or work including school, are suspended or reduced. Generally, holidays are intended to allow individuals to celebrate or commemorate an event or tradition of cultural or religious significance.
 
What really catches my eye is a time to set aside or reduce normal activities, which is intended to give more time to reflect and celebrate what is important to people.  For many of us, instead of reducing our normal activities, we end up piling on additional activities around the holidays.  This ends up causing stress, which does not cultivate hospitable conditions to reflect and celebrate. 
  
Let me give an example of my client Ann, a single mom who came in the week before Thanksgiving feeling more stressed and overwhelmed than usual.  Ann owned her own business and so had planned to work up until the day before Thanksgiving.  I had her explain what she had planned for the next day, and this is what she outlined:

• Get up and go to the gym
• Eat breakfast and shower
• Do some paper work and phone calls she could do from home for her business
• Clean the house
• Take her teenage daughter to a friend’s house
• Drive to Oakland to pick up her older son who was flying in that day for the holiday
• Pick up the turkey and last-minute groceries on her way home.
• Pick up her daughter at the friend’s house
• Start making pies when she got home. 

Ann wasn’t reducing her normal obligations, she was simply piling on more. Expecting ourselves to accomplish more with the same amount of time and energy is like expecting our car to go an extra 100 miles on the same tank of gas. Our time and energy, like a tank of gas, are limited resources that need to be managed correctly to stay in good supply. To help Ann manage her time and energy that day, I had her use three time-management tools that I use with my clients: Accommodate, Delegate, and Eliminate.
 
Ann started out by accommodating. Her first thought was to eliminate her workout, but I advised against it.  Self-care is often the first thing people want to cut out, and it is the very thing that reduces stress and helps increase energy levels.  Instead she decided to cut the amount of work she wanted to get done with her business in half.  Next she delegated.   She told her daughter that if she wanted a ride to her friend’s house she needed help around the house, so delegated cleaning the bathrooms to her. And finally, she eliminated, instead of home backed pies, she would get store bought ones.  
 
It’s not always easy to use these tools. Eliminating a task or activity we’re attached to can be painful. Delegating tasks that may not get done as well as we want—her daughter would not clean the bathrooms the way Ann would like— can be disappointing.  And accommodating, or compromising, around tasks can feel like a loss. But look at the alternative. Taking on more than we can handle makes us stressed and resentful, inhospitable conditions in which to reflect and celebrate what’s important to us.
 
Managing time and energy helps people to cultivate what they personally value most, in Ann’s case it was flexibility, connection, presence and fun. Those are qualities she wanted to have not only during the holidays, but every day of the year!

I am working with a client who came in complaining about difficulty deciding things. Whether choosing a career path or just buying a pair of shoes, unless she was 100% certain she was making the right decision, she delayed, conducting endless research, revisiting her pros and cons list, seeking reassurance from others, and changing her mind repeatedly. I recognized these behaviors right away as safety strategies. As long as she employed them, she was safe from the threat of deciding something she was uncertain about.

Using safety strategies to avoid uncertainty fuels a cycle of anxiety that tends to get worse over time. Whenever a decision is delayed due to uncertainty we reinforce the mindset that certainty is indeed possible, training the brain to categorize future decision-making situations as threats to our safety. Over time, we have less and less tolerance for uncertainty, and higher levels of anxiety when the need to make a decision arises. That’s why I call these strategies feeding the monkey mind.

In order to interrupt this cycle my client would have to begin to think more expansively around decisions, accepting the inherent uncertainty of life. Together we brainstormed for an alternative belief to counter her need-to-be-certain mindset. Here is what we came up with:

Of course, her new belief wouldn’t last long if she kept up her safety behaviors. Together we made a list of new behaviors that would give her the opportunity to practice tolerating uncertainty.

Over time, using expansive behaviors will increase our tolerance of uncertainty and create less anxiety when making choices.  And as a bonus, expansive strategies give us more resilience when a decision doesn’t work out well.

To help you identify your own intolerance of uncertainty you can download this quiz. To help you recognize your beliefs—and develop new healthier ones—you can download the Intolerance of Uncertainty Mind-set Chart from Don’t Feed The Monkey Mind.

#MonkeyMind  #AnxietyAuthor  #AnxietyCBT

I didn’t think my client wasn’t being a crybaby at all. She wasn’t complaining about her condition.  She was simply crying like a baby. And there’s a big difference.

When we are in crisis or fatigued, even the littlest things can overwhelm us with negative emotions like frustration, isolation, fear and helplessness. We often struggle to get rid of these feelings, as if they represented a threat to our survival. “Why is this happening to me?,” we ask. “No one understands what I am going through. This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.”

Complaining is one way we resist the negative emotions associated with the alarms of the monkey mind. Our hearts are closed to feeling this pain. Unfortunately, complaints do nothing to improve our situation, and worse, they send the wrong message back to the monkey mind. That message is, I can’t handle this.

Instead of treating negative feelings as something to be complained about, it is far more useful to accept them as necessary. Like the sun overhead and the clouds passing by, negative emotions are beyond our direct control. All we can do is allow them to pass through our lives. Disruptive and painful as they may be, we can choose to make room for them and yes, to express them. Depending on how

deep the pain, that can mean letting the tears flow—just like a baby.

From the first moments of birth, our bodies and minds are perfectly capable of expressing negative emotions in a spontaneous and healthy way. When we welcome our negative feelings, instead of complaining about them, we can process them, from the beginning all the way through to the end. A crying baby can sound like a thunderstorm. But eventually the sun comes out.

Three Rewards

• Of course, it takes courage to accept negative emotions and allow ourselves to feel them without question or complaint. But your courage will be rewarded with increased resilience to all the inevitable pain in life.
• And when we welcome uncomfortable feelings, we are sending a much more productive and powerful message to our monkey mind. We are saying, I can handle this. This message calms down that part of our brain, and with continued repetition, fosters more peace or equanimity in our lives.
• Finally, and most importantly, when we actively open our hearts to pain and sorrow we widen its doors for all emotions, including joy and pleasure. We are expanding our capacity to feel and stay present in the moment.

The next time you feel sad, or scared or frustrated, if you notice yourself slipping into that well-worn, but ineffective habit of complaint, take a moment to stop and acknowledge what you are feeling. Can you welcome it instead? Open the palms of your hands as a physical reminder that you are keeping your heart open, and allow the feelings to flow through you without any resistance.  Breathe deeply, making plenty of space for whatever sensations emerge. You don’t need to change or control anything. Trust that what you are feeling is natural and necessary.

And if you are so moved, let the tears flow. Go ahead. Cry like a baby.