People have a tendency to focus on what they don’t want to happen. When those stress hormones kick in, our body thinks it’s in survival mode and we become hyper-focused on anything we perceive as a potential threat. That’s a very useful system in any kind of real life or death situation, but it becomes a problem when the threat your unconscious is worrying about is really just a rude customer. Every year more and people are being diagnosed with different types of anxiety disorders. I would be really curious to know if there’s something changing where more and more people have anxiety disorders, if the number of people has always been this high we just weren’t diagnosing it, or some combination of the two. I would imagine that it’s a combination of the two, but that’s not really my place to say. What I can tell you is that the effects of chronic anxiety can be devastating on your mind, body and spirit. The good news is that there are ways to get through through this and overcome it. So some of you may or may not know, but I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). I was diagnosed at about six or seven years old, and the symptoms came on so strong they actually thought I was having seizures. Since then I’ve spent my whole life battling with this disorder, and it’s one of the reasons that I got interested in psychology. For the sake of time I’m not going to get into what I all I went through. Basically medication made it worse so I stopped taking it early on, and I was tormented by the worst intrusive thoughts and compulsions for a very long time. As a kid and even teenager I remember crying myself to sleep at five in the morning, because the disorder would keep up all night.
So I’ve spent the last twenty-something years with this one issue. It sucked but in learning to overcome it and heal myself I’ve learned a lot about how the mind works and developed some very important skills. What I’m going to talk about today will help you if you have any issue at all with anxiety, with depression, with negative thinking, with overthinking or with anger issue. The list goes on. Whether or not you have an actual disorder or just want to upgrade your mental powers and mindset, these strategies can help you improve your life.
There’s a couple of strategies I’ll talk about, but the single best resource I’ve found is the book “Brain Lock” by Jeffery Schwartz and Beverly Beyette. My key takeaway from the book probably seems overly simplistic, but the way they explain it makes all the difference in the world.
Explaining OCD is difficult because the thoughts and compulsions don’t make any logical sense. If they did it wouldn’t be a disorder. In “Brain Lock” they basically compare certain parts of the brain to the transmission in a car. Those areas will sometimes get stuck in one gear and not want to shift. So whenever an anxious thought comes up, the area that regulates the transition between thoughts doesn’t shift properly so you get stuck in that thought. You get stuck feeling that impending doom even if it doesn’t make any sense and isn’t a reality. If there’s a signal of anxiety coming through at that time, the brain doesn’t want move past it. Even if you don’t have OCD, anxiety is huge problem in our society. I’ll get into some of the reasons why in a later episode, but for now let’s focus on what we can do to shift out of those anxious thoughts. As you get better at this, the shifting becomes much smoother. At first it’s difficult and takes a lot of effort, but before long your unconscious will catch on, change the programming, and it gets much easier.
The book gives four steps for teaching your brain to shift gears more smoothly. By the way, this works for negative emotions in general, not just anxiety. I’ve used this method in all sorts of scenarios, including depression. The four step are Relabel, Reattribute, Refocus and Revalue.
It takes a little bit of leg work, but if you practice paying attention to the thoughts in your head, and to the physical effect they have on your body when those stress chemicals are released, you’ll start to get good at noticing the unconscious patterns and habits that you perform throughout the day. Remember, neurons that fire together, wire together. So when you have anxious thoughts, if your reaction is to slip into a fight or flight response and obsessing, that becomes a habit. That habit will be hard to break, but by practicing these four steps, you will develop new habits and actually change the structure of neurons in your brain, and the unconscious habits in your body. You’re basically changing the code of your programming, and writing a new map for your unconscious to follow. A quote from the book is “Focus your attention on the mental and physical actions that will improve your life,” and it’s really that simple.
So let’s get into the four steps…
Relabel
The first step is Relabel. Basically what’s happening here is you need to start understanding when a thought is valid, and when it’s a symptom of your brain not shifting gears properly. So for those of you who do not have OCD, the way these negative thoughts manifest might look a little bit different. You may not feel the overwhelming need to check that the stove burner is off 33 times before leaving the house, but you may have a habit of getting stuck thinking about people at work who made you angry. Maybe you’re stressing about money and it gets to the point where you stop being productive and thinking of solutions, and begin to just stress and obsess over the worst case scenario over and over. In the relabel step, all you’re really doing is learning begin recognizing when you do this. You can’t break out of these bad habits if you don’t even notice when you’re doing them, and you definitely can’t break out of them if you don’t realize that those patterns are destructive to begin with. So you begin noticing when you’re getting stuck in a thought loop, in a compulsion, in an anxiety attack or whatever it is, and you learn to tell yourself “hey this is just my anxiety. This is OCD, this is just me stressing, etc.” When you do this you relabel the thought as being less important than your stress response would suggest.
This is not going to fix anything in and of itself. The reason it’s important though is because you’re teaching yourself to identify the feeling that you get when that mental transmission is getting stuck. It’s a physical thing that’s happening in your brain, and it’s causing chemicals to be released into your body. Because of this you need to train yourself to not only identify the thoughts, but the physical sensations that come up. There’s nothing wrong with running through scenarios to figure out how you’re going to act when that one person starts to bug you, but you don’t want to get stuck obsessing over how upset they make you. All that’s going to do is give you a negative mindset, and leave you with a bunch of cortisol and adrenaline pumping through you.
One final thing from the relabel chapter; the authors make a point to remind you that if you’re someone who’s struggling with something like this, that it’s important to not see yourself as a victim. Sometimes people think that they’re weak or disadvantaged because they don’t see others having such a hard time. You have to adjust your mindset to realize that you’re working through something difficult. You have to adapt to a condition that’s creating an uphill battle. A lot of times people never take charge of their thinking, so learning all of this and developing the skill that it takes to cure yourself can potentially leave you much stronger and self-controlled than someone who never had to go through all of that.
Reattribute
Ok, now that we’ve learned to notice when our negative obsessions are just that and nothing more, the next step is “reattribute.” It’s important to begin to understand that “these thoughts are just a false alarm caused by a short circuit in the brain.” Whether you have a disorder or not, any proclivity you have towards negative thinking, anxiety or obsessing over “what ifs” is not something wrong with you, it’s just the mechanics in your brain are a little off. Certain parts are not functioning properly, and that’s what’s causing the amount of stress you’re under. But you are not your brain. It’s important to understand that and it’s the whole point of the reattribution step. Consciousness is not generated in the brain. Your mind (so to speak) is using the brain to operate in the world, just you like drive your car to work every morning. When the car starts giving you trouble you don’t blame yourself and think that you’re less of a person because this machine isn’t functioning properly, you just go get the car fixed. It’s the same way with anxiety and depression, so it’s important to reattribute the psychological problems to a physical thing that you can fix. When you change your thought process and your behaviors, your brain rewires itself. It creates new neural pathways, and physically restructures itself so that the unconscious can follow those new pathways like a map. Once you have that map written, it gets so much easier because it becomes automatic. People don’t realize that. The depression and anxiety don’t have to be forever. The struggle doesn’t have to last forever. You just need to get your car fixed. Yes you’ll still have to do some maintenance on it, but getting started is the hardest part.
Refocus
So now that we understand the true nature of these thoughts, we can roll up our sleeves and get to work. Step three is “refocus.” It’s as simple and as complicated as that. Your car is stuck in first gear not wanting to shift, you’ve got to get aggressive with it and just force it into that next gear. It’s going to be hard at first and you’ll find yourself automatically slipping back into those old behaviors for a while. Remember that every single time that you take control and push your thoughts and your body into different patterns and behaviors, that’s a victory. If you spend a couple minutes fighting against your old habits, and it feels wrong and scary but you put up a fight, you win. It’s that simple. You did not create these powerful negative habits overnight, you’re not going to break them overnight. It’s not going to take too terribly long to develop new ones because you’re doing it intentionally, but it’s going to take some time. Don’t think that just because refocusing on something doesn’t alleviate that anxiety, that you’re failing. You’re brain is still in freakout mode, and is still going to try to bring you back to what’s familiar. Any genuine attempt you make that you weren’t doing before is progress, even if in the end you still fall back into your old ways. As time goes on and you practice, the act of forcing those gears to shift will make it go smoother. The brain will learn that this is what you want to do, it’ll create those new pathways, it’ll release less stress related chemicals, which will make things much easier, and it’s all downhill from there.
By the way; if your car transmission is not shifting please go get it serviced.
Take things one step at a time and celebrate every small victory that you can. The best exercise in this book is the fifteen minute rule. Whenever you catch yourself in a downward spiral, shift your focus to something else for fifteen minutes. Look at the time and don’t let yourself give in for fifteen minutes. Don’t obsess over that rude customer, don’t wash your hands again, don’t let yourself slip into whatever it is that’s bothering you. It’s going to be hard but knowing there’s a time limit makes it much easier. After fifteen minutes, usually your brain relaxes because you start to realize that nothing bad is really going to happen if you don’t act right away. If it’s still stressing you out then ok; slip into that behavior and celebrate the fact that you’ve shown yourself capable of fighting back even if it was only for that time frame.
It’s really important here to actually do something else though. Sitting there trying to force yourself to not think about something is probably not going to work. Actually focus on something that will take up some of your attention. Do something physical and change your state if possible. You may also start to notice a tendency for your body to start to behave certain ways without you knowing it. Unconsciously you may start tensing up, moving sporadically and breathing shallow. Taking the time to notice and take control of these behaviors will go a long way towards your healing. At first the anxiety or depression will still be there, but that’s ok. With practice it’ll take a backseat and start to fade as you get better at shifting from the negative to something else. After you do this for a while you’ll begin drawing new maps for your unconscious to follow, and you won’t even need to give it much conscious effort anymore because your habits will align with your goals. Don’t get discouraged when this is difficult at first, because it will be. Don’t just expect that you can change imbedded negative patterns without getting active and doing some real work. If those thoughts and feelings get overwhelming, just look back on those first two steps and remind yourself that they are symptoms of a disorder, bad habits or whatever it is that you’re struggling with. Even if it’s something like anger, remind yourself that you’ll have plenty of time to be angry and upset in fifteen minutes, but nothing bad will happen during that time if you don’t immediately act on those urges. This is going to train your mind to really understand that these are just thoughts and feelings that don’t necessarily have to be acted upon, which leads us to our final step…
Revalue
This step is a natural result of the previous three steps. After you begin to teach your mind to shift gears from the negative to the positive, when those thoughts and feelings do come up they’re not going to seem as intimidating. When you start to really understand that anxiety, depression and whatever else is just that and nothing more, those thoughts are just thoughts, they really begin to lose their strength. What I really want to point out here is when you’re really struggling with a disorder or really powerful negative patterns, we have a tendency to feel stuck. We start thinking that this is just the way life is and that it’s forever. That could not be further from the truth though. Once you build the skill involved with taking control of your thought process you will develop a very powerful mind. Becoming self-aware enough to dictate your unconscious leaves you with the ability to shape your life however you want. Not only will you learn to cope with these issues, they will cease to be something you struggle with. If you’re in that place where every day just feels like survival and your mind is a living hell, I promise you that not only can you survive, you can completely and permanently change how you feel. You don’t have to live like that. I spent years looking for solutions before I started to make progress so I know the struggle. It takes real work, but when you change your behaviors and habits your brain rewires itself. It changes it’s physical structure to match those habits, so you can change it to not go down those same roads anymore.
Beyond that though; once you master this skill you’ll realize that you can not only heal, but you can begin creating whatever life you want. You can shape your way of thinking and feeling, which before long becomes your way of life. I like to think of Dr. Strange in the Marvel world. He’s got a crippling injury and is trying to figure out a way to heal himself. He learns of a formerly paralyzed patient who apparently made a complete recovery and goes to talk to him. The man tells him that he learned the mystic arts from monks in Tibet, who basically taught him to heal himself with magick. So Strange goes and learns the same skills, but he doesn’t settle for his healing miracle. He wants to see how far he can take it and ends up being this incredibly powerful superhero. That’s my all time favorite Marvel movie, because the story conveys something that we all have the innate ability to do. We can heal our thoughts and feelings, and take that power as far as we want to. After we heal we can intentionally create the life of our dreams and go from suicidal to superhero. What’s crazy is that it really doesn’t even take that long if you really commit.
You can begin by following these four steps; Relabel, Reattribute, Refocus and Revalue.
Your thoughts don’t necessarily reflect reality. Understand that those feelings are just feelings, and that you can change them with a little work.
Thank you for reading everyone. If you want to get in touch with me, Instagram or the email on my website is the best way. Let me know if you have any questions or if I can do anything to help.
Good luck!
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