Do You Know What Mindfulness Is?
Can you tell me what it is for you? I have two female friends each recently concerned with being more ‘mindful’.
One of them has invested a lot of money in a mindfulness course but she’s not happy with herself. She doesn’t believe she’s getting it right. The instructor does a ‘body sweep awareness guided meditation’ where everyone lies down, closes their eyes then focuses on different body parts under the guidance of the instructor’s voice. The first body part they focus on is the right thumb. This friend complains to me she always falls asleep half way through so she’s not doing it right and she’s frustrated with herself. ‘Do you have any tips I can use to stay awake, Carl?’. I tell her I do the same thing myself at my yoga class and I’ve never heard the full guided meditation my instructor does either. In fact I’m so conditioned to fall asleep now I doze off as soon as I hear the words ‘right thumb’. I believe if she needs to go to sleep she should go to sleep and accept the fact she goes to sleep.
I tell her if I were in her position I would focus instead on the self criticisms; rather than on her going to sleep. I suggest she just accepts she falls asleep half way through the guided meditation but then criticises herself and focus on why she does that. At the moment my friend doesn’t want to do that and continues to feel frustrated but I think her instructor would be pleased if she did and told him.
My other female friend likes to attend hour-long group meditation sessions in the evening and keeps trying to encourage me to go to the same sessions. I’ve been a couple of times but don’t get home until 11.30 pm and I’m really tired the next day. We have conversations about meditation and she tells me she does meditation with the intention of being happy throughout. She also talks about ‘mindfulness’ and tells me I would be happier and mindful if I did what she did. I explain to her my idea of meditation and mindfulness are different to hers. My friend sits down to meditate with the intention of being happy whereas I meditate with a view to allowing whatever comes up from my emotions to come up. I work with negative and positive emotional energies alike; simply watching them go by with minimum criticism or intention. Whenever I try to impose an intention on them it gets in the way of the processing. If I had a bad day I had a bad day and if I had a good day then I did.
Trusting the Natural Process of Pure Observation
I’m going to let you in on a little secret everyone knows but can’t quite believe. Our brains are designed to restructure themselves automatically; purely through observation alone. You know that old saying ‘we only use 10% of our brain?’. It’s not true. The truth is only 10% of our brain is made up of fixed neuronal pathways – the other 90% consists of clusters of ‘glial’ or ‘glue’ cells – which are all constantly on the move. These clusters of glial cells use the neuronal networks like fixed telephone lines to communicate with each other. When current neurones aren’t needed any more or new ones need growing it’s the glial cells that re-route them.
The only thing you need do to cause this restructuring is take your conscious point of focus to the place you decide needs to be observed. The greatest stimulus for generating change in your brain’s structure is pain. So if you’re thinking automatically in a certain judgemental way about something and this causes you emotional pain taking your conscious point of focus into the emotional pain itself and staying there will force your glial cells to restructure your thought networks eventually making your self-critical-pain-causing-thought-habits go away. The part of your brain which makes the decision to take your conscious point of focus ‘in’ to an area of life for closer observation is what I call ‘the Silent Observer’.
This takes a degree of courage because whenever you do this your automatic unconscious thoughts will come up into conscious awareness and warn you ‘you may not survive this’. In a way it’s true – the old ways of thinking and behaving will not survive. But you won’t know whether this is a good or bad thing until you take yourself in ‘there’ and observe it for long enough.
When we talk about ‘mindfulness’ what we’re talking about is paying attention to how a thing actually is, including ourselves, in the natural world rather than how we wish it was or currently think it is. Criticising ourselves for ‘not being mindful enough’ misses the entire point of mindfulness. If you are criticising yourself pay attention to that. Whatever arises pay attention to it. There is no right or wrong. The practice of mindfulness involves becoming non-subjective: being objective. Sitting on the outside, looking in.
Developing the Silent Observer
I got rid of 27 obsessions; 14 phobias; panic attacks and depression simply by developing the willingness to go inside and observe closely and for long enough. This forced my brain to restructure itself. This approach to working on myself has now become an automatic habit – and I continue to get happier and happier as the years go by because I work on accepting how I really work rather than how I wish I did. Early on in my self-work I noticed I was becoming more aware of a part of myself I called ‘the Silent Observer’. It did not speak; it did not feel; it did not produce much at all – but it directed my next steps. It observed. It told me where I should go both internally and externally to ‘observe’ as an action in its own right.
I learned later the Silent Observer is officially called the ‘Prefrontal Cortex’. I’ve written plenty elsewhere on the blog about what the PFC does so I’m not going to go into that too much here. The Prefrontal Cortex decides on ‘direction’ in an Objective Mind (unemotional) way. What it does then, however, is it instructs your emotional brain and body parts to produce emotions whenever you appear to be going off path. In this it acts as a ruthless master controller. Unfortunately what it doesn’t control is what other people do; so when other people are blocking the path your PFC has decided on your emotional brain and body parts start sending out pain signals telling you that you are going off path with the message you must change yourself or do something in the external world about it. Often when the signals coming back tell the PFC the path is still blocked no matter what you do it doesn’t accept what the signals are telling it and starts blocking them. This is when we have started to deny what reality is and we get stuck emotionally and in the outside world.
Our Prefrontal Cortex is a ‘sensory gateway controller’. It opens and closes sensory information routes in our body and brain. If it makes the mistake of refusing to allow signals about reality come on through for its attention, which it does by labelling them ‘unacceptable’ or ‘abnormal’; it sets you up for a lot of long-term pain. You become incongruent – who you really are internally and who you are trying to project yourself as externally become misaligned. So when you sit down to meditate you force yourself to think happy thoughts and when you lay down for a guided meditation you punish yourself for not meeting your unrealistic expectations. Observing yourself doing this is enough to start the ball rolling in terms of genuine mindfulness.
As you practice studying yourself in this way you become gradually more aware simply ‘looking’ is enough to cause deep, long-term changes for the better in your life. You may not at times like or enjoy what you see and experience – it can come as a shock – but that is the whole point. That is genuine mindfulness.
What Does Mindfulness Training Actually Do?
It teaches you to accept who you are and how you operate as a genuine individual human being.
But don’t let me tell you what it is and allow me to sit here all smug in my ‘knowledge’? You tell me what it means to you by leaving a comment! 
Regards
Carl
Anxious About Entering a Room Full of People?
It’s natural when going into a room full of people – especially if they’re mostly strangers and even more so if you’re going to be speaking to them – to feel a little apprehensive. By ‘apprehensive’ I also mean anxious. Fearful. Sometimes downright terrified. I work with a lot of teachers who would tell you they often feel the same way.
It’s not a pleasant sensation. But you can offset those temporary feelings by reframing them in your thoughts as ‘exciting’. Instead of saying ‘I am afraid’ replace that with ‘I am excited’.
The message ‘I may not be able to cope’ enters your thoughts – reframe that with ‘I wonder what I’ll learn’ or ‘I wonder who I’ll meet?’ or ‘How many people will I make feel good today’ or some other positive message.
In terms of the overall reaction itself reframe that with ‘this is the price for learning; for progress; for growth – and everyone pays it at some point’.
Instead of saying ‘what’s wrong with me/I’m so weak/I wish I didn’t have this reaction’ reframe that with ‘this reaction is designed to protect me in case of dangerous circumstances – I’ll just watch how it works’.
Keep an eye out for ‘catastrophisation’ – ‘making mountains out of molehills’ thinking; this is the thinking where your imagination creates scenarios of ‘terrible things that could happen’ and it causes your body to react as if they are happening but after they haven’t happened you feel a bit silly. Be aware if something negative were to happen you can always use social systems designed to deal with it or you can simply take better control of which groups you go into. Expect to go into lots of groups and not enjoy some of them – but the anxiety of going into a group is a different thing to what happens when you’re actually in a group, isn’t it? Anticipatory fear like this is a just in case response.
Don’t criticise it – just observe it. Observe it with criticism and you’ll maybe block the response from releasing (which can lead to emotional disorders). A lot of the agoraphobics I come into contact with have developed the reaction because they couldn’t accept this natural process and have started to fight it automatically. Observe it in the same way a naturalist observes gorillas in the wild and you’ll just be accepting it as a natural reaction and eventually the whole thing dies down from an intense reaction to a tiny little twitch of ‘excitement’.
There are some groups you don’t want to go into; you’re not suited to them and they’re not suited to you. That’s why we all have this reaction. But you won’t know whether you’re mutually suited unless you’re going into them. It’s important not to make the mistake of saying ‘it’s just silly me again’ and forcing yourself into groups you’re not suited to in order only to overcome emotional discomfort. If you find yourself definitely being treated badly in any group I suggest you leave it at your earliest opportunity.
But don’t let the protective mechanism designed to protect you from unsuitable groups stop you going into those you do want and need to go into by criticising the mechanism itself.
Regards
Carl
Five Things To Do When in a Really Bad Mood
Recently three upsetting things happened to me on the same day (I’m a big believer in the ‘trouble comes in threes’).
One of them was a long-term background problem which had been going for several years coming to a head, and which threatened possible financial disaster for me, while the two others were unpleasant one-off interactions with two stupid egotistical men in separate locations. The end result was I felt in a really angry mood. If you’ve read the rest of my blog you’ll know I’m always giving out the advice on how to overcome emotional problems (which are actually nothing more than trapped moods we’ve identified with and made permanent) but that doesn’t mean I escape being human. I get into moody states too.
Drop a Happiness Seed in Your Head
‘I am not happy now but I will be eventually’. Create a picture of yourself having felt your bad mood out and returned to a calm, happy state. Then return to feeling your current actual mood. It’s important not to try and escape the symptoms of a mood because the mood then remains for much longer – sometimes even becoming ‘permanent’. Acknowledge you have to endure and work with the mood until it has been fully released but know you will eventually return to a much happier state.
Fester on the Cause of Your Bad Mood
In a ‘safe place’ – by this I mean in a closed off room where no social damage can actually be caused or with the help of supportive others, positively fester on the issues concerned and think about exactly what it is you’re upset about. Agree with your reactions. Do not attempt to ‘moralise’ your feelings away – emotions are neither good nor bad, they are natural temporary states. It’s what you do with the energy produced, rather than the fact you produced the energy itself which decides the question of their morality. By ensuring you do the work in your own space and time it completely removes the question of emotional morality.
At different points along the journey repeatedly introduce the idea of ‘eventually happy me’, repeating the idea your mood is temporary and without attempting to impose happiness immediately.
Express Your Mood with Various Mock Purposes
A mood produces a lot of energy and the energy needs funnelling and directing. Write an ‘unsent letter’; draw pictures; create imagined scenarios. In imagination only take excessive revenge and go through the physical actions; do anything which allows the energy to come up and be released. Feel the full power of your mood knowing at some point you will release it while extracting some useful information from the experience – even if it is only the knowledge you are able to funnel and direct the energy of your own moods without causing unnecessary harm in the outside world.
Normalise the Journey
Create a mental picture of yourself as you travel through the mood, releasing the energy and returning to a happier self (I create the image of an ‘energy hill’ in my head knowing once I’ve released the energy at the hill’s peak the mood will soon pass through me). Acknowledge this is how almost all people behave when in a mood. Also acknowledge if they try to pretend they’re not in a mood and refuse to release the energy they remain stuck in a suppressed state – holding the mood in, and criticising themselves.
Equally, acknowledge people often get the energy release mechanism wrong in that they project their mood energy onto others and this can cause social damage. You’re not going to be one of those people. Emotional maturity does not come about as a result of never having a mood – it comes about by realising the responsibility for managing your moods is ultimately your responsibility. That does not mean, however, nothing needs to change in the external world. That’s going to be the next thing to do – but before we get to that …
DO NOT SELF-CRITICISE.
Reverse any and all self-criticism as you do this work in private. If you made a mistake say ‘I learned from that mistake and it’s a normal part of the training’ and move on. The ‘should-not thoughts’ are all unrealistic. Your emotional core is probably more of you than the rest of you is; it is your caring core. It reacts and you have to work with whatever it does. Criticising it does not make it go away and if you try to make it go away it will fight back. Emotional disorders are moods fighting moods with more moods. Trapped energies fighting trapped energies. Releasing the initial response safely using this, or any other effective method you use, ensures you don’t get stuck in the emotional disorder trap. Self-criticism is evidence you are automatically trying to block a natural process. Learn not to do this. And don’t feel bad when you do do this because that’s what I’m talking about! Feeling bad is a natural thing – don’t feel bad because you felt bad – move on.
Drop another ‘happy seed’ in there while you’re at it. If the mood’s still present continue to be with it knowing it will go of its own accord. Now about that needed ‘change in the external world’ stuff.
Channel the Energy into Producing Positive Outputs and Outcomes
An output is a thing while an outcome is the overall affect of the thing.
You do not have total control over how the positive output and outcome are received by others – you only control your intentions. There are quite a few situations I’ve been in where no matter how I responded the feedback would never be exactly what I’d hoped for and it was just a matter of making the best of a bad situation handed me by life. Become firm on your intention to produce a positive outputs and outcomes habitually and then accept you have limited control of how the things you produce are received. Just think ‘whenever something bad happens to me and I produce the energy to deal with it I do my best to ensure I produce a constructive output or outcome using that energy’. That’s enough – then make sure that’s what you do. Here are some examples:
- A group of young men passing make threatening remarks and it frightens you – you walk by without saying a word in reply in order not to make the situation worse but you’re still left with the fight/flight reaction to deal with. You take your reaction to the gym. As you work out in the gym you imagine yourself hitting those young men in self-defence. You get a really good work out. After finishing the workout you picture the group of young men and mentally thank them for enabling you to get a really good workout. Their intention was to upset you but you transformed their intention into something else; remind yourself you are a person who takes negative energy and converts it to positive outcomes. If you see the same group of young men and they repeat the behaviour, however, you phone the police and let them deal with it – the young men concerned are a social problem; not your problem. Having used this approach multiple times successfully you find yourself mentally thanking those groups of aggressive young men even before you get to the gym
- You remember the ‘unsent letter’ technique I mentioned above? This involves writing everything you think and feel down in a letter you may or may not send later. Once you are calmer read through everything written and extract those points you think can be sent to the right people with a view to resolving the initial triggering problem. Don’t be accusative if you can avoid it – get formal; almost helpful. Learn how to persuade people rather than punish them. Avoid being too demanding. Show some empathy for them – but don’t be too forgiving either, eh? Sometimes they really are as evil as you think they are. Start nice and if nice works then stay nice but if it doesn’t move on to necessary
- Intend to share your experience with others with a view to benefiting them – this is my most important mood normalisation and release technique – to use my experiences to support others in ‘what it is to be human’. We often feel alienated and isolated when stuck in a mood and society is full of folks who feel bullied, picked on and disempowered. Break the spell by sharing your inner world with others. You can start by leaving a comment below! Or you can write me using the feedback tab on the left and tell me what techniques you personally use to escape a bad mood.
May your today be full of flowering happiness seeds!
Regards
Carl
Emotional Vibrations Part 7– Attachment Versus Detachment
At full intensity attachment feels blindingly wonderful. At full intensity detachment, its opposite, feels physically-fall-down-to-the-floor-and-stay-there helplessly debilitating. Neither of these vibrational states is unnatural. All mammals have states such as these organically built in.
Towards; Away From or Play Dead
Those are the options we’re given. We hear a lot about the ‘Law of Attraction’ but there’s also a ‘Law of Repulsion’ and a ‘Law of Surrender’, with all three built into our biology. One causes us to move towards a thing; another away while the third causes us to lie down and give up for a while (this third response is also known as the Freeze Response or the Mammalian Disassociation Response and is accompanied by a deep sense of powerlessness). These are Nature’s Laws; whether our egos like them or not. Every single activity going on in your body: your thoughts, feelings, actions, conscious or unconscious, is initiated by the physical connection and disconnection of receptors and ligands – organic locks and keys – millions of them interacting on the surfaces of every single cell of your body – locking into each other, exchanging messages, initiating physical affects, unlocking, detaching and moving on. Connection and disconnection is the entire story of life. This is a physical reality.
It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about our individual cells, ourselves as individuals, individuals as parts of families or organisations and even nations – we operate using the same model atoms do. They vibrate, we vibrate. They pull together, they split apart, we do too. We collide and struggle sometimes finding ourselves sucked in by distractions which pull us away from our own personal journey while travelling between multiple vibrational fields producing, using and wasting a lot of energy as we go (it is our misunderstanding and mismanagement of these energies, particularly the failure to fully discharge them and return to a happy state, which leads to emotional disorders).
We follow the ‘greater mass’; get attracted to certain things within the mass, despite knowing at some point we will inevitably be rejected and feel withdrawn. We do all this knowing everything gained in our lives will eventually be lost; everything. Yet still we find a way to create meaning and that meaning gives us a sense of direction – this is something to be worked on by every one of us otherwise we really are ‘lost’ amidst everybody else’s intentions. It’s a process we’re all united and equal in – this process of happy vibrational living managed through a strong sense of meaning.
First Love Attachment
Between puberty and the mid-20’s I believe we are most susceptible to ‘first love’ attachment, one of the most intense natural attachments we can have (if you have others and want to share them please tell me about it as a comment or send it to me using the feedback tab top left of the page). We regard another sexually attractive idealised person as ‘the one’ then bond to the idealised image we produce. This feels wonderful and works great if you both feel the same way, but when it’s a one way deal one of you is in for a period of suffering.
It helps to realise, when dealing with attachment versus detachment issues, you are not bonded to the actual external person or ‘thing’ or lifelong plan you have invested yourself in – you are bonded to an internal image, or to some other form of electrical sensory construct, to which you have internally attached strong ‘toward and reward’ molecular reactions – nothing less, nothing more. The person or thing to which you attached is not responsible for your attachment/detachment process nor are they required to do anything to resolve this inner conflict. You created it; you alone have the right to keep, transform, learn from, reduce and even remove it.
Blinded by ‘the light’ of first love attachment we are unable to see negatives in the other even when externally those negatives are glaringly obvious to everyone else. As those external negatives signals grow in plain sight we go on to develop denial strategies; desperately attempting to retrieve the bond. We suffer withdrawal symptoms whenever we perceive the internal image as being taken away from us. When the real external person or situation begins to abuse us, either psychologically or physically, the fact something is wrong in the relationship is self evident but the bonded person takes responsibility for ‘fixing things’ by assuming over-responsibility. Internal self rejection follows on from the external rejection and confused withdrawal symptoms kick in as we eventually surrender to the fact we are powerless to achieve connection. We are organically designed, pretty much, to punish ourselves during periods of disconnection. As I say, it’s all built in.
Our reward and punishment mechanisms (the Mesolimbic and the Limbic brains); work to ensure we get rewarded for connecting and punished for disconnecting. The most intense feelings of reward are built around the sex/maternal/parental drives and these drives are produced by powerful bonding neuropeptides – hormones and neurotransmitters. The degree to which we bond depends on our individual mix of genetic, social and personal programming. Did you know there is a gene in males, for example, the length of which decides whether he will be a sexual bonder or a player by default nature?
Say Hello to Your Prefrontal Cortex
Generally speaking our reproductive drives win the battle for control over what we think about from puberty until some time in our mid-20’s. You have to wait until then before the connections between your Prefrontal Cortex and the rest of your body become functionally connected. The PFC, based just behind your forehead, controls how you react to your own thoughts, feelings; impulses and actions in regards to your physical and social environments. By the time the PFC finally connects you may already have reproduced without consciously meaning to before being fully ready for the responsibilities of parenthood. Unless, that is, you’ve had a good relationship with another trustworthy adult possessing a fully formed Prefrontal Cortex of their own, and you’ve used their PFC as a proxy guide.
This is why (in my neighbourhood anyway) there’s necessity for so much heavy duty sexual health education for teens. The Government is attempting to act as PFC for these young folks. Reproducing on the basis of your sexual or maternal impulses makes Nature happy and to demonstrate it’s happiness with you it pumps you full of intensely bonding gratification responses to compel you to meet that agenda even against your own conscious will.
The maturing of the Prefrontal Cortex connection, in terms of the level of control it exerts over the Natural agenda we’re subjected to, isn’t automatic – we have to work at it all our lives. To be happy most of the time you have to pay properly focused attention to what and how you attach to things emotionally. To be ‘mature’ means to have a properly connected, fully functional Prefrontal Cortex and we’re all at different stages of development in this regard.
If we don’t pay attention to what the PFC tells us in private we become dependent on the external social world for managing our internal world and, because the external world rarely operates with our personal happiness in mind, we can find ourselves rapidly switching backwards and forwards between the two vibrational states of attachment and detachment, without any idea how this switching came about or how to stop it.
Amazing You to Stupid Me in Five Seconds then Back Again and Forth Again and Back and Forth Again
I’m talking with a 19 year old who’s big dream is to be lead guitar player in a band. Right now though his problem is he hasn’t eaten in several days. He has no money and nowhere to live. He tells me he has a problem discussing his problems with people but I point out to him I’ve known him all of 10 minutes and I get a different impression.
From the information he’s given me so far that big band dream of his looks to be a realistic possibility; as long as he survives long enough to reach it! When we discuss the dream you can see the dopamine-induced power it has on the way he talks and physically moves in his chair. He comes bright and alive during those moments. Dopamine is the neuropeptide which gives us a sense of excitement about the new, the sparkly, the interesting – it is one of several important natural ‘bonding agents’ we have and a prime ‘attachment’ driver. Talking about his big dream even gets me excited and thinking about my own. Wow. Big Dreams, eh? But we have to come back to reality. In the short term, today, – and maybe for a few more weeks or months, he’s got to focus on more mundane things such as eating, sleeping and having a roof to do both under. I remember a time I was his age and having pretty much the same difficult experiences he is.
I start discussing (and drawing out on paper) the steps I regard as mundane but necessary solutions to his problems. I’ve done the same things with hundreds of people before and I know they work so for me there’s no sense of mystery or wonder to them. To him, though, it’s all new information because the problems he’s dealing with right now are also relatively new (the depression’s been going on a while, he tells me, and my personal interpretation of the reason for that is he’s feeling trapped with few immediately obvious available escape options).
As I’m outlining each and every step and how it will resolve a particular problem he goes into a temporary reaction of ‘wow’ at the end of every step discussed. He looks off into the distance, eyes glazing over as though he’s looking at yet another big dream and says. ‘Wow, if you can get that problem sorted for me that’ll be so amazing. That’ll make my life sooooo much better’. As we finish talking about the final step his attention turns back to me, he seems to physically shrink into himself and with a sullen look on his face says ‘I’m so friggin’ stupid, I should’ve sorted this out before. It’s my own fault. I’m sorry for wasting your time. I’m an idiot, I always have been. My whole family tells me but I just can’t sort my head out. It’s this depression thing’. Throughout the chat I notice I’m getting this ‘switch from hope to despair’ response repeatedly; a kind of habitual ‘you’re cool but I’m a nightmare’ thing’s going on inside his head.
We go see a few of my other colleagues who help sort some of his money and food problems; then we have a second meeting to discuss progress so far and start talking about the way he alternates between ‘wow’ and ‘I’m stupid’ during our conversations. He asks if I know why he has this ‘switching’ habit. I tell him I think he uses it as a motivational tool and it looks as though it’s become an unconscious habit; I tell him some of the things I’m going to say below and he nods and tells me I’ve opened his eyes and he ‘gets it’.
Using Detachment and Attachment as Motivational States
Most of us have used the ‘harsh’ approach to get something done now and again – this approach, when used against others, threatens ‘social detachment’. Sometimes it becomes necessary to do this where people are being determinedly difficult and don’t want to change. I’ve used it as a shock tactic, admittedly sometimes inappropriately, in a bid to protect my own health or someone else or get a particular job done. Others attempt to use it on me. The reason most of us don’t like it, though, no matter how it’s used is because although it gets a particular job done, it damages the overall relationship (and sometimes the approach can backfire). That’s fine if you want the relationship to end anyway or you’re willing to take the risk of paying the consequences when things go wrong. Usually though, even if everyone involved agrees harsh motivators are necessary, the result is a social atmosphere that ‘stinks’.
The same thing happens if you’re using negative motivators on yourself, automatically, and can’t physically ‘leave’ after creating an internal stink. What you’re doing when you negatively motivate yourself is breaking your inner bond – trying to motivate yourself by threatening to dislike yourself if you don’t achieve something. Do you like yourself? Your ugly bits too? You should because liking and having compassion for yourself are the only shields you have against mistreatment from others. Tell enough people out there you don’t think much of you; tell them your negative life experiences are happening because a faulty you is attracting them, and you’ll soon find yourself with a ‘raving support network’ willing to confirm the theory. That theory soon becomes a standard operating procedure you deliberately refuse to change – until the internal pain gets so great it forces you to challenge and change your interpretations.
We probably start the self-criticism habit after experiencing negative treatment from someone we’re dependent on, or currently trust, and who’s opinion is important to us. They point out some alleged weakness of ours, such has having an ‘anger problem’, then we see evidence they may be right and ‘adjust for the better’ in order to receive their social approval. We internalise this whole approach and start automatically associating criticism of the self with social reward, acceptance and relationship maintenance.
This is also why we unconsciously allow ourselves to ‘catastrophise’ – a posh word for ‘building mountains out of molehills’. We create imaginary, emotionally charged negative scenarios, designed to drive us to either avoid or deal with a potential threat, should it eventually turn out to be genuine. Although the threat more often than not turns out to be unreal, the negative emotional charge produced to deal with it is, and once again we’re left with an internal environment that ‘stinks’ unless we take action to clear it out.
Once our self-punishment-to-motivate tactics becomes unconsciously habitual, we create a consistently negative internal world, without even realising we think that way. Like all negative environments, the only thing you eventually want to do is leave. You can make yourself perpetually so sad about all your alleged failings and so angry about all your alleged losses you literally nag yourself into a state of depression. Brain scan studies on depressed people show they attempt to pull their electrical brain activity down into their lower brain areas in an attempt to withdraw from external life, and from themselves. They are attempting to leave. The problem with this is it’s their internal life – the pain inside – actually causing the problem and pulling back causes them to ruminate even further.
All of this, by the way, needs to be ‘accepted’ as normal if you suffer with depression and want to get better. It is a completely normal trap to find yourself temporarily stuck in. The way to release yourself from the trap is to understand the structure of your attachment/detachment process and work with it instead of against it. We need to stop criticising ourselves for criticising ourselves!
The Leap
Down in the doldrums; ruminating in our lower brain; we now get desperate to leap upwards towards the relief of positive feelings again. We use our imagination to work for us by creating an amazing wonderful sort-it-all-out-in-one-humongous-dream launch and this produces a powerful dopamine buzz. For a short while those deliberately over-inflated expectations in the brain work but dopamine needs the feedback mechanism provided by another neuropeptide, serotonin, to balance its affects and restore its own depleted reserves.
Serotonin is our gratification inducer and is triggered when we see we have ‘arrived’ at our big dream (just note here again this is also an internal mechanism which has little to do with what’s going on in the real world – which means if you can find a way to generate your own serotonin triggers you can rebalance your emotional attachment process in regards to your imagined scenarios without needing to rely on the external world for permission). Found mostly around our stomach, but also in our brain, serotonin is the stuff that makes us feel and so think ‘satisfied’. Pump up your dopamine release too high without achieving the big dream before your dopamine depletes and your brain knows the big dream ‘failed’ and serotonin release is held back causing withdrawal symptoms to kick in (eg disappointment; feeling ‘down’). This is a simplified model – there are other bonding neuropeptides involved, but it’s enough information to develop a working mental model and use it on a daily basis.
To rebalance ourselves when entering a state of withdrawal we need to go fully through the negative symptoms for long enough to allow natural production of dopamine to top back up again. Once on the other side of withdrawal we can reduce the frequency of this ‘up-down-see-saw’ affect by lowering our daily expectations while at the same time practicing focusing on smaller daily results thereby releasing serotonin more regularly. What if nothing particularly satisfying happened today? You find something from another day and use that. You trigger this gratification mechanism deliberately rather than expect some random hoped for series of life events to do it for you.
Practising gratitude by deliberately focusing on what we did do rather than what we think we should have is the answer. Big dreams are nice now and again; it’s OK to let yourself be carried along by them for a while – as long as you’re prepared to pay the price for the other side of the equation. We have no direct control of any external big dream but we do have the ability to control our internal world in regards to how we perceive our daily experiences.
I advised the 19 year old to focus on savouring each of his daily successes – regardless of how mundane they may seem – to focus on reflecting on his guitar jamming sessions rather than always using ‘the leap to the big band dream’ for boosting his mood. This will help reduce his getting stuck in that ‘nothing’s ever good enough’ loop.
Attachment Management
Ideas; images; other people; things; plans; directions; sensations; sounds; rhythms; hobbies; experiences; beliefs; places; values; time periods; emotions; body parts; books.
We can attach to a lot of things. Here’s a suggestion:
- Identify a big dream in regards to the kind of person you are or want to be
- What kind of daily, mundane things does that kind of person do? Do those things
- Set daily goals in regards to carrying out those mundane actions proving to yourself you really are that kind of person – you can explore; experiment; research; discuss – while accepting you will only occasionally achieve external recognition – your true achievement is in seeing and liking yourself as you act in this mundane way; this strengthens your inner bond regardless of what others say or do
- Ask yourself at the end of every day if you’ve taken action to be that kind of person you admire then positively fester on the satisfaction gained from the slightest sign you have.
By all means, now and again, think about a big external dream and enjoy the buzz it brings, but remind yourself you do not control the actual results.
Attach to that and you will repeatedly return to a happy state; not quickly maybe; not in a ‘burst of light’; but once you’ve done it a few times you’ll learn to trust and like yourself more and more as time goes by.
Regards
Carl
Emotional Vibrations Part 6 – What Happiness Is
How do you know when you’re ‘happy’? I don’t mean ecstatic or satisfied or enthusiastic – happy. What does ‘happy’ feel like? Describe it as a vibrational state or in any other form.
And once you’ve done that – tell me how to get it not just once but consistently even if I haven’t got it or had it for a long time; we’re talking here about having lost happiness for so long I’ve forgotten what it looks and feels like. Can you tell me how to get happiness back please?
That was the situation I found myself in near the end of 2004 – with my obsessions and my phobias and my panic attacks and my depression – I had forgotten what happiness felt like. I certainly didn’t know how to get it back. I had been asking advice from the professionals for a while and they weren’t telling me what I needed to know.
In 2004 I was 43; I’d been emotionally ill from age 22. Now, all this time later, I was finally giving myself permission to take proper care of myself; to get happy no matter what it took; but I wasn’t sure how to do it – or how I would even know when I’d finally ‘achieved’ it.
I am not alone in my forgetting. People with long-term emotional disorders, or who have been in a negative environment for a long period of time, are at risk of losing not just their happiness but also the understanding of what happiness is. They forget what it feels like; looks like; how to get it.
In this post I’m going to explain:
- Why we forget our understanding of happiness
- What causes us to lose it
- Chip Conley’s happiness formula and how we can take practical action based around it
- How we get happiness back by pursuing it directly which means:
- ending relationships; destroying pleasant memories and changing our ‘moral beliefs’ (at the bottom of the post you’ll find Amazon links for the books mentioned).
Why Do We Forget?
Happiness is our default emotional state. That’s why.
Prior to losing connection to our default happiness we don’t really know we have it. Like most default things in life we only notice our default happiness when it’s gone. Like when you’re in a store and they turn the muzak off and you realise you weren’t consciously listening but now it’s gone you’d like it back please (well I would, anyway).
So if we learn to regard happiness as our default emotional state this means we understand it cannot really be permanently lost; it can always and only be blocked from access by something else getting in the way. We gained something we need to lose – we didn’t lose something we need to retrieve.
Reconnecting to Our Default Happiness
Reconnecting to our lost default happiness means we need to do something we’ve not considered doing before. In my case it required an overhaul of everything I was doing; aiming for and thought of as important in life.
When I had emotional problems I felt disconnected from who I really was. I saw other people treating me as someone I wasn’t and then my reacting internally like someone I never intended to be. Most of the time I was figuring out ways to be ‘nicer’ and not so emotionally reactive. In reality I was reacting negatively to genuinely negative environments deliberately created for me by others but pretending I was some kind of super-tolerant person ‘absorbing the negativity’ on everyone else’s moral behalf.
As a child I had been turned into a bit of an emotional punch-bag by others; as an adult I still saw that as my role in life. To put up with. The turning point for me came when I accepted I needed to end or limit any relationships or situation causing me pain. Up until then I had always been concerned about whether or not certain other people were happy; (they never were) and whether or not I was meeting my responsibilities despite the fact I had almost no rights in those areas of my life. I was unhappy because, without realising it, I had unwittingly and repeatedly agreed to be.
In vibrational energy terms, when struggling with an emotional disorder or a painful life experience or environment, a negative vibrational state has been added to your overall tone and is blocking you from accessing your default happiness. It is this negative vibrational state we need to get rid of and, unfortunatel,y it may mean we need to consider taking real-life, difficult, long-term action to minimise environmental causes. Heaven forbid; you may even have to put yourself first.
Where Do These Negative Vibrational States Come From?
Chip Conley, author of the book Emotional Equations (link below), tells us the formula for achieving happiness is a question of dividing wanting what you have by having what you want:
Wanting What You Have
If you feel unhappy or have an emotional disorder it’s because your body is producing an emotional response your Pre-frontal Cortex; home to your ‘you’; does not want. Your you is refusing to accept what your body has given it to deal with; so you do not want what you have. You are trying to escape your organic self. The more you do not want it the stronger the negative vibrational energy response you produce in a bid to fight or run away from it.
Things in your life you have accepted, including all the other emotional responses which did not turn into emotional problems, have quickly become, in emotionally vibrational terms, ‘awareness neutral’. You feel neither positive nor negative about them. You only start feeling negative if you are threatened with their being taken away or somehow they are changed into something you do not want.
By default we are not designed to automatically want what we have. Wanting what we have – ‘gratitude’ – needs to be a deliberate practice. We need to either practice it on a regular scheduled basis or make sure, when we’re feeling negative, we deliberately give ourselves the ‘gratefulness’ response. Gratitude
There’s the straight forward approach of simply sitting quietly and focusing on different things in your life; allowing yourself to reflect on and feel good about them. For example: think about paper. What would life be like without paper; how much better is life with paper? Isn’t life so much better with paper? What an amazing idea to turn trees into paper! (we don’t need to think only about the ‘big’ things in our life – anything will do). Just think about paper for thirty seconds. All the things we use it for. Isn’t it amazing? There are people who process trees so we can have paper then there are people putting things on and in paper to benefit others then billions of us are using paper for all kinds of social reasons. All of humanity supporting each other, contributing to each others lives, simply through some thin dry plant-based material.
In addition we can insert mini-gratitude practices deliberately whenever we think it will help our mood. For example I often practice ‘relativity-gratefulness’ thinking. If I’m dealing with something difficult in the present and start to feel negative I’ll picture an experience from the past worse than the one I’m dealing with now and it changes my internal response (my most common relativity reference is ‘well, at least they’re not hitting me over the head with broken glass like they used to). Some of us might say ‘I’m not doing that because it’s not ‘real’ – but you will if you’re in the habit of deliberately prioritising, and taking full responsibility for, achieving your own personal happiness. It’s not an external reality, it’s an internal one.
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