IRADA Clinic

MOTIVATION
10 Signs You're a People-Pleaser
You'll never reach your goals if you're trying to be all things to all people.

KEY POINTS
For many, the eagerness to please stems from self-worth issues, while others have a history of maltreatment.
Many people-pleasers confuse people-pleasing with kindness, thinking they "don't want to be selfish" and "want to be a good person."
One sign of being a people-pleaser is frequently apologizing.
Over the years, I’ve seen countless people-pleasers in my therapy office. But more often than not, people-pleasing wasn’t really their problem; their desire to make others happy was merely a symptom of a deeper issue.

For many, the eagerness to please stems from self-worth issues. They hope that saying yes to everything asked of them will help them feel accepted and liked. Other people-pleasers have a history of maltreatment, and somewhere along the way, they decided that their best hope for better treatment was to try to please the people who mistreated them. Over time, for them, people-pleasing became a way of life.

Many people-pleasers confuse pleasing people with kindness. When discussing their reluctance to turn down someone’s request for a favor, they say things like, “I don’t want to be selfish,” or “I just want to be a good person.” Consequently, they allow others to take advantage of them.

People-pleasing can be a serious problem, and it’s a hard habit to break. Here are 10 signs that you may be trying too hard to please everyone:

1. You pretend to agree with everyone.

Listening politely to other people’s opinions — even when you disagree — is a good social skill. But pretending to agree just because you want to be liked can cause you to engage in behavior that goes against your values.

2. You feel responsible for how other people feel.

It’s healthy to recognize how your behavior influences others. But thinking you have the power to make someone happy is a problem. It’s up to each individual to be in charge of their own emotions.

3. You apologize often.

Whether you excessively blame yourself, or fear other people are always blaming you, frequent apologies can be a sign of a bigger problem. You don’t have to be sorry for being you.

4. You feel burdened by the things you have to do.

You’re in charge of how you spend your time. But if you are a people-pleaser, there’s a good chance your schedule is filled with activities that you think other people want you to do.

5. You can’t say no.

Whether you say yes and then actually follow through, or you later fake an illness to get out your commitments, you’ll never reach your goals if you can’t speak up for yourself.

6. You feel uncomfortable if someone is angry at you.

Just because someone is mad doesn’t necessarily mean you did anything wrong. But if you can’t stand the thought of someone being displeased with you, you’ll be more likely to compromise your values.

7. You act like the people around you.

It’s normal for other people to bring out different sides of your personality. But people-pleasers often sabotage their goals. Studies show that people-pleasers engage in self-destructive behavior if they think it will help others feel more comfortable in social situations. For example, people-pleasers eat more when they think it will make other people happy.

8. You need praise to feel good.

While praise and kind words can make anyone feel good, people pleasers depend on validation. If your self-worth rests entirely on what others think about you, you’ll only feel good when others shower you with compliments.

9. You go to great lengths to avoid conflict.

It’s one thing not to want to start conflict. But avoiding conflict at all costs means that you’ll struggle to stand up for the things — and the people — you really believe in.

10. You don’t admit when your feelings are hurt.

You can’t form authentic relationships with people unless you’re willing to speak up sometimes and say that your feelings are hurt. Denying that you’re angry, sad, embarrassed, or disappointed — even when you’re emotionally wounded — keeps a relationship superficial.

How to Break Free From People-Pleasing
While it's important to impress your boss and show that you can be agreeable, being subservient could backfire. You'll never reach your greatest potential if you're trying to be all things to all people.

Start getting out of the people-pleasing habit by saying no to som**hing small. Express your opinion about som**hing simple. Or take a stand for som**hing you believe in. Each step you take will help you gain more confidence in your ability to be yourself.

If you’re really struggling to let go of these habits, seek help. A therapist can help you build the mental strength you need to create the kind of life you want to live.
Free For Consultation Please Contact
Call : 03065222270
Phone : 0512156061
Gmail : [email protected]
For more details, please visit our website!
www.iradaclinc.com
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ALCOHOLISM
The Evolving Evidence on the Health Implications of Alcohol
A growing body of research suggests that all alcohol leads to health risks.

THE BASICS
What Is Alcoholism?
Find a therapist to overcome addiction
KEY POINTS
Research suggests that drinking small or moderate amounts of alcohol is unhealthy.
Even at moderate levels, research shows alcohol consumption increases the risk of cancer.
Governments across the globe are reevaluating their guidelines on alcohol consumption.
More than 10 years ago, an organization in the United Kingdom called Alcohol Change U.K. kicked off a Dry January campaign to encourage U.K. residents to abstain from drinking alcohol for January.

Fast forward to today, the initiative has become a global trend. This year, some 11 million U.K. residents will participate, and surveys find more than 200 million Americans will attempt to give up alcohol for January.

This year, Dry January comes as governments across the globe reassess guidelines for how much alcohol is safe to consume. Last year, the World Health Organization published a new statement on alcohol consumption: No amount of alcohol is safe to consume. Canada followed suit, advising residents to have no more than two drinks per week, a decrease from the previous recommended limit of 15 drinks for men and 10 for women. (Australia published similar recommendations in 2020.) In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health has convened a panel to reevaluate the evidence on alcohol consumption and will publish new guidelines later this year.

A growing body of evidence suggests this is a wise move. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that alcohol consumption is responsible for some 140,000 deaths in the U.S. each year. Their research found premature deaths typically involved adults aged 35 or older and were primarily related to the health consequences caused by too much drinking over time, such as cancer, liver disease, and heart disease.

Research shows that even moderate alcohol consumption is associated with an increased risk of high blood pressure and coronary artery disease. A large study published in The Lancet found that alcohol consumption is connected to more than 60 diseases among men in China, including many conditions that were not previously connected with alcohol use, including gout, cataract, and gastric ulcer.

But alcohol’s biggest threat is that it leads to cancer. Large studies show that alcohol is connected to a significant proportion of cancer cases, including breast, bowel, stomach, pancreatic, throat, and liver cancers. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies alcohol as a group 1 carcinogen, the highest risk group, which also includes asbestos, radiation, and to***co.

What’s going on here? Molecular research shows that alcohol damages DNA in cells and prevents the body from repairing the damage, causing damaged cells to reproduce and create a tumor.

While the U.S. awaits updated alcohol consumption guidelines based on the most recent evidence, adhering to the new Canadian guidelines may be the best evidence-based solution.

The Canadian guidance recommends that two drinks or fewer per week will likely avoid health consequences related to alcohol consumption. It says that consuming three to six drinks per week increases the risk of developing cancer, and seven or more drinks per week also significantly increases the risk of heart disease or stroke.

The guidelines also recommended drinking no more than two drinks on any one occasion and abstaining from alcohol when pregnant or breastfeeding.

The take-home message: The latest evidence finds that alcohol consumption at any level increases the risk of developing serious health problems.
Free For Consultation Please Contact
Call : 03065222270
Phone : 0512156061
Gmail : [email protected]
For more details, please visit our website!
www.iradaclinc.com
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DOPAMINE
Is Dopamine Running Your Life—or Ruining It?
Why no goal may be more important than mastering your dopamine.

THE BASICS
What Is Dopamine?
Find a therapist near me
KEY POINTS
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter essential to human motivation.
Dopamine can motivate either behaviors that help us or harm us.
Modernity increasingly uses our dopamine circuit against us.
The simple formula for a happy life is pursuing rewards that require effort.
Deep in your basal ganglia is a minute brain structure with a massive influence over your life. Known as the nucleus accumbens to neuroscientists, it measures in at a measly 1-2 cubic centimeters (for perspective, this is so small that your nucleus accumbens would fit into a teaspoon with room to spare). Yet this tiny piece of neural tissue is involved in nearly every action that you take and may even be responsible for much of our progress as a species.

Here are some achievements for which the nucleus accumbens can claim ownership:

The works of Michelangelo, Picasso, Beethoven, and Shakespeare
Every Olympic medal and sports championship
All Nobel Prizes, bestselling novels, and Oscar-winning movies
The advancement of human civilization, from cave-dwellers to city-dwellers
That's an impressive resume, especially for an area of brain matter so compact that you could easily rest it on your fingertip. Whenever you see people with drive, ambition, persistence, vision, dreams, or purpose, you are witnessing people with a nucleus accumbens operating the way that Mother Nature intended.

Yet this remarkable brain structure also comes with a dangerous dark side. Here are some of the modern hazards associated with a nucleus accumbens gone haywire:

>100,000 annual deaths in the U.S. from drug overdoses
The estimated 93 percent of Americans with impaired metabolic health (e.g., diabetes, fatty liver disease)1
The millions of U.S. adults addicted to alcohol, ni****ne, or gambling, or struggling to control countless other problematic behaviors
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This same brain region critical to our survival and progress for thousands of years has arguably been hijacked in the span of just a few decades, morphing us from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde in the process. Although you likely won't find it on anyone's list of New Year's resolutions, learning how to regulate your nucleus accumbens may be the most important action you can take to elevate your quality of life.

Fortunately, there is a simple formula to follow to help this area of your brain work more like a superhero and less like a supervillain. But first, let's understand how the nucleus accumbens works and what's happened in recent years to help turn it against us.

Meet Your Nucleus Accumbens
Your nucleus accumbens is a powerhouse for two reasons. First, this region regulates a substance known as dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter—a chemical used by neurons—critical to reward-seeking and goal-directed behavior (see Figure below). Put simply, no dopamine means no motivation.

Dopamine is ancient. So ancient that it predates humanity, perhaps by millions of years. It is also the chemical pushing us to eat, drink, sleep, play, explore, procreate, go to work, and pay our bills.2 This mobilizing function makes even more sense after learning that dopamine is a precursor to epinephrine and norepinephrine (two other energizing substances in the body).

The second reason that the nucleus accumbens and dopamine regulation are so powerful is because human existence was historically so difficult. Life demanded this biochemical drive be potent just for us to survive.

Until the last few centuries, each day presented daunting challenges in the form of obtaining food, finding shelter and potential mates, protecting against weather, predatorial animals and other humans, and surviving famine and disease. Even the most basic behaviors necessary for living often required enormous and sustained levels of energy and motivation. Were dopamine and our nucleus accumbens any less proactive, our ancestors would not have possessed the tenacity to survive these obstacles.

With progress, thankfully, the amount of exertion necessary to survive diminished. The same goals that once demanded copious amounts of time and energy became simple conveniences for most people. To our ancestors, a world like today—where high-calorie foods, s*xual stimulation, and boundless forms of entertainment and pleasure are cheaply available—would have seemed like paradise.

However, the comforts of modernity are instead a mixed blessing because even though our survival needs are now easily fulfilled, our biological drives for them remain as strong as they were thousands of years ago. When our drives for activities such as eating, s*x, and pleasure-seeking no longer require time and effort to satisfy, the result isn't necessarily paradise. The result may also be addiction, metabolic diseases, and mental illness. These paradoxical consequences of modernity are a likely cause of the most pressing health concerns of the 21st century. For example:

Why are obesity and other metabolic disease so common in the U.S.? Because our drive to eat and consume calorie-dense foods is the same as for hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago—only we now have effortless, 24-7 access to these foods.
Why is addiction suddenly everywhere? Because our reward drive is as insatiable as it was for our ancestors—only now we have access to pleasure sources far more easily, varied, and intense than anything available to people in the past.
Why is mental health declining despite the conveniences of modern life? Because many people in the U.S. define happiness in terms of pleasure-seeking, status, and material goods. This type of hedonic happiness is transient, however, and can fuel withdrawal, cravings, abuse, and depression. In contrast, sustainable happiness in the form of meaning, connection, and contentment (called eudaimonia by Aristotle) requires time, sacrifice, and energy to obtain and cannot be purchased or derived from substances.
The Simple Formula for Mastering Dopamine
Although dopamine is essential to life, dopamine without effort negates quality of life. In the form of hyper-palatable foods, drugs and alcohol, ever-present technology, and pervasive advertising, modernity figured out how to hack our eons-old reward-seeking circuits for its own purposes. Seduced by promises of pleasure and happiness, many of us have instead found disease, despair, detachment from others, and premature death.3

The solution to this modern crisis likely won't be found through medicine, therapy, or even artificial intelligence. But I argue that it can be found using the most time-tested strategy for success in human history: effort.

The formula for health and happiness is a life oriented towards effortful rewards. Pursue goals that demand your best self (e.g., intimate relationships); seek out achievements won only through dedication and sacrifice (e.g., fitness); and create a lifestyle encouraging ongoing learning and personal growth (e.g., self-actualization). This is one lesson from history that will never become obsolete.
Free For Consultation Please Contact
Call : 03065222270
Phone : 0512156061
Gmail : [email protected]
For more details, please visit our website!
www.iradaclinc.com
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RELATIONSHIPS
16 Ways to Become a Better Listener
New research on communication shows what’s really behind good listening.

THE BASICS
Why Relationships Matter
Find a therapist to strengthen relationships
KEY POINTS
Listening is a vital life skill, helping to build relationships in ways that you might not even realize.
A new paper shows the essential ingredients that make up the 16 qualities of good listeners.
Knowing what qualities make for a good listener can help you foster better and more fulfilling relationships.
The fact that communication is a two-way street is som**hing that everyone accepts, but not everyone keeps in mind.

Perhaps you’ve become frustrated with one of your friends, who never seems able to stay on track in the conversation. You can tell that their mind wanders almost as soon as you start talking. They ask you a question that literally would involve a restatement of what you’ve just said. Even in a conversation as mundane as deciding how to get to someone’s house, you find yourself repeating the same information at least twice.

Communication researchers have long emphasized the importance of good listening. Within counseling and psychotherapy, teaching the ability to listen is a mainstay of all training programs. Various m**hods exist to train students to become expert listeners, as it’s known that without this skill, it’s almost impossible to help someone in need.

Apart from the professional need to be good at listening, the ability not just to “hear” but comprehend what someone else is saying is fundamental to good relationships. Your friend may be your friend no matter what, but wouldn’t it be great if they could engage with you in a way that shows they put value in the words that come out of your mouth?

The Science of Listening
According to the University of Mississippi’s Graham Bodie (2023), in a contribution to an entire journal on “Listening and Responsiveness,” “competent listening is defined as attending to all available information in a way that best preserves the content of a message (what was said) and its relational intent (what was meant)” (p. 2). Several “affective precursors” (mood-related) factors can help improve the ability to listen well, including mindfulness, or conversational sensitivity

In other words, you need to be able to clear your mind of your own emotions and instead zero in on what someone is actually saying. This means being “in the moment,” as the expression goes, and not letting your thoughts stray.

There is also a cognitive component to good listening, where you pay attention to facts and details. To do this, you need to set your own emotions aside.

Putting these two components of listening into concrete terms means that you want to be sensitive to the conversation as a relational tool, and also to the details you need to be able to offer a response. However, as informed by previous research, Bodie argues additionally that if you’re going to be a “high quality” listener, it helps to express a positive intention toward the other person. Feeling and understanding the other person can help them feel better about themselves, making this an important relationship-building technique.

Unpacking the 16 Behaviors of Good Listening
Research in the field of communication science goes beyond setting up these desired features of good listening to identifying the specific behaviors that constitute good listening. Use these 16 to see how you measure up.

Number one on the list is attentiveness. Just pay attention to what is unfolding in a conversation, a behavior that you can put into action with such cues as making eye contact, paraphrasing what someone said, and asking clarifying questions. Now the other person knows you’re engaged and not letting your mind drift off to someplace you’d rather be at the moment.

Next, you can move into what Bodie calls “communication competence,” which is what enhances good listening to improve relationships even further. These behaviors include being:

Expressive
Persuasive
Open and direct
Assertive
Intelligent
Organized
Unbiased
Finally, the seemingly elusive quality of being “socially skilled” includes a set of these 8 attributes, making up the total now of 16:

Friendly
Other-oriented
Helpful
Outgoing
Enjoy new people
Accepting
High in self-esteem
Not nervous
You might recognize some of these qualities as similar to personality traits, specifically such Five Factor attributes as being low in neuroticism and high in extraversion, agreeableness, and openness to new experiences. Some people are naturally socially skilled if they have these qualities. If you’re not, knowing how important they are to good communication could provide you with a set of qualities you can try to develop.

Putting Good Listening in the Context of Relationships
There are many situations in which good listening can serve to help you fulfill your life goals given, as Bodie notes, that “listening is an essential life skill” (p. 3). Whatever the situation, though, communication researchers have found that listeners construct shared realities with their conversational partners. The minute you open your mouth, you’ve started to create that reality.

A friendly “Hi!” can make all the difference in the world, but a grumpy “Oh, you?” can lead to the opposite outcome. Words themselves create relationships in the moment.

When you’re a good listener, you use that context to your advantage. In active listening, you move the narrative along in a way that allows the other person to elaborate on their thoughts and feelings, helping them gain greater insight and self-awareness. The insights you express, based on what the other person communicated to you, can create a positive relationship bubble in which the two of you feel intimately connected.

This set of developments certainly needn’t apply to all of your interactions. If you’re waiting in a long line at checkout and the person in front of you comments on your shared predicament, it doesn’t mean you need to start building an intense connection. However, at least acknowledging the other person’s expression of the reality you’re both in can create, for a moment, a sense of shared understanding.

To sum up, listening is indeed an essential skill to success in life, and it is also one you can develop if it’s not your strong suit. Research will continue to advance the academic understanding of this valuable attribute but in the meantime, you can advance your own ability to use it to build your own life’s path toward fulfillment.
eel Free For Consultation Please Contact
Call : 03065222270
Phone : 0512156061
Gmail : [email protected]
For more details, please visit our website!
www.iradaclinc.com
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