This is something that we all experience. It is universal. The only difference is in how we deal with it. If we know what to do and do it, we lead a content and happy life. I am going to share what to do with you in this blog, to help and support you if you want to make changes that will significantly change your life for the better. You will feel that this journey of learning and personal development has been transformational, like any big life change, such as finding your passion.
In my client counselling sessions, I provide as your counsellor reinforcement of this knowledge and help you to put it into practice, using your unique resources and your specific circumstances and needs. We will use your problems, issues, needs, and address these, specifically focusing on solutions that work for you and with your experiences, current life and future wants, in mind. The outcome is you will know where negative thinking and anxiety come from and what to do to feel happy, coping, and brave in your daily life.
This blog is presented as an evolving story that starts with sharing with you your inheritance.
Your Inheritance.
You have one head and three minds, all separate and having evolved over time. The first oldest brain is oft referred to as the reptilian brain as it dates to reptilian living creatures, such as snakes, lizards, and birds.
For humans this is in the brain stem and cerebellum. It governs our basic instincts such as eating and mating and participates in keeping us alive by breathing and digesting without thinking about them. It is also involved in the fight or flight response. These things are emotionless, automatic instincts with which we are born. This brain saves us without our need to think or feel. I feel incredibly grateful for that!
When we evolved into mammals about 225 million years ago the next level of brain development happened. We know this as the limbic brain, and it is on atop the brain stem and cerebellum. The brain stem communicates with it and the limbic brain attaches emotions to the impulses. This is all still mostly automatic and outside awareness. Say we have a flight response to a situation that faces us, we then feel anxious. How we feel creates physiological responses in our body such as an increased heart rate. This is something we have all experienced. This brain has been referred to as our chimp or elephant brain. It is irrational, primitive, emotional and negative. It is powerful, together with the reptilian brain representing about 90% of the mind. It is drawn to bad news, likes to blame something, and reacts with panic and fear, oft experienced as anxiety or anger or depression or a combination of. Examples include excess consumption, wasting money and excessive risk taking i.e. with no thinking of consequences.
When we lived as early man and woman in caves, we faced decisions such as whether to go outside the cave and fight for food or retreat into the cave, ‘flight.’ The reward for hunting and gathering and for interacting outside with their tribe was serotonin, the happy coping chemical. If they thought that their life was in danger the subconscious emotional limbic brain would take over. We have inherited this. But we do not face bears today as we go about our daily lives and do not have to hunt for food! The subconscious limbic brain relies on something else to decide whether to step in and that is our thought patterns. If we perceive something to be negative that happens and we think negatively about it, the emotional mind steps in. This part of the brain being large, houses all our experiences as well as our beliefs and values. Past behaviour always repeats as we draw on our subconscious memories. But we can change this ‘precedent library.’ More on this later in the blog.
The third brain known as the cerebral cortex is young and evolved in the Homo sapiens (modern humans) about 300,000 years ago. It sits above the limbic brain. The cerebral cortex is higher functioning than the two other brains. This brain is responsible for memory, thinking, learning, reasoning, problem solving and sensory functions. Part of the cerebral cortex and at the front of the frontal lobe is the prefrontal cortex. This is the intellectual mind and represents about 10% of the mind. It reasons and makes decisions. It is responsible for goal directed behaviour, social behaviour, regulating emotions and social interactions, cognitive control, inhibiting impulses and maintaining focus and language and speech formation. Full maturation occurs mid to late twenties. This part of the mind stays in charge when we are positive. I like to think of this brain as the human atop the elephant. The human oversees the elephant when positive. When negative the elephant is in charge and can run riot reacting to things happening or believed to be happening. Examples of what we observe in ourselves, and others include a disciplined lifestyle such as healthy eating, boundaries around news and social media, self-care such as relaxing and what we see as rational behaviour.
I will now provide the simplest explanation of what is emerging and the way I share my knowledge when counselling you as your counsellor.
How does your mind work? Can we blame sometimes chronic conditions such as anxiety on our survival instinct? Yes, we can. The primitive and emotional parts of the mind are a whopping 90%. It all starts with a negative thought pattern. Negative thoughts are always converted into anxiety as the mind does not distinguish what we think from what is real. There is a direct relationship between anxiety and intellectual control [your actual age and thinking brain, the intellectual mind]. When anxiety goes up your intellectual control plummets down, and your subconscious unconscious emotional mind takes over. Experts estimate that the emotional mind has the intellectual age of a seven-year-old child. The response pattern that we have inherited from our ancestors is now in play with one or more of anxiety, anger and depression appearing. Common symptoms include feeling agitated, overwhelmed, and low. Our survival instinct is overly sensitive. Habits attached to these patterns often involve oral substances sometimes known as self-medicating with comfort food or alcohol, for example. Addiction can result including the use of pharmaceutical drugs.
I would like you to visualise your subconscious mind as a funnel with three layers. The top later near the surface includes your automatic thoughts. Below that are your life rules. At the deepest level of your subconscious are your beliefs and values. The depth of the item denotes how it is ingrained in your thinking. Only if you really want to change your rules and even more so your values and beliefs will you be able to change them. Changing your mindset is possible. Until the 1970s we believed that our mindset is set. Now that we have discovered neuroplasticity, we know that we can change how we think and so how we feel and our consequent behaviour. With one hundred percent conscious intent and with some work at a subconscious level, we can change how we think and develop more functional helpful beliefs and values and have less, more flexible rules. These will positively impact our automatic thoughts.
We do have a mechanism in the brain for dealing with anxiety. It is called rapid eye movement. We have REM at night during our sleep patterns to rerun the negative events of the day. When our REM pattern is working well, we awake free from previous day upsets.
However, if we create more negativity than our REM can cope with, or, for whatever reason we are not getting enough REM sleep for the amount of negativity in our day, then we build up a surplus of anxiety. It is this surplus of anxiety that causes us to lose intellectual control. It is this surplus that prompts the subconscious mind to evaluate our life as being in crisis and respond with depression, anxiety, and anger.
What I do as your therapist is help you to reduce your anxiety so that you can get the real you back. I will give you my CD to listen to that will start the process and help you in between sessions. And we will see a difference. Trance hypnotherapy work will also happen in some sessions. It will help enormously as we have access to your subconscious mind and can reprogramme it to give you the outcomes that you want.
What can you start doing that will positively impact your mind and body and reduce your anxiety leaving you feeling calmer?
For some, anxiety will be chronic. I like to think of anxiety as something that can be managed so that calm is experienced more often than anxious spells.
Here I share with you some antidotes to anxiety:
1. Positive thinking: there is no doubt that positive thinking is immensely powerful. By catching a negative thought, then challenging it with ‘is this thought helpful and kind?’ [the answer is always ‘no’], we can proceed to reframe it into a thought that is. You can start out by journalling these.
For example, negative thought ‘I hate working here.’ Is this thought helpful? No. I feel demotivated and low. I eat chocolate to push down difficult feelings. Reframe…I will focus on aspects of my work that I enjoy, whilst thinking about where else I might like to work.’
One of the tips that I give my clients is to always have a reality check i.e. reframe for realism then positivity. It is going to be hard to convince your mind to go from ‘I feel fat and ugly’ to ‘I am beautiful inside-out.’ So always have a layer of realism within your reframe.
Another tip is repetition. Experts tell us that it takes us 30-90 days to change a habit, and we will all vary within these timescales. So set yourself a goal; for instance, ‘for the next 3 months I will journal my negative thoughts and my reframes and conduct the associated actions’.
This personal development is highly rewarding because happy coping chemicals will be your reward. When you feel happier you are less likely to self-medicate or make poor choices with activities such as tv over exercise or reading for growth.
2. Positive end of day reflections: Also in your journal, have three columns for personal, work [includes work in the home and study] and social. Before you go to sleep, note three things, one in each category that you have enjoyed and/or achieved that day. My personal one is always growth related such as learning something new or achieving a new target physically such as number of sit ups. Yours can be something that you like to do for yourself. An example covering a lot of things is self- care. You could do your nails or give yourself a face mask or have an aromatherapy bath or pay for a massage. These logs can be small things, for example in the work category you might have decluttered your inbox or top drawer. Obviously achieving a step towards your objectives counts here too. Social, in my experience, is the hardest category for many of us, especially during workdays. Think creatively here. For example, reaching out to a friend on e mail with some news and an invitation to catch up face to face. Or having an interesting conversation with a family member at dinner.
3. Positive Activity: anything that you enjoy and makes you feel good. Common ones are walking in nature, dancing, and other exercise. Movement produces endorphins as well as serotonin, natural doses of happiness. Find your positive activities and do them often. I am not a big socialiser but do enjoy group exercise classes where the exercise is right for me. I am currently enjoying yoga and pilates.
If you can schedule positive activities in your daily routine including alone, work, and social ones, this is optimal. For example, ensure that you are available for something you really enjoy in your work; for instance, calling a work colleague who always inspires you on a Monday, to help to set your energy for the week ahead. An individual activity I love is bookending my days, work-related reading when I wake up and light reading before lights out.
4. Take a technology time out: Some months ago, I was taking the train to see a client. I observed a twenty something passenger multitasking, and I felt stressed in the moments that I watched him. He was typing on his tablet, whilst on a call on his mobile telephone, which he was talking into some of the time. I also saw him texting at one point. He also had the Financial Times open and was part way through a breakfast sandwich. He occasionally took sips of coffee. He spilt some of his drink when he was retrieving his ticket for an inspection. He was sitting hunched up and looked tired, yawning regularly.
Technology being a key part of your everyday life is normal, and we can better manage its impact on us. Having time out gives your mind and body [remember the physiological responses in our bodies that come with mind activity. For example, if we feel rushed, our rate will be running fast] a breather and a chance for your agitation to cool down.
I encourage you to eat without watching TV or engaging in some other media. You can activate your smell, touch, sight senses and taste your breakfast eggs!
5. Acceptance of good enough: A common reason for anxiety is perfectionism and extremely exacting standards. Since human beings are all flawed by design, this is dangerously impossible and damaging to our health and relationships.
Perhaps aim for consistent self-improvement rather than perfection and aim for good enough. I use this with my exercise and eating ensuring that I pace my body, have rest days, and relax my eating habits for occasions such as holidays and birthday.
6. Relax into sleep: to avoid ruminating on the day instead of falling asleep switch off digital distractions including TV and smart phone. Next journal your reflections from the day and plan tomorrow aiming to include work, personal and social activities; this balance will help you to feel calm. Finally listening to a relaxation CD to sleep can make an immense difference to sleep quality and how you feel tomorrow.
Other anxiety hacks that work well include:
Slowing down
Stopping procrastination
Prioritising. We overestimate what we can achieve in a day but underestimate what we can achieve in a month and year.
Expect uncertainty and lack of control over most things in life
Establishing a routine
Move from your comfort zone to your learning zone but avoid the danger zone of burnout
Have rest periods e.g. 10 minutes per hour to do the Schoen Breath Technique
Practice discipline and delayed gratification.
Practice saying no to things that you do not want to do.