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How email, text and instant messaging is making insecurity in relationships worse
“I feel so insecure! All the bloody time! I keep on at him – if he doesn’t text me back within 10 minutes I feel like I’m going mad. I know I’m crowding him. He tries to reassure me, tells me I’ve nothing to worry about, but my neediness and jealousy is driving him nuts and no wonder! He’s only human.” Sheila
“I love her so much, she’s matters more to me than anyone I’ve ever had in my life. I can’t even begin imagine going on without her. But I get madly jealous if she so much as looks at another guy’s profile on Facebook. When I see her texting someone, and smiling, I feel sick inside. Who is she ‘talking’ to now? Sometimes I don’t hear from her for hours, sometimes she ignores my texts altogether and then she says she was too busy with the kids!” Dave
As part of developing the overcome insecurity in relationships 10 step course I’ve been talking to many people who find emotional insecurity in relationships a major issue, both face to face and via email.
And what I’ve noticed is that instant messaging is part of the standard background of just about every story of relationship insecurity I’ve encountered. There are regular refrains:
“Why hasn’t she answered my email?”
“Why hasn’t he texted back by now?”
“What did he mean by that status update? Everybody can read it! Was he serious?”
In that same period, how we communicate has changed in unforeseen and quite dramatic ways. But have these changes put more pressure on relationships?
Why hasn’t he texted me? (It’s been fifteen minutes!)
In the ‘old days’ (we’re talking 15 to 20 years back) it was much harder to get hold of people. If someone was travelling, you might not hear from them at all unless they made a special effort to get to a public call phone that was a) working and b) not being used by someone else. If someone didn’t ‘get back’ to you, there were hundreds of good and perfectly valid reasons why. And we all knew that. Of course, we might still worry and fret, but heck – I remember a time when answer machines were the latest thing, and before they came on the scene you couldn’t even leave a message unless it was with a… person! And we all know that people don’t always pass on messages. So there were good and widely appreciated reasons why you might not hear from someone for a while. We all understood that you sometimes just had to wait for other people to get in touch. We all had no choice but to put up with the uncertainty.
But now…
How instant communication has driven up relationship anxiety
Don’t misunderstand me, modern communication technology is amazing and I absolutely love it. For one, it enables you to read this (lucky you!  ). Loved ones can stay in touch from far-flung corners of the world. We can converse in real time with people from Singapore to Seattle to the Seychelles.
However, if you are somewhat prone to anxiety and emotional insecurity, this blessing may sometimes feel more of a curse. And even if you’re not the worrying sort, and generally tend to feel pretty secure in your relationships, you might still feel somewhat less secure because of the way these new modes of communication affect us.
Relationship insecurity merges into obsessive checking
Obsessive behavior has us repeatedly and often carrying out a certain set of actions. We obsessively check, or clean, or seek reassurance from a loved one – because we are trying to assuage our anxieties.
But it can also work the other way round.
If we repeatedly and often do something we can start to obsess about it. So you might have got into the habit of regularly checking your phone for messages from your loved ones. And because you have gotten into the habit of doing this so often, you start to feel anxious about it. Anxious obsession makes us check often, and checking often can in turn make us more anxious and obsessed.
The average person checks their phone 150 times a day, or once every six and a half minutes for every waking hour (1). Now couple that obsessive behavior with obsessive thoughts about a relationship, feelings of acute emotional insecurity and fears of rejection or being ignored, and you have a potent recipe for severe relationship angst.
The fact that we are so contactable may make us more anxious – because there seem to be fewer valid reasons why someone hasn’t been in contact. Other than… they don’t love me any more!
And there we have another problem.
“That’s not what I meant!”
If we rely heavily on text and email and instant messaging rather than on actually speaking face to face with the object of our love, we are more likely to misunderstand and misinterpret the messages that are going to and fro.
We can assume someone is serious when they are kidding, or that they mean one thing when they really mean another. We might think we have picked up signs of anger or loss of interest when we “read between the lines” because we can’t hear the tone of voice or see the smile on the lips or the glint in the eye. Emotionally insecure people misread, over-read and imagine all kinds of negative stuff about their relationship anyway, but this can be confounded by text and email.
Oh great, new ways to feel jealous
And if you can communicate instantly and in lots of different ways with the person you care most about then so, potentially, can other people. Technology may have given us a whole new way of feeling insecure and jealous. People can feel cheated on because their partner has an online relationship with someone they have never even seen face to face.
Relationship insecurity has always been around, of course, with its uneasy bedfellows of suspicion, pessimism and doubt. But texts, email and the rest, wonderful as they are, might actually be raising levels of insecurity for some people.
And that’s why I’m so pleased that one of the most important things that the 10 steps to overcoming insecurity in relationships course does is help people relax with uncertainty and refrain from making negative interpretations without solid evidence. This will help them feel more confident in and optimistic about their relationships – and that’s whether they are relating face to face with their lover or via any of the fantastic forms of communication technology that are so central to our brave new world.
Notes
- According to Nokia, who reported this at MindTrek 2010.
Published by roger.elliott May 7th, 2012
in hypnosis-downloads.
Podcast: Download (2.0MB)
The full download for Eyes of a Child will be released on May 29th, 2012 although you can get it 1 week earlier and save 15% by creating a free account.
Transcription of Eyes of a Child preview
Maybe you’re listening to this download because you feel like you’re not appreciating your life as much as you could be. Perhaps you feel you’ve lost some of that boundless enthusiasm and energy you had as a child, or that life has become quite repetitious and routine, as though each day feels the same, and whatever happens, you feel like you’ve seen it all before.
There is a tendency in all of us to become more rigid as we grow older, and by rigid, I mean in our bodies and in our minds. Just think about the flexibility of a young child – playing, running, jumping, bouncing on the bed, and flopping down in a fit of giggles. The way a child might pull silly faces, pretend to be different animals, crawl through the bushes in a garden, or in the tunnels of an adventure playground. The way they play with their voices, and make high sounds and low sounds, and even sing songs totally unselfconsciously. Now compare that to a typical adult working in an office every day. Think about how much more restrained that adult learns to be, compared to a child, how much stiffer their movements often are, how little variety there is in their voice, how routine and predictable their habits and conversation topics have become. It’s almost as if, as we grow older, many of us begin to live our lives on autopilot, and forget to fully engage with what’s going on.
Just the other day I walked into a grocery store, and exchanged a few pleasantries with the checkout assistant as I paid for my goods. I was in a bit of a hurry myself, and he looked like he was just going through the motions, saying once again things he said over and over each day. Of course we were both perfectly friendly and polite, but neither of us was fully present, fully engaged, in that interaction. And I was reminded of how much more intense and vivid things used to feel when I was a child, when a trip to the shops was a real, significant event that seemed to last forever, and how going to the supermarket would seem like a huge adventure, filled with aromas, background music, fluorescent lights, brightly coloured treats and tasty delights. And I see this in my own children too. I remember taking them to their first ever firework display, and seeing their eyes open wide in amazed and delighted awe at each and every burst of coloured light. Their innocent enthrallment that night made me see the fireworks with fresh eyes too.
This session is going to help you to re-connect with that child-like awe and openness within you, so that you can really start to shake off the stiffness and rigidity of being too serious and too adult about how you see life. Having a more childlike appreciation of the world is a rare and beautiful capacity, a capacity many of our greatest artists, musicians and scientists are said to have had. As Einstein once said, “The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.” And that innocence, playfulness, and ability to see the world afresh, opens you up to greater creativity, as you find yourself thinking in freer, more flexible ways, and it lets you become more present and alive to each moment.
Published by mark.tyrrell May 6th, 2012
in Enjoy Life.
Podcast: Download (2.3MB)
The full download for Long Term Thinking will be released on May 29th, 2012 although you can get it 1 week earlier and save 15% by creating a free account.
Transcription of Long Term Thinking preview
If you’re listening to this, and you’re a human being, you have a bias in your brain towards short-term thinking, towards focusing on the immediate effects of your choices and actions rather than any potential long term consequences. This is not some character flaw in you. It’s part of what it is to be human, for all of us. It’s the pattern behind all kinds of problems in life, from overeating, gambling, smoking, impulse purchases, being prone to outbursts of anger and saying things you don’t mean, or even making poor choices when it comes to serious life decisions. As I’m speaking now, the news headlines are still about the collapse in the housing market that came about because people were encouraged to take on mortgages they couldn’t afford, which wasn’t short-term thinking just on their part, but also on the part of the banks. You might say that the majority of human problems are caused, or exacerbated, by our tendency towards short term thinking.
The more we learn about the brain, the more uncover about the exact processes that operate when someone is deciding between going for a short term reward versus a long term reward. For example, a study headed by psychologist Samuel McClure and neuroscientist Jonathan Cohen at Princeton University found that when people are considering the relative merits of either immediately receiving an Amazon.com gift voucher, or waiting up to four weeks to receive a higher value voucher, different areas of their brains become activated depending on what choice they make. People who chose to wait for the higher value rewards had a higher activation of the frontal lobes, the part of the brain most associated with abstract thought. In contrast, in those who went for the immediate reward, there was a higher activation of parts of the brain associated with emotion. In other words, short term thinking is emotional thinking, long term thinking involves more abstract, conceptual thought about a future that doesn’t exist yet.
So how can you learn to deliberately activate the areas of your brain associated with long-term thinking? Well, intriguingly, a second study carried out in Hamburg, Germany, found that there is actually a simple, reliable way to start thinking for the long-term. Participants in this study were again offered a selection of financial rewards, with the same choice of an immediate smaller sum, or a higher-value sum being offered at some distance in the future. But this time, half the participants were given an extra task to perform before making their decision, and that was to think about several things that they would be doing over the next year, holidays and vacations they had planned, courses they needed to attend, visits from friends and relatives that had been arranged, and so on. In other words, the researchers got this group of participants to focus on specific, expected future events, even though these events had no connection with the small sum of money the participants were deciding about.
As you might have guessed, reflecting on several specific future events triggered more long-term thinking in that group of participants, and they became much more likely to choose the higher-value, longer-term reward. In essence, the experimenters helped the participants to trick their own brains into making the future more real, more concrete, so that it became self-evident and obvious to them that the best choice was to go for the higher-value reward and just wait a few weeks for it.
This session is going to use this research, along with a variety of other psychological principles that I’ve used with my clients over the years, to help you to really embed in your mind this connection with the long-term future. As you listen repeatedly, you’ll notice that you start to instinctively make wiser, more life-enriching decisions in your daily life, and create a future for yourself where you have greater wealth, greater health, and greater happiness, because you took the time to properly think ahead, rather than falling into that old short-term impulsiveness trap.
Published by mark.tyrrell May 2nd, 2012
in Thinking Skills.
Downloads Unwrapped – April 2012
The journey is more than the destination
Once upon a time a student was told by his wise old teacher that he was too serious. The wise old teacher knew what his disciple needed to do – he must seek out “the happiest man in the world”. So off the young man went, travelling from village to village, looking for whoever was reputed to be happiest. But every time he met the local happiest resident, that happy individual would inevitably say “Yes indeed, I’m very happy, but there is someone much happier than I! Go to such and such a place and you will find them there…” The young man had all kinds of adventures, and met all kinds of people, but even after years of searching he couldn’t be quite certain that he had yet found the happiest man in the world.
One day he was pursuing his quest, having been told that the happiest man lived right in the middle of a dense, deep forest. He followed the sound of laughter and eventually came across the happy fellow sitting cross-legged and bright-eyed in a clearing. “I know why you’re here,” said the man. “You’re looking for the happiest man. I am he!” And he laughed. And laughed again. And then he laughed some more, and then some more after that, chortling and giggling, until the younger man couldn’t help but join in, chuckling and guffawing until the tears ran down his cheeks, and he had to make a tremendous effort to get out the words “What’s so funny?”
The happiest man became serious for a moment – though there was still a steady gleam of joyous contentment in his eyes – and said, “It’s hilarious! Have you not yet noticed that I am none other than the man who sent you on this quest all those years ago?” And he burst out laughing again. The other man was astonished. “Then why did you not tell me at once that it was you whom I sought?” “Because,” replied the happiest and wisest man, “you needed to have certain experiences, to learn certain things. And that was only possible in the context of really looking hard for something. The finding was, in reality, in the seeking!” (1)
It’s great to be ‘solution focussed’, great to be so absorbed in the goal you seek that every single thing you do is directed towards bringing it about. But consider this: what if you ‘fail’ to achieve the result you were looking for, but the ‘journey’ takes you to a much better ‘destination’ than the one you had in mind? Sometimes people feel their time has been completely wasted if they don’t get what they were initially after. In my view, time is only wasted if we haven’t learned from our experiences. Some people don’t really let themselves enjoy the process of working towards their goals because “only the goal matters”, but successful people often tell me that their happiest times were when they were starting out. Being goal-driven is great – if you couple it with the capacity to enjoy and learn from the journey itself. The new Enjoy the journey download is all about overcoming narrow assumptions about what can truly benefit us or make us happy.
Take the contest from the context
The usefulness of a tool depends on what you use it for. That nail needs banging in? Your hammer is your best bet. The light bulb needs changing? Move away from the hammer! In its place, competitiveness is a tool that can change the world and infinitely improve all kinds of things. But – I just know you were waiting for a but! – some people are competitive even in their personal lives, always ‘playing games’ and trying to get the upper hand. For some people every social situation is a full-blown contest. Who can be the funniest? The most attractive? The coolest? Or even the rudest? Undisciplined and indiscriminate competitiveness stops you from just relaxing and enjoying the situations life brings you, and makes you insensitive to the needs of others to feel competent. The new Stop being over competitive download uses a beautiful metaphor to illustrate how wonderful life can be when you can sensitively cooperate and collaborate as well as compete. Feeling that you have to treat all of life as a competition is highly stressful, as if you are under the thumb of one of those inner bullies like perfectionism. Some men (and some women too) see every sexual encounter as an opportunity to “prove themselves” – but some things in life really do work better when we just go with the flow and let go of judgements as to how we are doing. This latest hypnosis session is designed to help people become less competitive when they don’t need it, so that, when they do need it, their competitiveness can be an all the more effective tool.
Be who you really are by thinking for yourself
Hypnosis is often seen as a sort of programming. But we at hypnosisdownlaods.com are actually more interested in using it as a tool to liberate people from programming, so that they can be more in charge of themselves, better able to withstand the programming effects of anxious, depressive, angry or addictive states, and more able to really think for themselves.
To be able to think for ourselves we need to be able to discern in what ways we actually don’t think for ourselves. You see, we can easily deceive ourselves that we are thinking for ourselves when we are not.
Group psychology sways us very powerfully, and so do subliminal environmental influences. Things that can stop us thinking for ourselves include:
- blind obedience to authority
- group think/conformity
- the need to feel and appear consistent – it takes courage to publicly change your mind
- strong emotion that distorts thinking and clear perception – lust, for example, can make us completely blind to someone’s real nature
- tradition – believing that because it’s always been done this way it must be done this way
- faulty ‘pattern matching’ – such as taking a dislike to someone merely because of a passing resemblance to someone else you didn’t like in the past
- the habit of not examining assumptions, your own or other people’s.
We all used to think the world was flat. We all used to think the sun moved round the earth. We all used to assume hygiene had nothing to do with health.
It’s so much easier to just follow the herd, to assume that because a lot of other people think something, it must be right. Thinking for ourselves takes courage, calm and clarity. Whenever we overcome a personal difficulty such as low self esteem we think more for ourselves. In fact, overcoming low self esteem specifically means learning to think about yourself for yourself, rather than through someone else’s eyes, or through the distorting tyrannical lens of perfectionism or conditioned pessimism.
So the new Think for yourself download is designed to help people overcome the conditioning of life at least to some extent for better mental health.
Note
(1) I adapted this tale from a story found in World Tales (subtitled “The Extraordinary Coincidence of Stories Told in All Times, in All Places”) by Idries Shah (published in 1979). Shah contends that stories have many meanings. The notion that the journey is sometimes as or more important than the destination is one of the many possible meanings of this particular tale.
Published by roger.elliott April 24th, 2012
in Downloads Unwrapped.
Podcast: Download (459.6KB)
We posted this a few years back on the Uncommon Knowledge blog, but I thought you might need a laugh. So the above audio is an outtake from when Mark and Jill were recording the Powerful Reframes CD, a training CD for therapists.
If you’re a therapist, you’ll know how important effective reframing is when doing therapy. If you’re not – quick explanation:
Reframing involves changing the meaning that a person attaches to something. It’s generally followed by something like “Oh yeah, I never thought about it like that” The glass half empty / half full is probably the most well known reframe. That’s why we stuck it on the front of the Reframing Techniques CD – creative no?
Now we all know that reframing techniques include humor, which is a good job, because otherwise the people in this clip would have no excuse for the obvious enjoyment they were getting from recording the CD…
Oh, and if you weren’t already persuaded by the prospect of shedloads of handy new reframing techniques to use with your clients, there’s more outtakes on the CD too. So if nothing else, you’ll have a laugh.
Published by roger.elliott April 19th, 2012
in hypnosis-downloads.
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Mark Tyrrell
Yes good point Kathleen. Human communication in "real life" isn't always instant-do we use the technology or does it use us?
May 08 at 11:53 am