ER-3: Self-Care Wellness Plan

For this Module ER Blog-Post assignment, you will practice a Self-Compassion & Wellness Exercise. First and foremost, it is important to be completely honest and open here. Only then this exercise will be of benefit to you. Secondly, put your creative hat while writing the blog-post describing your experience of this exercise. You have to give full-picture of the exercises to the readers and also demonstrate intricate details that will help them as well. Let's get started: 

There are 2 PARTS to this exercise:

1. Writing a Self-Compassion Letter

2. Putting a Plan in Place for Holistic Health and Wellness by Changing Habits and Life-style

Part ONE: Exploring self-compassion through writing

There are 3 steps in this PART:

Step 1: Which imperfections make you feel inadequate?

Follow these steps:

• Everybody has something about themselves that they don’t like; something that causes them to feel shame, to feel insecure, or not “good enough.” 
• It is the human condition to be imperfect, and feelings of failure and inadequacy are part of the experience of living a human life. 
• Try recalling in your mind about an issue you have that tends to make you feel inadequate or bad about yourself (physical appearance, work or relationship issues…). 
• Listen to this recording by Dr.Kristin Neff guiding you through this step of the Self-Compassion Break Exercise. 
• Pause this recording exactly when it reaches 1:12 min. What emotions come up for you when you think about this aspect of yourself? 
• Try to just feel your emotions exactly as they are – no more, no less – and hold on to the thought.

Once you have completed listening to the recording until 1:12 min and have the scenario pictured, progress to the next step.

Step 2: Write a letter to yourself from the perspective of an unconditionally loving imaginary friend

Now think about an imaginary friend who is unconditionally loving, accepting, kind and compassionate. Imagine that this friend can see all your strengths and all your weaknesses, including the aspect of yourself you have just been writing about. Reflect upon what this friend feels towards you, and how you are loved and accepted exactly as you are, with all your very human imperfections. This friend recognizes the limits of human nature, and is kind and forgiving towards you. In his/her great wisdom this friend understands your life history and the millions of things that have happened in your life to create you as you are in this moment. Your particular inadequacy is connected to so many things you didn’t necessarily choose: your genes, your family history, life circumstances – things that were outside of your control.

Write a letter to yourself from the perspective of this imaginary friend – focusing on the perceived inadequacy you tend to judge yourself for. What would this friend say to you about your “flaw” from the perspective of unlimited compassion? How would this friend convey the deep compassion he/she feels for you, especially for the pain you feel when you judge yourself so harshly? What would this friend write in order to remind you that you are only human, that all people have both strengths and weaknesses? And if you think this friend would suggest possible changes you should make, how would these suggestions embody feelings of unconditional understanding and compassion? 

Write a hand-written self-compassion letter to yourself, in the second person, about this experience, using the following guidelines-

• You may want to do this exercise after practicing breathing-focused meditation or compassion imagery. Allow yourself to remember the situation or think about your stress/suffering.
• Then acknowledge your feelings or thoughts, as well as what you (were or are) hoping for and needing.
• “Dear Kelly, I know you are feeling (sad/afraid/angry/disappointed in yourself, etc.). You were really (looking forward to…./ trying your best to….., etc.)”
• Write about both the stress/suffering and the core need underneath it: a desire for health, safety, love, appreciation, connection, achievement, etc.
• Offer a message of common humanity (eg. All humans make mistakes, sometimes fail, get angry, experience disappointment, know loss, etc.).
• Mentor yourself with some compassionate advice or encouragement.
• What would you say to a loved one in this situation? Someone you believed in and wanted the best for?
• After writing the letter, consider reading it our aloud to yourself, or putting it away for some time and bringing it out when you need self-compassion.
• As you write to yourself from the perspective of this imaginary friend, try to infuse your letter with a strong sense of his/her acceptance, kindness, caring, and desire for your health and happiness.

Step 3: Feel the compassion as it soothes and comforts you

• After writing the letter, put it down for a little while. Then come back and read it again, really letting the words sink in. Consider reading it out aloud to yourself in front of a mirror.
• Resume this recording by Dr.Kristin Neff from 1:14 min as she guides you through the Self-Compassion Break Exercise.
• Feel the compassion as it pours into you, soothing and comforting you like a cool breeze on a hot day. Love, connection and acceptance are your birthright. To claim them you need only look within yourself.
• Once you have the letter written, and have also read it aloud in front of a mirror, and have spent time reflecting on the emotions at that moment, write your reflective thoughts on your blog-post in blogger explaining the exercise, how you planned, what you did, and how doing it made you feel. Also include a picture of the letter. Words in the letter don't have to be clearly shown in the picture for people to read. Just post the vague image of your letter within your post for people to see your hand-written letter and the effort you have put into it. It also helps me to know you have done the exercise adequately.

Part TWO: Put a Plan in Place for Your Holistic Health and Wellness by Changing a Habit and Replacing it with Something Positive

Step 1: Start with Change Cycle Concept in mind

Psychologists have proposed a few action steps when it comes to changing some habits. For starters, one needs to be ready to change.

Have a look at this important theory by Dr.James Prochaska and his colleagues (Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross, 1992; Prochaska, Redding, & Evers, 1997) that formalizes the notion that change of any sort takes place through a series of steps or stages, beginning with contemplation (when one thinks about the benefits of change) and progresses through preparation (when one thinks about the difficulties of change and sets a goal) to action (when one actually starts to change by arranging appropriate rewards or punishments) and finally to maintenance (when one takes steps to prevent relapse).

So, the purpose of this present exercise is for you to change some health-relevant habit, but only try it if you are beyond the precontemplation stage. That is, if you have not already thought about change, this exercise is not the right trigger for the subsequent steps.

Step 2: Add and Subtract at the Same Time

You may want to reduce or eliminate some habitual behavior and simultaneously add a new one to your repertoire. Doing both at the same time is under the assumption that the bad habit may be serving some purpose for you currently. Merely eliminating it can leave that purpose hanging and result in backsliding.

Eg: If an individual wants to quit drinking at the neighborhood bar, perhaps he/she needs to join a chess club that meets every afternoon and fulfill whatever social needs that local tavern has been satisfying.

Step 3: Define the Habit

It is important to define the habit for yourself in concrete ways that allow you to monitor changes.

“Becoming a better person” is a wonderful goal, but it is a lot easier to know that you have succeeded at “greeting the doorman of your apartment building every morning.”

Step 4: Take Small Steps

Along these lines, it is easier to change a habit that allows you to do so in small steps, so that you can note and relish your progress. That’s why Weight Watchers not only provides participants with target weight goal, but also it tracks and celebrates during the meetings the individual pounds that are shed in a given week.

Researchers who study goals and their attainment agree that hard and specific goals are more motivating than easy or nebulous ones, what are derisively termed DYB (Do-Your-Best) goals (Locke, Shaw, Saari, & Latham, 1981). However, you need to break hard goals into more-manageable components. And when you do start to change the habit, focus not just what you still need to accomplish but also on what you have already done. For example, “I have 50 pounds to lose” is daunting, whereas, “I already lost 10 pounds” is affirming.

Step 5: Practice Keeping a Journal

You probably want to get into the practice of keeping a journal with respect to whatever habit you want to change. If you want to cut down on smoking or drinking soda or sugar, write down at the end of every day how many cigarettes or sodas or candies you had. And on the other hand, if you want to increase exercising, write down the number of blocks you walked, the distance you covered, or the amount of time during which you experienced an accelerated heart rate. It is a good idea to keep the journal for a week or two before you try to change the habit. This will give you handle on exactly what the habit entails.

Step 6: Expect Occasional Backsliding

If you are on a diet, do not interpret one cookie as a sign that you are an utter failure. Weight loss specialists have documented the abstinence violation effect, which refers to a common but thoroughly irrational response to breaking one’s diet (Marlatt & Gordon, 1980). Many people conceptualize dieting only in terms of good days and bad days. A good day is when you stay on the diet. A bad diet is when you violate the diet, which I have just emphasized will happen on occasion. Craziness enters the picture when one makes no distinctions among the degrees of bad days. One cookie at lunch leads a person to give up dieting for the entire day, finishing the bag of cookies in the afternoon and topping it off with a quart of ice cream in the evening or a pizza at midnight.

Step 7: Have Accountability, Support, and Encouragement Partner

If you can enlist a friend or family member in your efforts, that might help so long as you each can provide support and encouragement to one another.

Step 8: Prepare a Plan to Maintain Your Change

Making a change is never as difficult as maintaining the change, whenever the steps taken to change a habit prove impossible to incorporate into one’s ongoing lifestyle. This is why extreme diets have only short-term success, or why an exercise program begun on your vacation falls by the wayside when you return to work. So, while you think of how to change a habit, also keep in mind what you will do to keep the change permanent. Do not celebrate the loss of 50 pounds by ordering the entire right side of the menu at the International House of Pancakes.

I do not urge you to do your best. I urge you to succeed.

Develop a plan-of-action based on these steps. Customize the plan to your needs and your current lifestyle. Include the plan in your blog-post following the Part-1 of this assignment. Additionally, in your blog-post, as you develop the plan-of-action, reflect on your emotions and feelings overall in completing this exercise

Source: Adapted from Dr.Kristin Niff work on self-compassion and Dr.Chris Peterson's "Primer of Happiness" book on habit change.