Transcript - From Stress to Stillness With Dr. Seth J. Gillihan

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: From Stress to Stillness With Dr. Seth J. Gillihan

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 541 of Live Happy Now. What if you had an easy way to instantly reset your emotions whenever you’re feeling stressed and anxious? Well, this week’s guest is here to tell us how to do that. I’m your host, Paula Felps, and this week, I’m talking with Dr. Seth J. Gillihan about his latest book, Your Daily Reset: 366 Practical Exercises to Reduce Anxiety and Manage Stress Using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Seth, a licensed psychologist in private practice, has created this book to be a daily companion to help stop the negative spirals of thoughts and emotions. From everyday worries to peak anxiety moments, his book offers the tools you need to break free from those familiar patterns. Let’s have a listen.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:53] PF: Seth, thank you so much for joining me here today.

[0:00:55] SG: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

[0:00:58] PF: I’m really excited to talk. You have written a great book, and it offers a fantastic collection that really helps us get through an entire year. Before we dive into talking about how this came about, could you tell us what your daily reset is all about?

[0:01:13] SG: Yes. This is 365, or 366 depending on the year, daily practices that a person can do that will help them to manage anxiety and stress. The exercises are all very brief. They’re intended to be done in the limited time that most of us seem to have for managing our mental health. It’s meant to come back to every day for a little, as we say, a little reset.

[0:01:40] PF: That’s what really impressed me about it. I’ve received books throughout the years, where it’s like, one page a day, or sometimes one chapter a day, and I end up starting that, and then it just becomes too much. It’s like, I don’t have that amount of time. Yours, we’re talking a paragraph, or sometimes just a couple of sentences. Tell us how simple that is.

[0:02:00] SG: Yeah. Yeah. Really, it’s, I mean, I kept track of it as I was writing. I don’t remember exactly. But on average, it’s maybe 35 words or so, so two or three sentences. I evolved into this, I guess, from my work as a therapist where I would work with people in a session and then work with them on things that they could do between sessions. I think of it as the other 167 hours out of the week. You’d have some continuity, so the insights that a person is having within that hour then get carried through to where it really matters in a person’s moment-to-moment life.

That evolved into, I was making card decks for a while that it’s the same idea, one a day. I think, those can be really helpful and there was a really good response to those. I wanted to see if I could maybe abbreviate the exercises even a little bit more, make them more – what I’m always aiming for is to make the practices portable, so they come right into a person’s life. Again, in that moment when you actually need a mental adjustment, or some kind of reminder of something that you probably already know.

What I really love about the calendar aspect of it, syncing out the exercises to the days, is that I can think about it in terms of what a person is doing from one day to the next. There can be a variety of exercises built in. In a way, the card deck, it doesn’t have quite that same structure, because the cards can be shuffled around and used all different ways. That’s really how this evolved.

[0:03:43] PF: I can really see it as being something you keep by your bedside. When you wake up, that can be that first thought that you put into your head for the day. That’s an incredible way to wake up and just get things started.

[0:03:58] SG: Yeah. I think morning is a great time to have that little reset. A person can, if they wanted to, maybe take a picture with their smartphone and bring with them throughout the day. The exercises are brief enough that I think it wouldn’t be a bad thing to repeat them multiple times throughout the day. Some of them have explicit reminders about, come back to this exercise as often as you need to today.

[0:04:23] PF: These are all rooted in cognitive behavioral therapy. For those who aren’t familiar with that, will you tell us what CBT is?

[0:04:31] SG: Yes. Yeah. It’s a way of linking together your thoughts, your feelings and your actions. When we understand how our thoughts, feelings and actions all fit together, then things make a lot more sense, because we recognize like, “Oh, I was feeling some way.” That had a lot to do with the thoughts that I was thinking. Those thoughts, in turn, were affecting my actions. Our actions, as I’m sure listeners know, feedback into our thoughts. If there’s something that scares me and I don’t do it, if I shy away from it, that’s probably going to strengthen a thought I have about myself, because maybe I can’t face that, or it’s overwhelming.

When we understand all those connections, then the real strength in CBT is in having a structured approach for addressing those things, so I can work more systematically and effectively with my thoughts. I can choose actions that lead me toward my goals, instead of away from my goals.

[0:05:37] PF: This is such an effective roadmap, really, to walk through. Even though it’s done for a full year, you don’t have to wait till January and start it then. Tell us a little bit about how that’s set up. You can really jump in anytime. You can miss a day or two. Talk about how that is all designed.

[0:05:57] SG: Yeah. Yeah, that’s something we thought a lot about, because there’s something nice about making a book progressive and systematics that it builds on itself. At the same time, that does create the demand that we have to start at point A. You have to start January 1st. Or if not, you’ve missed out. You have to catch up at that point. Or, as you’re suggesting, if you miss a couple days, then you have to review those days that you’re current. What I decided is to just make it the thing you can pick up at any point.

One thing I should add that’s an important component of the CBT approach that I use and that is really embodied in the book is that it incorporates what’s come to be known as the third wave of CBT, which is mindfulness and acceptance-based approaches. There’s a lot of that in there. Because there’s a lot we can do in working with our thoughts and our actions in constructive ways. As everyone knows, there’s some stuff in life that we can’t think our way through. We don’t have ultimate control over the things that happen to us. Some things, we can’t really change. That’s a lot of where mindfulness can be most effective, is in helping us to be in our lives exactly as they are, as messy as they might be, which life can be a lot.

[0:07:25] PF: Yeah. Yeah, it definitely can. Right now, a lot of people are feeling that. As you designed it, did you take into account the different seasons of the year, or anything like that, say, like with the holidays?

[0:07:37] SG: Yes. Yeah. As much as possible, we tried to match up some of the exercises to specific holidays that they fall on. On Valentine’s Day, for example, we might do one around, some kind of love theme, probably self-love, because obviously, if it’s something about your significant other, like not everybody has a significant other. Those kinds of things, I think, I like going with the meeting a person where they already are, I guess, is a way of thinking about it.

Another one that comes to mind in a broader sense is there’s an exercise I’ll encourage people to do sometimes, where – and it’s grounded in mindfulness of just paying attention and tuning in to what the seasons are doing. There’s a certain feel in the air. Like this season that we’re in right now as we’re recording this. There’s a way that the air feels and smells. There’s a progression of the light that’s different this time of year than others. Leaves and foliage look different. Animals are doing different things. With a card that’s not linked to a day, I can just say, pay attention to the seasons.

If I’m doing it this time of year in the northern hemisphere, I can say, on this late summer day, or specifically, this September 4th day of this year, that’s the only day it will ever be exactly this day in the history of time. What do you notice? What stands out on this day? Yeah. Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up. I think that the syncing of activities and exercises with seasons and days, I think, is a nice feature of it.

[0:09:21] PF: One thing that I thought about is we do get busy, we do put aside our practices and our habits sometimes, but for them to know, even if they’ve put this down for a while, and they can come back and say, it is, “Oh, it’s fall, and I have a little bit more time in this schedule of mine, and I’m going to resume this and get it through.” I think it’s very accommodating to that, to our human tendency to just get too busy to follow through on what we want to do.

[0:09:49] SG: Yeah. There is such a tendency once we fall off to not get back on. I think not just out of habit, we fall out of the habit, but I think there can be a sense of, “I’ve failed. I can’t go back to it now. I’m not allowed to.” Or, I don’t know, “I don’t deserve to,” or some kind of story gets in the way of getting back on when it’s right there. We could just get right back to it. Speaking of getting back to things, I picked up Banjo again recently. I was a beginner banjo player for many years, and now I’m a beginner banjo player again. After not playing for a while, and I definitely had that feeling of like, yeah, I haven’t played for a while, so I’m not going to get back to it, even though I would have an impulse to. Then one of the videos that I was watching recently with the instructor that I follow was saying that, something like, restarts are always free. Something about that.

[0:10:46] PF: Oh, I love that.

[0:10:47] SG: Yeah. Yeah. I love that, too. I was like, oh, even if I miss a day, or a week, or whatever, you can always pick it up. There’s no penalty. You don’t have to earn it, or claw your way back. You just pick it up. Just pick up where you are.

[0:10:59] PF: I love that approach. I love that mindset, because there is no judgment. You haven’t lost anything. Maybe a little bit of time. But you can just restart wherever you are. I do like that.

[0:11:12] SG: Yeah. I’ve often thought of it as like, train tracks that are – there’s always a parallel track. The mental model that I have implicitly is if I’ve gone in the wrong direction for too long, then I can’t just – I can’t just hop back on. I have to, again, that idea of clawing my way back to where I was, to pick up again and, oh, it’s so much work. I have to get back there. Whether it’s exercise, or meditation, or playing the banjo. The train track idea for me says, you don’t have to work your way back anywhere. It’s just right there. Just step on the other track. It’s always right next to you. The flip side is that you can always jump tracks and go in the wrong direction, but we can always get back on.

[0:12:01] PF: I love that. You talked about, you tried different things. You did the cards. Why was this the right time to do the book?

[0:12:08] SG: Really, how this developed is I have a Substack newsletter, and I was offering subscribers these month-long plans that were simple exercises, very similar actually to what ended up in the book. There was a really nice response to that, I think to the regularity of it and the continuity of it. I was using a lot of them in my own life. I thought, you know what? Why a week or a month, or two weeks Why not a full year? Why not have it be something that’s available for every day? That’s where it came from. I talked to my agent about it. We pitched it to publishers and they said, “Yeah. Sounds like a nice idea.”

[0:12:53] PF: We’ll be right back with more of Live Happy Now.

[BREAK]

[0:13:02] PF: Now, let’s hear more from Seth J. Gillihan.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]

[0:13:05] PF: There were several takeaways from your book that really jumped out at me. One of the things was like, how your book teaches us to embrace anxiety rather than fight it. This is a time of tremendous anxiety for so many people out there. Can you tell us cliff note version of how we’re supposed to learn to embrace our anxiety, rather than running from it, or fighting it?

[0:13:30] SG: Yeah, such an important question. There’s so many ways to address anxiety now. Therapy, medications, TikTok. People are describing all kinds of things on social media. There can be this idea of like, “Oh, if I just get this right, then I won’t feel anxious.” Unfortunately, that’s not true, and that belief then can lead to unnecessary tension and resistance and self-criticism and a sense of, if I’m feeling anxious, I must be doing something wrong. I have to make myself stop feeling anxious. But that just leads to this false expectation and a sense of responsibility that really shouldn’t be ours. It’s not our responsibility to completely control our emotions, which tend to have a mind of their own.

What I try to focus on and I think what a lot of people in CBT emphasize is you’re going to feel anxious. You can’t perfectly manage your anxiety. What can you do that’s going to give you the best chance of having the life that you want, regardless of what anxiety might be doing? That’s really what I emphasize in this book.

[0:14:49] PF: For people who are really struggling with it from a standpoint of all the things that are going on around us in the world, I know a lot of people who are in turmoil over just the state of our world right now. Obviously, that is something we can’t change. What’s a practice, or a technique that they can use to step back and work with that?

[0:15:10] SG: Yeah, a couple of things come to mind, Paula. One is that so much of what we see in the world has to do with what we’re attending to. If we’re filling our minds with the divisiveness and the outrage so much of what social media feeds on, then that’s going to give us not a completely inaccurate view of the world, but a pretty biased view. One thing I think we can do is be careful about the diet that we’re feeding our minds. The other thing, I think, is to not discount the good that we can do. God knows, I can’t control what happens in Washington, but I can choose whether or not I become one more voice that’s feeding into that cycle, and that’s not nothing.

[0:15:59] PF: What about self-compassion? You say that plays a pretty significant role in this, too. Can you dive into that?

[0:16:05] SG: Yes. Yes, that’s such a big one. I see it as something that even the practices in the book that don’t specifically address self-compassion, it’s a big part of what motivates what I’m doing and what I really want people to take from the resources I create, from the therapy that I do is we just tend to be so hard on ourselves in ways that I think are really out of line with reality. I think we tend to see ourselves more harshly than we see others, not because – I don’t think it’s because we’re seeing ourselves more clearly and we see other people. I think it’s just that we, for various reasons, it’s easy for us to fall into the opposite of self-compassion, self-criticism.

[0:16:52] PF: We get very judgmental very, very fast.

[0:16:54] SG: Yes, yes. So quickly, so effortlessly, automatically. Yet, this is where mindfulness, I think, can be so helpful. There’s this deep well of love and goodwill that’s available to us, whether it comes from people, or from our faith, tradition, or just from connecting to, thankfully, what seems to emerge from meditative practices is this awareness that there’s something fundamental about love, and that we are fully accepted exactly as we are. When we have that awareness, I think it’s not one data point among many. I think it can really be a foundational shift to recognize like, oh, I don’t have to earn my place in this universe. That in fact, the universe, or God, or whatever wanted me to be here to occupy this space so much it made room for me, and it called me forth into being. Oh, my God. That’s a big shift from assuming that everything I do is tainted with my wrongness.

[0:18:09] PF: Is there an exercise that you recommend for developing self-compassion?

[0:18:14] SG: Well, one of the exercises is designed around the explicit step-by-step process of self-compassion, which involves making room for our experience instead of saying, “I shouldn’t be feeling this way, or I shouldn’t have thought that.” Connecting to the realization that what we’re experiencing is common to humanity. Like, if, “Oh, I’m going to loan me right now.” Yes, who in all of time that humans have been here has not experienced loneliness at some point? Connecting with that sense of shared humanity is a crucial part of self-compassion.

Then, not fully identifying, or equating myself with the way that I’m feeling is the third part. Having some perspective on – I’ll give you an example. This was a few months ago. I was having a rough day. May have been one of these days, where I wasn’t feeling great and had probably some conflict in my relationships and then ended up with a migraine at the end of the day. All of a sudden, I get the visual aura. I can’t see things. I’m like, oh, I just have to get in bed. I felt so defeated.

I’m lying there in bed, just feeling defeated and really identifying with that sense of like, this day was so rough and poor me. Then I had this feeling of like, I think probably all of us can relate to this at some point. Like being able to step back and see myself and talk myself through it. The wiser part of me was saying like, “You had a tough day, didn’t you?” I broke down crying at that point. I was like, “Yeah. Yeah, it’s been a hard day.” That was it. It had been a hard day. It wasn’t any better than that, and it wasn’t any worse than that. Just that little bit of perspective on it and really a moment of what felt very compassionate, this compassionate part of me, it was like, yeah, you’re having a tough time, huh? It didn’t make it a nice day, but it really provided a moment of solace in that pain.

[0:20:26] PF: Right. That makes perfect sense. As we mentioned, this book is packed with exercises and practices that people can use. Is there one that you have as a go-to in your life?

[0:20:39] SG: Yes. Yeah. The one that comes to mind, because I do use it so often is, I call it just this. Just this. Our minds are really good at imagining all of our problems all at once, stacking them up. We’ve got this huge stack of things like, “Oh, my God. It’s too much. It’s overwhelming. I can’t control all this. I don’t know how everything’s going to turn out.” Reality is much simpler than that. Only one thing ever happens at a time. Maybe there’s a lot going on, but we can only deal with one thing at a time, and we’re great at dealing with that one thing.

When my mind starts to multiply all the problems it’s imagining, when I remember to, I narrow my focus down to whatever I’m doing in that moment, just this. All I have to do is this. For example, today I had a busy morning in my clinical practice. Then, you and I are speaking after lunch. Then I have several activities for our kids with back-to-school stuff that we have to be a part of, making dinner. None of that is happening right now. The clinical stuff was this morning, The kid stuff is this afternoon. All I need to do right now is just this. It’s talk to you. It’s this moment with you. It’s not even the next question. It’s just what’s happening right now. I know that I can do that.

In fact, there’s something wonderful about what’s happening right now. I get to talk to you. I’ve never met you before. I can tell in a few minutes we’ve had, you’re a lovely person. I have this opportunity to speak about these things. Rather than feeling stressed out about all that stuff, we might actually find something wonderful in the moment, or at least it’ll be just a difficult moment and not more than that.

[0:22:32] PF: I love that. Now, I want to make a little card that says, “Just this,” and put it up on my wall, so I remember that.

[0:22:37] SG: Yeah. Because I know you can do that. You can do just this.

[0:22:40] PF: Yeah. That’ is fantastic. I love it. You’ve been generous enough to give us a free download that we’re going to offer our listeners, so they’ll have a 30-day stress management program, and tell them how they can find the book. What is it that you most hope that readers gain from reading this book?

[0:22:58] SG: It’s comfort. I don’t mean in the sense of not so much like a cushy easy chair comfort, but the comfort is in solace. Life is hard in both senses of the word, or it can be. It can be difficult and it can have those rough edges, or sitting on a – well, I guess, maybe it is that kind of comfort, like sitting on a hard bench, or something. It’s uncomfortable. Finding some comfort lace and peace in a world that often doesn’t make that easy. That’s really what I hope for people.

[0:23:39] PF: This book does that. It is a great tool. It does give us some guidelines for getting through the day in a very quick way. I’m really excited to share it with our listeners. I really appreciate you sitting down with me today and talking about it, because I think it’s something that everyone can benefit from.

[0:23:54] SG: Thank you, Paula. I really appreciate the work that you’re doing, and thank you for this opportunity.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:24:03] PF: That was Dr. Seth J. Gillahin, talking about his new book, Your Daily Reset: 366 Practical Exercises to Reduce Anxiety and Manage Stress Using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. If you’d like to learn more about Seth, follow him on Substack, or get his free 30-day stress reduction plan, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode.

That is all we have time for today. We’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.

[END]

In this episode, you’ll learn:

Why “just this” might be the most powerful phrase for calming overwhelm.
How to restart your mental health habits without guilt or judgment.
A simple framework for embracing anxiety instead of fighting it.

Visit Seth’s website here.

Check out his latest book, Your Daily Reset: 366 Practical Exercises to Reduce Anxiety and Manage Stress Using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Download Seth’s free 30-day Stress Management Program.

Keep up with Seth here:

Substack: https://thinkactbe.substack.com/

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