Living Large Coaching and Counseling - It's Your Life. Your Evolution.
This is a professional blog about health and wellness, personal growth and transformation, mind-body medicine, and spirituality. Highlights include life coaching, counseling, psychology, and behavior change.
We offer the support you need for creating a healthier, more fulfilling life. Includes self-help tools for creating lasting change, navigating trauma and difficult life transitions based on the author's vast life experience, knowledge, and scientific research.
Are you having difficulty making a needed change? Quitting smoking, losing 20 pounds, ending a toxic relationship, stopping that social media doom scrolling, etc.? You know what I mean. You "know you should stop", but you don't, can't, or won't. And with every failed attempt, you feel bad, beat yourself up, and then eat another Twinkie.
Welcome to the human race. All the insight in the world rarely leads to permanent behavior change. We know we should, if only we could. But, don't despair, change can and does happen in a very patterned and predictable way. It's all well documented by the Stages of Change Theory* (see link below).
And once you understand the process, it can help you along the way. You're not defective, or a failure. It's only that we tend to underestimate the effort required to create lasting change and it's easier to fall back into old patterns. Once we understand the stages of change, we can more easily make successful attempts to reach a goal.
In a future article, I will outline my experience going thru the stages of change to quit smoking. Until then, get acquainted with the stages of change.
*Reference: Raihan N,
Cogburn M. Stages of Change Theory. [Updated 2023 Mar 6]. In: StatPearls
[Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2026 Jan-.
National Library of Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK556005/
All Rights Reserved, Copyright
Living Large Coaching & Counseling
It's Your Life. Your Evolution.
What's Fun Got To Do With It? Asking the Right Questions
Sometimes our mental health hinges on asking the right questions. When experiencing a bout of depression or anxiety, it may become easy to pathologize our current state i.e., view our condition as psychologically unhealthy or abnormal. Certainly, in the present day environment of being trauma-informed, it seems like all the focus is on healing childhood "wounds" or grieving losses in adulthood. But, what if it wasn't as complicated as all that? What if we've been asking the wrong questions? What if focusing on how bad we feel, or our anxiety was better dealt with by making a slight shift in our mindset? This is where the question: What's Fun Got To Do With It? comes in.
When was the last time you had a roaring belly laugh? Or grinned from ear-to-ear so hard your face hurt? When was the last time you intentionally set out to have fun? Do you even know what fun feels like anymore? Fun is a necessary prelude to joy. Fun brings us lightheartedness. Fun is a giant stress reliever. It resets our nervous system and offers a coffee break from becoming over focused on the negative. Fun is a respite from the daily grind of life's responsibilities and chores. Fun and laughter bond us to the people we care about and creates memories we share together. Fun brings us back into balance and shifts our perspective making life worthwhile. Fun eliminates the drudgery we can get caught up in when we work too hard. Fun helps recharge and rejuvenate our physical energy. It can also provide the space we need to shift into problem solving mode, instead of endlessly ruminating.
Just like getting enough sleep can reduce stress and anxiety levels, fun makes it easier to cope with emotional challenges. There's something to be said for gallows humor. At the end of his life, my father developed Lewy-Body dementia. In our morning phone call, I would always ask him, "What's going on?", and he would reply, "You're asking me?". Even though my Dad's memory was slowly waning, he never lost his sense of humor and was able to laugh at himself to keep going.
Here's a challenge for you. Make a list of the top ten activities that make you laugh, smile, giggle, or feel joy. Make sure to add silly nonsensical items to the list. Then the next time you feel super anxious or depressed, pull out this list and do the quickest activity you can manage in the moment. Take time to lighten up, put your emotions into perspective, and recognize not all negative feelings mean we are suffering from ongoing trauma or wounds.
Here's my top ten list of fun mental health activities:
1. Watch YouTube videos of the Beatles.
2. Joy ride in the car to my favorite rock-n-roll tunes.
3. Watch the sunset over the beach.
4. Pull goofy faces in the mirror.
5. Watch dance videos on YouTube.
6. Go to a Comedy Open Mic night.
7. Tell Knock-Knock jokes to my friends.
8. Pull a prank or practical joke on a friend.
9. Listen to an oldie but goody AM radio station.
10. Make up irreverent words to my favorite songs.
You get the point. I leave you with a laugh track video from my YouTube channel.
A fun laugh track from a sketch comedy improv writing session with my friend, Stan.
In loving memory of Stan Fleisher, soulmate and running partner. May he RIP.
Now
we have AI Apps being advertised as real therapy. The depersonalization
of vulnerable humans for monetary gain and data collection purposes is
now complete. This is such a joke. AI
CAN NEVER BE THERAPY. All these AI Apps exploiting vulnerable people
with fatuous promises is disgusting. All
this is is Dear Diary with a sycophantic feedback loop, based on some
Psych 101 principles in a dumb algorithm with a screen. Call it what it
is and please stop duping people.
This really takes AI too far. It strips us of all that makes us human. I
had a young man today tell me that he found a good therapist on Better
Help for 2 half hour sessions a week, for $75.00 out of pocket, that has
been a life saver. Why? Because he's not sitting alone in his pain. Therapy
is only therapy with two live humans, for God's sake. Don't let all
this AI Therapy hype fool you. It is because we are human that we need
other humans. Now
if Dear Dairy works for you, fantastic! But let's not confuse that
with something it's not. It's not therapy, it's a playback machine and
nothing more.
All Rights Reserved, Copyright
Living Large Coaching & Counseling
It's Your Life. Your Evolution.
