Undertaking a 30-day challenge you set for yourself

Half the participants were told the article was from the New England Journal of Biology and Medicine (an expert source), whereas the others were told it came from a popular magazine such as those you see in the supermarket (a nonexpert source). As you might expect, participants were more likely to agree with the position if they thought the articles came from expert sources rather than nonexpert sources (Pornpitakpan, 2004). Source credibility The degree to which the audience perceives a message's source as expert and trustworthy. The Appearance of Expertise and Trustworthiness Although real expertise can convey strong arguments that persuade people through central-route processing, the appearance of expertise often persuades through the peripheral route. For example, a commercial advertising mouthwash may feature a spokesperson wearing a white lab coat and a stethoscope around his neck, giving him the appearance of a medical expert when in reality he is most likely an actor. A viewer who takes the peripheral route without paying close attention to the substantive claims being made might just assume that the mouthwash is effective because the spokesperson appears to know what he is talking about. In theory, this ban now raises the desire to bite into the forbidden fruit. If it doesn't go as planned, then this official extra-time gives birth to a whole new generation of World of Warcraft characters. CBT in Germany What happens in CBT might be quite similar from country to country. But the circumstances vary, such as how easy it is to find a qualified therapist. If you like to compare the therapeutic care of where you live with another region, then here is a brief description of how it is in Germany. If you are interested in getting a CBT treatment in Germany, you are basically in a good spot. This is because in this country you usually don't have to pay anything for it as it's covered by public health insurance. The downside of this is that free therapy sounds very good to a huge number of people, which leads to a serious shortage in available appointments. Many patients tell within the first phone call, that they have already contacted more than 20 psychotherapists, all of whom had told them they would have to wait for several months to start a therapy. Just pop in your headphones, close your eyes for a bit, and bliss out. I'm going to include a script I've written for a full body progressive muscle relaxation that you can read.

I guarantee that it will make you feel good if you decide to breathe along while you read. I'll put this script into the appendix at the back, though. I take my guided relaxations seriously. I don't swear at you or make bad jokes in the script. We'll keep that gentle stuff separate. Just promise me you'll imagine that my voice sounds like Bob Ross when you read through it. Seriously, just don't be. It takes more than the strategies I've described so far to really kick anxiety in the ass. Indeed, speakers can appear more credible, and thus be more persuasive, simply by speaking with confidence, quoting statistics, or even just by speaking quickly--none of which necessarily means they have expert knowledge (Erickson et al. Miller et al. The source of a message can also gain credibility by being perceived as trustworthy or unbiased in his or her views. One way to accomplish this is to express an opinion without the audience realizing that it is the target of persuasion. Imagine that you overhear some people at a coffee shop praising a new restaurant. You have no reason to believe that these people are biasing their opinions to influence you (they don't even know you're eavesdropping! When Walster and Festinger (1962) arranged such a situation, that is exactly what they found. People were persuaded more by someone's opinion when they believed they were eavesdropping on a conversation. The power of overheard messages hasn't been lost on advertisers. Just think of all the commercials you've seen that attempt to portray a private conversation between two people (Gee, Tyler, your glasses really do sparkle! Since people usually seek out psychotherapy in times of crisis, even 2 weeks of waiting time can feel like an eternity. A few years ago, the results of a survey were published in Germany: according to this, the average waiting time in 2017 was 20 weeks [25].

While in big cities you only had to wait for about 3 1/2 months, in some rural areas it was more than half a year (fewer psychotherapists live there). These numbers are not CBT exclusive and also include other psychotherapies, such as psychoanalysis. There's an everlasting conflict in Germany about this issue: psychologists, psychiatrists, health insurance companies and politicians argue about what might be the true reason for those enormous waiting times. The most common criticism towards the psychotherapists is that they would conduct too few therapy sessions per week, would give preference to patients with minimal problems to the disadvantage of the seriously ill, and would eternally delay the end of therapies, instead of quickly taking on new patients. However, from the point of view of many psychotherapists, the problem lies in the fact that there are too few Kassenzulassungen. Imagine these as some kind of German certificate, which enables the therapist to get paid for conducted psychotherapy sessions by the public health insurance companies. But these certificates are limited in number - every city or region has its fixed maximum. That means: one psychotherapist (often older in age) first has to return his Kassenzulassung to the pool, then another therapist (often younger age) can get one - the amount of available psychotherapy stays the same. You need to set yourself up for success, too. You need to invest in yourself. You need to stop being a butthead and sabotaging yourself. Let me take a wild guess here. Your life is pretty stressful. Things seem to happen quickly, and often times there are factors that are out of your control but that significantly contribute to your level of anxiety. You have this high level of kinetic energy inside of you, and sometimes it feels like you can't stop the hamster from running at full speed and it just won't fall off the wheel even though it's so tired that it could die. About 60% of you just nodded your heads, so I feel good about this next part I'm going to advise you on. YOU NEED TO TAKE A DAMN BREAK. Actually, you need to take several breaks. What dish detergent do you use? In fact, advertising and public relations agencies often pay writers to masquerade online as delighted consumers, writing positive reviews of their products or services on various web sites such as Amazon.

The writers are paid to appear like average people--for example, by intentionally inserting typos into their reviews. In this way, advertisers hope that the fake reviewers appear trustworthy and, thus, persuasive because the writers do not seem to have a stake in the sale of the product or service. After learning about the strategies that advertisers use to market their goods, you are smart to be skeptical of some of the claims and endorsements you read or hear. Another way in which a communicator gains in trustworthiness (and persuasiveness) is if he or she argues in favor of a position that seems to be opposed to his or her self-interest. Imagine that you, like participants in a classic study by Walster and colleagues (1966), heard Joe `The Shoulder' Napolitano, a habitual criminal and drug dealer, arguing for more lenient court proceedings. Even if he is making some good arguments, you might not be very persuaded because you know that he personally has something to gain from convincing you of his position. Indeed, participants in the study were completely unconvinced. But when the same alleged criminal argues for stricter court proceedings, how do you think you would respond? The argument now is that if more of these certificates would be given out, then more offices could offer psychotherapy, and therefore the waiting times would be lower. The opposite of free therapy is paid therapy. This clearly sounds less attractive, but that is what can be offered by all those psychotherapists who didn't succeed in getting a Kassenzulassung, even though being highly trained professionals. Therefore, in most German areas you will meet two types of therapist's offices: those offering free treatment to patients, with the downside of them having to wait for an eternity for it to start, and offices where you have to pay for it yourself, but with the advantage of getting an appointment maybe as early as the next day. Since a single session of CBT in Germany costs about 100Euro, for the majority of people, this isn't really a choice. A unique thing in Germany is that it's allowed for nearly everybody to offer psychotherapy. All you have to do to get permission is to pass a 28-item multiple choice test about health basics, providing proof that you haven't been a criminal in the past, and have a public health official certify that you don't seem to pose a threat to the health of the German population. Therapists of this kind often have very well-designed homearticles. Because of that, it can be very hard for patients to distinguish between experts and non-experts. Maybe the phone number you just called belongs to a therapist who finished university with an academic title, spent hundreds of hours in CBT training workshops and supervision sessions, and finally passed the difficult German state exam for psychotherapists. Actually, you should take several breaks EVERY DAY. Crazy concept, right?

One of the annoying things about anxiety is that it almost never occurs in isolation. If you are the type of person to carry a lot of worry, especially about unfinished business, you are also probably the type to feel really guilty when you do things other than those pieces of unfinished business. Guilt is such a shitty thing. As if things weren't hard enough with the anxiety symptoms, guilt just creeps right up in there and makes things exponentially more difficult. I like to call this snowballing. You get worked up and then getting worked up makes you feel bad and then you get more worked up about feeling bad about getting worked up and then. So yeah, back to the breaks. What if I told you that taking breaks and doing nice things for yourself was not a waste of time? Participants in the study were much more likely to agree with his position. The Sleeper Effect Credibility can be a peripheral cue when people are not elaborating on the persuasive message. It's a handy heuristic simply to decide, She's an unbiased expert, I'll believe that, or I'm not buying anything that sleazeball says. However, this kind of peripheral influence of source credibility may not last long. The decay of source effects can happen when, over time, people forget the source of the message but remember the message content, a concept known as the sleeper effect. Suppose you scan the front article of a sensationalistic gossip magazine while waiting on the grocery checkout line (come on, we all do it at least occasionally), and it claims that new evidence calls global warming into question. A few weeks later, the topic of global warming comes up in a conversation, and you remark that you read a story arguing that global warming may in fact not be happening, but you can't remember where you read it. Might that argument be more compelling now that you've forgotten that it came from a not-so-credible source? Sleeper effect However, it could also belong to a person who only watched some CBT videos on YouTube before creating a professional homearticle and offering this service to the public. A little CBT story