I went for a 5K run with my daughter at the weekend. She was surprised that I was running without listening to music. She said, “But you’ll be stuck in your own thoughts all the time.” And what’s wrong with that. I guess the problem is that many people do not have very positive thoughts all, or even most of the time. To be honest I can’t say that the thoughts I have about running, whilst running are always positive either. This is one of the paradoxes of the human experience. We have evolved this wonderful thinking machine, which has raised us ‘above’ everything else on the planet. And yet at the same time we often use our brains to beat ourselves up about the past, and to worry about the future. Is this the best use of this highly evolved machinery? You may have seen nature documentaries where a pride of lions will chase down a zebra. After the lions have caught their lunch, the rest of the zebras, who were only a few seconds ago running for their lives, stop and eat grass. Usually within sight of the lions feasting on their erstwhile herd member. The zebras don’t all stand around in a huddle fretting about what just happened, and what might happen to them next. No, they stop and eat grass.
We feel anxiety when we imagine a future that we don’t prefer. It is how our bodies translate the sense that we’re imagining a future that we do not want. This can be useful, because maybe you need to plan, or take some action. If I have an exam next week and I’m anxious about it because I haven’t done any revision, then what is the feeling telling me? Maybe that I should do some revision, or that I need to change my expectations about my outcome and decide what I will do if I don’t pass. Here the anxiety isn’t a bad thing, it is a messenger. Treat it that way.
Have you ever had the experience when something you were worried about didn’t turn out as bad as you thought it would? It’s common, because we build things up in our heads, and catastrophise. But things were never actually as bad as we convinced ourselves they were. We are using the power of our own thinking and imagination to make ourselves feel bad. That may not have been our intention, but it is often the outcome. There is fundamentally no cure for anxiety, except to habitually imagine a future that you do prefer. Easy to say, not always easy to do. With clients I explore what stops them imagining a future they do prefer. This is often negative emotions from the past, limiting beliefs, internal conflict, or a learned process. The tools in the Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) toolkit can help people to let go of these limitations.
Fritz Perls, who was one of the people modelled in the creation of NLP, used to say, “Stop thinking and come to your senses.” There are many ways to do this. One is box breathing. When you feel anxious, breathe in, whilst counting to four, then hold the breath for a count of four, breathe out for a count of four, and finally to complete the box, don’t breathe for a count of four. Another way to take the edge off your anxiety and to get out of your thinking sense is to see five things, feel four things, hear three things, smell two things, and taste one thing. Ground yourself back into your, non-thinking, sensory world. Thinking is great, but we must learn that we are the ones who are doing the thinking. We create it, we can learn to control and direct it. Meditation is another way to get yourself back into your sensory experience, and to quieten the mind. I come across many people who say, “My mind is too busy to meditate.” But that is why you need to meditate. It is both a short term and a long-term solution, and it is worth the effort. Become like the zebra, run when there is real danger, but once the danger is past, stop and eat grass.
“To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.” Lao Tzu
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