How to Stop Feeling Guilty About Everything

Constantly feeling guilty gnaws at your emotional well-being and causes negativity to snowball. “It can make you feel defeated, anxious, or even depressed,” says Susan Krauss Whitbourne, PhD, professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. And we often beat ourselves up for no good reason, she adds: “Most of the time, we manufacture guilt in our minds simply because of the ridiculous expectations we set for ourselves.” Yank yourself out of the spiral with this three-week plan to being your own best friend. 

Week 1: ID your guilt triggers

“If you can learn to pause and recognize when you feel guilt coming on, you're halfway toward fixing the problem,” says Whitbourne. So right off the bat, get to the bottom of what makes you feel the most remorse. 

Pay attention: Notice any moments you feel guilty, as well as what prompted the pangs (you missed a deadline, you spent a lot of money). It may help to take some notes, either on paper or in your smartphone. 

Check the frequency: Did you get ticked at yourself each time you bought a $15 lunch this week? Do you lie in bed every night wishing you'd been more patient with your kids? Track how often specific subjects leave you regretful. 

Group the majors and minors: At the end of the week, pinpoint the issues that incited guilt more than once or weighed on you more heavily than others. (You'll deal with the lesser regrets in week three.) 

RELATED: 5 Reasons You Always Feel Guilty (and How to Stop Being So Hard on Yourself) 

Week 2: Change your perspective

"You don't want to try to just be 'over' a guilt that's coming up a lot for you," says Whitbourne. "Pull it out, look at it and come up with some alternative interpretations."

Envision a redo: Think (or even talk out loud) about what you wish you were doing differently-maybe you want to have a better attitude at work, or you think you should reel in your spending by creating a budget. “It doesn't mean you have to go out and make some drastic change right this minute, but you're talking about it, and that's productive,” says Susie Moore, a life coach in New York City and the author of What If It Does Work Out?. 

Pick a different emotion: "Guilt and sadness and anxiety are all on a continuum in a way,” says Whitbourne. “And when we're stressed, it's easy to be self-critical." Try asking, "Wait, does it really make sense to be feeling guilty at this moment? Or am I letting stress get to me?” 

Realize you're human: "Perfectionism is often what drives guilt," says Whitbourne. "At some point, you have to just accept your limitations." Moore adds that it can even help to tell yourself, "No mom or wife or employee is doing everything flawlessly."

RELATED: This Is What the Scary Side of Perfectionism Looks Like

Week 3: Shake off the small stuff

"To say you will never feel guilty again about something silly would be ridiculous," says Whitbourne. "But it's important to recognize when you may be blowing things out of proportion." Practice short-circuiting your regret when it's truly unnecessary. 

Reframe a fail: Look at it with a practical eye. Instead of "I shouldn't have left the office early today with my current workload," tell yourself, "I needed to cut out in order to attend this doctor's appointment that was long overdue." 

Laugh it off: "Humor is one of the greatest antidotes to guilt," says Whitbourne. Poke fun at yourself: You ran out of time to bake and brought a store-bought dessert to the holiday party? How dare you even show up! 

Find a silver lining: Let's say you're upset because you slapped together your gift wrapping this year. "Well, you also didn't go to the department store and have them wrap it for you," says Whitbourne. "You're showing the person that you love them enough to put in the effort."

Repealing The Affordable Care Act Could Be More Complicated Than It Looks

After six controversial years, the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, may be on the way out, thanks to the GOP sweep of the presidency and both houses of Congress Tuesday.

“There's no question Obamacare is dead,” said insurance industry consultant Robert Laszewski. “The only question is whether it will be cremated or buried.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) confirmed Wednesday that repealing the law is something that's “pretty high on our agenda.”

But promising to make the law go away, as President-elect Donald Trump did repeatedly, and actually figuring out how to do it, are two very different things.

“Washington is much more complicated once you're here than it appears to be from the outside,” said William Pierce, a consultant who served in both the George W. Bush Department of Health and Human Services and on Capitol Hill for Republicans.

For example, a full repeal of the health law would require 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster. Given the small GOP majority in the Senate, “they would have to convince six or eight Democrats to come with them to repeal. That seems highly unlikely,” Pierce said.

Republicans could-and likely would-be able to use a budget procedure to repeal broad swaths of the law. The “budget reconciliation” process would let Republicans pass a bill with only a majority vote and not allow opponents to use a filibuster to stop movement on the bill.

But that budget process has its own set of byzantine rules, including one that requires that any changes made under reconciliation directly affect the federal budget: in other words, the measure must either cost or save money. That means “they can only repeal parts” of the law, said Pierce.

Republicans have a ready-made plan if they want to use it. The budget bill they passed late last year would have repealed the expansions of Medicaid and subsidies that help low- and middle-income families purchase health insurance on the law's marketplaces, among other things. President Barack Obama vetoed the measure early this year.

That bill also included, as Vice President-Elect Mike Pence promised in a speech last week in Pennsylvania, “a transition period for those receiving subsidies to ensure that Americans don't face disruption or hardship in their coverage.” The bill passed by the GOP Congress at the end of 2015 set that date at Dec. 31, 2017.

Delaying the repeal date could work in Republicans' favor, said Laszewski. “Then they'll turn to the Democrats and say, 'Work with us to replace it or be responsible for the explosion,'” he said.

But Tim Westmoreland, a former House Democratic staffer who teaches at Georgetown Law School, said that strategy won't work. “I don't think people will see the Democrats as responsible if it all blows up,” he said.

Meanwhile, Republicans have only the broadest outlines of what could replace the law. Trump's campaign website has bullet-point proposals to allow health insurance sales across state lines and to expand health savings accounts-which allow consumers to save money, tax-free, that can be used only for health care expenses. House Republicans last summer offered up a slightly more detailed outline that includes creating “high-risk pools” for people with preexisting health conditions and turning the Medicaid program back to state control through a block-grant program.

Yet even Democrats are convinced that Obama's signature accomplishment is on the chopping block. “A lot of people say, 'Oh, they can't really mean it. They wouldn't really take health insurance away from 20 million people'” who have gained it under the law, John McDonough, a former Democratic Senate staffer, said at a Harvard School of Public Health Symposium last week. “How many times do [Republicans] have to say it before we take them seriously?”

One possibility, according to William Hoagland, a former GOP Senate budget expert now at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington-based think tank, is that Republicans could use the budget process to combine tax reform with health policy changes. “And a reconciliation bill that includes reforms in Obamacare and tax reform starts to become a negotiable package” that could attract both Republicans and potentially some Democrats, who are also interested in remaking tax policy.

But if Congress does pass the GOP's “repeal” before the “replace,” it needs to make sure that insurers will continue to offer coverage during the transition.

“Are [Republicans] going to invite insurers in and listen?” said Rodney Whitlock, a former House and Senate Republican health staffer. If there is no acceptable transition plan, “insurers can say the same thing to the Republicans that they've been saying to Democrats,” said Whitlock, which is that they are leaving the market.

That's something that concerns insurance consultant Laszewski, who says that already there are more sick than healthy people signing up for individual coverage under the law. With probable repeal on the horizon, he said, that's likely to get even worse. “A lot of [healthy] people will say, 'Why sign up now? I'm going to wait until they fix it.'”

And if that happens, he said, there might not be any insurers offering coverage for the transition.

 

This article originally appeared on KHN.org

This New Patch Can Monitor Patient's Vital Signs With High Accuracy

Hospital patients could have their vital signs tracked without cumbersome wires and complex monitors once a new startup's wearable monitoring patch hits the market.

VitalConnect is building a lightweight, disposable patch that can be affixed to a patient's chest and wirelessly sends vital signs including heart rate, ECG read out and rate of breathing to a mobile app. The patch has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and provides clinical grade accuracy in monitoring, the company said.

“It is very small, comfortable and fully disposable,” Dr. Nersi Nazari, VitalConnect's CEO, said on Wednesday during a demonstration at the Fortune Brainstorm Health conference. One patch can be worn for four to five days and can survive getting wet in the shower, he noted.

The patch, which could also be worn by patients at home, has the ability to detect if the wearer has fallen down. If a fall is detected, the patch can wirelessly notify a doctor or other party.

VitalConnect is also developing a cloud-based service to analyze the health data collected by the patches. The software ultimately could help physicians decide how to treat a patient or decide when the patient is ready to be discharged from the hospital, Nazari said.

For more about medical wearables, see: Can a Wearable Fitness Device Predict Your Heart Attack?

“The data is sliced and diced and analyzed to the condition that the doctor is looking at,” Nazari explained. “We do not want to bombard doctors with so much data that it's just not useful.”

VitalConnect, founded in 2011, is seeking to combine expertise in bioengineering and data analytics. Nazari previously worked on semiconductor chip design at Marvell Semiconductor. Joseph Roberson, the company's chief medical officer, was formerly chief of otology-neurotology-skull base surgery at Stanford University.

 

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com.