well i'd like to introduce our next speaker and fact i'm happy to introduce our next speaker dr elizabeth binfield boardman she is a psychologist she's been a psychologist for over thirty years and  she has been instrumental in fact in when my wife and i were adopting our first child we had lots and lots of questions in regard to  challenges as parents that we were dealing with and she was such a a jam with with all of her wisdom and understanding and knowledge and so i'm excited to to introduce dr elizabeth gibbons keyboard men measure she's talking about the baby be able to meet maybe in a different room maybe this room later on with questions or anything left over from today because there is i i have a lot to talk to you about and to ask you to cooperate with so hopefully we'll get it all done so one of the things i'd like to suggest is that we all probably need ten minutes fifteen minutes thirty minutes to slow down so that we can really think about what's going on in our lives and especially if we're going to try to improve our level of happiness so of course the road to happiness is a really rocky road as you might might or i'm sure you already know one of the things that i have to assure you is that i don't have any magic wand and sometimes people  think psychologists have a lot of answers to the questions and they're surprised to find out that mostly we just want to have a dialogue so that's what i'd like to do with you today and the list that you hopefully filled out is to consider that these are coping mechanisms somebody said i said no to kick the dog that's good that's good if you could just fill out the questionnaire if you find it on the chair and then all of reach a regroup later so anyway once you fill this out i'd like you to consider that these are what i will call coping mechanisms so when a person is stressed or overwhelmed it's very important before they try to solve the problem that they're facing or the problems they need to calm themselves down and slow down and stabilize so if you're in the middle of dealing with a stressor you might not be able to easily slow down or  this white list is even though even the items that look like they might not really be coping mechanisms like take the dogs or cry i invite you to consider that they are coping mechanisms because we all need to sometimes do things that aren't very rational but maybe would really help to get rid of the emotion before we  the brain and problem solved i'd like you to look at your list and circle your favorite coping mechanism so anything on the right hand side that you  said yes to i'd like you to circle that item anybody wish to share with me why they circled what they circled what is your favorite if any  salie those of us who know how to meditate i think are very lucky and for me if i don't meditate i just feel awful during the day i'm used to it  is good so that the sequence is a fixed one comes first and then the next i think we women are lucky because we can cry enough say that males never cry but no terrible generalization but i think and as you may know when you cry your release endorphins your brain's releases endorphins which are calm a tip of an a stress reliever  and same thing happens i think when you meditate the next thing i'd like you to do on your list is the star the item that you find is the most helpful when you feel stressed just put a star next and then you can just catch my eye again if you when you finished anybody willing to share which item is your most helpful on your list hopefully there are so you and i call that state that allows us to talk openly i call it emotional safety and i had to experience this weekend with my step daughter she was visiting us and we were going to have a trip and she just melted down and the whole weekend she was crying and she didn't even want to participate in the activities and at the end she got back home she she stomped off and she said she was angry and she said i'm going to bed at eight o'clock ok that's fine and the next morning when she got up she she said i'm so sorry how i acted up our acted like a teenager and she's forty and i said no i'm so glad because sometimes you need to let off steam you need to if if we had a fight and that was the fight but you can only do that with the people you're close to and even though it's not pleasant it's really important  their own special coping mechanism that is your favorite anyway anyway if you did then feel free to add that up too and the point here is that each of us is an individual of course and that are coping mechanisms are very personalized through that what works for my husband wouldn't work for me and hopefully we all understand that our road our partners are the people we live with that it has to be very much our own decision about what it is we do to cope with stress so the last thing i'd like you to do now does anybody know how to have any idea why i asked you to add them up any any guesses for that ok ok absolutely well that's a good that's a good point the more you have in the yes column i would say the better you can cope because sometimes if let's say we're in a public situation and we're the kind of person who you know must go to the restroom to cry and that's not even an option then we might as well try to find a different coping mechanism at that point and if if you have lots of choices and i think that's what life is about is many choices if you have a lot of big number on here then  you'll probably not get stuck and when we get stuck literally what happens i think the people who know brain physiology better than me or anatomy i think what happens is that the oldest part of our brain what they call the animal brain literally takes over maybe that's the fight or flight mechanism and we cannot think we cannot problem solve all of our higher powers decisionmaking remembering paying attention they all shut down and so at that moment when we're very emotionally upset there is no way that we're going to start to cope so if you have a lot of these choices then the white sheets set of things might be helpful enough to calm you down so that the next piece is  so while i was getting ready to talk to you today about happiness i i know that it's a little bit presumptuous of me to say that i can help you get to happiness but one of the things i did was i listen to a lot of what we call we might call the experts and the experts or people you know from my field from psychology from even crisis intervention and but i also found that there were a lot of ted talks on happiness and some of them were fantastic and there was a lot on you tube about happiness so it was very interesting because some of those people are experts some of them are just people like ourselves who wanted to share on on you tube already familiar with your true sort of they just wanted to share their ideas the list of i gave you the green list is what i would call the giant steps to happiness so we talked about the the baby steps to happiness just coping so that you can get to another level and start problem solving so these are some of the generalizations that i think you know kind of put down as a result of what the experts are saying what other people are saying whether it's on the internet or not  so the biggest thing that i would like to suggest to you is that building your support system is extremely important and  a couple years ago there was a wonderful book out called family dinners and this book was all about how powerful a ritual it is for parents of with children who are always worried about their kids not getting getting in with the wrong crowd or being violent or whatever it is being into drugs so that one of the best rituals to ensure that your kids are solid is to have family dinners and we all know how difficult the head can be to pull together kids who are going to soccer or going to any of the martial arts  whatever but if you can possibly if you have kids and you are grand kids and you can possibly sit everybody down at least once a week it seems to be such a powerful way to  build really strong families and hopefully ensure happiness anybody have any other ideas about how to build a support system or any experiences where you  maybe move to a new area or you're retired or you just things that your life changed and you started to realize that you needed to build a new supports a storm gets married when might have some did a what they call a study of studies and what that means is they look at all the research in a certain area and they try to figure out what it what are the generalizations what are these all these different studies with hundreds and thousands of people what did they all say and the only factor that came up over and over and over again that is closely related to good mental health is a good support system so what you said about isolation and it's amazing how a girlfriend of mine in philadelphia she they retired and they picked a place that was fabulous in terms of had all the amenities they wanted but they moved and they moved about a half an hour from where they used to live and she is feels just devastated because she's isolated there's nobody there that she feels connected to  you know so it's it can be a challenge and so the other thing it doesn't really matter what your support system methods are in other words you can be a volunteer and get into a group that way you if you can be part of a church per group you can be heard of a book club you can hang out with the people at work if you really you know like them and want to it doesn't really matter what the source of your support is it  will all be workable suit b do self care conscientiously so the thing that always comes to my mind and we're hearing a lot about is the good  sleep i'm amazed clients tell me that they get less sense six hours sleep at night i'm amazed i definitely can't function like that maybe maybe i'm unusual but you always need downtime and fun so anybody got some favorites exercise and do you think said for most people the exercise is fun well right yeah it really is and yeah right right right minutes left ten minutes left ok thank you i recently into a pickle ball and it's amazing we have a man in our group who is ninety and he plays pretty good pickle ball let me tell you how i feel like i can stay with this for a long time all right so i think one of the important pieces anybody else have a talking to people and you know all this stuff that you know the isolation is a really tough one it really is so often between sleep deprivation isolation is the biggest those are the biggest causes i think of depression because they just it is just really difficult so one of the things about self care that i want to suggest to you is that sometimes or often we have expectations of our self that are high really high and that's good i mean it's good to have high aspirations and high shoe high with your goals but my thinking is that if your expectations are up here but reality is down here this gap between your expectations and what really happens in the real world is probably a measure of how unhappy you are and so of course you can't change reality you know just like we always say you can't change your i know they get sick of me saying that but you can so in reality is set here but you can lower your expectations and it's not easy to do that and sometimes we feel guilty or disappointed with ourselves but it's possible and believe me i think the payoff is huge and so then the measure of the gap between our expectations and reality is much smaller so see on your list is protect your boundaries anybody have any idea what i mean by that ok i think it's really especially hard if you're just coming out of a period of stress let's say somebody close to you has died that i think that you have to protect yourself emotionally otherwise it's going to get worse and worse and more so for example i have some clients who have recently gotten divorced and it was pretty ugly and this one woman i'm thinking of and she caves getting questions from her coworkers dirt you know whatever and she says every time somebody asks her she becomes traumatized all over again so i suggested to her that she tell them that it would be much easier if she didn't have to talk about it and she started to do that and she's really pleased it's starting to to be a lot easier for her now too and so she can talk about whatever she wants but that's that's one of the ways i mean by protecting yourself and putting boundaries around people the other thing is to protect your time you know there's so many of us who are over how am i doing b five minutes ok there's so many of us who are overcommitted we have lots and lots going on in our lives we have many activities and stuff in our family i have named it  too many projects it's a fatal disease and so sometimes when my husband has fourteen things to do i think he can pay t v anybody have a notion of how you protect your boundaries because i think that if you look at this lift and anything you put a yes on they might be ways of protecting your boundaries like hide in your room when you need quiet time you need quiet time that's it doesn't matter if anybody understands it or not it's important and you to take it if you are somebody who does tend to cry i'll tell you i guarantee you most people are not going to try to talk to you about anything difficult or otherwise while you're crying so if you know protects you and presents a kind of boundary to them anybody else want to take a look at this then how do you do it with the kids remember maybe you don't go into my cave it's very one respect our daughter was of small one day she came and she was probably about four or five she came into the kitchen she said dad is mixing your meds is that me and here is really my husband's really pretty good natured usually and so i took her aside and i explained to her that sometimes daddy needs to go in to his cave and she love that oh my goodness she loved it so sometimes she'd go daddy yes ourselves this morning while i was trying to get this talk organized i had to forgive myself because i didn't prepare like i usually do i didn't have time was busy my husband was having pain and i had to make sure he got better so i had to forgive myself for not doing a good job of preparing and it's amazing to me how often i have to kind of say well wait a minute be a little you know let me off the hook here but i think i huge and they say that self compassion and that term is means just having some pity on yourself i guess is one of the most important things the client in therapy can learn how to do to get relief show and finally i want to introduce another concept and that is what i call a p o b and a b is simply a pat on the back and so i invite each of you to realize that you are already doing a lot of the things that we talk about in a b c and d and i invite each of you to pick one of those and if you feel comfortable in this public setting to give yourself a pat on the back for having done a good job on that one ok and if you want you can do on the other side as well my favorite exercise and you can do it on your mate that's beautiful beautiful thank you for that so you know finally i would i want to just i want to say thank you to steven lonnie for creating this wonderful party what a happening and how how wonderful and hopefully some of these items i gave you a notebook on purpose thinking that maybe you'd take it home and this could be your little journal of us or your way of writing down anything that you think you might want to do in the future to story the bit there that i put it over in the corner there yeah that's it in that fax and if somebody can help us get it the american psychological association has a help center web site that's wonderful anything at all that you want to you know look for search for in on their database on their web site is fabulous so enjoy those and hopefully hopefully they will be of some help oh my goodness to so much  thanks about being happy thank you so much