Action for Happiness – September 2021
The staff in Counseling and Wellness Services wishes everyone a happy and healthy end to the Summer 2021 semester here at Hudson Valley Community College!
Counseling and Wellness Services staff members are available Monday – Friday from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. (via phone or Zoom sessions) for counseling, consultation and referral needs of currently registered students, but we also wanted to share additional virtual resources that may be beneficial.
Action for Happiness is a movement of people committed to building a happier and more caring society. The movement promotes a way of life in which people care less about what they can get just for themselves and more about the happiness of others.
Please visit the Action for Happiness website for more information and resources. (The website is the source of information for this article.)
Action for Happiness creates monthly action calendars (see below) that are “packed with actions you can take to help create a happier and kinder world.” Each month, Counseling and Wellness Services will highlight these action calendars to facilitate a happier and kinder state of being for our campus community.
Self-Care September
Self-care isn’t selfish, it’s essential.
No-one’s perfect. But so often we compare our insides to other people’s outsides. This month we’re encouraging everyone to be kinder to themselves (as well as others), especially when things go wrong. Self-care increases our resilience and helps us get more out of life. It also helps us accept others as they are.
Click here for the Self-Care September Calendar PDF.
Self-Care
Having constant criticism in our heads about not being good enough is a sure way to be unhappy. This doesn’t mean we should ignore our weaker areas or bad stuff that happens, but it does mean accepting that no-one is perfect, us included. It means putting our imperfections (and things that happen to us) into perspective — seeing them as normal rather than out of the ordinary. And it means a shift of focus, from what we don’t have or can’t do to what we have or can do.
Self-Acceptance Unpacked
Psychologists describe two parts to our well-being — feeling good (perhaps what we typically think of as happiness) and functioning well. Functioning well is thought to be made up of a number of key psychological factors that contribute to how good or happy we feel. One of these factors is self-esteem or self-acceptance
Self-esteem or feeling positive about ourselves has long been a subject of psychological study. Self-acceptance expands this concept to: knowing our strengths and our weaknesses, coming to terms with our past and feeling okay or good about ourselves while being aware of our limitations. Importantly, self-acceptance doesn’t mean ignoring what we don’t do well or mistakes we’ve made, but it’s about working with rather than against ourselves.
Albert Ellis, a renowned psychologist, described two choices: accepting ourselves conditionally (i.e. only under certain conditions, for example when we succeed) or unconditionally (under all circumstances). The first choice he says “is deadly.” If we don’t fulfil the conditions we set for ourselves and so fail, we think of ourselves as a loser or good for nothing rather than accepting failing as a normal part of life and learning from it.
If we are low on self-acceptance, we can be troubled by aspects of who we think we are and long to be something or someone different. This can lead to dwelling more on what’s wrong with us or what we aren’t, leading to a lot of negative self-talk. And this really gets in the way of making the most of ourselves, and of our happiness.
The Problems with Self-Esteem
There is a lot of scientific evidence that people with a balanced sense of self-worth or self-esteem (judging that we are good and valuable), experience more happiness and optimism and less negativity, depression and anxiety than those with low self-esteem.
But self-esteem can also be problematic. Indeed Martin Seligman, a “father'” of positive psychology, has warned of the dangers caused by overly inflating the positive side of ourselves. For example, it can lead to increasing our sensitivity to negative feedback, making self-improvement difficult, and can causing anger and aggression when our ego is threatened.
Self-esteem (as opposed to self-acceptance) is typically based on judgments of how good we are within specific areas of our lives, for example our appearance or our performance at work, school or at a particular activity. Because these judgements are dependent on how well we are doing in that area, how good we feel fluctuates based on our latest success or failure.
Self-esteem also means that our judgment of how good we are is relative to other people, so it can lead to a sense of superiority over and ulimately separation from others. Since our connections with others are a key source of happiness, having self-esteem that is too high isn’t always a good thing.
Being More Compassionate with Ourselves
We all know the expression “treat others as you would wish to be treated,” but perhaps it also needs to be reversed. We give ourselves a hard time for things we would be compassionate toward in others. Think of a close friend failing to get a promotion. We don’t tell them “you’re no good” or “you’ll never get anywhere.” Chances are we’d say “you can try again next time.”
Recently, modern psychology and neuroscience has started to explore “self-compassion” which has been a Buddhist concept for thousands of years. Research studies are showing that self-compassion is associated with greater happiness, optimism, curiosity, resilience and reduced depression and anxiety, suggesting it has all the benefits (and more) of self-esteem, but fewer of the downsides. For example, it seems to promote building connections with others.
Self-compassion is defined as having three overlapping parts:
- Being kind and understanding to ourselves in instances of suffering or perceived inadequacy;
- A sense of common humanity, recognizing that pain and failure are unavoidable aspects of life for all human beings; and
- A balanced awareness of our emotions-the ability to face (rather than avoid) painful thoughts and feelings, but without exaggeration, drama or self-pity.
Kirstin Neff, a leading psychologist in the study of self-compassion, says that if we think that we are the only people to mess up or not be good at something, this makes us feel inadequate and can lead to feelings of shame, which causes us to cut ourselves off from others. In contrast, if we realize self doubt is something everyone feels at times in their lives, it gives us a sense of being connected to others and enables us to have the same caring, kindness and concern towards ourselves as we do for those close to us. In other words she says, self-compassion “is available precisely when self-esteem fails us.”
Neff’s and others’ studies also show that self-compassion promotes self-improvement and reduces comparison to others (which is very detrimental to our happiness). It helps put our own issues in perspective and so reduces immobilizing self-pity. Because it is about caring about ourselves being self-compassionate motivates us to work through challenges and learn from mistakes. Indeed, it has been shown to be positively related to developing new skills and knowledge.
Self-acceptance and compassion are also closely related to mindfulness and meditation.
Wishing you a strong Self-Care September!
Counseling and Wellness Services
CTR 270
(518) 629-7320
counseling@hvcc.edu
Published: Wed, 01 Sep 2021 11:35:57 +0000 by k.weeks