Reframe

Feeling crabby lately? Need better sleep? Troubled by an open memory or a past unpleasant experience? You might consider trying the strategy of "reframe" on how you think about the memory using the language of thankfulness. 

Gratitude helps us reframe memories of unpleasant events in a way that decreases their unpleasant emotional impact i.e. to look at them in a different way - to assign a fresh perspective. Psychologists call this technique reframing.

Grateful people sleep better. No pills necessary. This is because Gratitude protects against negative pre-sleep mental activities that impair sleep, and facilitates positive pre-sleep mental activities leading to quality sleep. Spend just 15 minutes jotting down a few grateful sentiments before zzzzzzz, and you will sleep better and longer. Study has showed that Gratitude predicted greater sleep quality and sleep duration, and less sleep latency and daytime dysfunction.

Note that the goal of reframing isn't to change the emotion itself but how you relate to it. As the name suggests, reframing is like putting a new frame around an old picture. In reframing, you look for the meaning, opportunity, or benefit from the feeling, even when the feeling is negative. In this way, you raise the likelihood that you'll make insight-driven decisions.

This implies that grateful coping entails looking for positive consequences of negative events. For example, grateful coping might involve seeing how a stressful event has shaped who we are today and has prompted us to reevaluate what is really important in life.

The unpleasant experiences in our lives don’t have to be of the traumatic variety in order for us to gratefully benefit from them. Whether it is a large or small event, here are some additional questions to ask yourself:

• What lessons did the experience teach me?
• Can I find ways to be thankful for what happened to me now even though I was not at the time it happened?
• What ability did the experience draw out of me that surprised me?
• How am I now more the person I want to be because of it? Have my negative feelings about the experience limited or prevented my ability to feel gratitude in the time since it occurred?
• Has the experience removed a personal obstacle that previously prevented me from feeling grateful?

Remember, your goal is not to relive the experience but rather to get a new perspective on it. Simply rehearsing an upsetting event makes us feel worse about it. That is why catharsis has rarely been effective. Emotional venting without accompanying insight does not produce change. No amount of writing about the event will help unless you are able to take a fresh, redemptive perspective on it. This is an advantage that grateful people have—and it is a skill that anyone can learn.

Listening is what makes you memorable.

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.

A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

Unfortunately, listening is a skill that not many people master; most people would rather talk. When you're talking, you're in control. You don't have to hear anything you're not interested in. You are the center of attention. You can bolster your own identity.

The other reason we’d rather talk is because it’s easy to get distracted when we listen. The average person talks at about 225 words per minute, but we can listen at up to 500 words per minute. So our minds are filling in those other 275 words (...notice your mind begins to wander...). We go to our thoughts about what's for dinner, or how we can fix the other person's problem, or how many ways they could have done that differently.

It takes effort and energy to actually pay attention to someone, but if you can't do that, you're not in a conversation. The irony of being a good conversationalist is that talking isn’t the most important piece; listening is what makes you memorable. 

We live in a culture of perfectionism where our idealized selves become our social currency, the soul and the heart too often go homeless. Usually when you tried to tell your story people often interrupted you to tell you that they once had something just like that happen to them. Subtly your pain became a story about themselves. Eventually you stopped talking to most people. It was just too lonely. We connect through listening. When we interrupt what someone is saying to let them know that we understand, we move the focus of attention to ourselves. When we listen, they know we care.

When we haven't the time to listen to each other's stories we seek out experts to tell us how to live. The less time we spend together at the dining table, the more how-to books appear in the stores and on our bookshelves. But reading such books is a very different thing than listening to someone's lived experience. 

Listening - really listening - takes practice.

And presence.

Mindfulness.

You can even practice it alone.  

Set a stopwatch. For 15 seconds, stay quiet and listen. What do you hear? Try it again and see if you can hear more this time. What new sounds were there?

Listening is the art of closing one's mouth and opening one's ears and heart. Get connected.