@DrWendyWalsh is covering New Years Resolutions, relationships ending. (12/29) Hour 1

you thought about your nerves resolutions yet? No? I think I'm over New Year's resolutions, Doctor Wendy, Well for me. You know, I started, I want to say, right after Thanksgiving on a bit of a fitness kick after an acquaintance of mine passed away suddenly of heart disease, and I was just like, okay, got to get back and shape.

So I've been doing Orange Theory and then on alternate days, I've been doing Lagree Studio Mdr Pilates, and I've been using an app to calculate all my food every day Andy, And let me tell you I have learned there are a lot of calories and alcohol. That's what I've learned. So the app will show me every day how much protein, how much fat, how much carbohydrate, and how much total calories, and then you put in like your exercise and estimate how much you burn. And so every day I'm like

monitoring it. Did you know there's research to show that if all we do is monitor our intake, out, take activity level, record it in some way, no matter what, it all works to make us healthier. Like, in other words, if you went on the chocolate chip cookie diet and all you ate was chocolate chip cookies, just the fact that you're more aware of your eating means you're going to eat less. So becoming aware, attuned, and mindful of

health is the first step. But I want to remind everybody that we are walking around in an ancient brain of hunters and gatherers who spend a whole lot of time starving and trying to find food. Or the things we enjoy doing, eating, sleeping, being a couch potato are actually pleasurable to us because they can serve energy and they're linked to survival. On the other hand, high activity

burns calories, which is linked to less survival. Right, So, having said this, there is so much research to support this idea that willpower doesn't work. You can't have an idea and say I'm gonna do this. And one of the reasons why, I'm using an app to monitor everything, And yes it takes time. Every time I sit down to eat, I gotta plunk it into the app and whatever. It's actually cool app. I use app to be called some carb carb monitor or something carb maker, carb whatever.

But you just shine your camera on any barcode of any food and it automatically tells you what's in it and adds it to your thing anyway, So forget all this willpower. Here's what you need to do if you want your New Year's resolutions to actually work and change. Number one, do not try to change everything at once. Change one behavior at a time, one at a time, because here's the thing about the psychology of change. Once you accomplish that, it generalizes to the next behavior you

want to change. So work on. Although I do want to say eating and exercise are intrinsically combined. If you're going to still continue to eat like it's still the holidays and go to the gym and think, oh, it'll be fine, it's so much easier to work together. Right, eat less sugar, less carbohydrate, more healthy fats, more healthy protein, and then get out there and work out. Then you're building muscle. Right, you kind of got to do those two,

but basically one behavior out of time. So don't try to quit smoking, quit drinking, get your finances order, and lose weight all at once. Too much, too much. Now here's the thing about habits. Everything's a habit for us. In order to change a habit, you don't want to actually will power go. I'm not going to do that. Let's say it's a bad habit you want to get rid of. Let's use the example of smoking or vaping

or what have you. You have to choose the anticidant, the thing that comes first, the trigger right of your habit. So let's say you come home from work and the first thing you do is sit in your most comfortable chair and you know, grab your cigarette, your vape or whatever, electronics say, whatever you do. And you sit there and maybe you swipe through your emails, or you Netflix or or you yeah, I don't know, you two, you do some little gaming or whatever. It's just sort of your

decompressing time after work. Well, a behavioral therapist would say, the very first thing you need to do is change all the furniture in your living room so that when you come in, you can't just plunk down in your chair. You have to stop and think, oh, it's over here now, and that alone will trigger oh wait, sitting in that chair is connected with lighting up. Then you have to

think of a replacement behavior. So maybe you've decided ahead of time, okay, instead of sitting down that chair and having that smoke, I am going to immediately go upstairs in my room and change into workout stuff because I'm going to be going for a walk or a run whatever. But you literally have to catch yourself before you do the behavior and then replace it that that new trigger

with a new behavior. Now here's the other flaw that people have when they try to change their bad habits is they think if they fall off the wagon, it's all over. Right. On the other hand, you have to plan for setbacks because change is about moving forward, slipping back, moving forward slipping back right, So you have to plan for those setbacks, and you have to have a strategy

of what you're going to do when the setback happens. So, for instance, I told you I've been monitoring my you know, and carefully me my wait and with the app and exercising. But recently, my sweet Julio and I had a date night and we went to a nice restaurant, a Michelin starred restaurant, Hatchet Hall. I don't know if you've ever been there in Culver City. It's fabulous. And so this is not a night where you're supposed to count calories, protein, fat.

It's date night. You're gonna order a fancy cocktail, at least I did, and things like short ribs with grits, turkey meat loaf with mashed potatoes, but done gourmet style. And we did have some salads. I'm just gonna say. He ordered some interesting banana pudding with cookies in it for dessert that was gourmet and fabulous. Okay, I had

a bite. So the point is I came home and I opened my oh it's called carb Manager, my app, my carb Manager app, and I thought, you know what, I could spend forever filling in all those things that say that I went way over on everything, and I could feel bad about myself, or I could say this was a small setback. So here's my strategy for repair. I'm going to add two hours to my intermittent fasting.

So I've been doing usually twelve to fourteen hours a day because you know, they're two ways to get your pancreas to give enough insulin. One is you give it less carbohydrate and sugar, and the other is you stretch out more time in between it so it has time to think. That's the whole process behind intermitting. So I waited till noon the next day before I allowed myself a morsel of anything, and why not, it's all the problem. Then I started again listing it. So that's how I

prepared for a setback. Also set up a logical reward system and schedule something that makes sense. So for instance, in the new year, when I get to it's not that much weight that I'm losing, it's just that I'm shifting it around, is what I'm doing. I don't have much to lose. But when my stomach is as flat as I want it to be, I am going to Lululemon. I actually I really like Beyond Yoga lately. They're really good, and I am just going to buy the best new

exercise outfit. See that's a logical reward because then I want to wear it when I go to the gym. I also want to tell everybody that there is science behind this. It takes sixty six days to create a new habit. So if I started my new habits right after Thanksgiving, it will be probably the end of January before I've done my sixty six days. Why don't you

think about it so much? So tell yourself You're going to monitor this behavior for sixty six days and then it becomes the new way of being your new habit, right, all right? When we come back, do you are you plagued by thoughts of your ex and you're reliving old relationships in your head like I should have, would have? Coulda? Or what happened there? Or because you broke up? You're

making everything about the whole relationship bad. When we come back, let's talk about a theory called the peak end theory in relationships and how we can reframe our past relationships so that we have a healthier perspective of our role and the other person's role in them. You're listening to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI Am six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.

they somehow morph into a friendship. I've always said that if you're able to stay friends with an ex, you were never like passionate in the first place, Like you never really had intimacy because something about that breakup, like you just can't go back. I don't know. So you can analyze me, probably my therapist should analyze me. But

I am not friends with any of my exes. I don't necessarily hate them, but I just kind of avoid them, right, they're not really So I want to explain that when you look back at a relationship, sometimes you trick your brain because there might be one thing that was maybe the ending right, that was so awful that you associate then with the whole relationship. Now, I want to talk to you about what psychologists might say is a healthy

perspective to take when you're thinking about past relationships. So, for instance, okay, I'm gonna use the example not of a romantic relationship, but of a parent child relationship. Whenever I hear anybody say to me, oh my god, I came from that best family, it's such a leave it to beaver family, like everything was fine, we didn't have any trauma, I'm like, oop, they're repressing something. Something went down there. I could feel it. Because here's the thing.

The very act of going from completely dependent infant to independent adult is a painful one, and there are no such thing as perfect parents, and so a healthy answer might be something like, you know, my parents did best with the tools they had, and there were a few gaps in their parenting where I had opportunities to grow. They aren't fond memories, but I was able to get through them and become more resilient because of it. That's a healthy way to look at the relationship you had

with your parents. So when I hear somebody say that it was all sunshine and flowers, or the opposite, where they might say, oh, my parents were all terrible, it was awful. They just tortured me, I'm like, well, you know, what was your piece and all of that, and what did you learn from that? How did you grow? All? Right? Now, now let's take that idea and let's look back at

some of our romantic relationships. You know, we are who we are today partly because well of those early childhood relationships, but also what we learned in our various romantic relationships. We should be able to look back and go, you know what, this part was great, this part wasn't so great. I liked how I showed up in this way. I

learned a lot about myself that way. Blah blah blah. Right, that's a healthy way to look back at an X. Well, there's this theory that was proposed years ago by a psychologist Daniel Canaman, called the peak end rule, and he found the people's overall satisfaction with their past relationships was shaped by two things. One is the most intense moment

in that relationship and also how the experience ended. So, in other words, if somebody, let's say you went on a great, great vacation and then you had a big fight on the last day, all of a sudden, in your mind the whole vacation was bad, right, it becomes this exaggerated memory and so when you think about past relationships, if you had a very conflicted ending and there was a lot of pain and yelling and trauma, you're going

to dismiss the entire relationship because of it. And actually, I'm thinking back, there was this relationship once where we went on the most amazing vacation ever, and on the way back, when we were changing planes, he suddenly got into the stupidest, dumbest argument with me, and I found myself saying things like, I am not your therapist. Don't do this to emmy. And it was a terrible it

was a terrible ending to a great vacation. I tried later to process it with him, saying things like, well, maybe you know we had such a good time together and now we were about to separate again, and maybe you had some separation anxiety that caused this anger, but he wasn't ready to process it right. So this is what our body does after a breakup. This peak end rule can actually distort how we remember the relationship, and

it's a bias. It's one of those cognitive biases. So let's talk about things we can do if we are looking back on this relationship and we want to have a more healthy view of it. First of all, focus on the journey, not the destination. So in other words, if you believe every relationship should end in happy ever after and a marriage proposal and children or whatever, then you have created a distorted idea. In fact, every relationship

is a journey. It's a time for you to learn and grow on this journey of finding and keeping a secure attachment. Also, one of the things you can do is create a new positive ending ritual. Uh huh. That means you can send a holiday card to one of your exes that just says hope you're well, thank you for the great years, or whatever, just something positive so you have positive feelings. Also, reframe those memories. Take time to think about your relationship as a whole. Ask yourself

these questions like what did it teach me? What are the small moments that stand out that are very meaningful? And you can actually reshape the way that you remember relationships and also take those lessons and those memories into your new relationship. Right, so you can have you can bring the best of you because you can remember the things that worked in that relationship and say, you know, I was really good at this part. I want to

make sure that I do that next time. And also it's okay to have the entire spectrum of feelings in your memories. You see, we live in a world where many people believe in black or white, right or wrong, good or bad, happy or sad, and in truth, emotions are a rainbow. And when you look back on a relationship, any relationship, think of as being sparklingly bright in some ways, with some dark moments, with some laughter, with some boredom, with maybe a little bit of fear here or there,

or confusion, and also excitement and peace. Because every relationship has all of that, and you were fifty percent of everything that happened. Don't forget that. The peak end really means. Don't take that one thing, the ending of a relationship, and let it dismiss the entire relationship where you might have been a good person in a lot of it. Right, Take your resiliency and the things you learned into your next relationship. All right, speaking of relationships, I have a

question for you. Can yoga fix your relationship? Well, some people think one kind of yoga can. Let's talk about it when we come back. You're listening to the doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty or live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.

me in that down dog I'm barely down in or doggin'. Okay, you get me in that child's pose, and I'm barely a child posing. I just don't know how to do that warrior thing without falling over a break in my back. Interesting enough, I don't mind high impact aerobics. I don't mind running around. Pilate's much better because it's more on strength. But the flexibility thing not for me. So somadic yoga.

First of all, Soma is a Greek word, and I teach psychology of health counseling, where we talk about the mind body connection. So I certainly know what something somadic is. By the way, question it's on my quizzes for all my students. If you'd like to ever take one of my quizzes, you can. Uh. Here's one of the questions. When someone has a psycho somatic in a illness, are they imagining their symptoms? The answer is no, they are sick. Their body and mind have colluded, and the origins of

their physical illness are psychological. Doesn't mean pretend, doesn't mean imagined. It starts with psychic energy and the body speaks for them. Okay, just want to get that out of the way. So we say soma is the Greek word for body. Somatic yoga is a form of yoga that's really designed to try to create a greater mind body connection. So the difference between it and traditional yoga is that you're not supposed to Supposedly, you're not supposed to master these perfect poses.

Sounds like it's for me just for a fitness purpose. You're supposed to experience the feeling of each pose and just adjust as needed. So somatic yoga apparently is not so pretty, but it is working with the breath and tiny movements and asking people to go inside introspection, try to release trapped energy and become more bodily aware. Producer

Kayla isn't your sister a reiki master? She is, yes, and reiki is the same thing, right, it's releasing trapped energy and muscles yum steep tissue work kind of No, she doesn't really touch you. It's more of an energetic cleansing, but she's a yoga instructor as well as because I've had that kind of deep tissue massages where they hit on some little not in your muscles and you have a memory. You suddenly remember something because of muscle stores the tension.

don't be afraid of them. They're just emotional messengers and they're as sent to our brain through a reaction of our sympathetic nervous system. And so in this particular kind of yoga, it is thought that people can learn to pay better attention to their feelings by paying attention to the sensations in their body. Makes sense. If you're somebody who's been a suppressor your whole life, then guess where

your feelings have gone into your body. So if you do a kind of yoga that's supposed to bring it out, I don't know, maybe it can work. You know, there are lots of people that have a very low mind body connection, right. Some people sadly are recovering from trauma and the muscles of their body hold that trauma. Others were taught to repress their feelings, ignore, deny information that comes from the body, and instead just push out unwonted thoughts. Well,

they don't push out right. There's also a kind of diagnosis called alexithymia, and that's the inability to recognize or express our own emotions. So people with alexithymium might have problems with introversion, meaning like what does your gut say?

How do you really feel? They don't have an answer for that, and they can't observe their own mental and emotional processes, but they might be aware of bodily sensations like, for instance, a lot of men with anger management issues, therapists might teach them to be aware of what happens in their body before they whatever, yell, hit whatever? Is it a tightness in their chest? Is it a tightness in their neck that kind of causes a headache?

relationship without empathy. You have to have feelings for each other. Right, So I want to say I haven't tried somatic yoga, but when I hear that, I don't have to be perfect, and I'm going to actually try to find some because I think that look, anything that two people can do to bring themselves closer together, maybe they go together and they practice this somatic yoga together, or maybe one person does and gets better at expressing their feelings. Right. What

is emotional intelligence? It's a three pronged thing, and it begins with one recognizing your own feelings, giving them a name. Number two, learning to express your feelings in a non confrontational way, just like this is how it felt, right, no judgment there, and then learning how to see the feelings in others. You can go online, actually and take

an emotional intelligence test. There's all kinds of them online and it shows you pictures of people making all kinds of different facial expressions and you have to guess the emotion. And I'm sorry to tell you that when my classes take this, the females tend to be a little better. We have a little more empathy and we can recognize feelings better. So there are women out there going My guy is such a narcissist. He has no empathy, No he could just be a dude, okay, because some of

them can't. Some of them can. I mean, my Julu is very good. He has a lot of empathy, but some of them can't. Hey, when we come back, let me answer some of your social media relationship questions. Reminder, I'm not a therapist. I'm a psychology professor. As you know, I've written three books on relationships, and I've also done a whole dissertation on attachment theory. I'm obsessed with the science of love, So send me a DM on Instagram. The handle is at Dr Wendy Walsh at doctor Wendy Walsh.

Producer Kla will go through them and let's answer you questions when we come back. You're listening to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.

ten years. Ten years? Where does time go when you're having so much fun? All right, let's go to social media and answer some of your relationship questions. I'm happy to weigh in with my doctor Wendy Wisdom. All right, dear Doctor Wendy. My boyfriend's x okay, so's got the boyfriend and the boyfriend's ex is another girl okay, is stalking my social media accounts. She has liked old posts and TikTok tells me she views my profile. Why is

she doing this? They broke up years ago. Here's my advice, lady, get over it. She's she's doing she's doing it because she's envious of you. Let her be envious, Let her look. Do you put things on social media as a private viewing for just your tiny inner circle. If you make them public, then the public can look. All right, you're putting on a show. Then then don't get mad who buys a ticket to the show and shows up. This is your brochure. You put it out there, any human

can reach out. Okay, so I wouldn't worry about it. Doesn't mean anything. Means she's envious of you and she's trying to emulate you. I know you're thinking, well, maybe she's trying to find out if we're breaking up, and then she'll go and get them back. But you won't want them if you broke up with them, right, So cares move along, Dear doctor Wendy, what do you think about asking I'm sorry, I'm already laughing. I didn't even get through the question and I'm giggling, and I don't

mean to hurt your feelings. Okay, what do you think about asking a guy if he's lost interest in you? He seems to be acting differently towards me and I'm not sure why if I ask? Is it anxious attachment? Okay? So we all want knowledge, right, we all want closure. We all want to know why he's behaving differently. I am less concerned with how somebody else is behaving, and I'm more concerned with my feelings or in this case,

your feelings towards it. If you are feeling a sense of loss, it is not for you to ask have you lost interest in me? What have I done differently? You're acting very different. That's very different than saying, hey, we used to talk more frequently and see each other more often. I'm noticing that. That's not so wondering why right, It's very different. It's not about you and feeling less

than it's you saying hey, I'm I'm noticing this. I'm aware of it, wondering why, and if you don't like the answer you get, which is like, I've been busy. That's how guys, I've been busy. I don't know, I've been busy. I don't think, or they completely deny that's not true. I'm still talking to you. You know. Both of those are lies, and as soon as you hear them, then you decide whether you want to put up with this behavior. Remember, our job in life is not to

change other people, nor to analyze other people. It doesn't matter why he's doing it. If it doesn't feel good to you, then change it, and you may change it by moving on. That's what I'm saying, Dear doctor w Wenny. A lot of girls writing in I think it's time to meet my boyfriend's mom, but he says it's too soon. Instead, he offered a vacation. I feel like the vacation is a consolation prize for him not letting me completely in. We've been dating for four months. If he hasn't let

me in, now will he ever? I think this is an opportunity to explore. You can say things like, can we talk about why you have a hesitance of me meeting your mom? Do you think she's not going to be happy with your choice of girlfriend. Has she been a problem in the past and breaking up you guys? Does she make you feel bad when you're dating other people? There's so much stuff that can come up as a

result of it. I know a young woman lately whose boyfriend said to her, oh, my mom had a dream that my girlfriend killed me, and so I don't want her to meet you because what if you look like the girl in your dream? Are you crazy? That's attachment anxiety of the mom. This is the mom's issue, by the way, not your boyfriend's issue. Totally the mom's issue. He knows she's going to do or say something that's

going to impact your relationship in a negative way. So you need to be a united front with him and explore what the outcome might be. Uh, Dear doctor Wendy. I went on two dates with a guy, and after the second date, he said he couldn't get into his place and asked to sleep at mine. I let him sleep on my couch and I locked my bedroom door. But around two am, I heard him trying to get into my room. Oh that's creepy. I didn't let him, and when I woke up in the morning, he was gone.

He wants to see me again, but the situation made me uncomfortable. Is this something I should bring up and how Yeah? But I don't think you should go out with him again. If you feel uncomfortable, you know there's sometimes you need to listen to your stomach. Right. The stomach is the second brain, and so get your main brain out of it. Oh but he's tall, he's cute, he has a good job. Get that brain out of it.

Listen to your stomach. Your stomach goes. You gave a stranger permission to sleep on the couch and then he tried to get into your room at two am. Now I'm not sure what transpired. Did you pretend you are sleep and not even whatever, or did you say I'm sorry you're not coming in like what happened? It doesn't matter. He's no, no, I don't want this guy around you. He just doesn't feel safe. This is not okay. He's

not a gentleman. Don't don't, don't, h I think we have time for one more, Dear doctor, Wendy, I'm dating a man who lives an hour away. Is that realistic? It depends. It depends if you have an electric car. It depends if if you have enough money for gas. It depends how much you're both into each other. I'm gonna tell you a story. When I met my sweet Julio. He was living in Calabasas and I was living in Hermosa Beach. If you're from La, you know what that means.

That's a solid hour, no hour and a half, and on a Friday night could be two like you have no idea, right, it's crazy. He actually drove once on a motorcycle at night to meet me at Taranaa. That was two hours. I knew he was into me, So yeah, is it realistic? Yeah, it's realistic for you to test how much he's really into it. That's all I'm gonna say. That's all I'm gonna say. Okay, when we come back. I've got more questions that you guys are sending me. If you want to send me one, send me a

DM on Instagram at dot Dr Wendy Wall. You're listening to The Doctor Wendy Wall Show on KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You've been listening to Doctor Wendy Walls. You can always hear us live on KFI AM six forty from seven to nine pm on Sunday and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app