The Secret To Getting Relief From Worry
You have a special gift inside of your own mind, just waiting to be opened. It is one you can learn to use to stay in control of your state of mind, no matter what is going on around you.
This secret is what Viktor Frankl used that allowed him to survive the holocaust and maintain his mental balance. It is what author Napoleon Hill weaves into his famous advice on achieving financial success in Think and Grow Rich. And it is something that you have within yourself right now, like a gift, all wrapped up, waiting for you to unwrap and put into immediate use.
The Gift of the Mind
Anyone can learn to use this gift. And the really amazing thing about it is, it never gets used up, because the more you use it the more powerful it becomes.
You might be wondering what is needed for you to gain access to this gift, and this is what we’ll be discussing. As director of the Anxiety Control Center I’ve been helping people to gain access in order to get relief from anxiety, worry, panic, procrastination and fear. From my years of research and practice, I have found that there are three parts needed to totally use this gift you have within. In this article you’ll get step-by-step directions on using the first set of powerful tools for using the gift of your own mind.
As you begin to experience gaining access to this gift, you’ll find that it peaks your curiosity to learn more. The tools you’ll find in this, and in my other articles and books are ones that you can use right away. There are some self-hypnotic techniques I’ll offer to help you speed up the process. The more tools you have in your worry relief toolbox, the more choice and control you can have.
More advanced skills are for another time, we’ll start today by setting you on the path of knowing how to offer the correct signals to your brain to trigger calm, balance and serenity – instead of worry, fear and anxiety.
Breaking the worry cycle: Changing the triggers.
In this technique we go behind the scenes to identify bodily signals, and thoughts that add to worry.
Sometimes you might be aware of your body sensations and scary thoughts. But at times you might find that you are disconnected, or that your thoughts move so quickly that you aren’t aware of them.
If you have suffered from a traumatic event, at times the memory is repressed, hidden from awareness. Although they are repressed they still have an effect on the way you react to the world. And at times these repressed traumatic memories can be triggered by something happening in the present moment.
Step 1:
To find what is triggering a feeling start by noticing the part of body where you feel the stress, worry or anxiety.
Each emotion is held in a different area of the body, and each person has a unique place in the body for each emotion. Example: a person might feel fear as a churning in the stomach; for another it can be a tightness in the chest; and for another it feels like a heavy feeling all over the body. Once you identify the different areas where you hold your emotions it becomes easier to identify what each emotion is really about. This is especially useful for people who aren’t yet aware of where they hold emotions. It’s like creating a dictionary of emotions. You can know what the emotion is by the part of the body you feel it in.
If we get quiet and ask your body for information it’s amazing the informational body will give you.
Some emotions you can start with are: fear, sadness, excitement, embarrassment and worry. Then you can use the body awareness to get in touch with the thoughts that are triggering these feelings.
Step 2:
Use the Calming the Mind technique to help you get into the best state to notice where your body holds worry or tension.
a. If at first you aren’t sure – it may be that you have pushed down this important information or that you just need a little practice at notice where different emotions are held in the body.
b. With practice you can reconnect to the information your body is giving you.
c. Start by being open and curious: with your eyes closed focus on your breath for a moment and then do to a body scan.
To do this imagine you are starting at the top of your head and scanning down your body. Look for any areas of tension, tightness, or other bodily sensation.
d. Once you notice where you hold emotion in your body, begin to wonder what the body is trying to tell you. Is it fear, worry, sadness, hurt? Each area of the body will hold a different emotion.
e. Being curious opens up the pathway to access unconscious information.
Step 3:
Past, Future or Don’t know. Where does Fear and worry comes from?
1. Past Events: Aware of memories that trigger fear about a situation.
a. In this case a person fears that the horrible feeling you had in the past might occur again.
b. This can happen with people who have panic in social situations. The might even be aware that they are worrying about what others will think. This type of fear doesn’t just come out of the blue. Something happened in the past that triggers the feeling in the present.
c. For people with a fear of flying it sometimes come after having a scary flight and fearing that will happen again. Yet for many people the fear of flying goes to much deeper unconscious issues that they don’t recall on the conscious level.
2. Not aware of where the feeling come from.
In this case we just know we are being flooded with worry, fear or anxiety.
a. I had a client that was terribly embarrassed when she was in 4th grade. Her teacher made her stand in front of the room as a punishment for talking.
b. She didn’t realize that this was the root of her fear of speaking in public. Once we tracked the fear back using a hypnotic tool we were able to re-program the reaction.
3. Upcoming Feared Events: Thinking about awful things that might possibly happen in the future. (what if phrases usually proceed these types of thoughts.)
Many worries are triggered by the the scenarios we create of possible negative things that might happen in the future: Fear of flying, test taking, driving, are some of the
Your Thoughts Stimulate Reactions – Tools to Use for Change
Whenever you concentrate on the multitude of possible scary scenarios that might come about in the future, the unconscious part of the mind acts as if they are already taking place. One of the interesting things about the unconscious mind is that it accepts your thoughts, pictures and memories as if they are real. Then the unconscious part begins to flood you with the chemicals, these further trigger feelings of worry, sadness, overwhelm, fear and insecurity. Thoughts can even create pain in the body, even when you are completely unaware of them.
The good news is that you can get relief by learning to change thought patterns that bring them about.
Whenever you find yourself stuck or indecisive, whenever you’re beating yourself up for procrastination, whenever you find yourself stuck in worry practice using the next two tools to break the cycle.
Tool One:
Changing one simple word (or sentence):
I was working with a client and she told me that she was so anxious that she couldn’t even make a decision on what food to she wanted to eat. She was running a real negative conversation in her head about how she wasn’t able to make decisions. I asked her to change her words from I can’t make a decision to I choose not to make a decision, on what food I want to eat. She said that felt uncomfortable saying it that way. And I’m sure it did feel uncomfortable saying she was choosing not to make a decision. The positive about saying I choose is that it put her at cause. Since she is choosing (not to make a decision) she can also change her choices.
Not being at cause makes you feel like something else is controlling you, and that adds to self-blame and anxiety. So as difficult as it is to say, I’m choosing (to think of negatives, to procrastinate, to worry) it puts you at a power position of choosing or not choosing, you’re back control.
Tool Two:
Step 1. Being at cause – by saying I choose . . .
Step 2. The second step after being at cause is to say to yourself:
“That’s curious that I’m choosing not to make a decision. I wonder what that’s about?”
When my client used step two and focused inward with the question, it amazed us both when she got her answer: The reason she wasn’t making a decision on what to eat was that she really wasn’t hungry, she was bored. After getting that information she can now see that it wasn’t that she was stuck and not able to make decisions (about food), it was that she needed to find something else to do so she would feel productive.
Techniques to get relief from worry, anxiety and fear
The stress-fear-worry cycle actually has three different parts.
a. Thoughts (cognitions)
b. Physical (bodily and chemical reactions)
c. Emotions (triggered by thoughts or body)
And there are tools that you can choose from according to what part of the worry cycle is being stimulated.
Just as when a house is built it starts with setting the foundation. When we work with the mind we set the foundation as well. What you are learning today will give you some framework to work within. Then in the final part, we can move to change the faulty inner programs, stuffed emotions and limiting beliefs that are running, behind the scenes, triggering your thoughts, perceptions and reactions.
Moving to the Next Part
I’m going to ask you to take a moment to think about some important ideas about the mind-body connection, as it relates to stress relief.
We’ll start with the concept that there are actually two parts that make up the mind-body connection. There are there parts that you are aware of, we’ll call the conscious part of the mind. The conscious part of the mind includes your thoughts, logic, perceptions and interpretations about what is going on in any event.
The Unconscious Mind
And the other part, the one that works behind the scenes we’ll call the unconscious (or subconscious) part. You know that there is an unconscious part running because it keeps your heart beating without any work on your part. Get keeps your body working, and it sends the signals for all the chemicals that move through your system. It’s responsible for digestion, breathing, and healing of wounds. All taking place without any conscious effort on your part. And the unconscious part is responsible for so much more: it stores all your memories, happy ones as well as traumatic ones. And it has many programs that run in the background that keep you in a serene and balanced state or that that cause you to react in your own unique way.
It’s important to recognize this part of the mind, because it is the part we go to when we want to re-program unwanted reactions. When I teach my clients how to access the unconscious the bonus they get is being able to tap into resources, such as power, self-confidence, serenity. Imagine uncovering a treasure trove of resources within your self, ones can be used to overcome fear, shyness, and limiting beliefs. And it’s all there just waiting for you.
Using the Mind Calming Exercise
When you used the Calming the Mind Exercise you were actually setting the stage for gaining access to the unconscious part. This tool gives the easiest way to create a light hypnotic trance that is needed to calm the mind and to focus inward. As you experienced, getting into an inner-focused self-hypnotic state is to easy to do on your own.
My other books and articles discuss more advanced techniques.
The importance of learning to get into an inner focused state of mind (trance state) is that this is where it is possible to identify and correct faulty programs that trigger fear, anxiety, worry and unwanted reactions. The unconscious part also responds to your thoughts and this is the area that we will begin to work on.
RECAP: There are primarily three different ways of breaking the worry and stress cycle. In the next step we’ll be using a tool to stop negative thoughts. As you already know negative thinking increases stress and worry. This next tool uses a light trance state (inner focus) to first identify any negative thoughts and then a tool to break the worry cycle (on the conscious level).
Because the mind can trigger worry just by thinking of scary or unsettling things this is a good place to start for gaining control of emotions.
If you would like to get yourself into a calm state quickly:
I recommend starting with the mind calming exercise. Click the button below to sign up and I will send it to your email. It’s a short video demonstrating the technique that you can practice again and again:
[maxbutton id=”5″ ]