Item 1

What do SSRIs really do to your emotions?

A major Oxford study (by researchers supportive of antidepressants) explored the lived experiences of SSRI users (experiences not captured by RCTs). What participants revealed about emotional blunting is disturbing…

Emotional side-effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors: qualitative study. 2018 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/emotional-sideeffects-of-selective-serotonin-reuptakeinhibitors-qualitative-study/88C72E9EA0961CDE777C2FDCDBCE1CA9

So here we go

1. General flattening of all emotions: Most participants said their emotions felt ‘dulled’ ‘numbed’ or ‘blocked’ by SSRIs. Some couldn’t feel at all, and just thought about how they should feel. Even joy, grief or love often felt distant or ‘fake’....

2. Loss of positive emotions: Nearly all participants described a marked drop in joy, excitement, love, affection and passion. They no longer felt uplifted by music, hobbies or even felt close connection with loved ones....

3. Relief from distress, but at a cost: many felt that negative emotions like fear, sadness and anger were reduced; which initially brought relief. But many also found this also muted their ability to grieve, cry or care when it mattered...

4. Emotional detachment: participants often felt like they were watching life through glass; ‘in limbo,’ like a ‘robot’. Even toward partners or children, empathy and connection was dimmed. Some welcomed this calm; others found it deeply isolating...

5. Apathy and ‘not caring’: Many described losing motivation, concern or urgency. They cared less about themselves, about others and about their responsibilities. One said: ‘I just didn’t care anymore, about anything...’

6. ‘It changed who I am:’ Some participants felt their personality had changed or been stripped away. They no longer recognised themselves. One called it becoming ‘a shell.’ Another said it made them behave out of character...

7. Real-world impact: Emotional blunting affected, parenting, work performance, creativity and relationships. While a few welcomed emotional control, many found these effects worsened quality of life; even led to self-harm in rare...

8. ‘It’s the meds, not the illness.’ Most participants were confident the flattening was not their depression returning. Clues included: effects starting after their treatment; emotional blunting improving after stopping SSRIs. A ‘chemical’ feeling to emotions…

9. So, what should we take from this? This was the first in-depth study giving patients themselves a voice on emotional effects. Given that 9 million adults were prescribed these drugs in England last year, politicians should wake up to the societial effects of numbing on mass.

10. Therapists take note. These blunting effects aren't rare, in fact many now consider them the ‘primary effect’ of SSRIs. Please understand this is highly relevant to your therapeutic work, despite what the status quo may have taught you...End

Item 2

The Happiness Trap: Stop Struggling, Start Living. Dr Russ Harris 2021.

Free yourself from the shackles of depression, anxiety and insecurity, and instead build a rich and meaningful life, with the world’s best-selling guide to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

Audible here $17 Apple audiobook here $28 Amazon Kindle here $9 Book from Russ himself here $35

(from Russ) The second edition has over 50% brand new material. There are new tools, techniques and exercises; new information about the nature and purpose of emotions (and how to overcome emotional numbness); many new topics and chapters, including how to break bad habits, push through procrastination, stop panic attacks, disrupt worrying and obsessing, deal with values conflicts and difficult dilemmas, overcome ‘people-pleasing’ and perfectionism; practical tips for those suffering from trauma; and last, but definitely not least, a stack of new material on self-compassion. On top of all that, I’ve chopped out a whole lot of waffle, repetition and technical jargon. So if you liked the first edition, I hope and trust you’ll get a whole lot more out of this one.

Part 1: Why is it hard to be happy? Part 2: How to handle difficult thoughts and feelings Part 3: How to make life meaningful

ACT Companion app – just $15, one off cost, available forever:

Be present, open up, and do what matters. The acceptance and commitment therapy app, based on the best-selling ACT self-help book, The Happiness Trap, by Dr Russ Harris. https://www.actcompanion.com/ à Feel better, without even trying.

Now, peer-reviewed research has found completing just one ACT Companion exercise per day can significantly reduce anxiety, depression and stress symptoms, and improve mood. The same study also found that using ACT Companion increased participants' mindfulness skills and psychological flexibility. See attached.

Dropping Anchor! When emotional storms hit hard - ACE it! 3 simple steps: Acknowledge, Come back into your body, Engage - Chapter 5 in Happ Trap, 3 tracks in ACT Companion Dropping anchor exercises all follow a repeating three-step structure, which you can remember with the acronym ACE:

A— Acknowledge your inner experience C— Come back into your body E— Engage with the world

Item 3

Be present, open up, and do what matters. The acceptance and commitment therapy app, based on the best-selling ACT self-help book, The Happiness Trap, by Dr Russ Harris.

https://www.actcompanion.com/ à Feel better, without even trying.

Over 850 published studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of the ACT approach for mental and physical health, relationships, performance, and behaviour change.

Now, peer-reviewed research has found completing just one ACT Companion exercise per day can significantly reduce anxiety, depression and stress symptoms, and improve mood.

The same study also found that using ACT Companion increased participants' mindfulness skills and psychological flexibility. See attached.

Highly recommended!

Item 4

It’s not working!

‘This isn’t working!’ said Karl, when I took him through the exercise above. ‘What do you mean by “not working”?’ I asked. ‘I don’t feel any better,’ he said. ‘It’s not making these feelings go away.’ ‘Yes, that’s not the aim of it,’ I replied.

Comments like Karl’s are incredibly common when people are new to this approach. Even after listing all their struggle strategies and realising the costs they have on health and wellbeing. Even after learning about ‘dropping the struggle’ — and how this reduces the impact of difficult thoughts and feelings, without trying to avoid or get rid of them. And even despite knowing that anchors don’t control storms.

Yes, even after all that, for many people this new way of responding to thoughts and feelings still takes a while to sink in. So if you’re one of them … that’s completely normal. When I was new to this approach, it took a while for me to get it, too. This is only to be expected; it’s such a radically different way of responding. Like Karl, most people initially misunderstand the point of dropping anchor, and try to use it as yet another struggle strategy. But that’s a recipe for failure and disappointment; this isn’t some clever way to control your feelings.

The aims of it are:

▪ to gain more control over our physical actions so we can act more effectively when difficult thoughts and feelings are present ▪ to reduce the influence of our thoughts and feelings: when we’re on autopilot, they jerk us around like a puppet on a string (OBEY mode); but when we’re consciously aware of them — acknowledging them with curiosity — they lose much of their control over us ▪ to interrupt worrying, rumination, obsessing or any other way we get lost inside our heads ▪ to interrupt our away moves (i.e. to short-circuit problematic behaviours that take us away from the life we want to build) ▪ to help focus (and refocus) our attention on the task or activity we are doing — especially if we’re disengaged, on automatic pilot or getting pulled out of it by our thoughts and feelings (this is why the exercise ends with the instruction to give your full attention to what you’re doing).

There are other benefits, too, which we’ll cover later in the book, but first I need to highlight something very important …

Distraction is not the aim

The word ‘distraction’ comes from the Latin distrahere, which means ‘draw away from’. Distraction techniques are struggle strategies, where the main aim is to take your attention away from unwanted thoughts and feelings. When dropping anchor, we do the very opposite: we actively notice the thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations, urges and memories that are present.

If we attempt to distract ourselves — try to get away from these unwanted inner experiences, ignore them, pretend they aren’t there — this is simply another form of struggling with them. (When you stopped pushing that book away, and let it rest on your lap, you didn’t try to ignore it or pretend it wasn’t there.)

Distraction isn’t ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ — but hey, you already know how to do it. We’ve all got zillions of ways of distracting ourselves, and we know they often don’t work or give short-term relief at best. So our aim here is to do something totally different: to step out of that struggle with thoughts and feelings, and allow them to be as they are; to let them ‘rest in our lap’; and allow them to come, stay and go in their own good time.

If you’re hurting badly — with crushing sadness, extreme anxiety, intense loneliness — your pain is unlikely to go as you drop anchor. However, it will often rapidly lose some of its impact; its power will drain away so it can’t so easily push you around. And if you keep the practice going for several minutes — usually three or four is enough, but sometimes longer is needed — you’ll often experience a sense of calmness, even as the storm continues to rage inside you.

On the other hand, if your pain isn’t extreme — for example, if you’re experiencing mild to moderate sadness, stress or anxiety — then as you drop anchor the pain will quite often lessen, and sometimes even completely disappear. When that happens, naturally appreciate and enjoy it, but always remember: it’s a ‘bonus’, not the main aim. If you take any technique we cover in this book and try to use it to avoid, escape, get rid of or distract yourself from painful thoughts and feelings … you’ll soon be disappointed or frustrated.

And then your mind will protest: ‘It’s not working!’

Mixing it up

I encourage you to create your own ways to drop anchor. There are hundreds of ways to use the ACE formula. And keep in mind, you don’t have to stick to the sequence above: Acknowledge Connect Engage.

Some people find it works better to first Connect with their body, and then to Acknowledge what’s going on inside and then to Engage in what they’re doing.

Yet others prefer: Connect Engage Acknowledge.

The sequence doesn’t matter as long as you include all three phases (don’t skip the Acknowledging, or this will become distraction) and you run through several cycles. You can also experiment with different methods of naming; some people like to use just one or two words: ‘Anxiety’, ‘Worrying’, ‘Sadness’, ‘Judging myself’; others prefer longer phrases like ‘I’m noticing a feeling of …’ or ‘I’m having thoughts about …’ So now … please run through dropping anchor once more, for two to three minutes.

Run through at least two or three cycles of ACE, and notice what happens.

What next?

You may be wondering, ‘After I drop anchor, what do I do next?’ (Even if you aren’t, I’m going to tell you.) Remember the concept of the choice point, in Chapter 2? Towards moves are things you do that are in line with the sort of person you want to be, taking you towards the life you want to build; and away moves are the opposite.

Item 5

Whatever the emotional storm is made of— anger or sadness or fear or guilt or hopelessness— the sooner we can ground ourselves, the better.

Three Steps to Dropping Anchor – CHAPTER 5 in The Happiness Trap 2nd edition

And now there’s 3 tracks in first part of ACT Companion on Dropping Anchor

Dropping anchor exercises all follow a repeating three-step structure, which you can remember with the acronym ACE:

A— Acknowledge your inner experience C— Come back into your body E— Engage with the world

Let’s look at these one by one.

A— Acknowledge your inner experience. The aim here is simply to acknowledge whatever thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories, sensations, and urges are present. It’s often useful to put this into words (silently or aloud), for example, “Here’s sadness,” “I’m noticing painful memories,” “I’m having a feeling of anger.”

C— Come back into your body. The aim here is to regain a sense of self-control by focusing on what you have most control over when difficult thoughts and feelings are present: your physical actions. Move, stretch, change posture, sit upright, stand up, walk, alter your breathing, straighten your spine, push your feet into the floor, and so on. These things help people to rapidly regain control over their physical body: a great first step toward any type of effective physical action.

E— Engage with the world. The aim now is to expand your awareness: notice where you are, what you’re doing, and what you can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. This is not to distract from thoughts and feelings, but to notice what else is here in addition to them.