The Hemp Connection:
behavior change

Lent is a time we tend to think of sacrifice. Typically we jump into thinking of vices we need to give up. On the theme of grief, perhaps this year Lent can be the time you work to adopt a healthy habit. Any change in behavior involves sacrifice, but real behavior change is hard if you’re only focusing on what you’re NOT going to do. If you haven’t decided what you ARE going to do when you don’t do what it is you DON’T want to do, you’re not very likely to succeed at changing the behavior.
Most women who diet make the mistake of focusing on what they aren’t going to eat. If a large majority of their diet is junk, and all they do is remove it, that leaves big voids of food that aren’t being filled. I’ve heard over and over through the years, how surprised clients are to find how much they genuinely can eat and still lose weight. They’d never thought of it as a journey of what TO eat. It’s always been about what NOT to eat. I like to keep them so busy eating everything they need to eat that they are too full to think of what they’re missing out on.
Adding exercise is going to mean giving up TV time. Going to bed a little earlier is going to mean giving up your nightly date with Jay Leno. Delegating more to someone else is going to mean giving up control of something.
Practicing better self-care truly does mean giving something up. It’s not an either/or thing. All of those are sacrifices, but instead of denying them to yourself, which often means setting yourself up for an indulgent binge come Easter, think of Lent as an opportunity to adopt a new behavior!
If you’re having a hard time giving up the chocolate, think of what you can add to your diet when you crave it. A packet of Justin’s Nut Butter? A handful of nuts? Greek yogurt? Some string cheese?
Not doing it for you to hear these suggestions? Then maybe it’s not the chocolate that’s the problem. Maybe it’s the dependence on binge eating to deal with stress. Try sacrificing an hour of Facebook time for an hour of yoga class.
Anytime you ADD a new behavior, it requires sacrifice of something else in order for you to make room for it. If you’re only focusing on the sacrifice, it’s going to suck.
Lent is a great time to change a behavior, provided your focus is on the newer, nurturing choice, rather than on viewing what you’re trying NOT to do as a punishment.
How can you succeed with what you’ve given up for Lent? What healthy choice can you use to fill in the void?

If you’ve been busy learning and applying various techniques to improve your health, you’ve probably heard of “Meatless Monday,” the idea of substituting a healthy vegetarian meal one day per week in order to beef up (no pun intended!) your vegetable consumption and lessen your dependence on meat. It’s a great idea, relatively easy to implement, and, over time, contributes to an overall pattern of good eating.

This “Mental Health Monday” column is also a good habit. Reading it is a way of bring attention (mindfulness) to the practices inherent in creating and maintaining good mental health. I often talk about ways to make small changes in attitude, behavior, or thought patterns. From a mental health perspective, what I like about Meatless Monday is the way it breaks down an overwhelming task (eating healthier) into a small, actionable, and rewarding step. If you implement Meatless Monday, it means you’re really thinking about what you eat. You’re taking time and energy to explore and experiment. You eat the food and realize that you don’t need meat to feel complete or satisfied. Or maybe you make a bad choice (pasta, pasta, pasta!), and realize that your needs call for more protein – but maybe it doesn’t have to come from meat.

Mental health is like this. You can’t take a huge, amorphous goal (say, “feel happier”) and just say, “that’s what I want – where is it?!” It’s a process, a project, a series of steps and experiments. There is a need for assessment, evaluation, and revision. Over time, you learn what’s missing in your upbringing, your thought patterns, and your ways of relating. Or you learn that there’s something you do quite often that is off-putting or unproductive in your relationships. You implement homework assignments from your therapist, read self-help books and do the exercises, and practice affirmations and positive self-talk. At some point, you begin to notice that things are improving. The process gets easier. You don’t have to consciously think really hard about how to have a productive talk with your boyfriend, set a boundary with your overbearing mother, or express your anger productively. You’re better. You’re happier. You’re healthier. And it all started with a small experiment, such as:

• Meatless Monday
• Not saying negative things about yourself, privately or in public.
• Joining a therapy group.
• Going to the gym just once a week.
• Adding Vitamin D3 supplements.
• Eliminating gossip.

In and of itself, one action is not enough. Cumulatively though, as you slowly implement mentally and/or physically healthy choices, the impact is there. What are you going to start doing to get happier and healthier today?

Gretchen Kubacky, Psy.D. is a Health Psychologist in private practice in West Los Angeles, California. She has completed the inCYST training. She specializes in counseling women and couples who are coping with infertility, PCOS, and related endocrine disorders and chronic illnesses.

If you would like to learn more about Dr. HOUSE or her practice, or obtain referrals in the Los Angeles area, please visit her website at www.drhousemd.com, or e-mail her at AskDrHouseMD@gmail.com. You can also follow her on Twitter @askdrhousemd.

I am half German and, as my grandfather on my other side always reminded me…half Southern! I love having such different cultures as influences in my life. On New Year's Day, that means eating black-eyed peas and sauerkraut. The black-eyed peas are so that my Dixie genes have good luck in the coming year, and the sauerkraut is for my German side to make lots of money.

This year, I decided to make extra black-eyed peas and share them with neighbors (figured I'd never be invited to any potlucks again if I tried to serve them with the sauerkraut!).

Early in the morning, I pulled out the slow cooker, poured in all the ingredients, and forgot about the whole thing until late afternoon. My neighbors were appreciative, but they all seemed to think I'd gone through a whole lot of trouble. I hadn't, really, just took 5 minutes to pour a few basic ingredients in the slow cooker before spending the rest of the day having fun.

I was reminded of how my clients often seem disappointed that what I have to offer them when they ask me to help them with changes…isn't high tech, or expensive, or glamorous. The best changes are always the easiest, the cheapest, the lowest maintenance. Why is it that if it's not complicated, high profile, or involving a lot of money, we don't think it's worthwhile to pursue?

The biggest investment with these peas was the slow cooker. And since I made a double batch, I had dinner for a week.

It's really not about big, dramatic, difficult changes. It's about small changes that stick with you over time. For most of you, I bet the hardest thing about learning to use a slow cooker is remembering to put all the ingredients together before you leave for work. But there is always the ever-handy Post-it note reminder right at eye level in the bathroom mirror.

You'll save money, you'll have a great smelling house when you come in at the end of the day, you won't have to worry about what to cook when you're tired…and what you DO eat will be a little closer to what you know you need to do for better health.

What do you say…about making 2008 the year of little changes that add up to big differences?

(This is our 1,000th blog post! Thanks to all for helping us grow!)

It was not easy to be Monika this month. It felt like every time I turned around, someone had decided inCYST was doing something wrong and attempting to extract some kind of apology, deferral, or program change based on their opinion.

There was a time, long ago, when I would have panicked had this happened.

The Universe was on my side with this, however. My computer had died, I was in the middle of that remodel I described yesterday, and therefore the only way I had Internet access, was to walk two miles to the nearest hotel and borrow their computer. It kept me from hitting"send" before I knew how I felt, and all of that walking gave me time to think and sort through what was happening.

I finally decided that sometimes criticism is a compliment. It means you are doing something well, so well, in fact, that you raise the bar for others. I never openly stated to anyone that they needed to change how they did things…but in the process of doing what I was doing, apparently, I moved some individuals out of their comfort zones.

Because of my situation, and the limited time I had to devote to anything business-related, I made the choice, instead of helping people understand why inCYST wanted them to join us in our endeavor, to let the critical people stay in their comfort zones.

Not devoting time to conflict freed me up to create new programming that you will hear more about very soon.

And, out of the blue, we were invited to collaborate on a project that will give us wonderful connections that we'd been wanting for years. Had I chosen to give audience to the conflict, I would not have been able to accept that invitation because the energy it would have taken to get all the conflicting individuals on board would have diluted our ability to effectively partner with people who were already on board with us.

Are you feeling like the harder you work to be healthy the more critical people become? Is it possible that you've made them aware, however silently, that there are things they could be doing for their own health that they are not? Are they attempting to derail your progress so they do not have to be aware of that?

How much energy are you putting into accommodating the criticism? Do you feel entitled to not give it audience and to honor your own health needs?

You only have so much energy to go around. It is not selfish to prioritize yourself. If you do, it can be amazing to watch the Universe support your choice.

I've been managing a pretty major remodeling project over the last six weeks. I have an 1100 square foot condo that needed new flooring. It had been decided that tile would be the option. However, when the tile guys got there, they realized that the older building my second floor condo is in, had sunk enough so that the difference between high and low spots was too significant to make tile the option. They had to work out a complicated mix of carpet and tile to do the job.

Here is the"before" photo. That table is office #2 from where many of these blog posts are created.

Here is the"after" photo. Well…for about 24 hours. Once the grout dried I immediately had to start moving everything out of the bedrooms and closets onto tiled areas so carpeting could commence.

The carpeting job ended 2 weeks ago, but this is pretty much what my dining room looks like today. Not because I'm lazy or sloppy, but because I decided that since I rarely have occasion to go through every single item I own and decide if it needs to stay or go, I was going to use this as an opportunity to perform a massive"feng shui".

I have a lot of papers that were stored in boxes, artifacts from the days before the Internet when us intellectual types kept every piece of printed material we had in case we needed it. Now we don't need to do that, because most information is somewhere in the cloud.

It's a hard habit to break though, hanging on to things in case you need them. I'm big on not wasting things or unnecessarily using landfill space, so I'm trying to make a good decision about every single piece of paper, trinket, electrical cord. My personality type is such that I can only do this for a short time before I lose focus and start throwing things in boxes to get the task overwith. So I promised myself this time I would not do that. I only ask myself to make 10"what should I do with this?" decisions a day. As you can see by the massive size of this pile (and it's only half of the pile!), being so diligent means I'm going to live with the pile for awhile.

The first week it felt like I was never going to get there. But the day before Christmas I looked and saw that one whole corner of the dining room was free of clutter. And the office, where most of this stuff had been stuffed into the closet and started to overflow into the room…was so clean and crisp that I was far more productive working in there than I ever had been. All that clutter was interfering with my focus and concentration.

The process reminds me somewhat of the old advice for eating an elephant: one bite at a time.

And as with gardening, it made me think of many of you. How you might be anxious to lose weight and how frustrating it can be to see it come off slowly, some days seemingly not at all. But how if you stick with it, one day you look up and the progress is just THERE. If you lose focus and start going at the task in a disorganized fashion, you'll get rid of the chaos at the superficial level by shoving it in the emotional closet, but that mess is still there…and as with my closets…has a tendency to grow and multiply on its own if left untended.

It doesn't matter how small your effort is today. If it's an effort and it moves you even a tiny fraction of a millimeter in the direction you'd like to go, it will pay off.

I'll post updates when both the office and the dining room are truly back in action!

Several years ago I asked a neighbor in my condo complex, who at the time was in charge of the grounds, if there was one task that she could assign me that would be my"thing" to give to the condo community.

She showed me a section of grass right by my stairs that had been completely overrun by an aggressive weed. The entire lawn in this section was gone, where it had been completely choked out by this ivy-like covering. This is what the entire lawn looked like back then.

I enjoyed the weed pulling, as it gave my mind time to organize thoughts, and I liked having something to do that had visible evidence of progress at the end of the task.

When the weed was first pulled, the ground looked bare. So bare, in fact, that one of the HOA members asked me to stop pulling it because all that dirt didn't look so pretty.

(I have to admit, I sneaked out at sunrise and sunset for some reconnaissance gardening, because I knew the plot needed to be"unpretty" for awhile in order to give the grass what it needed to grow.)

These days, for the most part, this is what the grass looks like. It's real grass! It's thriving now that it isn't competing with the aggressive weed for oxygen, sun, and water.

Every fall though, when summer temperatures finally drop and it's enjoyable to be outside, I go back to the plot and look for stragglers. They are there, never quite as firmly as when I first started weeding, but some of the roots always break off in the process and come back after time.

This year it occurred to me that this entire ritual of mine is the perfect analogy for what it takes to change a behavior!

1. Looking at all the habits that need to be changed, on the front end, can be overwhelming. It can genuinely feel like there is nothing of value or beauty underneath all the bad habits and"damage".

2. When you have pulled away all the"badness" that you thought needed changing, it can feel pretty bare, raw, ugly…to the point where you'd rather go back and live with the behavioral weeds than wait out the process of new growth and change.

3. Without regular maintenance and self-checks, the old behaviors can creep back in. They've got pretty strong and stubborn roots, just like my weeds.

I thought if I gave you the perspective that change, no matter where it happens in the world…on a lawn, on Facebook, in yourself…has inevitable stages. It's not a perfect process, and sometimes there are events that feel like"backslides".

All that really matters is that you're consistent, no matter what the result of the day may bring. If you are consistent, and patient, and understand that change is not always linear or forward moving, the process forward will outweigh the seemingly backward steps and it WILL occur.

Journal your changes. On days when you're not feeling like you're getting anywhere, ready to toss it all in because it isn't working, flip back a month, 6 months, a year. You might really surprise yourself. Change sometimes happens so gradually you don't realize it's happening.

It does, and it will.

I thought that while Amber is blogging her journey, I'd follow up with posts explaining my part of the discussion.

Regarding the"hubs" story. This is not at all uncommon and I'm so glad Amber shared that changing her own behaviors is going to involve relationship change as well. When you decide to do ANYTHING differently in your life, you create change for others. Understanding the psychology of social change is important for long term success in change of any kind, if you plan to maintain it.

My favorite analogy for any kind of social system, be it a family, work environment, club, church…whatever, is that it is exactly like a pile of pick up sticks. Remember that game? The goal is to gradually remove a stick from a pile without disrupting the structural integrity of the pile.

Before you decided to make changes on behalf of your PCOS, you were a pick up stick in one, two, maybe several different piles. Your attitudes, your routines, and your choices…all supported the structure of those piles of sticks. When you decided to make changes…in essence, you pulled yourself out of the pile, which rendered the structure of that pile a lot more fragile and susceptible to collapse.

The remaining"sticks" in the pile, when you decide to no longer be part of the support, have two choices: (1) they can shift to create a new structure of support, (2) they can pull you back in to your original position to support the old way of doing things.

The knee-jerk reaction in a system where one but not all"sticks" have identified a need to change…is number 2. It's the quickest way to reduce awareness of the nonproductive nature of the system. Get the changer to stop changing, just do things the comfortable way, and we can all live in peace, right?

Bottom line, many of us are in comfort zones where we don't really think too much about what we're doing. Because if we did, how it would feel to be aware of our choices and taking responsibility for them…would totally suck.

(I see it all the time on our Facebook page, anytime I post a statement likely to create awareness that part of the dilemma of PCOS may be due to unproductive personal choices, we lose followers. So why do I keep at it? Because it's at the point of the discomfort of awareness that opportunity for true change is most likely to occur. I fail our fans if I only tell them what they want to hear just to keep our numbers high.)

How many of you allow yourself to be pulled back in to an unhealthy system, just to keep the peace?

Another point of awareness when someone in a system decides to make a change, is that the person who has been identified as the"problem" needing to be"fixed", is no longer allowing that kind of finger pointing to happen. Awareness is created that it takes a village to create, and maintain, unproductive living choices. Systems like this often have one identified person on who all of the problems within the system are channeled into one point of focus. It's so much easier for a family or a group of friends to look at, analyze,"help" a person who is struggling with their weight, than it is to look at some of the less concrete problems with the system.

How many of you allow your weight to be the focus of family conversations?

I've been doing this work for 30 years. It's almost a given part of the process. Someone decides to make changes…they get a"diet" from me, they start to follow it and see success…and then they disappear from my office. If I track them down and chat about where they've been, it almost invariably has to do with not having the energy to push back against the spouse who's bringing home ice cream, the family member who makes a fuss when seconds are politely declined, the friends who are not willing/able to create social activities based on interests other than food.

If your choice is to be alone and healthy…or amongst loved ones and living with PCOS, I can, for the most part, understand, why many of you have trouble changing.

Hang in there. Look at what Amber said. The changes were resisted at first, but hubs eventually came on board and is actually enjoying the process.

Just because the old pile of pick up sticks worked, doesn't mean it was the best way to pile the sticks. I mean, if staying in that pile means you increase the risk of collapsing it altogether because your mortality pulls you out of the pile…for good…in a way that you can no longer be a part whatsoever…

Research shows that people who hang with healthy people are healthier themselves. Maybe the reason the old pile of pickup sticks needs to collapse is so you can create a new one with new players. There's never going to be room for it if you hang on to the old one.

…I think it's worth it to negotiate TV eating, exercising, all the things you need to do for your family as well as you, to keep your system alive and healthy for many years to come.