Who is depending on you?

I'm going to be alright The last thing that I want to mention about taking better care of yourself is some basic stuff. It's basic stuff you are probably terrible about adhering to, though. This is the part where I tell you that your body is a temple. Well it is! Take care of it. You don't have to do the whole ultra gluten free level 5 vegan juice diet crap, but treat your body well. Don't eat tons of junk food without getting some green in your life every once in a while. Communicator Similarity If we tend to be persuaded by those who are trustworthy, likable, and attractive, we must also be more persuaded by people who are similar to us, right? Here the answer is a bit more complicated. In some cases, people are more easily persuaded when the source of a message is similar to themselves (Mackie et al. Sometimes, however, people are influenced more by dissimilar others than by similar others. The key factor is whether the issue at hand deals primarily with subjective preference or objective facts (Goethals & Nelson, 1973). For issues dealing primarily with subjective preference--that is, when there is no correct answer--people are more confident in their attitude when similar others agree with them than when dissimilar others agree with them. So if you believe that Beyonce is the greatest recording artist alive, agreement from a similar other, such as a close friend, would make you more confident in that attitude than agreement from a dissimilar other, such as a foreign exchange student. In contrast, when people are trying to determine whether something is objectively true or factual, their attitudes are influenced more by the opinions of dissimilar others than by those of similar others. For instance, if you believe that Beyonce sold more albums than Rihanna (which is either factually correct or incorrect), agreement from a dissimilar other would make you more confident in that belief than agreement from a similar other. At the latest after saying the words cognitive restructuring of dysfunctional thoughts it is clear that this woman will never come back. A therapist in my neighborhood - a female psychoanalyst - once told me about a lady who has already come to therapy sessions for over 10 years.

In therapy, they chat about politics, philosophy, men - and this lady just loves it so much that she probably will come for another decade. This story suggests that patients of this kind do exist somewhere. In my CBT office, people at the end of the very first session are sometimes astonished that at minimum a second session would be necessary for them to make progress in solving their problem. Didn't the Internet say short-term therapy? In their CBT training, young therapists in Germany often get told by their supervisors, that the first 10 sessions of therapy are basically there for getting to know each other. Up to this point, not much therapeutic change has to have happened. This message sounds very good to trainees, and is thought to reduce the inner pressure that is quite common among them. The problem, however, comes from the fact that their later patients don't know about this 10-session-rule, and often come with a different expectation. Don't drink excessive amounts of alcohol when it's not your birthday. Try to drink more water than you do now, because I'm sure you don't drink enough of it. Sleep is a topic for another article, but resting is really important. Interestingly, sleep is totally vital for learning new skills, which is what I've been bitching at you about this whole time. During sleep, you consolidate new memories, so that you can reach up in there and pull them out when you need to. So get plenty of sleep and keep beating that brain into submission with your new awesome anxiety slaying skills. The matrix has you. We are all plugged in and as much as we like to think that we use technology as a tool. Don't get me wrong, I blinking love technology. If it weren't for google drive, e-readers, text messaging, and internet radio, this project would have never seen the light of day. When similar others agree with us on matters of fact, we are often uncertain whether they agree simply because they like us or perhaps because they have been exposed to the same faulty information that we have been exposed to. But when a dissimilar other who does not have those biases verifies our belief, we assume that the belief must be objectively true.

APPLICATION Similarity and Morality in Politics Understanding the influence of communicator similarity gives us some insight into why appeals to morality in political rhetoric often fall on deaf ears and fail to change attitudes. Some research shows that liberals and conservatives have somewhat different moral priorities (Graham et al. Conservatives, more than liberals, for example, value loyalty to the group and respect for authority as moral principles. From this cultural perspective, morals are more subjective than objective. And the problem, according to Feinberg and Willer (2015), is that political candidates often advocate their positions based on their own sense of morality, not the moral principles of the audience they are presumably trying to convince (ie, undecided voters or those leaning toward the other candidate). This suggests that if communicators pitch their message in line with the moral principles of those they are trying to persuade, they should be more effective. Indeed, across such issues as military spending, same-sex marriage, and English as the official language of the United States, Feinberg and Willer find that framing the issue in terms of liberal morals (eg, fairness) better persuades liberal audiences, whereas framing the same message with conservative morals (eg, loyalty) better persuades conservative audiences. It's getting even more difficult, when patients have to pay for their therapy themselves. People who have their Euros flying out of their wallets with every passing minute often appear less interested in slowly establishing a therapeutic relationship, and rather ask for precise instructions about what to do to reduce their symptoms. But what instructions could that be? People often come to my office like pilgrims in search of a guru, who they assume to have a mysterious secret knowledge, and whom they now want to ask an important question. For example: How do I get rid of my binge eating attacks? Since there is rarely a really good answer to questions likes these, the visit often leads to disappointment. If the psyche was a car, and you would look into a random CBT textarticle for a guide about how to replace a defective injection pump, the preciseness of the instruction would often go like this: Initiate the replacement procedure. Use tools that are suited for this task. Evaluate your progress. Then the article ends. One thing I've noticed in my professional training as a therapist is that the older generation of shrinks out there just don't quite get the influence of technology on modern life and modern mental health. I really think that technology has changed the landscape of anxiety.

There are many things that it is great for. You can use technology to really facilitate your domination of anxiety, but it can also feed into that anxiety and the bitch about it is that sometimes those two scenarios look almost identical. This topic is very personally loaded. Not just in my personal experience, but for my wife, who has been gracious enough to allow me to blab about her in this article. She has issues with anxiety. Sometimes it's not so bad and she can go about her day and do important things. Other days, she can get thrown into a panic attack as she's trying to go to sleep and completely unravel within a few minutes. The reason I'm talking about her here is that she is self-employed as a blogger, author, calligrapher, wedding designer etc Like so many of you out there who are self-employed or just work for modern companies, that means she lives her life on the internet and interfaces with technology for everything. This can be seen as a specific example of a broader tendency for communicators to be more effective when they present audiences with messages that fit with values the audience finds personally important (Blankenship & Wegener, 2008). SECTION REVIEW Characteristics of the Source The power of a message to influence attitudes depends, in part, on who is delivering that message, or its source. Credibility Credible communicators are both expert and trustworthy. Legitimate expertise persuades through the central route. The appearance of expertise persuades through the peripheral route. Attractiveness Communicators can be persuasive when they are attractive, even if their credibility is low. Attitudes about subjective preferences are influenced more by a similar source than by a dissimilar source. How less stressful all this would be if my role as a therapist was indeed just to listen to stories about egoistic husbands and wicked wives, and here and there join in with an empathic Oh, my goodness! But as long as there's the omnipresent advertising message: CBT - highly effective techniques for defeating psychic problems, many come to meet a mechanic for a quick-fix, and not somebody to talk to.

The future of CBT We must slowly come to an end. That which applies to a session of CBT also applies to this article. Have a nice week, see you next time. Oh, you want to hear something about the future of CBT? Well, here's a picture with a cautious guess about how therapy may look like in 10 years from now: At first glance, a psychotherapy without the necessity of a human psychotherapist would have a lot of advantages: lower costs (or even none at all), availability 24/7, and the option of skipping the search for a parking spot in the therapist office's neighborhood. The idea isn't new: already in 1966, the German-American computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, a simple computer program that does conversation in the style of a Rogerian psychotherapist. It's amazing what you can do with the world at your fingertips. Just right now, she was like, Hey send me a quote from the article to make a graphic out of, and I was all like, Yo. Pretty awesome. With the pervasiveness of technology and our lives becoming one with the cloud it is sometimes hard to understand where work ends and life begins. When part of your job is keeping up with blogs, does reading them count as a break anymore? Having emails delivered directly to your phone is great, but what about when it is interrupting dinner or stressing you out right before you go to sleep? You gotta get that shit under control before it controls you. Rage against the machine, my friend. There is no one right answer to the correct way to interface with technology, but in general, you want to set yourself up for success. You want to do a little bit of lifestyle min-maxing. Attitudes about objective facts are more influenced by a dissimilar source. Characteristics of the Message