People who plan their time tend to be happier than people who wander through life being bored or not knowing what they want to do.

• Monitoring Your Daily 'Emotional Bank Balance'
• The 'Face Test' Helps You Face YOUR Feelings
• The Upbeat Cycle of 'Pleasant Activities'
• When Enough Just Isn't Enough
• Discounting
• Fear of Failing
• Taking Time to Enjoy the Harvest of Your Labors

Taking Care of Yourself

Planning is the basic element of taking responsibility for yourself-- and it includes planning for work periods as well as for purposes of enjoyment.

Your mood and feelings about yourself also are directly related to how much time you spend doing things you really enjoy, and being with people whom you enjoy. But "enjoyment" that puts off required work destroys itself--there is satisfaction in getting jobs done. And "enjoyment" that leaves you hung over or with dulled senses can be counterfeit and hollow.

Monitor your "emotional bank balance" each day. Deposits are (1) doing something you really enjoy, (2) having good exchanges with someone close to you and others in your day and (3) getting satisfaction from doing something you need to do.

Consider how alcoholic drinks, mood-related medications, drugs or other substances (even cigarettes) relate to your life and feelings about yourself. Do you need something to "get through"? How much do such things cause you to miss in life? How do they make you feel about yourself?

Define what "enjoyment" means to you--what really leaves you feeling good and what you think ought to make you feel good but perhaps doesn't. When does "a good time" become a bad time, or a hard job make you feel good?

Write down three things you could do to help yourself feel better. Do one of them today. Discuss with a family member how you might help others feel better.

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Monitoring Your Daily 'Emotional Bank Balance'

Your emotional state is not something solid that you carry around with you like a solid-state transistor radio. It goes up and down, almost always in response to what is happening in your life at the time--not overall, but daily specifics, the hour-by-hour interactions with yourself and those around you.

This emotional "checking account" can be flush and cushiony one day and thin or overdrawn on another. It all depends on the type of transactions going on--a series of withdrawals without enough deposits quickly puts you in the red.

Debit items are easy to come by: worries about schoolwork, keeping up on the job, what's happening with personal relationships, concerns about your future or even world-news events.

Deposits sometimes seem harder: doing something pleasant for yourself, completing a challenging piece of work that you've been avoiding, complimenting yourself for some little thing or for just being yourself, spending time with a good friend.

There are ways we can learn to make more frequent deposits, keep our emotional accounts in the black and stay out of emotional holes--and these ways aren't really hard at all.

This process includes:

• A simple self-assessment of how you're feeling and how that might relate to what's happening in your life.
• Developing a plan for increasing your deposits, either to get you out of a hole or keep you from getting in one.
• Monitoring yourself, keeping the "balance".

Psychologists and family counselors use many techniques to help clients improve their daily emotional states, but the common denominator in most methods relates to transactions, interactions with others (and yourself), personal expectations and small steps. People who wait for a big, life-altering change to happen by are like those waiting to win a million dollars in the lottery--it doesn't happen often and you're going nowhere in the meantime.

One barrier to emotional ledger-keeping is a feeling that we "don't have time for one more thing!" Most of the small-step "deposit" techniques are substitutes for debit items, and take no more time or energy. They do require daily doing, not just knowing how to do them.

The cost of becoming emotionally overdrawn is depression--a personal bankruptcy that is a debilitating (sometimes fatal) condition. It can lead to a variety of personally and socially destructive behaviors, from drinking and substance abuse to stressful over-achievement and physical illness. The cost is too high to allow it to happen--and each of us is responsible for keeping it from happening to ourselves! Everyone has the power to take the small steps to do that.

A HIGHLY RECOMMENDED BOOK on self-monitoring methods, self-control techniques, pleasant-activity planning, social skills, constructive thinking and other elements of personal balancing is Control Your Depression, edited by Peter M. Lewinsohn, Ricardo F. Munoz, Mary Ann Youngren and Antonette M. Zeiss (1978, a Prentice-Hall Spectrum Book). Lewinsohn, a clinical psychologist, began developing his depression-avoidance ideas and methods in the early 1960s, and they have since become standard fare for many counselors, therapists and individuals.
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The 'Face Test' Helps You Face YOUR Feelings

Looking at others can help you see yourself, if you know what to look for.

Often when we are feeling vulnerable or overly self-critical we tend to become more critical of others--whether they are other members of our family or complete strangers. We might not even be aware of how we're really feeling at the time--just that everyone else seems really messed up some days.

Hence when we look at the faces of other people and they seem strange and "ugly"--or when what those people are doing seems completely inadequate and "all wrong" -- there is some probability that we are really responding to an overdose of self-criticism.

Conversely, when on some days people appear interesting and beautiful it can be a sign that you are feeling good about yourself and how you are doing.

This "face test" idea also may apply when someone is being critical of you. It may be that you are not the real target of that criticism.

When you (or others) are being critical, a helpful and constructive step is to convert that criticism into a request for a specific, precise change of behavior. This process can clarify a great deal about what's really happening in your relationships with others.
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The Upbeat Cycle of 'Pleasant Activities'

Nearly everyone has heard of a "vicious circle." That's when a bad situation leads to a bad situation that reinforces the original bad situation.

There's a counterpart, however, that might be called a "benevolent spiral," and it heads upward instead of downward or 'round and 'round.

The key to the latter is simply finding pleasant activities, enjoyable things to do or think about, satisfying things to accomplish.

The sad part about a vicious circle is that when you are emotionally caught in one you really don't feel much like engaging in the kinds of pleasant activities that would get you out of it. And, almost always, they WILL get you out if you try them.

Studies of thousands of persons who have used a 320-item "Pleasant Events Schedule" (called PES for short) demonstrate a definite connection between events and mood. BUT, people differ a great deal in what they consider pleasant events. (Thinking about what YOUR pleasant events are can itself be a pleasant event.)

Some events stand out as being especially related to moods and feelings, however. These fall into three groups:

• Social interactions in which people feel they belong--where they feel welcome, respected, accepted.
• Activities in which they feel adequate, competent and able to do things themselves.
• Activities that are in themselves pleasant, such as being relaxed with friends, viewing a beautiful scene, thinking about something good in the future.

A quick self-assessment of your pleasant activities level entails first coming up with a list of 3 to 10 thing you enjoy doing, then assessing how many times you have done each of those in the past 30 days. "Often" is more than 7 times; "a few times" is 1 to 6; and 0 is not often enough.

The next steps are planning and doing. Have a pleasant event today.
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When Enough Just Isn't Enough

An earlier LifeSkills publication discussed more efficient ways to "take care of business" in your life--whether that be the business of studying, or paying bills, or working in the "real world."

The idea is that if you become more efficient, you not only do a better job (which is something to feel good about) but also have more time free to do things you enjoy, thereby boosting your pleasant events scorecard.

But what happens when you feel compelled to fill up the extra time with added work instead of with pleasant things? This becomes a "workaholic" syndrome that can be both emotionally and physically draining, and can get one caught in the depression trap as surely as anything.

By the time young persons are of high school age, they usually have internalized the expectations their parents conveyed to them at the outset of their educational careers, in kindergarten or first grade.

However, some young persons (and adults) THINK they know what others expect of them--when perhaps their perceived expectations are way off base.

The only truly effective way of curbing these extreme self-expectations is to plan time for your pleasant activities and do them.
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Discounting

When some persons receive praise or a compliment--particularly from family members or others especially close to them--they "discount" it as coming from a biased source, or they think: "Aw, it's not that much."

Try giving full value to these "deposits." Just say, "Thanks!"

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Fear of Failing

The "fear of failing" is a frequent and tragic barrier to real achievement that counselors observe in both young persons and adults.

Sadly, the more important the project or subject is to the person, the more formidable becomes the "fear of failure barrier" -- until many become blocked completely and drop out or back away. The fear can be a prison.

To attack it you need first to be aware of it, then consider how sensitive you are to criticism. Many highly creative persons "uncensor" themselves until they get a job done, and leave the judging to a trusted friend or family member.
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Taking Time to Enjoy the Harvest of Your Labors

This LifeSkills publication is only as helpful as you and those in your family make it. It is not enough to "know" how to take better care of yourself; you must actually do it in order to be able to harvest the fruits (and vegetables) of your efforts. Practicing positive communications with yourself is just as important as communicating well with others.

The reason for spending time at work, for laboring carefully over a project or task, is to be able to enjoy the fruits of your labor, to use a saying from a more agricultural past -- when digging and planting resulted in real fruit, grains and vegetables. Today, the harvest may not be as organic, but is no less directly related to the type and quality of work that goes into it. We study hard in order to enjoy informed conversations and interesting jobs; adults work hard to achieve comfortable, secure standards of living. It is sometimes easy to lose sight of the purpose of work, and "lose it" in terms of our ability to kick back and appreciate our lives as we go, each day. Work is a means to an end -- when it becomes the end itself things get out of balance and priorities get muddled.

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FAMILY LifeSkills (copyright 1988-1997 Palo Alto Medical Foundation) Family Lifeskills is a program to strengthen and enrich family interactions -- with the purpose of making each person and the family as a whole as strong as possible. It was developed jointly by the Palo Alto Medical Foundation for Health Care, Research and Education and Palo Alto High School.

Next: 7. Being a Skilled Negotiator

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