One of the most common complaints that I hear from patients is being too busy to take care of their health.  Busy has become one of the major obstacles to taking responsibility for our health.  We even wear our busy like a badge of honor: “I am so busy I don’t even have time to drink water!”.  This must be a very important person who can not even drink water.   Being busy can be a way to get praise or attention.  However, that attention is often attention that is a vicious cycle of ‘poor me’ attention as in “I don’t even have time to take care of myself because I am so busy.”  This becomes a cycle that can lead to feeling powerless over our health conditions and victims to our own schedules.  Busy has become the scape goat for health conditions that need our time and attention.

“I know that if I only had time to make dinner and lunch instead of eating out so often, that I could loose weight and bring my cholesterol and blood pressure down.  But I am just too busy. ”

How do you get out of the busy cycle?  First step is to remove the word busy from your vocabulary.  When you are tempted to describe your day/week/month/year/life as busy, find another word that is more empowering.   For example when someone ask how your day is going, you can answer:  “I accomplished a lot today.”  Just changing that one word will change your focus in your day and put the power of time back in your control.

When we are not busy, we have time for everything that is important.  Our days are full of choices and decisions.  Every decision we make, we are also making a decision to not do something else.  We don’t have time to do everything we want to do everyday, but we do have time to do everything that we value as important.  If eating healthy meals, exercise, drinking water, sleep, are not valuable to you, then chances are that you will fill up the time with what is more important.  Even if we could add hours onto the day, you would still fill that time with what is important to you.  When you decide that health is important, you will find the time to do the steps necessary to take care of your body.

I have found that being aware of how you spend time in your day is a choice,  you will have the power to make changes.  For example, you may say that you have to go to work therefore you have no time for healthy living.   While it is true that working may take a big piece of the time in your day, no one is forcing you to go to work.  Going to work is a choice you make so you can pay the mortgage, drive a car, buy food, clothes, go on vacation etc.  But that is a choice.  You could choose to be unemployed or change employment.  Once we realize that every aspect of our day is a choice, you can begin to choose those activities that are in alignment with your goals. If you can see work as a choice, then you also have the choice to go to sleep so you can think clearly, or the choice to eat in a way that supports your ideal weight, or exercise your body so you can have energy.  Once you accept that time at work is a choice, then you will find that the way you fill your time away from work is also a choice.

If you are a busy person that finds yourself saying, “I wish I wasn’t so busy so I could : drink water/cook better meals/exercise/get to bed at night/do an activity that I love/spend time with friends,”  then start with taking out the word busy.  Next step is to make everything you do in the day a choice instead of an obligation coming from someone else.  Once you take responsibility for your time, you will make the time for everything you decide is important.  As you make time and take responsibility for feeling good, you will in turn be rewarded with feeling less busy.

At the end of your life, you will never look back and wish you had only been more busy in life and spent less time taking care of yourself.

Dr. Jill Scott ND

The NVC model is comprised of four main components: observations, feelings, needs, and requests. The following article will briefly outline the particular manner in which the NVC model addresses each of these four items.

OBSERVATIONS

Imagine yourself sitting quietly in the back yard enjoying a cup of coffee and taking in the scenery. You’re enjoying the morning, a few moments to relax, and the pleasant taste of a warm drink. Suddenly, your partner calls out from the window that you’ve “thrown your sports gear all over the dining room again” and mumbles under their breath “do you have to be such a pig?”.  They’re upset and really wanting more order in the house. Also, the gear smells of body odour and your partner’s not liking the way the house has taken on the same smell.

This is a familiar pattern in many relationships, and inevitably it leads to more conflict. The person at the receiving end of the message might respond that “you shouldn’t be so picky” or “why can’t you just relax”. Alternatively, they might say to themselves “she’s right, I’m a pig. I let him/her down again. I just can’t seem to get it right”. Either way, disconnection from each other seems likely to follow.

So how can this be avoided? I would suggest that the way in which we make observations plays an integral role in how people receive our messages. In the example above, the person who was upset with the mess made an analysis of what they saw. They used the words “thrown” and “all over” and called their partner a “pig”. Instead, if the message had been presented as what was actually seen, it’s likely that the person receiving it would have been more willing to listen to and accept what was being said. Imagine that the person annoyed with what they saw as a “mess” had said “I see your equipment is on the living room floor”. This is a fact. There is no judgement attached to it. The fact that the listener would likely agree with what had been said suggests that this is a good starting point for a dialogue.

The next aspect of the NVC process is how to share the feelings that are stimulated by your observation.

FEELINGS

An important question to ask about one’s feelings is who’s responsible for them?. You may have heard someone say “you’re making me angry” or “you’re upsetting me”. This suggests that other people are responsible for how we feel. But are they?

Imagine that you’re on a bus and a person who has just entered from the last stop begins to yell obscenities. One of the passengers might feel scared that this person could harm people, another passenger might feel curious about why there’s someone yelling, and yet another might feel compassion for the suffering that they believe may result from a mental illness. The point I want to make is that each person on the bus interprets what they see in their own unique way and that this interpretation leads to a feeling. I’m positing that, while someone might stimulate an emotion in us, it is how we interpret people’s words or actions that ultimately leads us to feel the way we do in any moment. As such, the NVC model does not utilize words such as ignored, abandoned, or denigrated as feeling words. Rather, it suggest that these words reflect analyses.

The NVC model focuses on what feelings are going on inside ourselves. Thus, when someone doesn’t respond to my question, instead of telling them that I feel ignored I might say “you haven’t responded to my question and I’m feeling sad because I’m really wanting to connect with you”. The latter part of this sentence, the part about what I’m wanting in that instance, relates to the next section on NEEDS.

NEEDS

Human beings all share the same fundamental needs. We have survival based needs for shelter, food, water, sleep, and warmth, as well as needs for love, fun, excitement, play, joy, connection, learning, relaxation, friendship, creativity etc. These needs are what connect us to one another and yet there is often little dialogue about them. Instead, in my experience, we frequently tell people about the strategy that we want to use in order to meet our needs. For instance, instead of saying “I’m really needing some space right now” we say “I need you to leave me alone”. Do those two messages feel different from each other for you? If so, why? For me, the former message creates an opportunity for further dialogue and for the other person to provide us with space as a gift. I feel lighter when I imagine myself saying or receiving this message. In the latter example, I see it more as a demand. I feel tighter in my body when I imagine myself hearing or saying “I need you to leave me alone”.

I believe that greater fluency in a feelings and needs based language can result in more meaningful connections with ourselves and others. It can also help us to make requests for fulfilling our needs.

REQUESTS

How do you like to be asked for something? I prefer to be given a choice. That is, to be asked if I’d be willing to do something rather than told to do something. When we come from a demand based style of communication we tend to focus on fairness and give and take. If we operate from the request based style that I’m thinking of then we give people the opportunity to choose whether or not they’d like to meet our need(s).

If one chooses to follow the NVC model, one shares the feelings and needs that have driven the request. Imagine the person in the first example who’s frustrated about finding the sports clothes on the living room floor. He/she might say “When I see your sports clothes on the living room floor (OBSERVATION) I’m noticing that I feel frustrated (FEELING) because I’m wanting more order in the house (NEED). I’m wondering if you’d be willing to support me in this and put those clothes in the wash when you’re finished your coffee (REQUEST)? I’m also wondering if, in the future, you’d be willing to commit to doing this as soon as you get back from your next game? (REQUEST).

Chris Rowe

PhD Candidate in Psychology

Chris will be offering a series of courses at Port Moody Integrated Health using the Nonviolent Communication system this fall.