Why small steps?
You may have heard that change often comes in small steps either in therapy, or life in general. However, you may also have found it frustrating that you seem to try supposedly helpful things but they ‘don’t work’, at least not quickly. I guess this is where the phrase; ‘believe in the process’ really comes into itself ….but, it can be hard accepting that if you do keep at it, the change will eventually happen.
I often ask my clients, especially those with low mood, where they are mood- wise on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest.
We discuss how, although many of us aim for 10, that really isn’t sustainable most of the time as an expectation. It’s important to recognise that life brings on all sorts of difficulties not just joy and satisfaction. Nonetheless, most of us chase the ‘happy, perfect’ pictures we are exposed to on social media.
Ask yourself : would you know how happy you were if you never experienced sadness or disappointment? Then try to accept that you need to experience a whole spectrum of feelings including the less pleasant ones. This is important as it relieves a bit of the pressure from trying to be super happy all the time. Accepting that we won’t, alleviates feelings of failure which make us feel worse.
Once you have really absorbed that feelings fluctuate considerably, often dependent on circumstances and events around you, you can begin to help yourself. This can start by deliberately increasing exposure to things that make you feel a little better.
Begin by noticing any fun or joyful moments, or at least, moments of peace in your daily life. If you are feeling ‘2’ right now, when did you feel ‘3’ and what made you feel like that? This shifts the focus to what is helping you. Maybe when you see a friend you feel like 3 or even 4 so you can try your best to see that friend more often. Perhaps you could move from seeing her once every two weeks to every week.
So, If something helps, you can increase that activity in small increments. Change will happen steadily. Keeping your focus on what is helping instead of how far you need to go, will ease that process.
Moving from 2 to 3 more of the time is real progress, small improvements are meaningful and achievable. It might be hard even to get out of your bedroom but if you could make that step every day for 10 mins you could, over time, really begin to notice a difference in your overall mood. Once that is achieved, you can add another small thing and another…progress may be gradual, but it is happening…. the more you commit.
Try to remember that you don’t need to get to 7/8 immediately, you need small actions done consistently to move gradually up the scale.
Repetition builds progress over time…..small steady steps.
