“Mindfulness has helped me succeed in almost every dimension of my life. By stopping regularly to look inward and become aware of my mental state, I stay connected to the source of my actions and thoughts and can guide them with considerably more intention.” Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook Co-founder)
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Skills
This therapy is based on Marsha M. Lineham's Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. DBT is a behavioral oriented therapy combines standard cognitive-behavioral techniques and reality-testing while focusing on:
- Increasing interpersonal effectiveness
- Decreasing crisis and mental health distress
- Teaching skills for managing distress and impulsiveness
DBT combines four comprehensive models
1) Mindfulness--the capacity to pay attention, nonjudgementally, to the present moment
2) Distress Tolerance—the ability to accept, in a non-evaluative and nonjudgemental fashion, both oneself and the current situation
3) Interpersonal Effectiveness—the effective strategies for asking for what one needs, saying no, and coping with interpersonal conflict
4) E motional Regulation—the effective strategies for learning to regulate ones emotions:
- Identifying and labeling emotions
- Identifying obstacles to changing emotions
- Reducing vulnerability to emotion mind
- Increasing positive emotional events
- Increasing mindfulness to current emotions
- Taking opposite action
- Applying distress tolerance techniques
For research showing the benefits of DBT please click here
Importance of Meditation: "A Wondering Mind is an Unhappy Mind "
Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert (2010) studied the effects "mind wandering" had on happiness. "Mind wandering" occurs when an individual thinks about past events, what might happen in the future or what will never happen at all. Past research suggests this is the brain's natural state. Their study concluded that:
1) People's mind wander frequently, regardless of what they were doing.
2) People were less happy when their minds wandered.
3) What people were thinking, rather than doing, was a better predictor of their happiness.
This research suggests that "a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost". DBT incorporates mindfulness and improves an individual's ability to stay in the present and control "mind wandering", thus having the potential to increase happiness.
