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MindHealth by Sara Stevens
Over the last few blogs, we have been looking at ways to help become a calmer person by not letting underlying habits trigger internalised anxiety responses. Our minds are black and white and even if we are pretending to ourselves that we feel ok, our inner minds won't believe what isn't true. I am sure we are all at times living in denial about things that are happening in our lives. We pretend to ourselves that it isn't an issue and that we are not bothered about something, when we are bothered, scared, living in denial, and pretending this is not an issue.
Anxiety can be increased within us in many different ways and the last few blogs have been looking at this. Avoidance can be a massive instigator of increased anxiety within you. Your mind is amazing, but it is always looking to protect you. If you are avoiding things then your mind will automatically think that this is something that is super scary and will react in these ways. A few thousand years ago we used our fight, flight, and freeze (FFF) response many times, every day, to protect ourselves from things that could cause us harm. If we saw a grizzly bear then we would, of course, avoid it, and if anything came up that could be similar, our minds would be reminded of the fact it could be a sign of a grizzly bear. This might be broken branches from trees, big footprints in the earth, or the place we last saw a grizzly bear, these are just a few of the things that could trigger your mind into a FFF response. Which of course was amazing and made us the most overpopulated species on the planet.
The last couple of blogs were about worries and anxiety, and how many different habits you might have developed that maybe negatively impact these levels. Moving away from anxiety will not only mean letting go of worries, but it will also lead you to live life in several different ways. One of these things is reassurance, whether it be we are searching for it from others, or we are giving it to ourselves. Our mind is very clear in how it holds all the information that comes to us, and we have to understand that this is such a vast amount. Everything we do is held and stored in our unconscious minds and if this storage aspect of ourselves was not set up in this clear way, then we would struggle to live our lives in the way that we do. If we think about some of the things we do in life, like walking, driving, talking, etc, these are all formed by the build-up of memories. These memories are all stored in the same place, and as we learn a new skill the mind expands this part of its storage to hold all these experiences. Over time it creates a solid learned and developed habit and many of these we now do with hardly any conscious effort. If we think about walking, when was the last time you thought about picking your foot up or putting it down? We have this great ability to just walk naturally because your unconscious mind has stored all those memories in a way that allows your mind to automate those habits.
We discussed in the last blog ‘Worries’, about these pesky worry habits, plus the way you are living your life which could be increasing your internal worry and anxiety levels. This blog will look at how to fill the spaces, that worry, reassurance, denial, and avoidance, may have left within you. Worrying about things can take up lots of time and if we are choosing to break from these habits then it is important to make the most of that time in ways which won’t inadvertently allow our inner mind to continue to worry. The key to not worrying is to distract yourself, if you are fully distracted you won't be worrying. But it has to be a full distraction or it won't have the results that you are hoping for. Being distracted is not about just being busy doing something, we can all easily be busy but still be worrying at the same time. Being distracted is when our mind is so involved in the moment that we just don't have room for worries. This is one of the most important things in helping us to become worry-free. These are the key things to understand; if we can take the time to understand how our minds work and if we are fully distracted, then we can’t worry. Getting our minds on our side is the key to helping us in every area of our lives, as our minds are the most powerful force we have in our lives.
We all get worried from time to time and that is quite normal. But if we are allowing this to take over and become a habit then this will negatively impact how we feel. The thing about worrying is that the more we worry, the more worried we can feel. Also, worries can be impacted by how we react to ourselves and the world around us. If, say, we are worrying about going somewhere and we keep telling ourselves, “It's ok, we will be fine”, this you might think is no big thing, but to our unconscious mind, it is a massive thing, as your mind automatically looks at everything. If you were ok, then you wouldn't need to tell yourself that you are ok. So, you are not actually telling your mind that you are ok, each time you say to yourself that you will be fine, you are telling yourself on a deeper level that you are the opposite. You might be thinking really?! But the fact is your mind is so black and white in how it places things and without any grey area to put things, it has no choice. The thing is, you do know that you're not feeling ok so you can't think on any level that you can trick your mind to think otherwise. This is the same if you ask other people to reassure you, if we are always asking people if we are ok or will be ok, this is not helping us to stop the worrying, it will only be adding to our worries.
Let’s have a look at the things that can be limiting you moving forward, being positive, happy, grateful and being the best version of yourself. You might not have looked at life in this way, but many of us, if not all of us, are following the path of least resistance. This means that you choose to do what holds the least fear for you, you might be saying now I don't feel fear or I am fearless which may be the case. But beneath the surface is the more complex and primitive parts of our mind they do operate on a different level to our conscious mind and sometimes we just haven’t stopped to see it this way.
Life is now so competitive, about who we are, what we have, how we look and the lifestyle we lead, if we don’t fit in, we can easily feel inadequate. For teenagers and young adults, life is super competitive and social media is the king who tells us how we should look and be. With all the social media, we have a window into people’s lives, or do we? Or is it just all the amazing bits and lots of great camera angles and airbrushing? Nearly every week there’s a new story on some celebrity who has altered their images and has been caught out, but we still can’t help getting pulled into the images. It's not just social media, it's everywhere in our lives, it's the mums waiting at the school gates, kids in school, the office, and the workplace, all of these can have the same pressures to conform and fit in. But what happens if we don’t? We can be left feeling inadequate, isolated, weird, not good enough and not feeling able to fit in. This can lead to anxiety, fears, and depression, as we find ourselves retreating into our minds and as we’re already feeling not great this can compound the negative feelings.
Every moment in life is gone by the next moment. How about taking a few days to just embrace as many of those moments as you can? It is a challenge to catch the moment and be present to fully enjoy it. I think we have to remind ourselves to stop and pause to embrace the moment. Being in the now is one of the most pleasurable times we have. When we are in the moment we just forget about everything else and just enjoy what is happening in the now. This might seem an easy task but for many of us, this is something we don't do that often.
All over the world, we lived in fear of a neighbour from the beginning of time, to the 1950s and in fact, this might still be the case in some places in our world. We have also lived with another country invading our homes, villages or territory. Slaughtering our friends, family, and community, to take over and occupy our land and resources, or if they didn’t slaughter us, they brought health epidemics which did it for them. We are also at a point where we can experience less helplessness of being in this powerful world, out of control with the force of nature. Of course, we do see many disasters and devastation, caused by earthquakes, tsunamis, and extreme weather conditions, and being caught up in those must be terrifying for anyone. But over the last 100 years, we have learnt so much, and we can now build houses to withstand earthquakes and even install earthquake protection beds - google them, they look amazing! We can now predict the weather more easily and send support to help when a disaster happens, to help minimise the loss of life.
Every moment in life is gone by the next moment. For most of us, we just don't appreciate the moments as much as we should. We can be lost in the habitual mundaneness of parts of our life and then we just get stuck in habit and find ourselves lost to them. This can be fine when we need time to speed up, when we are maybe doing things which don’t bring us as much joy or pleasure. But for some of us, we can get stuck in that cycle of disconnection and then the task or the job stops, and we can forget to bring ourselves back into the moment. Maybe it's less about forgetting and more about our unconscious mind just getting stuck into a pattern of behaving and then we just keep going with it. It's worth thinking when you do drift into these disconnected habits, are they just helping you get through the mundane tasks or things that you don't enjoy or are there times you are zoning out. Once you have thought about your life and how it is broken down into being fully present and then partly disconnected into the habits of your life, it can give you a good overview of how your life is. Then just evaluate if this is making the most of your life. Are you wasting time and losing parts of your life? Could you be more productive and get other things done while doing those mundane tasks? Are you not switching off and becoming present when these tasks finish? Maybe there are other questions you find you need to ask yourself that help you fully consider your life and how much of it you are present for, and how maybe there are parts of your life you can rethink and develop better ways of living.
Why put off something until tomorrow when you can do it today? I bet all of us do this at least once a day and for some people, it has become a way of life. I see lots of people
who have stalled in their lives, and they are literally only just doing the bare minimum and even that is a struggle. We all know what we should be doing but we just, at times, are stuck, avoidant and even frozen from moving forward with things. Why are we doing this and why can't we just push through this and change? It may be that we have become afraid of doing things on certain levels and over time this has compounded into this avoidant frozen issue. For some people they have just ended up living with it, but why should we? Life is short and time is precious, do we really want to limit the life we live? Sometimes it can just feel easier to just stay this way and not try to change. But really if we look at the bigger picture it is such a waste of our lives. We don't know how many moments we have left in life so why waste them, how about working on living life to the full?
Being yourself is a complicated thing. It’s something that can take a lifetime to achieve, and for other people, it can come so easily. How we are depends on the life we have led and how this has informed our deep unconscious about how we need to be. If our lives have been filled with unconditional love and support, we can often feel that this is how we need to continue to live our lives. Our inner confidence is something that is built as a child and then we continue to grow and develop throughout our lives. If sadly we have not received that unconditional love and support as a child, how can we know how to feel this way? Or maybe things in life have broken or even shattered that inner confidence and you just can’t find your way back to feeling secure. The truth is we don't, and we have to then find our way back to this point. This can take months or even years to do depending on the levels of insecurities we have built up deep within us. We often have to hide that we don't feel secure and this can then get in our way of changing this. This can be seen as the ego or the outer confidence. You might know people who are bold and strong, or so it seems on the outside. But this doesn't always mean they are the same on the inside. I think that we only have so much of this and where it's in a balance between the inner and the outer confidence or if we are too outwardly bold yet inwardly insecure. There is also another way people can be, where they are so painfully insecure that this shows inwardly and outwardly but for the main, it is often that battle of where we hold our confidence which is going on within us. But if we are the painfully insecure person and struggle to function well in life then maybe it's time to find a therapist, a hypnotherapist, a life coach, or a counsellor. It's about following your instinct to find who is going to be right for you, and what might be right to start with might change as you change and heal.
We have been looking, over the last few blogs, at the melting pot of our emotions and those emotional responses that can be triggered by stress and things that make us anxious. If you have read all of these then you will be quite aware of the differences we have, and how things impact us on an individual level. I think it shows that having too much of any emotion can lead us into seeing red, or getting blue, or any of the other emotional responses. What we need to do and strive to, is to stay balanced and have that rainbow effect of emotions to help and support us through those difficult times. Finding a way to rebalance yourself is key to helping you feel more grounded, more secure, and more personally in control of how you are responding in life. We all have to accept that there are times in life when we can't change what's happening, but we can change how we respond to things. Learning to challenge ourselves to be that best version of ourselves, even in those challenging situations, is the key to living a happier and healthier life. What we need to do is find our own personal solutions that help to change the negative emotional responses we are having. For example, if you see red a lot and struggle with your frustration and anger levels then finding safe ways to release the build-up of those feelings would help you. This could be that you go for a run, head to the gym, or even turn your music up loud in your car and have a scream. All of these can be effective in changing and reducing the red feelings within you, exercise is great at reducing trapped adrenaline which can easily flue the anger and frustrations within you. Also having a scream is great for releasing frustration and helping your body be more open to relaxing.
We have been looking, over the last few blogs, at our melting pot of emotions and how when we get anxious, we can respond in lots of different ways. Our unique blend of feelings means we can sometimes not fully connect to where this is coming from, which in turn can make it harder to change those negative behaviours that can stem from this. When we get anxious it’s such a range of responses that we can have at that moment, but also when we suffer from extended or long-term anxiety it then gets more complicated. We can all feel depressed from time to time and that is quite normal, our mood can get quite blue and low as well at times. But sometimes that melting pot of emotions can lead us into some dark and even black places. This can be a very dangerous place for us and lead us into life-threatening situations for ourselves. At times when we feel very black and bleak inside and just can't see a light at the end of the tunnel, we have to see that we just can’t do this on our own, and this is the time if you haven’t already, to ask for help. Because at times like this we can think nothing or no one can help us or that we have to just keep on like this, and one extra push or negative trigger in life can just push us over the edge.
We have been looking at our inner melting pot of emotions over the last few blogs and how when we get anxious about things we can all react in our own unique way. The thing is if we are reacting in a certain way and we don't recognise where this is truly coming from, then it is harder for us to change these responses. Understanding our minds at times can be super complicated and I often say to my clients your mind is like a very slippery snake. You feel you have got it in your grip and then it can just slip away from you. This is because our mind works on a deep defensive level, always trying to protect us from what it feels are life or death things. This was amazing 500 years ago, as most things back then and beyond that time were dangerous and we needed this defensive part of our minds to keep us safe, to stop us from getting complacent and in turn getting hurt. But now for many of us in England, what do we have to be afraid of? I am sure most of us have paused and thought, and then thought again, and realised that, we are living in an extremely safe world with nothing really to be afraid of. This is amazing that we can live our lives this way but our inner minds do need to catch up and reset themselves to this safer life that many of us are now living.
We have been looking at the melting pot of emotional responses we can have when life gets challenging, and how we all have our unique way of dealing with things. If our emotions are running high, then sometimes our inner minds fear that this could be too much for us to deal with and can detach us from what is happening. We know that this happens in shock and PTSD situations and this detachment from our emotions and ourselves is something that has been studied extensively. But with this type of research, I think it is so hard to fully navigate the uniqueness of our emotional responses, and this can make understanding this difficult to analyse. If you have ever been skiing then this is something you might have experienced or heard about. I know as a skier this is something I always hated and luckily only had to experience a few times - it's called a “whiteout”, where the snow is falling so much that you lose all concept of direction as the dense snow makes all the landscape indistinguishable. It's a horrible feeling as you just don't know what is in front of you or even which way is downhill or uphill and it can make you feel quite sick and very disorientated. I think at times when we are in an emotionally challenging situation our mind opts for a type of whiteout situation, in PTSD this is often at its maximum and I think we can then feel those disorientated and sick feelings but struggle to place this next to an emotional response or situation.
When life is making us anxious or things are challenging this can impact us in many different ways. This melting pot of different feelings is unique for all of us and often how we are thinking and responding to things is at the bottom of us feeling the way we do. If we are being challenged by life and we spend time with worrying thoughts it can take us down many different routes. This in turn will negatively impact how we feel and can then cause us to feel even worse about what is happening. If we put ourselves down and blame ourselves for what's happening then we can make ourselves depressed and have those blue, low feelings that can come with some levels of anxiety. We all have to accept that we are not perfect and all we can do is our best, things don't always work out how we would like them to do but beating ourselves up with these negative thoughts won't help either. If we keep pecking at ourselves with these insults and over-blame ourselves then after a while, we have pecked so much at ourselves that we have made ourselves bleed. This way of treating ourselves will just make our mood low and even make us feel quite blue and tearful at times.
We have been looking at the melting pot of our emotional responses to things and how this can trigger our unique response to how we deal with things in our lives and also how we live on a day-to-day basis. If our prominent colour is red then we will be carrying anger and frustrations within us, this can also mean that we might have habits of stirring ourselves up. We can do this by how we deal with things that are happening in the now and also those things we are struggling to come to terms with in the now. If we spend our time winding ourselves up, then this can often make us see red and then react. We have to accept that this is causing us to fuel these feelings, making us angrier and more frustrated by those things outwardly around us.
The way our minds work with worries and fears, is like a melting pot of many different colours that blend into our unique habit of worrying. We all add our own different colours and amounts, making it a bespoke formula, but the basis of all of it is, the pot and the colours. This is how our minds work to navigate fears and worries, and then form habits and direct us down a certain pathway of thinking. The pot is our mind, and the colours are the different accents that we choose to follow when we get fearful or start to worry about things. The colours all start as the same and these are made up of things like our past experiences and how we have been dealing with fears and anxieties, our upbringing and how our caregivers dealt with worries and fear. Then the colours diversify into things like our personality types, our underlying anxiety levels, how confident or not we are, if we have that inner safety and security within us, and what else might be happening at that moment in our life.
Life can weigh us down at times and it can leave us feeling the heaviness of this, which then can have an impact on how we feel and function in our lives. I think lots of emotional and mental health issues can weigh heavy on us and some of these things we can't change, but we can change how we communicate with ourselves. We can often be our worst critics and when life is challenging, we can beat ourselves up with our inner self-talk. Also, we can be volunteering our over responsibility for things happening around us by saying sorry for things that we don't need to do. This can be because we have set our minds in that heavy mindset that makes us feel not good enough and puts the burden of the things that don't seem right, always at our door. Of course, there will be times we are responsible for something going wrong and saying sorry is often the best route to deal with these times. But the overuse of sorry is quite a burden to our inner mindset and can over time make us feel weighed down with the burdens of the continual pressures of feeling in the wrong.
We are continuing to look at ways to help keep us feeling as bright and as sunny as possible even when life might have other ideas. As we looked at in the last blog ‘Sun’, this weather metaphor of our emotional states is ultimately the best one to be living in.
The clouds are the things that can just blow in from nowhere and overshadow that inner brightness and joy that we had been experiencing. We have to accept that we can't change what life throws at us, but we can work to find the best ways to deal with them. If we let things overpower us then we just let those clouds follow us around - just like in the movie ‘The Addams Family’; there were times when family members just had a big cloud hanging over them and wherever they walked, it just stayed right above their heads. I think this is a great way to look at how we can feel if we let things overshadow us and we let those issues overwhelm us. If we can't let things go then it is natural that they will follow us around, like that Addams Family cloud looming over us.
The blog last week was looking at the metaphor of the weather and how this can describe the feelings and emotional states we can experience and move through. I think the sun is one of the nicest ones we can feel from others and be experiencing ourselves. It is all about being bright, bold, warm, and vibrant. When we are living in the emotional state of the sun, we can shine brightly, and everyone around us can see this. Of course, people and life can try and bring things in that can overshadow our brightness. You can see this like the clouds rolling in and blocking us from the pleasure of the sun. What is an interesting fact is if we can get through the clouds on any day, in any place, the sun will be always shining. So, if we see this inner brightness that we all have and work towards not letting things cloud this lovely way of feeling, then we will be living a happier life.
Our emotions can be viewed just like the British weather. They can be erratic, and unpredictable and can go from snow, and freezing weather conditions, to bright blue skies and lots of sunshine. I think it's a good way to look at our emotions by using the weather metaphor as a simple way to help us stay in touch with how we feel. Also, for the other people around us, it can be a great way to look at how people are feeling and find the best ways to navigate the situation at hand. If we think of all the different weather conditions, we can marry those with all the different emotions we can have. Actually, you might not have thought about it in this way but we already use terms like, “something is clouding my judgement”, “the dawn of a new day”, “we feel gloomy”, “the perfect storm”, “stealing someone's thunder”, “a windfall”, and “take a rain check” - these are just a few of the things we can say to each other from time to time.
Our minds are the most amazing and spectacular things we can ever conceive. I know we often don't look at our minds in that way but it is so true. All you have to do is look around our world and all the things we have created. like rockets that go to the moon, keyhole microscopic surgery, life-saving vaccines, buildings that go up to 163 floors high, and computer technology are just a few of them. We could consider so many different things of incredible achievement and the one core component is that it’s minds like you and me that have created these. Our minds at birth or even before we are born are like mouldable multicoloured play dough, which can be shaped into anything you like. Pre and post-birth they say that you can hothouse your child's mind, abilities, mood and anxiety levels. Before your baby is born, they say that playing your baby classical music will enhance their mind, and yoga will enable them to be calmer. On an adverse level, studies show that drug use might lead to later development and learning disabilities. Also, studies have found that these children may also struggle to control their emotions and ability to focus on tasks. From almost the moment a baby is conceived, their minds and the nerves and tissues that support their minds are developing.
We were talking about being kind, and how this doesn't have to be grand and big, even the smallest things can make a difference. With this being the case, it is easy to think that we can learn to be this way and not just do this from time to time. We are all creatures of habit, and it is about forming habits that enable us to stay in good patterns, that are essential to long-lasting change. To live life as a kinder and more caring person, it's good to start to embrace just how lovely it is to be this way. Initially making changes does take effort but over time these can become just as natural as walking and talking are to us. To get to this natural place of living in a certain way will take planning and time to make this happen.
We can all look and see some terrible things at the moment happening all over the world. It can be hard to quantify that people can behave in this way to other people and cause them harm in this way. When we see these things happening in other parts of our world it can often make us feel quite helpless in how we can change or even help what is happening. At times like this, we have to take a step back and not get stuck in that helpless place, feeling that these things are out of our control, and so in turn, we don't feel that we can do anything to change this. This can be triggered by the defensive part of our minds as we can see the horror of war, violence, and crime, and deep within us this can trigger an internal response. We can then step into a place of fear and then end up being frozen in fear and finding ourselves not able to help in any way. We might not even be aware of this happening; we might just find ourselves trying to avoid what is happening. This might mean that we choose to not watch or listen to the news that informs us of these horrendous things that are going on. Life is always about balance and this situation is the same, we need to not ode on the information that is flooding into our media, tv, news, radio, and social media as this isn't great either. This could then cause our mood to drop, we could feel anxious and angry or experience a combination of all of these feelings.
Life is a medley of many different feelings, thoughts, memories and experiences. It can be very easy to get pulled down by the negative ones and stop us from taking pleasure in the other things in our lives. Often just being present and in the moment, just finding things that we can gain pleasure in and emanate that out, can make a big difference to how we feel. Maybe we see children playing and laughing, or we enjoy just looking into the blue cloudless sky with the warmth of the gentle sun on us. Or we could just laugh with a friend and feel that great feeling that comes with laughter. There is an infinite number of things that can make us shine from the inside out, but we need to acknowledge these and not block them with the negative things in our lives. If we learn to let those moments of joy shine out from us, it will not only allow us to hold those lovely feelings for much longer, but it will also allow this inner shine and happiness to then shine back out and be caught by the people we are around or we meet.
Time is a precious thing, as each moment that we get in life is something we can only have once and when it's gone, it never comes back. Change can seem a scary thing and often we put things off because of fear. What is super important is that we acknowledge this, and don’t make excuses to hide our fears and stop us from moving forward and harnessing that moment. Our primaeval part of our unconscious mind is the part of us that is the limiter in this. This is an old survival mechanism that over the centuries has kept us doing the same thing over and over again. This part of your mind is only there to protect you, and if you are alive and well then doing what you are doing must be working, so this part of your inner mind will always choose in these situations to stick to what you are doing. Why break what isn't broken, is the message that comes from this super protective part of your mind. Because if you change and do something new, you might not be as lucky with being safe and staying alive. This was great when we lived as cavemen and in those more dangerous times in our lives, but living in England or in fact, most of our western world, we are safe and changing what we do doesn't put us in danger.
We can all get anxious from time to time and this is quite normal for all of us. But if we are letting this anxiety and worry overtake us, it could then cause us lots of issues on a day-to-day basis. With anxiety, this can either come in an instant, maybe we see or hear something that makes us jump or shocks us; at those times we can become instantly anxious. The other way with anxiety can be that we are stuck on that heightened level of nervousness and anxiety and we can feel a constant high anxiety level for extended periods of time. This first response is quite normal as this is our fight, flight, and freeze response, which we aren't in control of, this is controlled by our primaeval mind, the part of us that is constantly on alert to protect us and keep us safe from danger. This part of us is amazing and is essential in how we have grown and evolved as a species on this planet. All animals and creatures have their fight, flight and freeze responses and each animal has adapted how they respond due to their different environments. For example, if we are living in a war zone then we are constantly in this fight, flight, and freeze response system, as such we will be on red alert and hypervigilant to our surroundings. This is necessary to help us stay alive in those most challenging times. But what if our bodies are reacting as if we are in a war zone, yet were not, and what is happening in our lives doesn't warrant the levels of anxiety we are producing? This is often what is happening with the second type of heightened anxiety; we have got stuck on that anxiety level and don’t feel able to switch it off.
If this is happening to you then it will be making your life miserable, you will feel on edge all the time, jumpy and nervous, maybe you won't sleep well or not feel able to eat, or even do the opposite and feel the need to overeat. We might also get headaches, neck, and shoulder tension, feel overwhelmed and emotional, get angry and agitated or find it hard to concentrate on anything. These are just a few of the many negative things that can be happening to us when we are feeling anxious. If this is a life-or-death situation then we must respond in these ways, but if it is not and we are living with this heightened anxiety, then now is the time to change this.
The more we worry, the more anxious and worried we will become, so taking time to distract ourselves from worries is a great way to help reduce the anxious feelings. Also, another good support is being active, when we exert ourselves by going for a run, we push up our heart rate and a whole host of other responses get fired up within us. This is great, as we need more energy to power our legs to run, but when we stop running, our bodies don't stay at those high-intensity levels of functioning, they naturally just start to reduce to a more normal level. So, this response is a great one to harness when we are feeling anxious or stuck with this heightened anxiety. Just a few minutes of intense exercise will push our heart rates up and out of the anxious state and move us into the exercising zone. Once you stop exercising, your body will follow the same route it always does after exercise and start reducing those high-intensity exercise levels to a normal level. This is great as it will break your mind, body and nervous system out of the heightened anxiety feeling and help bring you back down to a more normal relaxed level. You don’t need to go for a massive workout or do anything that takes up lots of time, just pushing your heart rate up is the key. You can look at things like HIIT training or get a skipping rope, do burpees, or a run around the block, it doesn't matter what it is, it just needs to get your heart rate up. After your body has reduced itself from all those heightened needs that come with doing those high-intensity activities, stress levels will drop and also those natural endorphins will be released into your body. These natural endorphins are the best drugs you can ever have to boost your mood and positively support how you are feeling.
We are seeing much instability in our world at the moment and for many of us, we can feel the impact this has on our feelings of peace and safety. It is a time that we need to offer support to those that need us but also to give ourselves the inner strength we need to help us keep peace within us. Often when things upset us or don't go the way we had expected them to go, it can cause a host of feelings and can trigger us to respond out of character. This is because our responses are being fuelled by fear and a host of overwhelming emotions. For the majority of us in England, we are lucky to be safe in our outer world and so our level of response to things should be appropriate to the situation we are facing. But for many of us, it isn't just the situation we are in, it’s all the things from the past, that on a deeper level are in some way intrinsically connected to not only the past, but the present situation too. Trying to separate this in the moment can often be near impossible to do, as the pull of our internal drivers often seem to have taken hold and the rational side to our ways of dealing and processing things are damaged or disabled.
When we get stressed, we not only feel this in our minds, by making our minds become a bit like scrambled eggs; as we have looked at already in other blogs, our bodies get anxious in all sorts of different ways. Understanding this is key to helping not continue to live this way with all those negative impacts that we feel when we are stressed. I do think for many of us life is a roller coaster, and other times more like just a walk in the park, but mainly we are somewhere in-between this. If we let ourselves just accept this as the way we live our lives, then I feel this is quite a limiter for us, and we can then end up not having the best life we could have because of it. It is important that we see our bodies and minds like a car, we wouldn't not service the car, change the oil, repair those things that have got worn out or look after it with regular maintenance etc. We are no different really, we need that regular input into our wellbeing to help keep our health at those top levels.
In the last blog, we were looking at worrying and the impact on not only our minds, but our bodies too. In this blog we want to explore one area of how our bodies can respond to stress. If we worry and get anxious, we will more than likely be impacting our breathing patterns. Our breath is such an important aspect of being alive, if we haven't taken a breath, in just a few minutes our bodies will just shut down and stop working. If we just take a moment to consider this, we all have to agree that our breathing is one of the top things our bodies rely on. What can happen in stress, is that our mind sends the signals to our bodies, and we can go one of two ways; we can literally stop breathing for a moment. What we find is that we start to hold our breath or tense parts of our torso up which then stops our bodies from breathing normally. Or we can find that our bodies start making us breathe faster, our breathing pattern will start to increase, at its worst we can start hyperventilating. Both of these extremes to our breathing can make us feel uncomfortable and this can then trigger our worries to continue to grow. Also, if we breathe erratically it will take up lots of energy doing this and in turn, reduce the amount of oxygen going to the brain. Because of this you can feel lightheaded and will have a rapid heartbeat. All of the symptoms are signs that you are anxious or having an anxiety attack. If we learn to be more positively aware of how we breathe, and work to remove the habits that are causing this tension around our breathing, we will automatically feel more relaxed.
We all worry from time to time and that is quite normal, but if we let these worries get out of hand, we can cause ourselves lots of issues. Worrying is not just sometimes what we do in our minds but is also something that our bodies do on many different levels. It is so easy for our minds to push worry into our bodies, and it can be done on such a deep level of our unconscious mind, we might not even be fully aware of it. If this is happening, we might find that we get a stomach ache, a headache, feel tension, increased blood pressure, elevated levels of cortisol, your neck can become very stiff, we can feel detached from ourselves, your feelings, or your world. Other ways our worries can get pushed within us is by our worries turning into other feelings; we can get reactive, frustrated, angry, agitated, sad, tearful, become aggressive, and we can also step into denial. With all the things I have mentioned, you can start to see that we can turn into an emotional melting pot of responses and feelings. These are only some of the ways we can feel, there are more ways our bodies can respond negatively to stress. So, if you are feeling stressed and you are having different physical feelings, then it might well be coming from the suppression of your worries. Because it is so complex and our mind is so clever in working to protect us, it can cause us to not easily follow where our worries are moving to and to fully understand why we are feeling certain ways.
We have been looking at ways to help keep your mind in a clear place and help you feel more relaxed and get those good night’s sleep that we all crave. If our minds are full of life, thoughts, options, worries, fears, and the burdens of our life, being in a calm place won't come that easily. Even if we think we are coping well, it doesn't mean that we are coping the same way on an unconscious level. Our minds are always trying to protect us and sometimes we feel fine on those outer conscious levels, but beneath the surface, it can be very different. Finding the ways that help us to clear our minds is ultimately the best thing for us, as with a clearer, calmer mind, we have the space to feel and function better.
We have been looking at finding ways to take down stress levels so that you not only feel more relaxed, but you also can sleep better. If our lives are messy, then our inner minds will also be messy. We all carry our lives around with us in our heads, we can't help it, it is how our mind works. So, if we can't change this then we have to look to change how much of our lives that we are carrying around with us. In the blog ‘Order’, we were looking at all the technology we have in our lives and how at times, they can be overwhelming. This pressure can negatively impact our stress levels and how we live our lives. Now it's time to look more closer to home in our houses, cars, office desks etc, if these are messy then it will 100% be stressing our inner minds out. Our minds are amazing, and they are always on a deeper level trying to make sure that we are safe and that nothing is going to cause us harm. If our lives are in order and we put everything in the place it is meant to be, then our mind will have already had that stored in its memory bank and can quickly do a sweep and confirm that all is ok. If the spaces we live in are messy, then it’s a minefield for your mind to then have to look through all that is there and make sure that nothing could be dangerous to you.
Last week we were looking at ways to help you switch off from work and allow your mind to relax better and in turn, help you get a better night's sleep. It is important that we support our minds, or they can easily get overwhelmed with things, the more we carry the more difficult it will be to switch off. Let's use the analogy of the library again as this is a great way to help you see better how your mind is working beneath the surface. As we know, if we don't find ways to help our minds switch off then we just take these issues with us to bed. This for many of us will lead to a poor night's sleep, as we toss and turn trying to juggle all these things in our minds. By using the voice memo detox approach, it can help us create a new holding system in our libraries and allow our library assistants to relax more as they know that these items are just placed on hold until you return to work. This keeps that main desk in your library clearer and so, in turn, our mind won't feel so overwhelmed or under pressure with trying to hold onto everything until the next workday. Remember all those approaches need to be right for you, so if the voice memo hasn't worked for you, try typing these things down and emailing them to yourself. Or you can just go old school and put pen to paper and pop the note by your keys, ready to take to work with you.
We have been exploring sleep issues and ways to help you find that better sleep. In the last blog, we were looking at practical things to do on a more physical level. Today we want to explore things we can do that will help us with our anxiety and stress levels, to enable us to sleep better. Our unconscious minds are black and white, they mainly work based on input and output. Being stressed, anxious and not sleeping well, can come from having too much in our lives that we are trying to cope with. By not finding those instant solutions we need, we then end up just juggling all those things around in our heads, this at times can become overwhelming for our minds. Life for many of us is a juggling act, if this is work-related then it is important that we find strategies that help you switch off from work and leave it behind till the next day.
We have been reviewing how we worry, and now we are going to look at some of the things that can get impacted when we are feeling this way. Sleep is one of them, and if we don’t sleep, this can have such a negative impact on how we feel.
Sleep is one of our basic human needs. Proper sleep is critical to many health aspects including our hormone levels, maintaining a good mood, and even weight management. However, not everyone can achieve good and sound sleep on their own. There are sleep disorders, a group of conditions that impair the ability to sleep well regularly, which negatively affect many people’s sleep. These sleep disorders can impact how you function during the day as well as at night. Whether caused by a health problem, stress, or an unhealthy lifestyle, sleep disorders are significant health issues.
We have been looking at our minds, and how they work on those deeper levels and just how much depth we all have within us. Also, I am sure for many of you, it might have made you think about anything that might still be impacting your life on a deeper level. Continuing to look at the analogy of ourselves being the planet at the centre of our universe; I think it is a good way to understand more of our hidden depths, just like as we explore the far reaches of our cosmos and what this holds. There have been many experiments and there is extensive continual research into our minds and how they work. It is truly like the cosmos we live in; much-uncharted territory and the unknown makes up a big part of how we see our cosmos. With our solar system we have made massive strides forward, our recent trip to Mars is one of the most exciting things we have achieved. Even with this, we still have so many unexplored areas of our cosmos, just as we do our minds. More high-tech resources can help us understand our minds on certain levels, but it is still so vast and unexplored on other levels.
In the last blog Solar, we had been looking at our mind and how it stores and holds onto things. We know that our minds are vast and much of it is unexplored, just like the solar system we live in today. On a conscious level we can often, over time, work things through, but if we think things work like that on a deeper unconscious level then we are mistaken. Our inner mind works very differently on what we experience, how we hold onto things and the whole process of fully letting go. But don’t be worried and think we can get stuck in the past and never move on either. Often, it’s not about blanking out the past and pretending it didn’t happen, it is about coming to terms with the past on a deeper level; that is the true key to change. If we change how we feel about the past then this is all we will ever need to do to make lasting changes. As it's not about the past per se, it is about how we feel about the past that is important. This is great, as we can't change the past, but we can change how we feel about it.
The subconscious mind takes everything literally, it does not differentiate between negative and positive. So, if you continually tell yourself that you’ll never succeed in a particular venture, it’s more likely to turn out that way. The subconscious mind is subjective, it doesn’t think or reason independently, it simply obeys the commands it receives from your conscious mind.
In the last blog, we were looking at shock and the impact it can have on us, and how these events can trigger our nervous system to respond in fight-flight or freeze response. This is great, as these survival mechanisms have made us the most overpopulated species on the planet. What we also have to understand is how our mind works more deeply around these times of survival, and how we can help ourselves to reset and get back to normal. The inner parts of our mind work in a completely different way to our conscious mind. One of the biggest factors of the mind is that on an unconscious level, we don't hold the same concepts of time as we do consciously.
Life can be comfortable, and we can feel relaxed and happy with things just ticking along in our lives, then, out of nowhere, something can come along and shock us. Sadly, this is something we can’t change or predict. The issue with things that shock us, is that we can never be prepared for these things and there is nothing we can do on a conscious level to change the reactions we have. At moments of shock, we are never responding on a conscious level; your flight, fight, and freeze response is in control of how you react to what is happening. This is something essential to support us and keep us safe. If shock blows our mind, then this could cause long term psychological effects. This is why our primaeval mind is always ready to leap into action, to soften the blow of shock and to protect us by pushing our minds and bodies into survival mode. If we blow our inner fuse board in our mind, then this can have a devastating effect on our mental well-being. We still know so little about the deeper levels of the mind, as these parts of our mind are so hard to study. We hear of many amazing things that people have achieved with the power of their minds, but knowing how to harness this easily, is something we don't understand yet. On the negative side, many severe but quite rare psychological issues can come as a result of shock and trauma, and we don’t fully understand these or know how to easily treat these conditions.
Life can be so full on at times, and we can, at times, never seem to find the time to just stop. I think many of our worlds are all moving at a very fast pace and don’t always leave much time to find that inner peace. In the first lockdown, some of us found we had more time, but for others, it was even more pressure from our life commitments, or maybe it was coming from new factors. But whatever our lives throw at us, it is very important that we work to give ourselves more time to find our inner peace. Our deeper mind needs these times of peace to feel fully safe and secure. If we are always on the go then sometimes our minds can get stuck in this overdrive mode. It's like your car when it is over-revving, it's on this constant cycle and it has an impact on many aspects of the car, from using more fuel, and wearing the car out more quickly. Living on overdrive will have similar effects on how you feel, it is like draining your energy and wearing you out more quickly because of it. Over time, our minds can feel that life must be this way, and even when we could stop, we can find ourselves filling those gaps with more busyness. Our inner mind is always searching for the patterns, and if we are overdoing things in life, then this is just what pattern we end up getting stuck in.
We can all see red from time to time and that is quite normal, but what isn’t right is if we then overreact to these triggers and situations. If you blow up like a bomb, then this isn’t going to make your life as happy as it could be. When we find better ways to deal with things, then we are not only making our lives happier, but we can also build better relationships with the people in our lives. A good way to look at the things which make us see red, is to choose to press the pause button and step out of the situation. Often our reaction is that we are not balanced with the situation, so if we have that time to process the situation it will help us calm down from the event and hopefully find rational thinking and better reasoning skills. If we look at what seeing red means on a deeper unconscious level, the reality is, it’s all based around our fight-flight and freeze response. This moment of us seeing red is our inner protective mind trying to fight our way out of a situation. For many of us, if the situation is not in any way a life-or-death event, then this approach is not going to help you, it is more than likely going to cause you more issues than less.
I am sure we have all done this at times, it can seem just an easy thing to do and, in some ways, it might feel that in the beginning like it helps. But floating down the river of “De-Nile” isn't the answer to things, it can over time, make things much worse. Denial is something our minds can resort to as a level of protection, and it is something we can choose when things are hard to face or deal with. I think that sometimes, we just don’t want to face up to things or what is happening, and we opt for this. Now you might be thinking, “Is this such a big issue? Will it be negatively affecting me that much?” Well, the answer is yes and in fact, it could be impacting you daily if you are still floating down the river of “De-Nile”.
The reason for this, is that our minds are totally black and white, and it has to fall into either black or white, there is no room for grey, that elusive unknown. This being the case, our inner mind just doesn’t understand denial in the way that we consciously see this to be. What our minds actually think, is that if you are in this state of denial then the things you are hiding from must be very dangerous and deadly serious. This will mean that every time we opt to float down the river of “De-Nile”, we are continuously adding fear and worry to our worry clouds. Living with that constant pretence is very detrimental to our inner mental health, as it can really cause lots of anxiety and trapped emotions to start building up in our worry cloud. The reasons for this are that our primaeval mind is the part of us that is listening to these messages very intently. If we are hiding, in denial, or pretending things are not happening, then we must be frozen in fear, and this must mean that whatever we are in denial over must be dangerous or deadly.
We can all get worried from time to time, this is quite normal, but if we start to over-worry about things, then this will be causing your stress levels to rise. For many of us, we know when we are relaxed and we know when we feel terrible, but often, we lose track of how we are feeling in the middle of these two extremes. This is because relaxation and stress are clearly defined in our minds and the gap in between isn't clear, so are we relaxed or are we stressed? If we let things grow, then it is like a drip-feeding response, and often if we don't notice this is happening then it can continue to grow. If you imagine, every time you worry, it sends those thought bubbles of worry and fears up into your own cloud, that just circles over your head. This is your personal worry cloud, which means that you don’t go anywhere without it, it just follows you around and the more worries you have, the more you fill your cloud. I guess all of us can have a few wispy clouds around us and maybe on our chill-out days they can blow away and let us have those clear blue-sky days. But if this is something you are doing all the time, then even when you are not worrying in the now, the worries of the past are still circling you.
If you haven’t read the other four blogs about the cat, and you suffer from worries and anxiety, then I would recommend that you do. They are ‘Don’t Feed The Cat’, ‘The Cat Is Back’, ‘The Cat Lives On’ and ‘I Can’t See The Cat’. These four blogs can help you fully understand your anxiety and help you see the things that unbeknown to you, can be negatively affecting your anxiety and worry habit. Also, the blogs give you lots of tips and advice about how to break the cycle of worry and become anxiety free. The last 18 months for all of us living in a time, while we are making history in this pandemic, has been a challenge. Now we are starting to see us coming out the other side of this. If we use an analogy to see where we are, we have just oven taken the COVID car and in the next few months it will be something we are looking at in our rear-view mirror. But it’s not to say that there might not be more challenges ahead, plus we all have to accept that COVID is here to stay, so now is the time for the world to learn to live with COVID and find the ways that will help us navigate this next stage.
Making changes in life can take time and this can often challenge us on many different levels. We can choose to play it the steady safe way with our goals and the desires we want to achieve in our lives, or we can take the opposite approach to things in a different way and think BIG. Thinking BIG is a good attitude to take when we are looking at making changes in our lives, as we can easily push our minds to achieve so much more. This won’t be for everyone, but that’s often how things are in life, we have to find what works for us. Using the BIG attitude to change, is about pushing our minds to the next level, and opening us up to see beyond our comfort zones. This is not something you would use in every area of your life and you wouldn’t do lots of different things at the same time with this approach either. Thinking BIG needs to be a contained approach to changing. Good areas to think BIG in are work, money goals, projects and even weight loss, as we can often push those boundaries and make big changes in our lives.
We often think that finishing things is the successful part of changing and of course it is. How great is it to get to the end of our goals and feel that amazing feeling of satisfaction which we have when we have achieved something? I think it is one of the best feelings we can have, not only the success of making it to this point, but also the things that you have achieved are exciting too. But the key to changing is actually the start of the process, not just the end goal. If we don't start something, we will never get what we want in life and in fact, we could end up living in a one-dimensional version of what we could truly be. Often, we don’t change, not because we don’t know what we want to change or even what we want to achieve, but it is that we just never get going with things. You might be a dreamer or maybe you know someone who is, and these people are always talking about things, but never actually following through and starting the things they dream about doing. If this is you, it is time to wake up and see that treading water in this way is just a waste of your life, which you have been blessed with. We should never forget how fortunate we are to be living in England and having all these options, choices, and opportunities. Many places in the world just don't get these opportunities and it is time to wake up and make the most of what we have in our lives.
Life is precious and over the last couple of years, I think we all have had some level of a wake-up call. This being the case, it's important that we take full advantage of how this makes our minds feel and respond on those deeper levels. Our minds are just so habitual, even if we think they aren’t and that we are super spontaneous. On a deeper level that isn’t the case, especially for our unconscious minds and the thousands of automatic habits and responses, we have every day. Changing from learned and conditioned habits takes time and we have to firstly remove the conditioned responses and then start developing the new habits. Have you ever done this while driving; you end up going down a familiar route instead of where you have planned to go? Or find yourself doing things in the house that you don't need to do but it's something you normally always do? This is the pleasure of having all of the amazing, unconscious, automatic, processes of our mind, that remembers what it thinks we should be doing and just gets on doing these things, without us having to make any conscious decisions in choosing to do these things.
In the previous blog ‘Hate’, we were looking at the power of words and just what an impact they can have on water cells and the fascinating work that Dr Emoto has done in his studies. We are all, about 50% to 65% of water, so now is the time to start sending the love we need and deserve, to ourselves and our bodies and also to start to emanate this to the world around us. We live in a very outwardly focused society for all of us, but more primarily the younger people who are bombarded with images that they can at times feel driven to aspire to. This is an issue for us all, as lots of the images are not true-life images, as they have been edited and enhanced. But even though we know this on one level, that can often not stop us from comparing ourselves to them, and this can in turn make us feel inadequate about who we are. The knock-on effect is that our confidence and self-esteem will be lowered, but at its worst, it can make us dysmorphic about how we look, which can lead to lots of issues. The extremes of this will be things like anorexia, severe insecurities and obsessions with beauty procedures, and these are just a few of them. This is because we can become over-focused on ourselves and not see things in their true perspective. As we continue to overfocus, we enhance those feelings of not being good enough, in turn, the more negative messages we send to ourselves, leading to increased feelings of negativity about ourselves. This can become a real negative spiral that just increasingly compounds how bad we feel about ourselves, knocking our confidence and lowering our self-esteem. What we all need to do, is to learn to love ourselves for who we are, and if we are not being that nice to ourselves, then this is something we need to change.
Can those negative words we say to others and also to ourselves, have a deeper impact on us than what we think? This experiment is going to blow your mind and make you start to rethink the power of words. What happened in this experiment is just so incredible it might seem hard to fully believe. Dr Emoto exposed water to both positive and negative music, spoken words, typed words, pictures and videos. Then, he froze them and took photos of the ice crystals under a microscope. Water exposed to words like “love”, “thank you”, “appreciation”, “happiness”, and “truth” or music, turned into beautiful crystals.
Our minds are so complex and for many of us, we know little about the deeper workings of the mind and those unconscious parts of ourselves. The unconscious mind is still viewed by many psychological scientists as just a shadow of the real conscious mind. But, much more research into the field now shows substantial evidence that the unconscious is not identifiably less flexible, complex, controlling, deliberative or action-oriented than its counterpart, the conscious mind. For most of our human history, we had not a great deal of connection to anything other than conscious thought and we saw that everything was based on intentional behaviour. In the 1800s, two very different but very exciting developments were starting to emerge, hypnotism and evolutionary theory. Both pointed to the possibility of the unconscious, with its unintended causes of human behaviour and how these deeper levels of our mind influence us. But nearly two centuries later much of the psychological science remains firmly placed in a conscious-centric model of the higher mental processes. Our unconscious mind is still shrouded in mystery and intrigue, also I don’t think it has helped that our view of the powers of the unconscious mind has come largely from studies of subliminal information processing. We have just not shifted from the belief that the conscious mind holds all the cards, and this can be right for much of our consciousness, but after 27 years working in this field, I know that this is not the full truth. Much of the research looks purely at subliminal-strength stimulation from the environment, thus perpetuating the notion that conscious processes are primary ones.
We were looking in the last podcast about how we can plant a seed within us and how if we nurture it, we can greatly encourage the seeds of thought and desires to grow. This is something we should all try to do, as it will enhance our lives, elevating the quality of the lives we lead by striving to be the best version of ourselves in all areas of our lives. Our mind is amazing and has such power in helping us change and grow, but we must never forget we are the part that’s in control of this. I know sometimes we can feel we aren’t and we can feel that our mind controls us. This is only because we have let those seeds of negativity grow within our minds and sometimes, they can start to overpower our thought processes. If we inadvertently plant a weed in our mind then this can and will grow, often weeds can even grow in the harshest environments and sometimes they can be hard to kill off too.
Our minds are the most profound and powerful thing we will ever have in our lives, we might not think that, but it is true. It's easy to look around our world and marvel at the technological advances we see around us and feel even awestruck by what we can now do. I have always looked at planes as they fly through the sky leaving the cloud line, travelling at five hundred miles an hour, at 30,000 feet above me, heading to the other side of the world, with just total amazement. Lately, we have seen on the News, the trips to Mars and what we have achieved; this is just mind-blowing, travelling 140 million miles on average depending on the orbiting cycle at the time. It takes approximately 7 months to reach Mars and is nothing like the world we live in. The surface is not hospitable to humans or most known life forms due to the radiation, greatly reduced air pressure, and the lack of oxygen in the atmosphere. This is such a fantastic and phenomenal achievement but let’s not forget that it was minds like ours that decided to find a way to fly and then decided to head out further to explore the universe. The Wright Brothers were amazing, they devoted most of their lives to developing a plane, they started with gliders and after five years of trying, failing, and learning, they had achieved just 5 hours of flight time. They never saw this as a limiter, they saw it as just the opposite.
I do love those times when we are taking off on a plane and you get that aerial view of the world beneath us - not that lately I have had the pleasure - but hopefully soon we can all be planning fun trips away if you haven’t already. When the sky is clear, the best views you can have are often over England, as the country and landscape is a totally different array of views. From the spalling cities and villages to the ploughed fields looking like a massive patchwork quilt. Then the hills and mountains, the woods, rivers, and streams, in contrast to the concrete jungle of roads and motorways, like the veins and arteries that travel through our bodies. Our world is amazing and often we don’t always stop to take stock of the bigger picture of what this actually looks like. This is just like how amazing our minds are and the diversity of what they hold, also how different we are in different aspects of ourselves and our lives. We are this ever-changing landscape and can go from the hub of an inner-city to the tranquility of a hilltop. But what is even more fascinating is that we have the pleasure of all of this, whereas, unless we are a pilot in our daily life, we only get a small view of the world that we live in. Also, for most of us, we only get to change our homes and gardens not the world around us, whereas in our minds we get to change the whole landscape of who we are.
Time is a strange thing; when we are waiting for it to pass, it can seem so slow, yet on the other hand, we can get lost in time and it all just seems to have rapidly evaporated. Also, how we see time in our outer world is different to how we see things in our inner world. Clocks are devices created by us humans to measure time. We all need this measurement to help us live our lives and coordinate our activities according to clock time. Without clocks, our lives would be very confusing, and we would never get much done as we would be waiting around to try and sync up with other people or events. Your inner brain does not perceive the passing of time with the same units of minutes and hours as on your watch. Throughout evolution, living organisms, including humans, have developed multiple biological clocks to help us keep track of time. Some of our timekeepers are set by external processes, like the rise and fall of daylight, this helps us adapt to the rhythms of our day.
Moving forward in life can take a combination of things, we can move slowly or quickly or even somewhere in between but also, we can move in circles. Making choices to enhance the process is what we should all aspire to do, not because we must, more because, why wouldn't we? Life is something we need to make the most of, and to do this we do not need to live life with procrastination and putting things off. If we take the time, we may be using it to procrastinate and put things off, to convert this to more proactive uses then we might not even need as much time to get things going. Another way to help us get going in achieving our goals is to not let ourselves get overwhelmed by thinking about how much we need to do. This can be one of the reasons why we can procrastinate, as we are scaring ourselves out of getting things done. Sometimes things are not always what we think and the reason we are not moving forward is that we are constrained by the fear that is holding us back. It can be very easy to find lots of excuses to stop us from getting going and getting things done, but it doesn't always mean they are the reasons why we are not moving on with things. A good thing to do is to take time to reflect on the reasons we are not doing something instead of just blindly following the excuses. Making things real, instead of in the denial of procrastination can often help to dissolve the fear, helping us see the situation from a calmer and more motivated viewpoint. With a clear view of the situation, we can then break the task down into more sizable chunks that will then help us get going. If the situation we are working on is a big task, then this is ultimately the best thing to do.
Life can feel like an uphill climb sometimes, which can seem like a struggle having to go through those challenging times. Whether this challenge is a work-related one and we must put in a lot more time and input into our work to reach the end results we need to achieve, or maybe we must do some house or garden detoxing to do or DIY changes. With the time we need to input into these challenges, fitting this in on top of what we already have to do can sometimes seem overwhelming. It might also be an exam we need to study for or a fitness goal we are challenging ourselves to achieve. Whatever it is we are being challenged to do, take the brave step and choose to rise to the challenge.
We all have to accept the challenges in life, and we can go either one of two ways, we can rise to the challenge or we can drag ourselves up moaning to ourselves or even others, every step we take. A good place to start is to take the issue and look at what this challenge is and whether we have to do it. This is a big thing you need to get your head around, if you can’t change the challenge and you have to do it, then it’s time to suck it up. If these challenging times can’t be changed, the thing that can change is the way you choose to approach it. Letting it get you down is a waste of your energy, so the best thing to do is to just start the process of working at it with a more positive attitude. Your attitude to how you cope with the challenge might be the only thing you are in control of, if the challenge can't change then this will be the case. Our mood can make a massive difference in how we deal with things and even in studies they have found that if we have a negative mindset about doing something it will take longer to achieve. Also, the more we put off doing this, the more anxious and uncomfortable we can start to feel about doing it, the more this continues, often the worse we can feel.
Motivating ourselves can often be seen as something we just work at trying to do, but I believe to get the best out of ourselves we need a plan and to see the true end goal. With a planned approach to change, this can help our minds see the beginning, the middle and the end results of what we are working to achieve. If we don’t, our minds will be guessing what the end result should be, if we don’t tell our minds what we want, how can your mind positively help you? Our mind is always in search of previous patterns, so if we have tried and failed before then you can guess what your mind will be picking as an outcome! Yes, that’s right, it will pick failure, not because we must fail, more for the fact that our minds are just following the patterns of what we have done before. Always remember our minds aren’t really trying to sabotage us, our minds are just looking at patterns and continuing to follow them. This is what our unconscious mind does the best; finding patterns, putting them together and sending them back to us to help us make things easier. This is because there are so many things we do in our lives that are coming from the unconscious and we are just on autopilot with them. None of us really think about having to walk or talk anymore, it’s just something we do without thinking. The same is for driving, singing, moving etc. We don’t instruct our bodies to do these actions, our inner mind has remembered the patterns and just automates them for us. Now, this is amazing because who would want to learn to walk every day or drive every day? Not me, it was hard enough the first time. But if we are on autopilot for something we don't want in our lives, we have to work much harder to break the automation and then create new habits.
Depression is a low mood that lasts for a long period of time and will be affecting your
everyday life. In its mildest form, depression can mean just feeling a little down, more
emotional and being in low spirits. In those mild cases, it doesn't stop you from leading your
normal life but makes everything seem such an uphill battle and harder to do, also it can
make it feel less worthwhile in trying to do things. At its worst and most severe levels,
depression can be life-threatening, it can consume your every thought and you can even
become suicidal. For all of us, we can say at times that we have been low and our mood is
negative or depressed or down. Usually though, these feelings pass, our life takes a more
positive turn, and we find the low mood shifting like a dark cloud being blown away and the
sky starting to look clearer. Hopefully then, this keeps going and the sky continues to clear,
the clouds get softer and lighter and eventually clear altogether. The sun comes out and the
light shines. But for others, this is just the beginning of a steady decline in how we feel; the
sadness can become overwhelming, and we struggle to cope. Many signs signal we are
feeling depressed such as low mood, hopelessness, frustration with ourselves, feeling like
we could cry at any moment. Other symptoms are that we feel unable to enjoy things or be
motivated to do things, feel hopeless and despairing, low self-esteem, suicidal, restless,
agitated or irritable. Also, you can feel guilty, worthless and down on yourself with those
empty numb feelings inside and over time you can start finding it more difficult to connect
with people, having a deep inner isolated feeling. As these feelings go on, we can start
reaching for things in some way of self-support such as alcohol, drugs, smoking, too much or
too little food, self-harming and putting ourselves in dangerous situations.
Life is getting more complicated for all of us and what can come with this is added pressure and nerves to perform well and live up to these expectations. The more we learn about communicating with people and learning to not judge people, can sometimes negatively affect us if we struggle with social situations. It can leave us in a place of second-guessing what we should or shouldn't say and add to our existing nerves and worries. Finding new ways to think about being around people can help with those insecurities and not only help our anxiety levels but also help build our confidence. Often with worries of what we should or shouldn't say and social anxiety, the biggest issue is not really about us not knowing what we should do, it's more about the worry that we will get it wrong. This being the case it is important for us to acknowledge this and start to focus on ways to help us change what we can change and let go of what we can't.
Our minds are heavily influenced by the world around us and this is a good time to have a good clear-out in your home, garage, garden or shed. If we live in a cluttered house and are holding on to lots of things that we don't need, then this will be having a negative impact on our minds. It sends the message to our minds that we need to hibernate, holding onto everything in case we might need it, or we feel we can't let it go or we will be causing our inner minds to feel unsafe. Hibernating and hiding have similar roles in the unconscious and our minds don't always see the difference in this. Because our mind just follows patterns, it just sees that something outside could harm us and doesn't know the difference between harsh weather, lockdown or hiding from a predator. This being the case, if we are hoarding or holding on to too much stuff then we are sending the message that we are fearful of going out. That we need to hold onto absolutely everything so that we don't need to go out to get anything and that we can just stay in to keep us safe. Our minds are just so black and white and follow simple patterns, but the messages that get sent because of this, can be big limiters to us in being able to change and move forward.
Spring is such a great time when we can feel ready to make changes, as it is a time of year for our English countryside to spring into life. It's great for those later nights now and the warmer weather on the horizon. This is such a great time to make changes, as our inner primeval minds are ready to move much more quickly as they see this time of year as the end of hibernating through the winter and time to get busy. Making the most of our natural motivational times, is a great way in supporting us to change and move our lives forward. Setting a goal and organising a time to do the things we need to achieve our goals, is the next step. Don't just think about things, as our minds are very used to thinking and not taking action. So, putting a spring in your step to change, means being proactive and choosing how to move forward. If your goal is to get fitter then book classes with friends, join a local group, or do a local boot camp or download the couch to 5K app. If it's about making a personal change in your life, take the time to work out what you are choosing to change and the steps you need to take to achieve these goals. Maybe it's to develop more confidence, to do this it's best to have things you can do to challenge yourself with, to help build these new habits of confidence. Make three lists; one is called the green list - these are the things you are doing and can do; the amber list are things you would like to feel more confident in doing and the red list are things that seem a bit out of your reach to achieve at the moment.
Things are about to change for us in England and the loosening of the lockdown for many people is an exciting thing but for some people, it can seem a scary next step. Our inner minds are always looking for patterns and ways to protect us. This is our primaeval mind; it is amazing and is constantly looking to keep us safe and out of danger. But it can also make mistakes with things, as it can read the wrong messages and so in turn send you the wrong signals back to you because of it. In our primaeval mind, it only sees things in black and white so finding areas of grey or confusion don't often work out well for this part of our mind. For all of us, we have had to lead a forced, unnatural life where we have been restricted and unable to go out or even meet with our extended family and friends. This for all of us has been a hard and challenging time but for our inner minds, it can be seen as avoidance of things. Avoiding anything sends messages of fear to our inner mind and then our mind sends signals of fear back to us, when we go into those avoidant situations.
Most of us are familiar with those nagging thoughts that tell us we are not good enough, casting doubt on our ability to achieve our goals and undermining our accomplishments. These thoughts might be there to greet us when we first wake in the morning, about how bad we are at our jobs or life and can even be the first things we think when we see ourselves in the mirror in the morning – “You're so unattractive, you're looking even fatter, how ugly are you”.
This horrible inner critic might continue with you into work – “You will never be any good at this job, you should just give it up. You'll never get everything done, what will people think. You are just not intelligent enough for this job, you'll be caught out soon. No one even notices you anyway so why are you bothering, just give up you loser”.
Our negative pasts can sometimes weigh heavy on our hearts, but also can have a massive
impact on how we live our lives in the now. Because we all have past experiences, we have a
part of our inner mind that we call our inner ‘Observing Self’ or the ‘inner witness’ and this
part of you is always doing just that. It observes and records what you think, feel, say and do
moment to moment. It doesn’t decide if what you are doing is right or wrong, it just
observes and records. It is a bit like our own internal videoing system whereby we can go
back and walk through the experiences that we have had in our lives. We can pause and
take a look in more detail about what happened, how we felt and how we reacted and also
follow through the experience from A to B. Let’s use having relationship issues as an
example, let’s imagine that you had a hard relationship in the past that negatively affected
you on many levels. You have left that partner now but can still feel it negatively impacting
you in your daily life. Your new partner says, “Come on, we are going to be late”, and
suddenly you find yourself enraged and screaming at them or you find you're feeling
anxious and tearful. So, what happened there? You’re not in that old toxic relationship. You
love your new partner so why are you responding in these ways? It can’t be the now so it
has to be the past impacting the now and this is where you can use your inner witness to
help you uncover what happened and get to the bottom of this.
Confidence comes from deep inner feelings of well-being, acceptance of your body and mind, your inner self-esteem and belief in your abilities, skills and experience. Confidence is an attribute that most people would like to possess and you will be pleased to hear that it is a learned and developed habit. It’s such a great thing to be confident and I do think everyone admires a self-confident person. We may even envy them a little as those self-confident people seem really at ease with themselves, others and their work. They hold a calm strong air about them, invite trust and inspire confidence in others. These are attractive characteristics that not only inspire others but feels great to have ourselves. It's not always easy to be confident in yourself, particularly if you are naturally self-critical, an internal thinker, a worrier or if other people put you down. But there are steps that you can take to develop, increase and maintain your self-confidence.
Keeping our mood upbeat and bright is essential in protecting our mental health and finding ways to keep us more optimistic when dealing with life’s stresses, can help us. We all have to accept that there are things in life that we can't change, this being the case getting stuck in the negative thoughts of these situations won’t help you. It’s time to challenge your mindset and get into this more positive way of thinking in as many situations as we can. We have to accept that there will always be some things that we can’t do this for, that is normal - if we had this positivity in every situation that would not be normal either. But what we need to do is try our best to keep the majority of things in that more optimistic way of thinking. Often when things aren't making us happy, we can spend our time overthinking things about what's happened and what may happen. This won't help you or the situation, it will only lead you down the path of lowering your mood and increasing your stress levels. So, it is time to stop this path and choose to stay in that positive lane of thinking, helping to protect your mental health and keep you in a good place.
We have been looking at ways of how to help us keep our mood in a good place even when life can be a challenge to us. This is a key thing not only in helping our mood but also in keeping our levels of anxiety in a stable and low place. If we spend lots of time with those worries and ‘what-if's’, we will be creating lots of inner fear and anxiety and if it is left unchecked, it can run riot within us. A good plan is to stop this before it starts, if it's just at the beginning of starting to ruminate, then the anxiety levels will still be at a low level and it is much easier to break from the pattern of worry at this point. But if we have let this get out of hand then it can become something that will be much bigger and so in turn, much harder to switch our mindsets out of. Our minds are amazing and are constantly supporting us, but if we send these worrying messages into our minds then our minds will listen.
We have been looking at ways to help keep us in a positive place and how we can do things to help keep our mood upbeat. Today let's look at something else we can do to help us stave off negativity and keep us feeling more positive, even in times of difficulty. We have looked at a way to limit and reset ourselves around negative times and experiences but what if we are going through a really hard time, what then? We all have to accept that life can be hard at times and that we can't change that but what we can change is how we choose to deal with it.
We have been looking at ways to make us feel more positive and now it's time to work on those next steps to help you make these changes in your life. If we can keep our minds focused in the right direction, we can be one of those positive people who see life in an optimistic way. Being this way is not going to have any adverse effect on your life, it is going to give you a more comfortable life, as being positive helps us feel happier and more relaxed, both of these are great attributes to have in your life. If we choose to keep our lives upbeat, we can enhance our mindset and continue to help our mind keep focused on looking at all the good things in life.
There is one thing we always have to keep clear within our minds is that none of us knows what the future brings and however hard we try this will never change. But there are lots of things we can do to point us in a good direction and one of these is being positive. This is not about trying to reassure ourselves with mantras of ‘It will be ok’ it about having a strong mindset to see the positive way forward first. I learnt these lessons nearly 40 years ago now when I first started looking at the power of our mind with people like Tony Robins an iconic motivational speak of my day. This time I spent as a teenager looking at the power of a positive mind and applying these to my life was one of the reasons that I chose to start my journey in learning and studying hypnotherapy and psychology. After a few years of studying, I choose to change my career and become a clinical hypnotherapist which was nearly 27 years ago now. At that time, it was not widely used at all, lots of my family and friends thought it was a poor career choice. But hypnotherapy at that time had already had such a massive impact on my mental health and I just couldn't share this with everyone who needed a new way of helping themselves to change. I must say that I am blessed I love my work and couldn’t be happier to be able to help people change how they feel and deal with life in such a profound way.
This time of year is often a great time to harness our drive and motivation to make positive changes in life but this year with the pandemic I think we are all feeling a bit stuck. This can mean that moving forward seems more strained for many of us. Making changes is always a challenge for our minds as we have spent much of our millions of years on this planet playing it safe to stay alive. These old habits are still within us and it’s important to understand these more to help give us more freedom and drive to move our lives forward.
We all have to understand that we are not in control of life and never have been, we have for the last few decades felt that we have been though. But this is not the case it’s more of an illusion and mirage type effect, about how we look at our lives and our futures. If we have things in place then we can feel that life is moving in the ways that we want and that we are in control of this, maybe we see going to university as our next step or we are at the other end of our working life and we see retirement as our next step. We can also have events planned and things in our diaries which give us the illusion of being in control of our destiny. Which of course to a certain extent is true, as we are the ones that choose to go to university or set a date to retire, we book holidays and meals out and plan things to do in our lives. This is the parts that we do have our free will and choice to decide on the things that we want to do, but even with these, we have limiters. If we can't afford to live without working then we can't retire, if our friends aren't available then we can't meet them for dinner. But things like the pandemic shows us that we aren't in control at all and life can take a different course at the drop of a hat.
With the new year just around the corner, it is often a time when we reflect about the year that we have had and the things that have been happening for us. It is also a time that we start to think about the year to come and what this can hold for us. This year has not been a year we would never have even dreamt about happening, even this time last year not many of us would never have predicted how our lives have been turned on their heads.
Life as we know, can be a challenge and at times it can feel like an uphill climb and at its worst, it can feel like the wind is blowing that hard that we just seem to be walking on the spot or even being pushed back or overturned. I love this quote by Jimmy Dean
I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination
Always remember that a problem shared is a problem halved. Another good way to help you when life seems to be making you feel out of control is to learn to stop and take stock. If we let things run riot in our minds then we are going to cause lots of anxiety within our minds and our bodies.
We talked last week about trying to ride the waves of life and look for the right time to challenge yourself so that you can make the best start into trying new things. Life, as we know, can be tough at times and it can feel hard to deal with as well, sometimes we can feel that we have got ourselves stuck in the current of a big wave that we can’t seem to get free from.
Life can have many ups and downs, some which are amazing, others which are far from that. Sometimes we can get so negatively caught up in things that it can just drag us down into those all times lows and other times we are riding the crest of the wave. These are of course the extremes of life and normally we don’t live by those extremes, but we can be dealing with challenging issues even daily. If we see the highs of life as literally riding on the crest of a wave-like a surfer, we have to often wait for quite a while to catch that right wave to achieve this.
Can we all change? Can we change if we fear that we can’t? Can we change if our partner wants us to? Can we change if we have to or if we don’t want to? Well, let's look at this as sometimes we are trying to change and we are just wasting our time as it's something we don't want to do.
We were looking at how we juggle our lives last week and how to drop the plastic things that won’t break, so we are able to concentrate on the things that are glass that needs our attention. One of the things which often gets pushed to the bottom of the pile is ourselves and today we want to look at the impact this can have on us and how we can find ways to positively support ourselves.
We are all juggling our lives, our time, our friendships, our family, our work and even ourselves. But not only just one of these things, we have to juggle all of these things simultaneously and it is quite a challenge in its own right. One of the most important things in juggling our lives, is that we learn how to prioritise the most important things and work to drop the things that aren't.
Life can be hard, life can be fun, life can be exciting, life can be scary, life can be sad, life can be happy, life can be anxious, life can be many things for all of us. This is just the way life is and we have to accept that this is life and that we can’t change what’s happening we can only change how we deal with life.
Anchoring is one of the fundamental tools of NLP which can be powerful in helping you to have more confidence, enthusiasm, be more relaxed and can be used to aid sports performance as well. It’s a simple way to allow you to change an unwanted feeling to a resourceful feeling in a matter of moments, and then it’s a tool you continue to use and build on.
We have been looking at ways to help support your positive mindset and today I want to teach you an NLP technique called Switch. Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a set of language and sensory-based interventions, which uses behaviour modification techniques intended to help improve your self-awareness, confidence, communication skills, and social actions.
Life is such a changing thing at the moment and for all of us, we are trying to find what our new normal will be and how we are going to live in this new way. In times like this when things are unstable, it's important to keep our moods and our attitude as bright as possible.
Now with the new uncertain of this pandemic coming back, we need to not go down the "What if" route as this will not help it will cause us lots of negative issues. Now is the time to stop our minds spiralling into this zone as the what-ifs of life are normal not normally positive ones.
We have spent a few weeks looking at how we can stop those worries that may have been turning into phobias, but know let’s look at how we can use our minds to enhance our mood and develop a more positive mindset.
We have been looking at fears and phobias over the last few weeks and how that inner chatter will be negatively impacting how you are feeling and that trying to reassure ourselves with these comfort blankets is just not working, it is having the adverse effect and it could be starting to smother us. Let's look at how we can be pulling our minds down into these fear cycles, which are stuck in this negative mindset and how this impacts the inner chatter of our unconscious mind.
Last week we were looking at those pre nervous responses we have when we are struggling with a phobia, today we are going to explore one of the things that we can be doing that could be negatively impacting you. It’s important that we look at the thoughts that come into our minds as something that isn’t us and isn’t real either so that we don’t just keep fuelling a negative habit within our minds.
Over the last few weeks, we have been looking at phobias what they are and how we can start to change how we respond to them. We have looked at how we have created a whole list of things that we have been avoiding and how we have shaped our lives to negatively support our fears. Now we need to look at what we do when we approach the things that scare us and how we can change how we respond by changing how we feel, and how we think.
Last week we started to look at phobias and today we want to explore this in more detail. Many of us feel that our minds are controlling us and that it is our minds that have got this imbalance over what we fear. On a level this is true but we have to go back to the point when we didn't have this and then start to understand that we have been drip-feeding our minds with our web of thoughts, avoidances and fears.
Let’s take a look at how our mind works and how we can develop a phobia to something. A phobia what is it? How is it different from just being anxious or nervous about something? I believe things can start as being something that just makes us nervous but can build up over time to a phobia. Also, we can instantly develop a phobia, if we have experienced a trauma or traumatic events have happened, or even if we have experienced a level of shock in the situation, these situations can push us directly into a phobia state.
Now 🌸
This pandemic has literally rocked our world and now that we are starting to see our lives slowing getting more back to the old lifestyles we used to have. It’s time to accept that there will now be a new normal that we will need to adjust to. I think it's important that we choose to learn through these times and challenge ourselves to be the best versions of ourselves.
❤️
Coronacoaster:
Noun: the ups and downs of the pandemic. One day you’re loving your bubble, doing workouts, baking banana bread and going for long walks, and the next day your crying, drinking gin for breakfast, and missing people you don’t even like that much.
Last week we were looking at how to make good choices in our lives and pick the positive side and learn through the negative aspects of life. Today we want to explore fear zones and how we can get stuck in these limiting patterns and not feel able to move out from behind the walls we have built up around us.
Life can be a challenge and these last few months for all of us have been something many of us has never ever seen or experienced in our lifetime. It's times like this that can allow us massive personal growth if we choose to embrace the experience and learn through the adversity. For many of us wanting to experiencing change its time to see that we can learn the most in the hardest times in our lives, as these times can push us to transform
After spending the last few weeks looking at our mood and the impact that people can have on it now it’s time to start putting this new knowledge into practice. As you develop better habits and new ways of thinking it will stop you from catching other people’s negative emotions, one of the key things is awareness.
We have been looking at our mood and what things can positively and negatively impact us, last week we looked at bad and at this point, you may be thinking if that was bad, what's ugly? The ugly is the consequences just like the issues that second-hand smoke can have, it can have the same or even a worse effect on the health of non-smokers. These negative second-hand emotions can have significant, long-lasting effects on the health and wellbeing of those experiencing them.
Over the last few weeks, we have been looking at our mood and the effects that the environment and people can have on us. Last week we looked at the good ways the emotional contagion effect can have on us and how we can even create your virtual environment and positive experiences. Now we are going to look at emotionally contagious connections that occur in a negative direction and how to find ways to stop them from having a negative impact on you.
Last week we were looking at our Mood and the impact others can have on it, now it’s time to work out how to harness the good times and positive things that can impact your mood. Emotions are highly contagious and now it’s time to catch lots of amazing happy, smiling positive ones in your everyday life.
Our mood is one of the biggest factors that can influence how we think, feel plus also how our body and nervous system respond. The thoughts we have and the way we respond to things are one of the most important things to look at if we are not feeling in the best place.
Last week we were looking at ways to find those strong places within us to help us deal with life more securely. Finding caring and positive ways to help ourselves and others in times of challenges is a great way to support our inner self and in turn, it will allow us to develop more confidence and inner security.
This blog I dedicate to Helen. Life can seem like an uphill challenge and with it can come the complete draining on who we are and how we see ourselves. Over time we can lose the inner strength to feel able to continue as life and its challenges seem to be getting the better of us. This I feel happens to all of us at times and this is happening to many of at the moment, as emotionally we can struggle to keep going when we are up against such tough times.
Today we are looking at ways to keep you feeling safer inside and how this can make a massive impact on anxiety and stress levels. At the moment our health and external safety is our priority because of this pandemic sweeping the world, but let’s not forget how important our internal safety is.
I don’t know how I can fully express my gratitude to all of you that follow my blogs, plus my clients, family and friends that have also supported me over my free book launch.
We have been looking at ways to deal with the hard times that come our way in life, we all have to accept that hard times will come and it's not about not having them, it’s all about how we deal with them. Staying calm is another skill we need, and could even be one of the most important ways to deal with things. Staying calm will have a massive impact on the situation by the strong secure message we send to others and to ourselves.
Life doesn’t come with a manual or a map to guide to that perfect place in our lives and if we get stuck in indecision then this won’t help us to move forward, it will just become part of the problems in not moving through those hard times in ways that would really serve us
Being kind and gentle with ourselves is essential in the hard times, being soft and kind to ourselves doesn’t mean though helping us to avoid and put things off. Being that soft support for ourselves is for when we make it through, we can take the time to value ourselves.
Unfortunately, we all at times have to deal with challenges in our lives, finding ways to make it as painless as possible is certainly the best way forward. But as many of us know our minds can often not always be on our side and can resist us changing, challenges and things that push us out of our comfort zone.
We have been looking over the last few weeks at how to deal with contained feelings and how we can work to let them go in a safe way. Who wants to live with those feeling just beneath the surface? It’s not a great way to be, we just end up living on the edge all the time and if we’re not careful we can end up letting them out in ways and situations we hadn’t intended to.
Last week we were looking at how we can contain our feelings and how these emotions can have a negative impact on how we feel on a day to day basis. I think it’s important to work these issues through, as continuing to carry them is a daily burden that can impact our mood, anxiety levels and confidence.
Life can be very stressful and at these times we can often move into the zone of having to contain how we are feeling inside. This is a perfect way to help us deal in the situation but then it is essential that we find the right time to work through our feeling and emotions.
Many people make changes this time of year and harnessing the positive power is great but it’s not about doing this for now it’s about changing forever. If we can see ourselves in a new place then it is much easier for us to change, so now it’s time to use images to help you continue to make these positive changes.
The last blog was about setting goals, today we want to look at the how to continue to change and make those changes permanent. To change anything in our lives, we need to not just let go of things, we have to fill the void it can leave in our lives, putting a new healthy thing in its place can be a win, win for you.
This time of year is one of the best times to plan changes, as we all have had tons of New Year’s resolutions programmed into our minds, from us and everyone around us. This will bring that motivation, desire and drive to change on a stronger level to us because of this.
Start your resolutions today it won’t take you long, let’s all start next year on a high and allow the strength and motivation to change and shine bright.
Life is like a game of tug of war in most if not all of our relationships and interactions, we all have our own agenda and hopefully we all strive to be fair too. But there is a fine line between give and take one we need to up hold in balance for ourselves if we are striving to be more confident
We have been looking at confidence building over the last few weeks, today we explore this a bit more by looking at how strong or fragile true confidence should be. Finding a balance in who we are and how we interact with people is essential in building our own inner safety and security.
Today we are looking at laughter which is actually amazing, it's such a strong positive emotion and on some levels can be seen as something that has medicinal properties. It can really help us connect with people in ways that can trigger healthy physical and emotional changes in the body. Laughter strengthens your immune system, boosts mood, diminishes pain, and protects you from the damaging effects of stress.
Smile 😃
Smiling is such a lovely thing to do, and is something that we can add to boost our confidence as well. Smiling is often a show of outer confidence!
Smiling is such a fabulous gift we can all give to ourselves and everyone else we come across in our lives.
❤️
Over the last few blogs weeks we have been looking at things that have been getting in your way of building confidence, hopefully now that you have let go of a few of those bad habits now is the time to ripple out those new confidence building responses. Confidence is a learned and developed habit so it’s about setting goals and letting your mind get used to living a confidence life.
Avoiding situations is like filling up the kitchen bin. Over time the bin fills up, at that point, we can then find we feel that need to avoid those things, we can see this as the bin being full of the nerves which now are too much for us to ignore.
We have been looking at building confidence over the last few weeks and today we are adding a new way of thinking to help you on the journey to becoming that safe and secure person inside.
Saying sorry, and admitting to our mistakes is a sign of strength. But, when we needlessly say sorry, we end up making ourselves smaller than who we truly are and diminish what we’re trying to say or do.
Being confident will allow us to believe in ourselves and also help us to develop those inner feelings of safety and security right to the core of who we truly are.
Let's start taking those compliments and simply saying "thanks!"
Some of our negative anxiety habits over time can form into our own hamster wheel these can at times seem the hardest to break.
The longer we have had the bad habits, the more formed the pathway in our mind is and the new habits are just at this initial stage just that basic track. The new habits we form are the new tracks which lead off from the old pathway and over time will starts to branch away from the old path, just like our minds does as we break away from old habits. If we start to wobble on the process of breaking free from old habits, it’s like we have lost our footing on this new track and fallen into a ditch.
If you have been walking the same path for years just imagine how that path would look in a physical way, after years it would be heavily indented and trodden down. This old path you would instantly see it clearly and with it being worn down it can be hard to get off of it too, as the edges of the path would be higher and the natural flow would drive you down the path.
It’s time to take a positive stance against our negative mindsets and bad habits, starting to send the new messages, then we can choose to accept and let it go of the past like a positive submission of the thing we can’t change. The more we don’t entertain these thoughts, fears and negotiating habits the more we can focus on the present and what is happening in the now.
This week I want to be about motivating YOU!
I know you can change, I know you can achieve your dreams. Shoo away those negative thoughts and fill your mind with positivity.
Today I want to explain how your nervous system is the part of you that often triggers these responses. It’s time to understand your body so you can then feel safer in how it works, when and how, we move through these different states. The more we understand how our nervous system works the easier it is to help calm our system away from those negative fear states and into that calm, safe, relaxed place.
Last week we looked at when anxiety is at its worst, how it can immobilise us and the freeze response takes over how we feel and often our nervous system too. Using the rabbit analogy to best describe this.
So, if we can’t shake the bunny awake, what can we use as a carrot to entice them out of this frozen state?
When we have anxiety, we can often feel that people don’t understand what is happening inside us and that our actions will be misunderstood. We can often feel at our worst, that we can’t fully connect with our loved ones and the people around us and we feel unable to let them in.
Last week we looked at how hope can help us make life-changing strides forward and enable us to be that best version of ourselves. Today we are going to look at the importance of having dreams and how for some of us we have lost that or for others we live in them too much. Life is all about balance and too much or too little of most things in our lives isn’t healthy for us.
Today I would like to share a client’s journey, as he is an inspiration to us all and how we should all strive for positive change even if the journey ahead will be hard. Share his story, this could be the hope that someone you know needs.
For many of us, if not all of us, we are following the path of least resistance. This means that you choose to do what holds the least fear for you, you might be saying now I don’t feel fear or I am fearless which may be the case. But beneath the surface is our more complex and primitive parts of our mind they do operate on a different level to our conscious mind and sometimes we just haven’t stopped to see it this way.
One key thing that many of us miss now is being outdoors, work, travelling to work, home life, school, the gym all of these things are indoors.
The lack of sunlight and isolation from people has a big impact on the mood, stress levels, mental and emotional wellbeing
Gratitude is a social emotion and is a relationship-strengthening emotion, as it requires us to see how we’ve been supported and affirmed by other people. Which is great for our mindset as it gets us looking for all the positive things instead of being focused on all the things.
The positive momentum of looking for things to be grateful for will quickly help you learn to be more grateful and stop you taking things for granted in your life.
Gratitude means thanks and appreciation, being thankful plus acknowledging and showing your appreciation.
Studies have confirmed that having gratitude does, in fact, make you feel happier. When we're grateful for things the natural by-product to this is that we feel happier about life.
Being positive is a must and is something we should all strive to be, it enhances our mood, reduces stress and allows us to start seeing and attracting happier experiences into our lives. What we have to accept is that life will be challenging and we just can’t escape from that, but we can choose to approach things with as much positivity as possible. Striving to make the best of things is the key in all of this and not losing ourselves into the abyss of fear, worry and what ifs. Winston Churchill sums this up in a sentence, A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
If you imagine your cars petrol tank and how firstly we have to use the right fuel for our car or the consequences can be catastrophic. If we are constantly stressed, we are then always over using our energy to fuel this, they say it takes six times as much energy to be stressed as it does to be relaxed.
Today we look at how, if we leave our emotional issues and the pressures of life to build up and how, at its worst, it can shatter us and our lives.
Inside of us we have our own emotional dam, it’s our protector and everyone’s is different, some people will be way more emotional than others and often it the internal emotional dam that will affect this.
If we imagine that we're a flower and at the very centre of the flower is the core of who we are. Then see all the petals as the things you do in life, imagine if we work too much and the work side of our flower has to then have so many more petals to accommodate for this level of work. It will mean that the side of the flower will be fuller and heavier. We only have so many petals, like the hours in our days and we can’t knit ourselves any more petals or time
Have you ever thought that you are a fraud? Or feel that at any time you will get caught out and then people will see you for who you truly are? You may be surprised to find that many people in all of their lives or just in some of the things they do, they can feel this way, so don’t worry if this is you. It is called imposter syndrome and it is when we can’t fully accept who we are and acknowledge internally what we truly do or are achieving.
In life, our pain, pleasure and reward system can become negatively set. This can be from our childhood which has been compounded over the years setting us really out of balance.
To change, we need to re-set. To do this, we don’t only have to change the negative reward system, we also have to change the positive rewards and rebalance, we just have to have the right motivation for us to change.
❤️
We can sugar coat things with the way we think and deal with life. Often, we can do this to ourselves and this will stop us from fully acknowledging how we feel, and this can cause us to suppress our emotions, over time these will build up and cause us issues.
It’s time to start connecting to your feelings and it’s time to know that it is safe to do that, it will feel a bit alien as it more than likely been a long time since you have been connected to your inner self.
Being who we are and feeling safe and secure inside is a great feeling worthy of taking the time to do this.
It can be very hard to be our true unique self as historically this has not often been possible, and we’re maybe holding onto to those old patterns and habits. If our old beliefs are pulling us back then it can also be a very scary thing for us too.
We have talked a lot over the last few weeks about the habits and patterns that can limit us, now it’s time to bring the focus back onto you.
The best person to help you will be yourself, committing time to change and supporting this new positive lifestyle is essential.
Our mind is like an oven, we have lots going in and out of it, there different levels, different areas, temperatures and a whole array of settings. I guess we all have things that get stuck over baking in our minds, these are the things we can’t seem to work through to a rational solution
If we see our worries like a bowl of egg whites, it's runny and fluid, and if poured out or dropped it can go everywhere and spread for what seems like an impossible distance, even if it is a small amount, it will easily spread a long way just like worries can. Then if we add fear to a big bowl of worries it will change how the habits and conditioned responses, looks, tastes, feels and respond
To help you break away from these conditioned responses which are keeping you stuck in these bad habits, start taking advantage of the fact that if it's different then the mind won’t have the same response.
To help break the habit more easily start changing things up so the conditioned response isn’t as strong or even not there at all.
This week we want to explore ways to help move out of these restrictive negative zones. Most of the things we do in our life are based on habit rather than a conscious choice
Our comfort zone is a place of safety and security, it's a psychological state where we feel we can conquer anything. But, when it begins to limit our decisions and stop us living life to the full. Then we need to challenge those fears.
If you want to see good things in your life then it’s time to start visualising those things happening to you, this will start the process of rewriting those old programs. There are lots of great things out there for you but you need to start to believe it
95% of our life come from the programmes we have developed in the first seven years of our lives. These early positive or negative experiences shape the people we become.
Our unconscious negative beliefs can just make us sabotage ourselves and keep us following and repeating those first few years of our lives early learnt programs.
If we let our negative experiences in our lives become our limiters as we move forward, then we will not achieve our full potential.
We're looking at Jen this week to show how our mindset and adaptability in the face of trouble can be the key to success.
We're looking at extreme personality disorders: narcissist, the anti-social and CBA's. Their extreme level of toxicity can get absorbed into our lives and affect how we feel.
Being aware of these personality types and understanding the impact they have on us, means we can take the positive steps to be the best version of ourselves.
We can often be afraid to speak up and confront those who produce toxic vibes, and this can then keep us in a toxic relationship, friendship, or even jobs and we can get trapped in the cycles it brings.
All relationships can be hard, but we have to not allow them to not negatively affect us otherwise we can come over just as bad as the other person.
Seeing people for who they are can be a powerful part in helping us to not get negatively affected by them.
This week we're looking at Debbie Downers they are someone who is excessively outwardly depressed, under any circumstance, this person's main objective is to trash, ruin, spoil and in many cases absolutely kill your joy. These types of people have mastered the art of self-pity and will go to great lengths to get anyone who will listen, to feel as depressed as they feel.
Mood hoovers have this negative attitude which can seem to suck the soul out of you and not in a good way. These people can just drain you of all positivity through their need to be negative and moody.
Taking it upon yourself to try and change them for the better will only lead to more issues emerging, this can impact your energy levels as well as your mood.
So lead by example and let positivity be the winner in your mood, let this shine out onto the people around you creating a positive contagious response
For some of us, leading an invisible life, not making a fuss and just trying to get through with the least attention as possible is a huge amount of effort.
People who suffer from social anxiety social can often feel this pull to be invisible hiding from the fear, no more getting hurt, no more in the spot light and how this makes us feel. We can have just got stuck this way, retreated inside of ourselves, not feeling safe or able to trust ourselves, sometimes we know and can’t seem to change it.
But you can! ❤️
Autonomous
Autonomy is often seen as a very positive thing, making judgments and actions based on our own particular set of values, preferences, and beliefs.
But the type of autonomy I am going to talk about today is based on fear not freedom, due to events in life we may have become anxiously attached to people. Being anxiously attached to people means that we fear letting people in or even letting them close
The most important ingredient in any relationship is trust, as it is the foundation of all human connections: from friendships, everyday interactions with people and intimate relationships. It governs all the interactions we have with each other, no one would drive a car, walk down the road, or get on a plane or visit a hospital, if we didn’t trust that other people took their responsibilities seriously.
Shame is an internal emotional and is grown over time from continuous rumination and worry.It can lead us to feel debilitated in our ability to like or love ourselves for who we are.
So it is time to let go of the past and we love and value who we are right now.
Guilt is such a strong emotion when we hold onto it or just have too much of it, at high levels it can be very paralysing for some people as well. It such a complex emotion which often doesn’t have to be embedded into reality or even rational reasoning, we can hold guilt for things we have done, things we didn’t do and even for feeling that we could or should have done more and just have that feeling we didn’t do enough.
When life is traumatic, painful or difficult to deal with we push the emotions and feelings inside. The things we can’t deal with just get pushed down, they don’t go away they create this inner toxic turmoil that if not dealt with just keeps growing.
This week there is a meditation exercise to help you deal with your inner turmoil. Contact me for the Mp3 to help with this.
For almost all of us, at some time or another we will be forced to face up to the fact that every day we are living in denial of the pain we are carrying. At some point the pain to carry this will outweigh the pain of facing it.
Many things in life we can’t change or alter what happened, but we can come to terms with it and in doing so, it can free us from the torment of living with this on repeat in the back of our minds.
"Sleep on it" is a phrase we have heard often, when something has unsettled us or got disrupted our emotions. More often than not, we do feel better for it, more rational and able to deal with the problem at hand. Without sleep, we cannot process our day and other events. But if there is a backlog of issues that need dealing with, it becomes chaotic and sleep is elusive. We can change it though.
Our memories define who we are, how we learn and develop as individuals. What if the process becomes corrupted? This can happen with injury, age or PTSD. But it can also be impacted from lots of little things. You're more than likely trying to do to many things at once and this is of course affecting how your memory works.
Focus
The angry, bitter messages that flood our mind stop us from stilling our mind and being truly focused on being in the moment.
Lacking in focus and being pulled by negative thoughts of our past block us from achieving.
The ability to still our mind when we are stuck in trauma or PTSD is so difficult. It's like trying to get a frantic bird out of an open window, if you could make it understand it would be so simple.
But there are techniques you can do to send the messages to your mind, practice will reinforce the message and it will listen.
Blindsided is another aspect of PTSD and trauma that we're exploring. We have probably all been in a situation that has totally took us by surprise, leaving us reeling and unsure what to do. But when this is unresolved, it can infiltrate into our lives, leaving us unable to be present in the moment and affect our happiness.
Trauma has similar responses to PTSD although less severe can still be debilitating. This week we look back to the library analogy, how trauma can have the same effect in our internal library. Our mind has no concept of time, instead it recognises patterns and behaviours. So when we approach similar situations that are related to the trauma first experiences, those negative feelings can resurface again.
Your mind is like a massive library and everything has its place and needs to be filing back on the right shelf in the correct section and in the correct order. In the moment of trauma your mind stops this natural process of filing and then just starts dumping things in a pile in your library.
This week we are looking at flight. This one is probably the most well known of the flight, fight or freeze reactions. When thinking of it in relation to anxiety, it can sometimes be a wave, but for chronic sufferers, it is constant. So much so, we become accustomed to it as a way of life and constantly feel worried and stressed.
There are things we can do to take back control...
For many of us with anxiety, we may not realise that we are stuck in the fight response. This can be in outward aggressive behaviour, reactive behaviour that we are not sure where it comes from or even an internal fight with ourselves.
For people living with someone in this particular stage, it can be the cause of a toxic relationship as your own self-preservation kicks in. But you can begin to move tackle this and move away from it by owning it. Not transferring it, or living in denial, but facing up to it and having the same zero tolerance policy with other bad habits.
We are all aware of the flight or fight response, but part of this is the lesser understood freeze response.
Our mind is our protector, when we face trauma it can lock us in a frozen state that can be triggered at any point.
There's no right or wrong way to be happy, only your way. But happiness is something that we have to work on, like any habit we need to keep practicing it.
Take a few minutes each day to truly appreciate where you are, rather than where you're not.
With access to news instantly, we are in touch with events from all over the world. It's amazing how we can find something out at the touch of a button.
Our knowledge has grown and continues to do so, but with it can also come with fear of the unknown, a constant worry that something bad will happen. But, think about how far we have come.
We are safer now than ever. It's time to embrace it, love peace and find it within ourselves.
If we think about 1,000 and even 100 years ago epidemics have swept the country and even the world, claiming the lives of millions.
But, medical advances have meant that we are tackling each one in a shorter space of time. So stop googling symptoms, and embrace where we are in this wonderful world!
It's no secret that social media has created an ideal world and made the pressure of acting, looking and being a certain more apparent. However, it has also given way to a movement promoting positive body image and celebrating individuality.
It's this we need to embrace, be our true selves and love ourselves for who we are!
Understanding our minds wasn't a priority when survival was our only concern. As we began to understand more about our minds, we were conditioned to be afraid and never to question superiors.
Although these factors don't exist, we still have a residual fear about the inner workings of our mind.
Welcome to the second part of Motivation or Habit
Have you decided on making a change for you? If so, then read on. I'm going to take you through step by step on how to make this change a lasting one.
How can we make our motivations into lasting change? We have all started some new fad, only a few weeks later we are back to what we were doing before.
It's all about creating habits and this week is about forming those positive habits.
Following on from last weeks 'Make Lasting Change' we are looking about addictions and how our behaviours have been influenced over the years by our parents, society and much further afield.
This blog focuses on food, but it can be applied to any addiction in your life.
I hope this is another step towards making positive changes for you.
When is one more, one too many? Our lives are rich in choice, but this can sometimes leave us chasing more and never feeling satisfied.
How can we stop that feeling of wanting more and appreciate what we have? That's exactly what we want to find out.
"It's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then"
What do you want to achieve? Or what do you want to change? Whether that is giving up smoking, drinking, over-eating or stop worrying!
This week I want to give you some insight into how to take control of your habits and make a lasting and positive change
How can we harness belief to make positive changes in our lives? There are many inspirational people who believed in themselves and achieved against all the odds.
Lets believe in ourselves and let our imagination run wild.
Fear drives us and reinforces negative behaviour. Although fear is hard to conquer we need to harness our beliefs to make positive changes.
In order to move forward, we need to know our limitations. Too far and we can't reach, too little and we remain where we were. A small fear can create a web of avoidance, feeding the fear. You're not to blame, rather an unfortunate set of escalating circumstances. It can change, just keep taking those steps.
Phobias can be debilitating and stop us from leading a full and happy life. the underlying cause is fear. This fear-avoidance cycle is a recipe for disaster, making a phobia spiral out of control. The pleasure is, if it can spiral out. It can spiral in again. It will take time and perseverance, but it's not impossible.
We all have obsessions, whether they have been over a particular situation or something more extreme. The difference between worrying about something and OCD is there is no resolution to an irrational fear. What can you do? It's about changing your patterns of behaviour, challenging your inner mind and distracting yourself to create a sensation of confidence within.
Rituals are present in every day life, from the little details in how we drink our tea. But inherited rituals can be damaging when we feel overwhelmed with negative emotions because we have strayed from expectations. In a world of choice, why shouldn't we?
Let go of the negative emotions, pursue positive affirmations.
Superstitions are a way of attempting to regain control over events in our life. Many of them are harmless and can even encourage positive behaviour.
So, this being the case, it’s time to stop the old habits of superstition and start empowering our minds with strength and confidence.
This week we look at intuition in this process. Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning, or without understanding how the knowledge was acquired. Harnessing our instinct, intuition and conscious mind is accepting ourselves fully.
Learning about our primeval habits we have only focused on misplaced fear. Now we need to use this amazing instinct to better our lives and take back control of who we are, not what society dictates.
Fear of not being in control of the uncontrollable is the biggest root of our anxiety. We need to train our minds to let go, trust and find the confidence within.
Worrying can be something that we mistake for just part of our personalities. It isn't, and we change the pattern of behaviour with the same zero tolerance we have learnt to apply before. Instead focusing our efforts on more positive behaviours.
Whether you're loud or quiet, confidence comes from within. After learning to not feed the insecurities and anxiety we have the space to learn positive habits.
Feeling confident starts with you. This week, lets have a look at starting to build your confidence by identifying what makes a confident person and thinking about who we really are.
Confidence is something we see clearly from how people carry themselves, how they act in social situations and everything in between.
Like every behaviour, confidence is learnt. This week I am sharing a personal story about my own confidence issues and over the next few weeks we will be learning how to grow your confidence internally.
We can over-focus on negative things and they can quickly contribute to a circle of anxiety that is difficult to break. But you can break it, it's a distorted perception, not reality. Let's change together.
Anxiety can be hard to overcome. Especially when everything we do can potentially feed it, this blog uses a cat analogy to help you understand how to take control and stop feeding your anxiety.
No experience is the same, our own perceptions shape how we see the same situation. But, how can this impact our anxiety?
Listen to find out more.
Our anxiety can grow through actions we are completely unaware of.
We can convince ourself we don't want to, or don't have time but are we simply getting stuck in denial-avoidance?
Let's challenge of ourselves and spiral outwards not inwards!
It's so hard to stop something that we don't know we are doing. Anxiety can feed off anything, even reassurance, so how can fight it? This weeks blog is here to give you some tools to do just that.
How has our past shaped our behaviour today?
The residual instincts that have kept us alive for millions of years in the face of danger. What do we do with them now?