(reprinted from January’s edition of “Mentality” for men)

Healthy self-esteem is a critical component in a well-balanced life. Guys need it just the same, and it’s a consistent practice over time to maintain and refine good self-esteem, or the relationship that we have with ourselves. The way we treat ourselves is a direct reflection of the way we attract others into our lives. Who we attract into our lives is a direct reflection of how we feel about ourselves - good or bad. Let’s take a look at some components to developing better self-esteem for men.

Here’s how this will happen: we’ll look at four common areas affected by self-esteem, and give four tips for each category.

• At Work
  • Feel accomplished by breaking up large projects into easy to manage tasks, and structure your time.
    • Check these free forms out to help get you better organized: http://davidseah.com/
  • Periodically ask for constructive criticism from superiors to do a better job. Don’t wait for your review. It’s not ass kissing if you to want to perform better, and wiser.
  • Use your lunch productively: do some stress management for yourself for thirty minutes
  • Set quarterly goals for yourself on the job, and work towards gradual achievement of them; if you’re unhappy at work, set quarterly goals to get yourself out of there and into a better job or career
• Relationship with Ourself
  • Identify and watch the toxic “self-critic”. Start to watch how it beats you down mentally, and how much of your behavior may be driven to succeed to “show” or compensate. This is the voice inside your mind that tells you “you’re not good enough, smart enough, successful enough.” Yes, that one.
  • Identify your needs and communicate them to the people that can meet them for you. Deal with the ones that can’t.
  • Identify your feelings and communicate them to the people that can listen to them. Deal with the ones that can’t.
  • Know what your limits are. Learning to say “no” is just as important for men as it is for women. Having healthy boundaries - which originate in ourselves first - is the foundation for practicing self-care, and developing good self-esteem.
• Lifestyle
  • List three things you’ve been saying you’re going to do - that you’re not already doing - and develop an action plan to start to do them. This includes interests, hobbies, investment in relationships, etc. Identify the blocks and barriers, and write them down. Repeat.
  • Consider your friendships, and how they should be mutually satisfying for both parties. Do you feel good about them, and feel like you’re getting from them, as well as giving to them? If not, is a change needing to be made? Our friends can be great mirrors of our self-esteem, if we look closely. Research shows that mental health,  like depression, can be socially contagious, so why wouldn’t positive (or negative) self-esteem? Surround yourself with well-intentioned people who are good for your self-esteem.
  • Practice 20-30 minute regular exercise routines and do it not for an end-result, but as a commitment towards greater energy and positive self-esteem. Do it for your partner (or kids) if nothing else. We’re not talking Lance Armstrong here. Shake up those feel good brain juices.
  • Align your values with your behaviors. Are you practicing what you preach? Are you doing things in the world that are consistent with what you believe in? Sometimes, recalibrating them brings improved self-esteem, when we’re living from our core values instead of someone else’s.
• Stress Management

• Practice 10-15 minutes of conscious breathing (you can do this at work) or mindfulness meditation. You’ll be able to “unstick” from negative thinking about yourself through this process. E-mail me for instructions on meditating or breathing exercises.
• • Create a “stress list”, and record the daily items that stress you. Dump the stressors onto that list, and put the list in your desk drawer, or in a glass jar labeled “To Worry About”. Don’t stress: you’ll get to them later.
  • Practice better anger. You can exercise it out, yes, but you can also get in touch with the experience of anger in yourself, and communicate your anger in a healthy way to those that are the cause of it. Don’t stuff your anger, but don’t explode either. Choose “the middle way,” and cool your anger and frustration each time it comes up. But time it well.
  • Don’t smoke, and drink a little less. Both will spike stress, and exacerbate negative thinking about yourself (especially if you then tell yourself you want to quit. This is called “cognitive dissonance”, when stress appears as a product of two competing ideas. (“I want to quit, but I’m still doing it.”)

Self-esteem is a relationship that we build with ourselves over time. It requires some work, and continuing to do the right things over and over again. If you think you have chronic self-esteem problems, and need help, contact me to see how counseling or psychotherapy might benefit you.

A lot of the time, we lose valuable experiences that take place in the present moment because we are busy “living” our lives in our heads, either lost in the memories of the past, or fantasizing about the future, where life will be better. It’s difficult to stay planted in the present moment, because that is where our minds don’t want to stay.

Men tend to avoid the experience of their emotions and feelings by living in the past or the future, and have a difficult time dealing with the present moment. Some men avoid their present moment experience by staying in their heads all of the time, and “thinking too much.” Some just avoid the present moment by not having their experience of anger, of pain, of sadness, or of grief. The failure to attend to these crucial experiences means that we have to find surrogate places to be. 

Growing up, many of us learned to stuff our emotions or feelings, and started creating a life that avoided the pain of the present moment. It was too hard then, and it’s too hard now. We build lives on top of these individual experiences of pain, fear and sadness, and then lament when our problems are getting the best of us. We forget that we are the ones that created a lot of the problems that we experience, because it’s been too long and our problems have been embedded in our lives for as long as we can remember.

Learning to be in the present moment is truly living our lives, and not living in the false realities of the past and future. It is difficult for people to do this type of living, especially when there are many places inside of us that are too scary to revisit.

Meditation, yoga, therapy, and other vehicles of mindfulness are all ways to get back into the beauty of the present moment. Deep breathing is also a practice into accessing the present moment. 

Learning to have our feelings and experiences, and then communicating them to the ones we love is a form of acceptance of the present moment. We are truly living our lives when we do this.

Do we really need Prozac? James Gordon, founder of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, D.C., says there’s a better way to treat depression—through diet, exercise and meditation. Roll your eyes all you like. He’s used the approach for 35 years with a wide range of patients, from runaway children and middle-class adults in Washington, D.C., to victims of war in Bosnia, Kosovo, Israel and the Gaza Strip. This week, Gordon is heading to flood-stricken Iowa to see if he can be of assistance there. About 10 percent of American women and 4 percent of men now take antidepressants (according to a 2004 CDC report). Gordon’s new book, “Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression,” outlines a treatment program he believes can be an alternative to medication. NEWSWEEK’s Anne Underwood spoke to Gordon about his recommendations and how he’s implemented them around the world. Excerpts: 

NEWSWEEK: So many people have been helped by Prozac and other antidepressant medications. Why do you say these drugs should only be used as a last resort? 
James Gordon: Depression is not the end stage of a disease process but a wakeup call to examine our lives. There are better ways to do that than taking drugs, which have side effects and don’t address the underlying message that depression is bringing—that our lives are out of balance and significant change is necessary. Instead they tell us, “You have a biochemical disorder, here’s a drug.”

But people with depression do have imbalances in levels of neurotransmitters. 
Some people do, I wouldn’t deny that. What I’m saying is that there are many ways to address those changes that do less harm and may be more productive in the long run because they give people the sense of control that comes from helping themselves.

Do psychiatrists hate your program? 
I’ve heard some do, but I hope that will change as they take a closer look at the evidence.  After all, I’m a psychiatrist myself. I have my medical degree from Harvard, and I worked for 10 years at the National Institute of Mental Health. I’m not the only clinician who believes antidepressant drugs are overused and that we need other ways to treat depression. A major study that appeared recently in the New England Journal of Medicine, which reviewed both unpublished and published studies submitted to the FDA, found that, when the unpublished trials were included, antidepressants were not nearly as effective as they’ve been thought to be. A second study that appeared in February in PLoS Medicine, the online journal, reviewed similar data and found that antidepressants were no better than placebos for mild to moderate depression and only slightly more effective for severe depression. 

How did you get interested in alternative treatments in the first place? 
At the National Institute of Mental Health in the 1970s, I worked with runaway and homeless children on the streets, in runaway houses and group foster homes. They came from chaotic households. Running away for some of them was the sanest thing they could have done. I wanted to develop programs to help them help themselves. Later I ran the adolescent service at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington. Virtually all the patients were minorities, and many were in trouble with the law. I created a holistic, or integrative, approach to their treatment. I brought in a kung fu instructor to work with them. I started meditating with them. I changed their diets and significantly increased their amount of exercise—lots of basketball, a running club and so on. The level of violence went down on the ward.

Describe the program you use with patients. 
It’s a good deal like what I describe in “Unstuck,” but done in a group setting. Each group opens with quiet meditation. You then introduce yourself and say what’s going on with you, focusing on your present experience. There is no analyzing, interpreting or interrupting. You become aware of what’s going on inside. In the first session, we have participants draw three pictures—one of themselves, then themselves with their biggest problem and finally themselves with the problem solved. It shows people they can identify their biggest problem and imagine a solution, a powerful experience when they’re feeling hopeless.