April Newsletter

Taken from Stop Thinking Start Living by Richard Carlson.

Thoughts Grow with Attention

The way you feel is determined by your thoughts. The more attention you put on anything that is negative, the worse you will feel. Despite that popular idea that talking about and working through negative emotions is a good idea, I’m suggesting that common sense dictates otherwise. People have been ‘working through’ endless negative emotions for years now, and very few are much better off than when they started. The question to ask yourself (and your therapist) are: when does the analysis stop? When have I had enough? When do I get to feel better?

If you believe that your thoughts are real - and you are encouraged to work through the worse of them - you will end up with even more to contend with, because the more your think, the bigger and more important the thoughts will seem, and the more of them there will be to deal with. Because your feelings are determined by what you thing about, you will, by necessity, sink even lower. And unfortunately, because negative thoughts, new ones that you now have to ‘work through’ It’s an endless negative spiral that never takes you upward towards where you want to be - happy. The spiral will end when you decide that enough is enough. It will end when you start with a clean slate, with a clear mind, and when you realise that the only thing holding your unhappiness in place is your own thinking. If you really want to be happy, you must stop focusing on your negative feelings, and start looking for the magical feeling of healthy functioning that resides inside you..

Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting is a way of life for many people. It means being on the look out for what’s wrong, finding flaws, seeking out imperfections, pointing out potential pitfalls, finding fault, generating concerns, being a sceptic, and remembering mistakes. For a computer product this can be crucial; for a human being it can be devastating.

Troubleshooting is a socially acceptable form of mental illness. Many people are proud of their ability to predict potential problems, see fault in others, and remember past mistakes. The call themselves ‘realists’. They consider their fault-finding skills necessary and important. They rationalise their behaviour and way of thinking by saying such things as “You must learn from history” and “Someone has to look out for the problems”

Troubleshooters often raise children with low self-esteem. They are so busy pointing out the ways that their children could improve that they totally forget to enjoy their presence. The children often interpret their parents’ attitude to mean that they are not good enough. Troubleshooters have low self-esteem themselves. Rather than experience what is happing in their lives, they are constantly thinking of ways to improve their experience. Regardless of how good things get they constantly want more.

A troubleshooter can never be satisfied because she is using her thinking against herself. She is too busy evaluating her life to enjoy it. She picks up the slightest imperfections and turns them into a big deal. Even when she likes something, she compares it to something else.

There is certainly nothing wrong with wanting to improve, excel, achieve or compare. But there is something harmful to the human psyche when, instead of being open and receptive to the beauty of life, it is overflowing with comparisons, criticisms, suggestions and thought of imperfections. Life doesn’t have to be a contest to see how many flaws you can find. Life can be beautiful, and it will be, when you start dismissing the thoughts you have that take you away from a good feeling about life, a feeling of love and appreciation, your healthy psychological functioning. Instead of following the troubleshooting thoughts you have, practise ignoring them. Rather than following through with an unnecessary suggestion to someone, practise holding your tongue. Instead, offer your support for doing it their own way. Instead of anticipating potential problems and reviewing past mistakes, keep yourself here, in this moment. See for yourself how living moment to moment tends to take care of most problems. Remind yourself that your inner wisdom and healthy functioning will learn from history - all by itself - even if you don’t review your mistakes in your head. Watch what happens when you dismiss a concern in your mind as ‘just a thought’. Notice how very few of your concerns actually manifest into significant real-life problems, how gracefully you solve them when you remain present and focused, when your head isn’t muddled with a lot of other thoughts, related or not, that only add to the problem.

The process of a troubleshooter’s thinking is very easy to explain. She looks at something or someone and thoughts begin to bubble. The specific content of her thoughts aren’t important. What ends up hurting her is the nature of her thinking, the fact that her thoughts are seeking to improve the person, place or thing. Rather than dismissing those thoughts, as a happier person would tend to do, the troubleshooter pays attention to her thoughts, believing them to be real. Because she thinks her thoughts are so important, she either points them out to someone or keeps thinking them to herself. The thoughts feed on one another and begin to take on a life of their own. She feels that she wouldn’t have thought them up if they weren’t worthy of concern.

A happy person might have the very same thoughts enter his mind, but the way he would respond to those thoughts would be quite different. The thoughts would bubble to the surface. He would then acknowledge that he was thinking them, dismiss them, and go on with his day. Obviously, if his wisdom told him that any particular thoughts did have merit, and the issue was important, he would choose to do something about the situation. He wouldn’t however, allow his mind to blow the situation out of proportion. He would tap into his healthy functioned as best he could, knowing that his wisdom would provide him with the answers he needs. He would remember a golden rule of happiness - it’s impossible to feel gratitude for something when you are too busy trying to improve it.

To break free from unhappiness you have to bring yourself back to the present. You must realise that you past is not longer here - it’s over . It exists only within your own thinking. It was real then, but now, it’s only a part of your imagination.

From generation to generation, each of us has been taught that the past represents what is, and that it predicts the future. A person who is psychologically sound and of good judgement is seen to look carefully to the past when thinking of future plans. Therefore, it makes sense to most people to recall the past when dealing with something in the present. This tendency, however, while useful at times, can wreak havoc on our rapport with others. It also takes us away from our healthy functioning.

The truth is that many arguments, painful confrontations, or difficult situations are only difficult because the people involved are busy thinking about the past without realising they are doing so! In other words they are filtering their present moments through thoughts of the past.

On the surface, almost everyone realises the past is over. Very few, however, internalise this understanding deeply enough to prevent the past from haunting them. Instead, they allow thoughts of the past to contaminate the present, interfering with the present experience of healthy functioning. If you can remember that the past is only a memory, you will be able to ignore, to a very large degree, the thoughts of the past that get in the way of enjoying life. You can learn a great deal from your past, but you need not suffer because of is. Your understanding of thought will allow you to remain right here, in the present moment, where happiness exists.

Getting to Grips With Your Anxiety

Anxiety is unpleasant. No one likes feeling sick and ill. No one likes the sensation of fear it produces. No one likes the feeling of loneliness and isolation which a sufferer from excessive anxiety endures. Everyone who suffers from excessive anxiety asks themselves the same question “Why Me? Why can’t I cure myself Why should I be scared of going to that party, or to the shops, or into a crowd when I know that nothing can happen to me? Why am I so stupid?”

Of course you aren’t stupid because there is a logic to all of this, but it is difficult to see that logic in the everyday situations where we experience our anxiety. When we are feeling ill in a supermarket queue, there is little point in reflecting upon the place of anxiety in human evolution. It’s time we got on to the practical nuts and bolts of our excessive anxiety.

We are who we are. There’s no point asking ourselves “Why me?” We start from where we are now and right now your are a person who, because of your temperament and your experience of life, suffers from excessive anxiety. An you would do almost anything to banish that anxiety. You can do that, and you will. The first hurdle you have to get over is that feeling that you are stupid to fear entering these perfectly normal situations which should cause you no bother at all

Why be Afraid?

Let us get fact absolutely straight in our minds. It would be daft to fear the supermarket queue, but that isn’t what happens. We don’t fear the supermarket queue. We fear the very severe and possibly disabling physical symptoms which we experience in that queue, or at that party or whatever situation it is which causes our symptoms. That fear of your powerful symptoms is entirely logical and sensible. If someone who had no experience of an anxiety state suddenly experienced your symptoms, they would think that they were dying, It is courage which has kept you going. There is nothing illogical about your fear. The symptoms are real, and the fear and concern we have about them is just as rational and as real.

The key factor in that vicious circle is that fear of your symptoms, because it is that fear which makes our symptoms worse. It is adrenalin which causes your symptoms, and some of that adrenalin is produced by your fear. But you can’t stop your fear, so the whole goes round and round. It is a logical fear, not of the situation, but of those symptoms, and no one can turn it off.

There is a way out. The start is always to understand what is going on, so that we can see a way into our problem. If we know that our symptoms are a natural phenomenon and that they can do us no harm, that we wont faint or cry out or whatever, then our fear must diminish just a little, and so must that adrenalin. We feel more relaxed. We have made a start.

We will dread some situations because we will still feel bad in them, these symptoms are powerful, and the simple application of logic wont banish them. There has to be a way of controlling the symptoms themselves, so that we have less need to fear them.

Physical symptoms

All of this presupposes that you can accept that your excessive anxiety produces a collection of adrenalin- induced symptoms. We can’t treat a condition in which we just feel unwell, and we have to do better than just saying that we feel anxious. From now on we have to be precise about our anxiety state. We really do have to pin it down. We have to know the mechanisms which make us feel so unwell. We know that our symptoms are due to adrenalin, or maybe some over breathing, but let’s consider exactly what that does to us.

There is only one really successful way of nailing down our anxiety state. We have to take pen and paper and do some writing. We have to make lists. You will never cure an amorphous, poorly understood condition. You have to take the surgeon’s scalpel to your anxiety, minutely dissect it, and examine the pieces.

Look at the situations which make your anxiety worse. And there almost certainly will be some situations which will be worse than others. It may be that you haven’t realised that this is so. The situations may be subtle, and it may not be places, if may be people, or one person, or one type of person. Or it may be a type of situation typically a situation where you feel closed in, or conspicuous.

Making a diary.

If your list is to be useful, you have to record just the right amount, and you have to record it at the time. You have to record just the right amount by looking at the events of your day and coming to some conclusions, and there is an art to doing that.

Make columns for the morning, afternoon and evening. List your symptoms and its severity (very mild, mild, moderate, severed, very severe) Make a note also of any situation, event or person, who might be making your symptoms worse.

Remember:-

Anxiety can be thought of as a list of symptoms

It is quite logical to fear your symptoms. Physical symptoms can be treated

Identifying your symptoms takes time and effort

A diary of your symptoms can be useful

Some of the symptoms may include

Panic attacks

Muscle tension

Pain

Headache

Breathing difficulty

Swallowing difficulty

Tearfulness

Diarrhoea

Excessive fatigue

Tremor

Dizziness

Palpitations

Stomach discomfort.

No one suffers from all of these symptoms at once, but sometimes one symptom can replace another. When you defeat one symptom any others you may experience become easier to detect because many of them are caused by the same physical factors.

The way that you treat the symptoms of anxiety is probably the opposite of what you might think. When people begin to feel anxious they tend to try to defeat if by doing something active. The housewife may begin to clean the house furiously, trying to distract herself from her symptoms. Someone else who is becoming anxious prior to going out will pace up and down, thus winding himself up, churning out adrenalin. That isn’t the best approach. Do the opposite. Slow down. Just stop what you’re doing and relax. That sounds simple, but for the tense, anxious person, it may be the most difficult thing in the world.

It is impossible to be physically relaxed and still be mentally tense. So there is a double pay-off to relaxation. Not only does it help your to control most of the unpleasant sensations associated with anxiety, it also relaxes the mind. The problem is that it isn’t easy.

Your worst problem may be that you will relax adequately during your relaxation session, but as soon as you stand up and move about you become tense again. That is a common experience so don’t worry about it. Remember that you are learning a skill which you can use in difficult situations, so that are learning a skill which you can use in difficult situations, so that achieving relaxation only when your really want to is a valuable asset. You want to be able to call up your relaxation at will, maybe in a meeting or on a bus or train, and that is something you can learn to do. It doesn’t matter if the sensations of relaxation doesn’t persist, though with experience and practice you should become generally more relaxed.

From JB

If you have any experiences which you would like to share with others, or questions you would like to ask, then please do not hesitate to contact us. Remember, this newsletter is for you, and we would like to know what you would like to read about.