Why, you may ask? Because, after the frenetic activities of the holidays, the lack of partners’ focus on each other, and the tendency to put each other on the back burner due to other activities going on, intimate relationships in January tend to feel depleted and partners may question their bond and their feelings for one another. Love relationships suffer at this time because the holidays may have brought a lot of excitement and newness with travelling; celebrating with friends and family, gift giving and holiday cheers, and now all this is gone. So, if you and your partner feel down, facing the relational doldrums of everyday life with little excitement and not much to look forward to, you are not alone

It is easy to displace frustrations and lack of enjoyment from the loss of sensational and extraordinary activities in our lives to lack of excitement in our primary relationship. While you may feel disappointed about what’s gone, however, you need to turn the situation around by creating renewed freshness and enthusiasm about each other again.

It is quite possible that you may want you partner to be emotionally and physically available to you, with a positive, caring and responsive attitude and a willingness to respond to your demands and needs, but perhaps your partner wants and needs the same from you and neither of you is getting what you want and need. Typically, when this happens each partner will do one of two things: he or she will either become louder in asking for what’s needed, or shut down and disconnect. Though understandable, it goes without saying that neither of these reactions produces healthy results, because neither provides what one partner is looking for from the other.

So, make sure you devote the time, attention and care to your loved one by setting up New Year’s resolutions for your relationship. By the way, had you ever heard of New Year’s Resolutions for couples? If not, you are not the only one, as most of people’s New Year’s resolutions tend to be about individual goals – losing those extra pounds; plan to exercise more and more regularly; take care of what you have been ignoring or procrastinating; create more balance in your life, and so on – but what about setting up a New Year’s resolution about your relationship with your life partner? Being in a healthy intimate relationship is a very foundational part of being happy. So, taking care of what’s going on with your partner is a very important task.

Think about your own love relationship and see if you can see where more attention and care are needed at this time. Write a list of things you are willing to do in areas where you would like to see improvement, and begin to be more aware of what you may be doing to contribute to the current situation – you being part of the problem – as well as to improve it – you being part of the solution.

In the next blog I will list some specific ways in which you can begin to feed your relationship and get it out of the current sad state it is in and into a more exciting and healthy one. So, stay tuned!

Susan and I worked like two little ants for months and months to get our book, “Couples at the Crossroads. Five Steps to Finding Your Way Back to Love” ready for you. Then, when we finally thought it was ready, we “snuck” it in and, voila, here it is, on Amazon.com.

How do we feel about it? Almost like we had to let go of a dear friend who had been with us for years. We knew all along that one day we would have to let go of this friend; that we would have to push our feelings of wanting to be together forever aside and support his move toward independence, but it was difficult nonetheless to say goodbye. With letting go of the book, it was difficult to stop our tendency to make one more revision, one more comment, one little correction here or there, one more clarification; one more idea… Once the book was finished, we knew we had to let go, and we finally did.

It also feels a little scary, as you and everybody else can now buy our book, read it and make comments on what we said, how we said it; what we left out and what we said more than once.

But, above all, we feel excited and very, very happy. We truly believe our book can provide help for couples like you who struggle in their relationships and are desperate to understand how they got where they are; how they can find a clear path to follow and acquire the necessary tools to move out of the pain. We know the book will be helpful to you because it contains a lot of the same things we speak of in our clinical sessions with couples. And we see how these couples, slowly but surely, begin to move from their place of pain to a place of gradual openness, as they become more hopeful. We see them when they begin to look at each other with different eyes; reverse the previous patterns of mutual hostility and disconnection, and find love for one another again.

What do you think? Interested? Do you want to check our book out? Click on the link below and the book will open in a new window or tab. Just open the first page and scroll through its Table of Contents, Preface and Introduction. This brief preview will make you want to know more…

Couples at the Crossroads: Five Steps to Finding Your Way Back to Love – Preview

This is how it works:

•Select a room in the house that is quiet and where you won’t have any interruptions. Turn your phone off and forget about it for five minutes or so. Tell your partner, children, pets and anyone else who may be in the house not to disturb you until you come out of the room again.
•Find a comfortable chair to sit on.
•Lower the lights but make sure that the room is not totally dark.
•Close your eyes.
•Now, think about the most salient part of your day: was it successful? Did you accomplish everything you had set up to do? Why did you choose that particular moment of the day, instead of any other?
•Observe your feelings as you think about that particular moment: are you anxious, tense, happy, relaxed, upset, or anything else?
•Don’t try to talk yourself into changing your feelings, reassure yourself if you feel insecure, or chastise yourself if you made a mistake. Just observe with no judgment.
•If the moment was a successful one, congratulate yourself.
•If the moment was not successful, think if there anything you can do right now to settle whatever wasn’t settled during the day, like writing yourself a note for something you can do tomorrow.
•Now, focus on letting go. Observe, with your eyes closed, how whatever it is that you were thinking about is moving, slowly, further and further away from you, until it disappears entirely.
•Tell yourself it is gone now and commit to not revisiting until tomorrow.
•Return to the present moment and the room you are in.
•Open your eyes and observe what’s around you.
•Shift in your mind from what you were thinking earlier to where you are right now.

You can now go back to your family or to doing whatever it is that you want to do before going to bed. You will find that you are better able to relax and keep good boundaries between where you were earlier in the day and where you are now.

Try to practice this every night, ideally at about the same time and following the same routine.

Good night!

The number one thing that can help you cope with stress is creating a strong support network around you. Studies over and over indicate that, when we feel supported, comforted, reassured and empathized with by people we love and respect, our abilities to handle stress greatly improve. Likewise, when we are alone, isolated and socially and emotionally disconnected, our strengths decrease considerably, and we are more vulnerable to external and internal stressors.

Do you have a strong support network? Remember that emotions always look much less scary and overwhelming when we have someone who can hold our hand, figuratively, and tell us that everything is going to be ok. Our fears, in particular, can be managed much better in these situations. So, think about how you can strengthen your support system – by being available to people who need you; by reconnecting with people with whom you have not been keeping in touch; by making an effort to reach out through your work, or your place of worship, or through your community or school.

One element that considerably increases your ability to deal with stress is knowledge. The more you know and understand about a situation that could cause stress, the more prepared you will be to deal with it. For instance, one situation that creates a lot of stress for most of us is our health. If we have medical problems, or if we need medical treatment or surgery, the more information we gather on what our condition is and the various treatments, the less stressed we are going to feel. So, get on the Internet and find information. Take the time to talk to your doctors and go to medical appointments with a list already prepared of all the things you want to ask. Go for a second or even a third opinion if necessary, and make sure that you know enough to feel comfortable with your level of knowledge and understanding. Being informed will help you better manage your anxiety. Also, make sure you bring a loved one with you.

Another element that helps you better manage stress is control. The more you feel you have a handle on what’s going on with you and what you need to do, the less likely you will be blindsided by something you didn’t see coming and thus didn’t have time to properly prepare for it.

So, write daily lists of what you need to do, and keep them in a place where, periodically, you can look at them. Consult them throughout the day, and check them off as you get them done.

Organize this list in terms of priorities, from the most to the least important, and make sure you don’t avoid what you don’t like to do! Pushing things aside, even though at first it can provide some relief, in the long run will make you more anxious. If you tackle these disliked things right away, it will reduce the level of stress for you.

These tips for stress management, and others we didn’t mention in this blog for lack of space, have the purpose of changing your assessment of stress. They do so by improving your views about your abilities, assets and strengths. This view, in turn, makes you see the stress as less overwhelming and intense.

Do you have some techniques that you found to be very helpful in dealing with stress? Can you share them with us?

What is stress? Stress is a normal physical response to situations that are perceived as being dangerous. We perceive our abilities to cope with this danger as being inadequate to handle it. So, we get ready for a fight or flight. When we face a danger, our breathing and heart beat increase, and so does our blood pressure; we sweat, we feel a rush of adrenaline; our muscles get tense, and we become very alert. Stress, therefore, is nature’s ways of protecting us by shifting our body responses into high gear and thus increasing our chances of survival. In this way, we get ready to deal with the danger.

Some stress is to be expected, and, in fact, it can be even positive. However, when it gets too intense, or when it becomes a chronic way of life, we are likely to experience serious health problems, both physically and emotionally.

If the stress persists, in fact, our body can develop symptoms like aches and pain all over our body; we may suffer from digestive problems, we may have difficulties concentrating and remembering; we may feel anxious most of the time, irritable, overwhelmed; we cannot relax. I could go on and on, but you get my point of why acute or chronic stresses are bad for you.

And who wants all this?

When we feel stressed, we try to cope with all these symptoms by getting our minds off the areas that cause stress. However, while some of these ways are healthy, some are not. Drinking too much, for instance, or relying on drugs, cigarettes, overeating or oversleeping obviously are not good ways of coping with stress. They don’t remove the cause of it and don’t help us learn good and healthy coping skills. They are, however, quite popular because, temporarily, they allow us to tune out how we feel, so we can better manage our emotions and relax for a little bit. When their effects are over, though, we find ourselves in the same original position we were in at the beginning, or even worse, and this pushes us to seek more relief by using again. Eventually we become dependent on some substance to make us feel better, in this way adding another problem to the original one.

Some healthy ways of dealing with stress, temporarily, are: taking a relaxing bath; going for a walk; doing some relaxation and meditation exercises; listening to calming music, and so on. These are ways of getting our minds off the reason(s) for our stress and, giving us a needed break. However, they don’t address the cause(s) of the problem. So, none of the ways we discussed so far, be them healthy or unhealthy, really help you in the long run.

Are there better ways of coping with stress? Absolutely there are. These are ways that help reduce the distance between the seriousness of the problem and our abilities to cope with it. Once we feel that we have the ability to handle a stressful situation, in fact, we can reduce the amount of stress we feel.

In the following blog we will discuss some of these healthy ways of assessing both situations that can create stress and our resources in dealing with them.
Think of some of the ways in which you cope with stress: what’s helpful and effective to you? Write down some of your answers and compare them to what we will suggest in our next blog!

Having a purpose

As you plan your retirement, think of what purpose you want your days to have: do you want to learn new skills? Or do you want to volunteer and give back to your community? Do you want to travel, and share with your local school the slides and experiences from your trips? Do you want to get more involved in your neighborhood? Do you want to do philanthropic work? Or do you finally want to learn to play the piano? Whatever you do, think of what purpose your choice will provide in your life and then ask yourself if this is what you want.

Retirement without any planning may lead at best to boredom and disorganization, and at worst to isolation, depression, excessive drinking and disconnection.

Being connected to loved ones is another important element that needs to be included in any retirement plan worth exploring. Being surrounded by loved ones keeps us involved, a part of a group. Loved ones, however, don’t necessarily have to be members of your biological family. They could be good friends, neighbors, fellows in the church or synagogue you attend. They can be people with similar interests to yours, with whom you resonate and feel close. Choosing a community where you can find the kind of neighborhood spirit that makes you feel ‘at home’ is very important, as isolation is dreadful, particularly as we age. So, stay involved in their lives. Ask what’s going on with them. Be interested.

If you plan your retirement right, you will get up each morning looking forward to a new day. You will be active, but not overwhelmingly so. You will feel positive. You will be better able to stay in the present and enjoy it, rather than worrying about what the future will be like for you.

After all, these are the “golden Years.” So, make sure that they are as golden as possible!

Gone seem to be the times when people retired and stayed home, played bingo, and gradually reduced their activities as their physical conditions deteriorated and their energy waned. Up until as recently as twenty to thirty years ago, when people retired they were OLD, often sick with multiple ailments, not interested in travelling and developing new interests and lifestyles. Often they lived close to family, their main activity being involvement with grandchildren and partaking of family life. A few of them, the adventurous and those who could afford it, moved to states like Arizona and Florida to live in retirement communities. These, however, were the exception, not the norm.

The idea of retirement today is quite different. A whole new industry has sprung out to cater to this growing segment of the population. A lot of people, at retirement, are still vibrant, healthy and full of energy, so this new industry is busy offering new housing facilities, new amenities, new opportunities to explore and be active in, and new medical care.

The new retirees tend to regard retirement as the time when they finally can do all the things they had to put aside when they were too busy working at their jobs and raising a family. It’s not surprising, therefore, that the ideas, plans and expectations of retirement are now quite different than what they used to be.

Because of all these differences – and because people live longer, hence they have more retirement years ahead of them – planning for retirement is an extremely important part of reaching this stage in life.

In most studies that address what makes people happy two elements are constantly reported as fundamental: having a purpose and being connected to loved ones. So, whatever you plan for your retirement, these two elements need to play a central role in it.

Having a purpose is an important driving force in selecting what we want to do and how to do it. When we work, whether we are professionals, have a trade or are stay-home parents, we like to feel that our work makes a difference. Perhaps we help people in need, or raise organic vegetables in our garden and sell them to the local farmer’s market. Or, we work in an office, or answer the phones, or clean houses, or do surgery. Or, we choose to raise our kids and spend many years involved in PTOs, immersed in after school activities and teenage angst. Whatever we do, we have a purpose, and this drives us to continue to do what we are doing …or change it, if we feel we don’t contribute enough.

As you plan your retirement, think of what purpose you want your days to have: do you want to learn new skills? Or, do you want to volunteer and give back to your community? Do you want to travel, and share with your local school the slides and experiences from your trips? Do you want to get more involved in your neighborhood? Do you want to do philanthropic work? Whatever you do, think of what purpose your choice will provide in your life and then ask yourself if this is what you want.

Retirement without any planning may lead to boredom, disorganization, and at times isolation and depression.

Being connected to loved ones is another important element that needs to be included in any retirement plan worth exploring. Isolation, particularly as we age, is a very hard thing to tolerate. Loved ones don’t necessarily have to be members of your biological family. They could be good friends, neighbors, fellows in the church or synagogue you attend. They can be people with similar interests to yours, with whom you resonate and feel close. Choosing a community where you can find the kind of neighborhood spirit that makes you feel ‘at home’ is very important, as isolation is dreadful, particularly as we age. Stay involved in their lives. Ask what’s going on with them. Be interested.

If you have planned your retirement right, you will get up each morning looking forward to a new day. You will be active, but not overwhelmingly so. You will feel positive. You will be better able to stay in the present and enjoy it, rather than worrying about what the future will be like for you.

The number one thing we can do is to monitor the level of stress in our lives.

When we look at ways of improving our lives, we tend to focus on physical changes like losing weight, being more active, looking better, but we tend to forget a part of our body that is central to all of this: our brain.

What can we do to maintain our brain in good health?

The number one thing we can do is to monitor the level of stress in our lives. Many studies have shown how stress can interfere with our brain’s healthy functioning and cause irreversible damage to it if it continues. When we are stressed, we cannot tune things out; we worry excessively; we obsess about what we need to do to manage the stress, and we cannot relax. Even when we sleep, we don’t give a chance to our brain to process all that happened during the day and be ready for the next day’s challenges.

Our body rests when we sit on a comfortable chair or lay down, when we take a bubble bath or when we sleep, but our brain never stops working, no matter what we do. So, if our sleep is not restful, for instance, in the morning our brain is already tired and weighted down by the many thoughts, concerns, preoccupations and emotions we dealt with throughout the night, even before we face new ones. Additionally, we know that when we are in the throws of emotions, our thinking abilities become less sharp and we tend to forget or confuse things more easily, our grasp of problems and our focus and concentration being diminished by the emotional state we are in.

So, what can we do to give our brain a well deserved rest?

Find a comfortable place to be, and try to clear your mind of all the thoughts and feelings that are there. Focus on your breath, in and out of your body slowly, and, whenever thoughts come to mind, gently push them aside and re-focus on your breaths, in-out, in-out, in-out. You will be surprised at finding yourself more relaxed, clear-minded and better focused. Just five minutes a day of this exercise will do a lot of good to your brain and, by extension, to your body as well.

We want our children to have golden memories of the holidays that they will cherish for the rest of their lives. We want family members who don’t get along with one another to temporarily stop their hostilities for the sake of meeting the universal expectations of happiness and harmony. We want the house to look perfectly decorated and totally organized and clean (two impossible tasks if you have to live in it!) We want the food to look like prepared by a five star restaurant, and everybody around the table on their best behavior.

Well, let me yell you: this is a fantasy, a nice one I should add, but a fantasy nonetheless. If you have been focusing entirely on everything looking perfect, by the time the holidays come around you most probably won’t have the energy to enjoy the gifts that what this season brings. You have been looking for rewards in the wrong place; you have been looking for the wrong thing and you will be disappointed.

In order to have fun and enjoy this season, all of us need to be more realistic in our goals and be more aware of our motivations. Are we going out of our way to clean, cook, wash, organize, prepare because we want to be complimented? Or is it because we want our friends and family to think our gathering is better than anyone else’s?  Or our gifts the cleverest, most appropriate, original, creative and the smartest? Do we want people to be amazed by everything we did, and how well and talk about us to family and friends? In the end, what are we doing all this work for? For the people who will benefit from it or for ourselves?

Let’s think about this seriously for a moment and let’s be honest, as nobody is really listening now. It’s just you and me. These holidays have become bigger and bigger through the years, and in the process have lost their original meanings. Most of us have a lot to be thankful for, if we look in the right places for it. We are lucky if we have some family or friends we love; if we have the opportunity to get together with them and share some moments of enjoyment and fun. After all, the holidays are not about expensive gifts and beautifully decorated houses, but about PEOPLE. They are times in which we let those close to us know how much we love, appreciate and cherish having them in our lives. This is the spirit of the holidays and this is what counts. The rest is just fluff.

So, reassess what you want to do and what is the message you want to give yourself and people around you. Eliminate everything else that will keep you too busy, burn too much of your money and in the end leave you disappointed because it does not provide the emotional gifts you want in your life.

Happy Holidays

About 7% of the population in the U.S. suffers from social anxiety disorder. This is a condition that can be so crippling that people affected by it cannot function in social situations at all. People suffering from social anxiety disorders are literally paralyzed by terror. This fear is usually of embarrassing themselves in front of people and feeling humiliated by the situation. They panic; their hearts race; they sweat; they get dry mouths, feel shaky, nauseous and may lose their voices. Because of the high anxiety they are experiencing, they may forget everything they know, going blank and temporarily losing their abilities to think clearly and discuss issues, even when they are very familiar with them. This contributes to their already negative feelings about themselves, making them more anxious, in a vicious cycle that makes them feel worse and worse about themselves.

Only 50% of social anxiety disorder sufferers seek professional help. The rest isolate themselves and avoid social situations as much as they can in order to evade the stigma that is associated with this condition. Because of the limited social exposure, these people are more likely than others to drop out of school, particularly if they are teenagers, leave jobs that involve a certain amount of social interactions, and miss opportunities for advancement because they don’t want others to know how they feel. They are even less likely to get involved in close intimate relationships, a lot of them living alone, at the social fringes of society, where they feel safer.

Social anxiety disorder typically starts in childhood, at around ages
9-10, as children begin to approach puberty. As they continue to grow, their fears very often get worse. Most adolescents experience times of shyness and self-consciousness. However, adolescents with social anxiety disorder experience much more severe symptoms in social situations. These persist most of the time and deeply affect their academic performance and social life.

Neurological studies of the brain indicate that people who suffer from social anxiety have a part of the brain – the amygdala – that is more active than usual. The amygdala is involved in processing emotions, in particular fear. Greater activity in the amygdala, therefore, indicates that people who suffer from social anxiety are highly sensitive to social situations that they experience as scary and unsafe.

As they become adults, their social fears, if left untreated, do not decrease. These people learn to live with their fears by avoiding stressful situations where such fears may get exposed, and tend to select activities and occupations that do not require a lot of social contact. As they continue to feel awkward in social situations, they progressively reduce their social activities, until they end up spending most of their time alone.

Well, the good news is that they should not have to suffer so much. Psychotherapy and medications (some antidepressants, beta blockers and some anti-anxiety) can relieve most of the symptoms sufferers from social anxiety experience, thus allowing them to “experiment” more with social situations. In this way, they gradually desensitize themselves from the anticipated risks and dangers of social situations. They can thus become more comfortable with others and develop more balanced social lives.