Mental Health Monday - Great Expectations

What kind of day did you expect to have when you woke up this morning? Good, bad, or indifferent—check back at the end of the day and see if your day surpassed, met, or failed to meet your expectations. Better yet, think back to last week and try to remember if how you thought your days were going to go actually predicted how your days went. For most people, most days are a function of the expectancy effect.

Clinical trials of medication utilize double-blind research methodology (i.e. neither researcher nor subject knows whether the pill being administered is real or placebo) because the effects of expectation are so powerful. That is to say, someone can show significant improvement on a sugar pill simply because he or she believes the pill will work. Or consider the example from the Norman Cousins book “The Healing Heart” about a cardiac patient whose heart was failing and reportedly beyond repair. The patient did not know of this prognosis and overheard his doctor refer to the “wholesome gallop” of his heart. The patient was unaware this phrase meant that his heart was failing; instead he assumed the doctor was impressed by his recovery. The story goes that the patient relayed to the doctor several months into his recovery that his condition began to improve after overhearing the “wholesome gallop” comment. From that point forward he thought we would feel better, so he did.

The expectancy effect is closely tied to the self-fulfilling prophecy: if you tell yourself you will fail enough times, your predictions, most likely, will come true. Fortunately, such prophecies can also be positive…but here’s the catch: for the effect to work, you should focus your expectations on things within your control. Sorry, you can expect to win the lottery all you want, but your expectations aren’t going to improve your odds. You can also expect to lose weight or ace an exam, but your expectations will be meaningless unless they are accompanied by the necessary actions to make what you expect to happen actually happen.

Go ahead and try it. You’ll find that great outcomes begin with great expectations.

Mental Health Monday - Tune In to Your Kids' Feelings

Emotions are the heart of the human experience. Day in and day out, our feelings wash over us naturally, like waves on a beach. What does not come as naturally for many people is how to manage uncomfortable emotions like sadness, frustration, and anger. Childhood is primetime for learning to handle these feelings appropriately, and tuning in to kids’ emotions is one of a parent’s most important jobs.

As children grow and their vocabularies expand, they gain the ability to speak about their feelings and the feelings of others, but they need parents’ help to manage emotions. Experts have distinguished between emotion-coaching and emotion-dismissing parents. An emotion-coaching parent monitors a child’s feelings, helps the child label his or her feelings, and sees negative emotions as opportunities for teaching children by coaching them how to deal effectively with strong feelings.

In contrast, emotion-dismissing parents view their role as to deny, ignore, or change negative emotions. It’s hard to see our children upset and hurting, and many parents jump to helping kids feel better as soon as possible. However, an emotion-coaching mom or dad recognizes the value in helping their child process the feeling as they console—for example, “I see you’re sad your ice cream fell to the floor; that would make me sad, too” or “I can tell you’re mad your brother took your toy. Let’s ask him to give it back.”

Helping kids tune into their feelings and the feelings of others is an incredibly important part of parenting, the result of which could be a generation that grows up with strong emotional intelligence and appreciation for the power of feelings.