Reverse Thinking

How to stop worrying

This is the second in a series of articles which teach you how to eliminate negative thinking.

Bad thinking habits, sometimes known as cognitive distortions, trigger worry, stress, anxiety, panic attacks, OCD, depression, guilt, Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), and a host of other problems.

Treating these problems have attracted lots of books and a variety of methods for overcoming them, including the Linden method and other techniques borrowed from NLP and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT). These, and many other approaches, including Dale Carnegie's 1948 classic 'How to Stop Worrying and Start Living' provide lots of workable ideas through which you can defeat anxiety. My approach, however, focuses on the core insight that worries, being fantasies, are best ignored. And that you need to be spending less time in Headmind.

As related in my previous articles there are four mistakes that people make around worries and obsessions:

These are:

• Getting sucked in by anxious thoughts
• Being frightened by them
• Not knowing what to do about them
• Living too much in the head

The four steps in the method I am explaining in these articles address all four problems.

To recapitulate, these are:

1. Change Position
2. Change Attitude
3. Change Focus
4. Practice Mindfulness

Before using the method, however, there is an important preliminary which you need to work through first. Which is to distinguish between Worries and Concerns.

Briefly, worries are fantasies while concerns are problems you can influence. 

A worry typically has one or more of these features:

1. Predictions of disaster:

Examples: I will lose my job/have a breakdown/get ill again

2. Hopelessness

Example: I won't be able to cope

3. Over-generalization

Example: I always mess things up

4. Exaggeration

Example: I am a complete failure

5. Perfectionism

Example: I can't make any mistakes

6. Musturbation:

Example: I must get it right

7. Self-judgment

Example: It's all my fault

6. Focusing on the negative:

Example: It happened last week, the month before that, twice last year and again this morning at 10 o'clock

Notice that worries aren't about anything that has actually happened. Instead they are a kind of nightmare in which it is assumed that anything that can go wrong will go wrong and what's more will always go wrong (Murphy's Law may be a joke but quite a lot of people with anxiety disorders treat it as revealed truth).

There is no point in arguing with this kind of thinking as so many cognitive-behaviour therapists believe. Doing that is the equivalent of trying to argue with the psychotic on the street corner who wants you to come and hide with him because the world is about to end. The only thing to do about worries is treat them with the contempt they deserve.

But one reason why even daft worries get taken seriously is that they get mixed up with concerns. And because concerns are real then worries can seem real too.

For example. I might have a concern about this article: namely, that it won't be readable. Were that the case then there are a number of things I can do about that: read examples of good writing and imitate them, get a friend to check it, use a thesaurus, rewrite it, etc. But the associated worry 'I will never learn to write' gets off on the genuine concern that I am finding this particular article hard work. And so I fall into the trap of taking it seriously.

In this series I am teaching you a four-step method through which you eliminate worries such as these. However, to make it work you first have to address any concerns. Doing that may eliminate the worry all by itself. For example, rewriting this article and getting some good feedback makes the earlier worry sound ridiculous.

Here are a few more tips to help you distinguish between the two:

1. If it is a worry it will frighten you; if it is a concern it will focus you
2. Concerns foster decision-making; worries foster paralysis
3. Worries leave you powerless; concerns alert you to what to do next
4. Concerns focus on potential solutions; worries on disasters
5. Worries are all about the past and future; concerns are about the here and now
6. Concerns have an emotion behind them; worries are empty
7. Worries tell you that you can't cope; concerns tell you that you can

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you control your mind - or does it control you?

This is yet another addition to the lenghthening list of articles on controlling Headmind that have appeared on this blog.

It seems to be the one problem most people struggle with in therapy and in life:

• Eliminating negative thoughts
• Ignoring the Chatterbox
• Laughing off worries
• Heading off panic attacks
• Forgetting guilt
• Putting the brakes on obsessions
• Doing the dirty on perfectionism
• Postponing procrastination

So I am continually being asked for more techniques on how to control what some people like to call 'Rational Mind' when it is doing dumb, stupid, things. And I agree that it helps to have a variety of techniques on offer so that if one does not work something else will. So I am going to share one of my recent discoveries with you.

It came about when I was looking up one of my favourite works - The Wasteland - by T.S. Eliot and I was reminded that Eliot had, in fact, had a nervous breakdown shortly before completing the poem.

(If you would like to benefit from a nervous breakdown yourself then read my prior article on this).

I then learnt that Eliot recovered from his breakdown in a sanatorium in Lausanne during the summer of 1922 while under the supervision of Dr Roger Vittoz, who treated anxiety problems by teaching his patients how to control Headmind with the aid of specific techniques devised by him.

His premise is that anxious people have lost control of their own minds and are paying attention to garbage. When they learn how to edit out negative words, objects, images and statements and replace it with their own content they get back control. Many of his exercises seem quite trivial at first but if you practice doing them every day for, say, a few weeks, the accumulative effect is that one is back in charge. And I can vouch from personal observation that some of the exercises work very quickly indeed. 

One of them works like this.

Write out a worry statement. For example:

I CAN'T COPE WITH OTHER PEOPLE

Now imagine that you are flashing up each letter on a screen, one by one, until you have the complete statement.

Now delete each letter of the statement one-by-one, working backwards.

Next, you replace the first statement with something more empowering. For example:

I AM LEARNING HOW TO COPE BETTER

And then you 'flash' each letter of that statement up on the screen until it is complete. Look at the statement for a few moments, and then decide on one thing you can do in order to act on it.

Like all Vittoz's techniques, it works on repetition. So use it every time you catch Headmind giving you a hard time with that particular worry.

If you would like to get a free copy of the English translation of Vittoz's book on mind control  - How to Control Your Brain at Will then you can download it from here.

 

How to be unique

This is a continuation of my series on becoming the person you were always meant to be. The last article in the series was How to be strange. And the one before that was Why it's ok to be a bit weird.

A second way to be strange, weird or unique is to be an incontrovertible expert in something. Or in two things. Or in three, four, five things. To become an authority on them in fact.

Now it helps if you choose subjects that a lot of other people are fascinated by. But it isn't strictly necessary. For example, if you choose to become an expert on Palmistry or reading the Tarot then I can guarantee you a ready audience from personal experience for the simple reason that most people are fascinated by the occult, even when they pooh-pooh it. But if you decide to become, instead, an expert on Egyptian hieroglyphics the fact that you know a lot about something practically nobody knows anything about will give you a certain cachet - which is a source of pride to you, even if you happen never to speak about it. For the simple reason that Knowledge equals Power.

Another, very good, choice is to become an expert in solving problems that everybody struggles with. For example: money management, child care, dealing with difficult people, employment law, maintaining a house, etc. Knowing a lot about those things will usually mean that you end up becoming an advisor of some kind - that, too, is a great way to exploring your personal power. 

One word of warning, however. Whatever project you choose, it helps to be guided by your Personal Genius.

 

 

 

Are you really ok - or just pretending?

In my previous article but one - How to be a Failure - I wrote that Failures exist only in their heads.

To be sure, it is possible to fail an exam or a driving test, but I am not talking about reversals like that. What I am referring to is the kind of thinking that ends in self-judgments of one sort or another.

In the next article I will write about success thinking instead. But before you start learning more about that there is something you must first do in order to shake off the habit of thinking like a failure. And that is to stop pretending you don't have problems. That is: stop pretending to yourself and stop pretending to others. It's tiring and it doesn't work; at some level your bodymind always knows when you are lying to yourself and the result is a state of suffering.

As I wrote before, Headminds that don't work properly distort the meaning of set-backs and turn them into no-go areas:

• It's not ok to be unhappy
• It's not ok to be scared
• It's not ok to be angry
• It's not ok to be sad
• It's not ok to be alone
• It's not ok to get it wrong
• It's not ok to be ill
• It's not ok to be out of work
• It's not ok to be poor
• It's not ok to be disabled
• It's not ok to be rejected
• It's not ok to be different

If one of these states of affairs exists then your Ego will conclude that you have failed. It will then waste the next few weeks/months/years looking for the 'cause' of the problem in order to find something, or someone, to blame. The consequent worry states will trigger guilt, rage, anxiety or depression. 

Meanwhile, the internal control freak inside your head will be ordering you to keep up the ego facade that there is nothing wrong. One trivial way in which this manifests will be the silly grin and the 'Me! I'm fine!' answer many of us give to people when they ask us how we are when we are are not (although, I have given up asking people that question nowadays - it's unanswerable if you really think about it).

There are a number of other ways in which this process of denial works and here are some examples from my therapy case-book.

• The frightened client who, for months after he was made redundant, pretended to go in to the office every day because he didn't want his family to find out. He spent the rest of the day hiding in the public library.
• The resigned client who put up with years of marital unhappiness with the thought that 'all marriages are the same anyway'.
• The argumentative client who would go off into a rage rather than admit he had made a mistake.
• The dying client who refused to get proper help for his terminal cancer until it was too late because he 'didn't want to make a fuss'.
• The alcoholic client who could not stand his boredom with life and used alcohol to diffuse it.
• The cynical client who blamed other people and 'life' for his unhappiness in work and relationships.
• Then there is my own case, in which I pretended for years that I wasn't deaf so as not be seen as a 'freak'. This caused endless complications in relationships.

Don't be taken in by Headmind's way of turning problems into disasters and stick to the facts instead. Then give yourself permission to have whatever emotion you want. For example:

'The relationship is over and I am alone and I am really, really sad about that. I need to be with people.'

Don't be taken in by the Ego's need to be Superwoman. Be humble and take responsibility for your errors:

'I made a mistake. What can I do about it?'

And accept your limitations:

'I'm out of my depth here. Time to talk to someone.'

Don't be taken in by the Ego's need to be like others. Dare to be different:

'I am deaf/black/dyslexic/fragile/etc. And that's part of who I am.'

Don't be taken in Headmind's tendency to run away from problems:

'I am ill/unemployed/broke and I need to stop pretending I'm not.'

If life truly is bad for you right now then give yourself permission to be unhappy:

'This is one of the worst periods of my life. It's not surprising I am feeling so down.'

And - whatever you do - don't put on that fake smile and tell people you're fine when you really are not!

 

I wish all my readers a genuinely happy year ahead.

 

The secret to making powerful decisions

I have been writing, on and off, about emotional intelligence for 15 years - here's one of my books here: Communicate with Emotional Intelligence - and it never ceases to intrigue me just how sophisticated Bodymind actually is. 

Let me remind my  readers that emotional intelligence relates to the ability to recognise, and act upon, Bodymind communication to you, and the twin ability to intuit what other peoples' Bodyminds are communicating to them, as you engage.

What is fascinating is that Bodymind uses  a wide variety of means to guide you towards making the decisions that are right for you, and for those you lead. You may be a leader at work, or you may be a leader in your family, in your circle of friends, or for those you teach. Your Bodymind is continually cueing you to exercise your Personal Genius, using emotions, intuitions, gut-feels and sudden inspirations, while you make decisions.

Brain research shows that individuals who have incurred brain injuries which disconnect the frontal lobes (Headmind) from the limbic system (Bodymind) tend to be poor at decision-making. For the simple reason that their thoughts have no emotional back-up and it is difficult for these people to tell the difference between daft ideas and wise ones. 

There is a really good interview on emotionally-biased decision-making with Jonah Lehrer (author of "How We Decide') on this link here: Passions of the Brain.

The secret to making powerful decisions is to be able to recognise, and work with, the emotional cues your body creates in order to guide you towards the best decision available (although, sometimes, Bodymind will tell you to wait, or do nothing).

Crudely speaking, your Body will use an emotional reaction to tell you to take one of the following options in relation to your decisions:

1. Go for it now! This is too good to resist.

2. Go for it, but be careful and take your time.

3. Go for it - but get some more information, or get some help, before you take the first step.

4. Do nothing - for now. Wait for a better opportunity.

5. Do nothing. The idea needs substantial revision.

6. Do nothing - ever. This option is not good for you, or for the other people in your charge.

Generally speaking, good decisions will  be backed up by strong, enthusiastic feeliings, while dubious ones will be accompanied by weak, lacklustre, uneasy, uncomfortable reactions.

In my own, personal, experience my emotional reactions, for each grade of Bodymind decision, are as follows"

1. Excited, joyful, feeling. My heart races and my head 'swims' a little. I am impatient and want to get started right away. I am full or energy. (Example: developing Reverse Therapy).

2. Less excited state, tempered with nervousness.  My upper body fills with desire but I remain clear-headed. I focus on dealing with the problems and pitfalls in the hope that I can eventually get what I want. (Example: Negotiating to buy the house I live in now, five years ago).

3. More scared than excited (I notice fear particularly in my stomach area). I really feel like I want to take things slowly and keep looking around, as if I were in a dark lane that I don't know very well. (Example: dealing with the aftermath of my wife's redundancy last year).

4. A sad, slightly heavy, feeling I notice mostly in my chest. Feels like I have lost an opportunity, as I really want to do something about this, but circumstances are preventing me. (Example: having to give up a planned holiday to the Maldives last year, when my wife lost her job).

5. A tense, slightly angry feeling in my upper chest, throat and jaw that seems to shout 'No!'. (Example: receiving a letter notifying me of a rent increase on my London office premises a few months ago).
 
6. Same as No. 5 but even stronger, and my anger seems more intense. This reaction usually comes when someone tries to take advantage of me, or those close to me. (Example: I find out that my son is in danger of being ripped off by an second-hand car salesman). 

What are your emotional experiences around making decisions? Please email me with those and I will feature them in a future article on practical decision-making.

Enneagram II

This is the second in a series of articles on the Enneagram and, if you haven't read it yet, it would be a good idea to read the first article here.

Some of you may have taken one of the two Enneagram Personality tests I recommended in that article. If you did then it is important to remind you of the following principle:

Whichever of the Nine Enneagram 'personalities' you think you have (or scored highest for) you should fight as hard as you can not to be that particular way. In short, you should lose that ossified way of being.

For example, until recently I scored high for the Number 8. Here is a description of the Eight by The Enneagram Institute:

Eights are self-confident, strong, and assertive. Protective, resourceful, straight-talking, and decisive, but can also be ego-centric and domineering. Eights feel they must control their environment, especially people, sometimes becoming confrontational and intimidating. Eights typically have problems with their tempers and with allowing themselves to be vulnerable.

In order to avoid the fate of becoming fixated on strength (and thereby making myself obsessional about it) I had to let go of the banana about having to 'be in control'. In point of fact I never particularly wanted to be in control of anything until I became a well-known therapist. After that point my Headmind decided that it had something to prove to people who did therapy or training with me, and then the banana about having to be 'strong' started to work on me. Before that particular delusion took over I usually scored high on the Number 5 personality. Here is a description of that one from the same source:

Fives are alert, insightful, and curious. They are able to concentrate and focus on developing complex ideas and skills. Independent, innovative, and inventive, they can also become preoccupied with their thoughts and imaginary constructs. They become detached, yet high-strung and intense. They typically have problems with eccentricity, nihilism, and isolation.

I would guess that I was a 'Five' all the way from my teenage years until about 10 years ago, when I learnt to see through that false ego. What drove it was my emerging experience of being typed as 'deaf and therefore 'stupid' and 'inadequate'. That was why I went for one banana about having to be a know-all and another one about having to live in an ivory tower. Neither obsession did me any good.

Here are the fixations that go with each of the nine types.

The One: Has to be in the right. Must never be in the wrong. The Perfectionist.

The Two: Has to look after others. Must never be rejected. The Martyr.

The Three. Has to be a success. Must never be second-best. The Workaholic.

The Four. Has to be admired. Must never be ignored. The Show-off.

The Five. Has to know everything. Must never be caught out. The Loner.

The Six. Has to belong. Must never stand out from the crowd. The Conformist.

The Seven. Has to be happy. Must not be sad. The Addict.

The Eight. Has to be in Control. Must not be weak. The Bully.

The Nine. Has to be inside the Comfort Zone. Must not get stressed. The Slob.

Enneagram

This is the first in the series of articles about the Enneagram.

The Enneagram is a method through which you can understand human personality. There are 9 personality types, which I will describe in later articles.

I have written about Personality - and also about the Ego - before. In the system of Reverse Therapy, your personality/ego is a creation of Headmind, which bears no relation to who you actually are.

A common problem with  Enneagram books is that they try to label people as belonging to a certain 'type'. Nothing could be further from the truth. All that knowing someone's Enneagram type will tell you is how far they have got stuck in Headmind.

You are far more than your personality. Somewhere, deep down, you possess a Personal Genius which holds  the personality you give out to others in contempt, and which seeks to break free of it. Personal Genius, if anything can be, is your real self. But you have no control over it for that was given to you at birth.

Your Enneagram personality, by contrast, is something you need to work on in order to abolish it. Your personality is not you; rather it is your Prison.

The ideal, the goal, is to become ego-less and to cease to possess a personality.

Only then can you become that which you are truly are. Gurdjieff, the originator of the Enneagram taught precisely this.

Before you read the second article in this series you might want to take the Enneagram test and here are two:

Eclectic Energies (This is a free test which is reasonably accurate).

The Riso Hudson test (The Riso-Hudson test is the most thorough test currently available. It costs $10.00).

Back to bananas

It's been building up for a while, but I have been getting more and more stuck in Headmind and the dis-ease state, due to the fact that I haven't written anything on this blog for over two weeks.

So the banana about having to be clever kicks in and Headmind gives me a hard time about ending up as a failure:

It tells me: 'You must write something good, soon, son, or your dreams about this blog are all going to end up in smoke...'

Which tells me that even the best of us get sucked in to obsessive-compulsions. After all, why the hell should I write something if I have nothing to say?

Similarly, with some of your own bananas:

• Why should you try to please people who care nothing about your efforts?
• Why should you get together with people you care little about?
• Why should you read a blog page that bores you?

Now that I have got that off my chest then I can go back to writing new articles without thinking that I need to appease the Internal Control Freak.

And immediately I write that, I get, first a release, and then a creative idea: Why not write about the Enneagram?

Think I will start on that now....

But meantime, I am humbly reminded that the battle against the obsession to be more than we can be never lets up.

And - please - if you are getting impatient about the delay in my posting new articles on here, then let me have your wishes and creative ideas rather than your complaints.

Switching off the chatterbox

Here's an email from a reader who wants to know more about how to switch off from the Internal Chatterbox (sometimes also known as 'The Internal Control Freak' in Reverse Therapy circles).

He writes:

"How do you stop Headmind going on and on at night when you are trying to get some sleep? Many of your blog posts for stopping Headmind recommend to go & do something else, especially something physical & endorphin producing. At night-time I find things like doing the bodyscan most relaxing, although that is not necessarily sleep inducing.

Chatting to people in my head is an obsession that makes me ill. For years I've re-played endless conversations with people in my head, especially when in bed - mostly going over what I actually said, but also going over what I/they might have said and my answers. These  conversations can range from confrontational to light-hearted; from serious to trivial.

This chattering can be quite random. Yet it goes on endlessly, keeping me awake and driving me mad!"

How do I switch it off when I need to go to sleep?"

And here is my answer:

1. If Headmind is overactive at night then it is almost certainly over-active daytime too. You will need to work on slowing Headmind down, or switching off from it regularly, during daylight hours. You can achieve that by utilising breath meditation, Tai Chi, Binaural beats, dance, sensate focusing, or substitutes for any of these. It is no good going through the day staying stuck in Headmind and then hoping it will quieten down later. Rather like training a badly-behaved dog, you have to show Headmind who is Master. Learning to live each day in Awareness of the present moment is also key.

2. If you work at a Headmind-centred job (for example, Information Technology) then you need to balance that with Bodymind-centred activities when you finish work, well before you retire to bed. Sport/gym-work/swimming is ideal for the purpose, as is any kind of handicraft or gardening.

3. Living in Headmind tends to create extra Adrenalin release and Beta brain wave states. Too much Adrenalin makes you fidgety, restless and agitated. It also triggers overwork in the frontal cortex, making it much more likely that you will worry more. A constant state of watchfulness and self-analysis maintains beta waves which, in turn, trigger still more internal chatter. 

If either case is true for you then you need to:

a) Dilute the Adrenalin rush before you get into bed. You could do that by taking a hot bath or using one of the instant stress-busters I recommended in my pre-Xmas post.

b) Slow down your brain wave-states from Beta to Theta. One way to do that is to listen to one of the binaural beat programs I recommend on the right hand side of this blog.

4. Having suffered from an overactive Headmind myself for many years before I got wise to its tricks, I found that you could outwit it by giving it something absorbing to do that is also trivial, boring or complicated. Counting downwards from 501 in increasing intervals of 3, 6, 9, 12, and so on is an old favourite. But reading tedious scientific papers on psychology usually does it for me!


Original image by sngyork

Losing your head

I have written before about the benefits of losing your head and centring your awareness instead in the moment, in the now, in Bodymind.

That switch of Awareness is crucial to everything we do in Reverse Therapy.

Now my long-term collaborator and friend, Mark McGuinness, has written a brilliant article - Why Thinking is Overrated - describing his own experience of losing his head and what such a 'headless' state can do for you in terms of blissful perception, creativity and problem-solving.

Mark focuses specifically on the benefits of letting go of habitual thought patterns and allowing insights to come of their own accord rather than listening to the Internal Control Freak and trying too hard to force the solution.

Enjoy.

Image by anthonyturducken