How to get unstuck | Terry Singh | TEDxYYC

thank you I have no ideas worth sharing so this is going to be a little awkward now that that's not true but sometimes I feel that way sometimes I feel like I have no ideas we're sharing and in fact I think that's true of all of us so what do we do when we feel like we have no ideas we're cheering when we're not feeling inspired and the idea of contagious inspiration seems unreachable maybe even unrecognizable this state of mind which I'm going to be calling the experience of being stuck is a feeling we've all struggled with at one time or another so we all know how frustrating that it can be now sometimes our experience of being stuck is relatively fleeting and we're able to work through it and continue on with our lives with with relatively little disturbance now sometimes getting unstuck takes a little bit longer and we go through a bit of a down period of time in which we feel uninspired and we might lose focus of or interest in our goals and things that we normally enjoy and for some of us being stuck is a sensation that takes hold of us with such intensity and for such a length of time that it actually begins to feel normal and what we do is we start to define ourselves according to our experience of being stuck now these prolonged periods of stuckness are what we've agreed to call mental illness I'm a clinical psychologist which means that I spend most of my workday talking to people about their experiences in the hope that I can help them work towards change now the struggles I hear about on a daily basis vary quite widely some of the folks I talk to are working through a diagnosable mental illness others are going through a difficult time or a down period and still others are just having a difficulty adjusting to a more recent change often a sudden change but what they all have in common is this experience of being stuck let me give you an example of what I mean a few years ago I met a woman let's call her Ana and she'd wake up every morning and immediately be overwhelmed by wave upon wave of anxiety and panic now sometimes some mornings Ana would feel that the anxiety was related to her work and she would attempt to cope by it by to cope with it by making a plan to go into work early and tackle those assignments that she was most concerned about in the hopes that her anxiety would subside now other times she'd feel the anxiety was related to her personal life and in those cases she'd attempt to deal with it by avoiding those social obligations that she felt were causing her to panic but nothing seemed to help and when I met her the anxiety attacks were as frequent as ever Ana was stuck so how do we get unstuck well the first thing we need to understand is that getting unstuck is not the same thing as feeling better or successfully changing getting unstuck is the first step that we take towards change and to the person feeling stuck it's actually more important to get unstuck that it is to feel better much in the same way that someone feeling despair would feel that it's more important to stop feeling despair than it is to feel happiness you see both goals of course are important but one is more pressing and one is dependent on the other you have to stop feeling despair before you can feel any sort of meaningful and lasting happiness now this distinction is important because too often when we're feeling stuck we make the mistake of leaping ahead and seeking out a solution before we've had a chance to fully experience what the problem is so often once we become aware of this most the most salient and uncomfortable aspect of our experience what we do is we immediately key and on that and look at us look for a solution don't we but if you're stuck what I'm going to suggest is the best way to begin to get unstuck is to focus on your experience of be being stuck rather than immediately looking for a solution you have to arrive at a place before you can leave it now I encouraged Anna to focus on her experience of anxiety in this way and she soon made an important discovery these overwhelming feelings of anxiety and panic actually started in her body so they began as primarily physiological in nature so she felt her chest tightening when she would wake up she would feel warm all over she had butterflies in her stomach physiological and after waking up the and feeling like her body was in a panic what she was doing in just a matter of a few split seconds was reacting to these physical feelings in the most natural way possible she would try to make sense of them by searching for the things in her life that she felt that she was most likely to feel panicked by now some weeks these things would be work-related in some days they were related to her personal life but what became clear to her was that it was not her work life or her personal life that were causing these anxiety attacks instead she was having anxiety attacks and in the process of trying to make sense of them she was unintentionally making them worse or prolonging them by associating them with work life and personal life issues that she assumed must be causing her anxiety when in fact they had nothing to do with her feelings of anxiety at all but this instinctive sort of search for a solution to the anxiety was helping to keep her stuck now in my day-to-day clinical work I try to help people through the use of talk therapy or psychotherapy and most of us have some idea of what this looks like right from a distance therapy looks like two people having a conversation if you're watching a movie maybe one's lying on some sort of strange and elaborate couch right we know what this looks like now of course two people talking is something that we're all intimately familiar with but the idea of someone but the idea of talking to someone in the setting of like psychotherapy makes this familiar act feel strange somehow foreign or mysterious doesn't it now a lot of times we have this feeling because we're uncomfortable with what with what the therapist may know or may come to find out about us but I want to let you in on a secret which really shouldn't be a secret at all psychotherapy doesn't help people get unstuck because of what the therapist knows it helps people to get unstuck because of what the person who is stuck knows there are of course many different kinds of therapy but what they all have in common is this underlying idea that our experience is far richer than we give it credit for and paying greater attention to the whole of our experience is that first step towards change let me show you what I mean I'd like everyone listening here to take a moment right now and reflect on their experience of this moment right now go ahead I'll wait how would you describe your experience of this moment how did you just describe it to yourself maybe some of you are thinking well I'm feeling good maybe some of you went maybe a step beyond I'm feeling good I'm kind of interested it's been awhile since lunch so I'm kind of worried about feeling hangry over the next half hour here right but our descriptions of our experience even when they feel detailed to us are excluding far more information about how we feel then they're including so take a moment now reflect on what you thought your experience was or what you felt your experience was a moment ago did you description include what you were thinking did you have many thoughts or just one thought if you had more than one thought which thought was the most prominent was this something you thought about what about your behavior did anyone take that into account did anyone consider their physical sensations how their body's feeling how many of you considered your emotions not only their presence or their absence but also the intensity of the emotions you were feeling and is the intensity of anyone's annoyance increasing with my non-stop line of questioning what I'm trying to demonstrate is that if you're going to pay more attention to your experience in order to get unstuck it's important not to take shortcuts so for example if I were to tell you right now I'm feeling really anxious what would you know about my experience you might guess that I felt nervous some of you might be looking to see if my palms are sweating some of you may concoct sort of an elaborate scenario in which I'm sort of cowering in the corner and repeating over and over to myself like please don't follow me please above it oh my god please all of it right but this is important because guessing would be all that you'd be able to do right because my anxiety is different than your anxiety different than his anxiety different than her anxiety our use of the word anxiety is a shortcut as are all emotion words the word anxiety is basically just a convenient way of expressing this sort of general sense of sweaty nervousness and fear that we all sort of understand by the word but it's precisely because of its convenience and its general nature that the word anxiety is not useful in helping to me me to get unstuck it cannot possibly convey the complexity and specificity of what I'm feeling like I scream I scream emotions come in flavors and some emotion flavors as it turns out are much more useful than others when it comes to getting unstuck for example if you tell me that you're feeling angry I wouldn't have much of a sense of your experience but if you tell me more if you tell me that your anger is causing you to sort of push others away to reject other people I would know from the research on psychotherapy process that this kind of rejecting anger isn't going to be very useful in helping you to change but if you told me that your anger was a little bit different if you're the flavour of your anger was actually causing you to confront other people in an assertive way so not aggressive but sort of in a very clear and direct way I'd know that your readiness to change was high you see the same way that there are different kinds of learners most of us tend to be focused on different aspects of our experience now we all know people like this we know people who are sort of more up in their heads right more cerebral we know people who seem to be more in touch with their emotions we know people who tend to interpret everything no matter what the case may be they interpret everything through the effects on their bodies I know I'm not thinking about my mother when I say this I'm uh she's actually there and I'm not thinking about it but anyway okay okay I'd let's be clear about this before I move forward right being being attuned to certain aspects of our experience is a strength but it can also leave us with blind spots these blind spots in our experience and taking a closer look at these neglected aspects of our experience is often a key to unlocking change not long ago I heard a story which I loved telling about a man who went to see a therapist he was all jittery and frantic you could tell that something was really bothering him and he went up to that therapist and he said it's my anxiety doc I need help I can't get my thoughts under control anymore and so the two of them started talking and and as the discussion turned to the man's morning he mentioned that he'd had four coffees before beginning his day and the therapist goes ahead and he starts writing all right four cups of coffee but he was interrupted the man says no no no doc not four cups of coffee four pots of coffee four pots of coffee dude you don't have an anxiety issue you have a caffeine addiction the dude part I threw in myself okay so - this man anxiety was strictly an internal affair right anxiety to him meant how he was thinking how he was feeling and because he was solely focused on that internal aspect of his anxiety he overlooked other information that was available to him write his caffeine intake and how that behavior was impacting his physical body which in turn was impacting his thoughts and his emotions all of the components of our experience are connected now with the benefit of hindsight sometimes getting unstuck and be as straightforward as realizing the drinking for pots of coffee in the morning is not likely to help with your anxiety issue more often however the key to the key to getting unstuck is more nuanced and can lie in that split second difference between feeling physiologically anxious immediately after waking up and our minds attempt to make sense of why we might be feeling this way for our friend Ana who is struggling with the early morning anxiety the crucial realization that these feelings began in her body was the beginning of her journey towards overcoming these attacks with myself as a guide she gradually got better and better at identifying her anxiety as a set of bodily sensations and resisting the urge to fix it by coming up with solutions which of course in this case were released just serving to perpetuate the attacks and in doing so she was able to see her anxiety for what it was and work on reducing it in a targeted way and for the remainder of our time together I got the had the distinct pleasure and opportunity of watching as her anxiety gradually decreased until it was no longer an issue for her and so this ultimately is the good news paying attention to your experience is a skill just like riding a bike the more that we practice paying attention to our experience in our daily lives the better that we get at it and the better that we get at it the less likely we are to get stuck when we're faced with a problem now study after study tells us that paying more attention to our experience can help us to gain greater control of an insight into our own emotions and our reactions to events in our day-to-day lives it can increase our tolerance to sudden changes and it can even improve our relationship with other people in fact it's my view that increasing your awareness of the whole of your experience is quite literally preventive medicine time and time again I've been fortunate enough to witness the profound positive effects of this seemingly small and subtle shift and I hope that my words today encourage you to try doing this when you're feeling stuck you might be surprised to learn just how much you already know thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 637,816

Rating: 4.6226311 out of 5

Keywords: tedx talks, Career/Life Development, Canada, ted talks, ted, English, tedx talk, tedx, ted talk, Life, TEDxTalks, ted x

Id: v2JXDPKohaQ

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 22 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/nitt]

This made a lot of sense. For example if you have social anxiety and feel stuck. You may just get rid of the social anxiety by avoiding those interactions, but you won't solve anything. To me, this is the hardest thing because you have to actually face the things that make you feel badly to overcome them.

It is a simple thing on paper. It is a struggle to put it into practice and not fall back into old stuck patterns of behavior or thinking.

[u/awhaling]

I enjoyed the part about the words not effectively conveying an accurate meaning.

That was cool, in my opinion.!