Mar 3

One Simple Step Towards Managing Emotions

Posted in Techniques
This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Change Techniques

Managing moods and emotions is something that many of us struggle with. Sometimes it seems like every day something happens that instantly triggers off fear, anxiety, anger, frustration, sadness, despair, guilt or shame. But with a simple technique, you can start managing those emotional hijacks and bringing them under your control.

Emotion figure
Emotion figures by Fuyoh!

Anyone who’s had successful “talk therapy,” or even a helpful conversation with a friend who just listened, knows that sometimes putting our emotions into words helps us to get over them. It works with written words, too, as you’ll know if you journal. A study of expressive writing by cancer patients found that even a 20-minute, one-off session of expressive writing, while waiting for an appointment in a busy clinic, helped improve cancer patients’ quality of life.

What’s happening when we put our feelings into words? Matthew D. Lieberman and colleagues did a brain imaging study, reported in Psychological Science 18 (5). They found that when participants in the study labeled the emotions they were feeling, it disrupted the activity of the amygdala (which isn’t a Star Wars princess but a part of the brain involved in emotion). The use of words activates a different part of the brain, and appears to shift the mental activity there, away from feeling the emotion.

The way that I teach my clients to exploit this effect is based on Mary Mrozowski’s “welcoming prayer”, which isn’t actually a prayer at all. It’s simply a practice to use when you notice yourself feeling an emotion: saying “Welcome” and giving it a name — “Welcome, fear,” “Welcome, anger” or whatever the emotion might be.

In doing so, you are paying attention to the emotion — so it won’t go behind your back and manipulate you into doing something you may regret. You are accepting the emotion as being part of your conscious experience, which then enables you to let it go more easily. And you are naming the emotion, which brings into play the mechanism identified by Lieberman et al.

I practice in the shower most mornings, when I’m relaxed, just welcoming the four main negative emotions — fear, anger, sadness and guilt. That way, when one of them comes along during the day, I’m in the habit of the welcoming practice and can immediately discharge a lot of the energy of the emotion.

Please let me know your experiences — and any other good techniques you use — in the comments.

(I’m currently working on a new product to help with emotional management. It’s called the Emotional Circuit-Breaker Toolkit, and if you want to know more about it, you can go to the Courses page and vote for it or sign up for my newsletter.)

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Feb 14

A Simple Mood Control Technique and How it Works

Posted in Techniques
This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Change Techniques

One of the simplest and most powerful techniques in the hypnotherapist’s repertoire is anchoring, in which you associate a touch with a mental state or mood. Anyone can use this; it doesn’t even require hypnosis, though it will certainly be more powerful with hypnosis. (My free Therapeutic Relaxation hypnosis recording includes anchoring, if you want to try it.)

The easiest form of the technique is this: Imagine yourself as vividly as possible into the mental state or mood you want – calm, confidence or whatever you like. Start with a memory of being in that state, and make the memory big and bright, loud and clear, firm and strong; see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt, if there are smells or tastes include them too, and turn up the power on the memory as if you were adjusting the controls on a TV or radio. You could use Michael Breen’s “nested images” technique to build it up even stronger.

When you have the state or mood as clear as possible, and are experiencing it very strongly, touch your thumb to one of your fingers – it can be any one, though most people pick the forefinger – and press firmly for a few seconds.

Fingerpress
Fore Fingers and Thumbs by ThunderChild5

You need to practice this a few times, but once you have done so, that mood or state is available to you at any time simply by using the thumb-and-finger press. Try it.

Why does this work? It’s based on what is known as Hebb’s Law, usually paraphrased as “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” As Norman Doidge points out in his fascinating book The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, Freud had actually stated it in 1888, almost 60 years before Hebb, as the “law of association by simultaneity”. For that matter, it can be looked at as Pavlov’s “classical conditioning“. A neutral stimulus that occurs at the same time as a stimulus that produces an automatic response eventually can produce that response by itself. The most famous experiment is that of Pavlov’s dogs, where he rang a bell and fed the dogs, and after a while was able to make the dogs salivate just by ringing the bell. The bell had nothing inherently to do with food, but because it had been repeatedly associated with food in time, the neurons (brain cells) that were set off by the bell became connected to those for the response to food. The food was an “unconditioned stimulus”, and the salivation an “unconditioned response”, because they actually had an inherent connection; the bell was a “conditioned stimulus” because it had no inherent connection to salivation but was now producing salivation by association.

In the case of anchoring, the unconditioned stimulus is the memory you summon up, which is already strongly linked to the mood or mental state (the unconditioned response). The conditioned stimulus is the touch of the finger and thumb. What you have done by practicing and repeatedly associating the two in time is to create a link – a mental pathway in your brain – between the two, so that the mood or state is now available to you on demand. You’ve reshaped your brain using attention, which is possible because your brain is “plastic” – capable of being changed in response to what it processes.

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Mar 18

Why it’s hard to change habits, and how you can change them anyway

Posted in Techniques
This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Change Techniques

(This post, revised and extended, forms one small part of an ebook on change, which you’ll get if you sign up for my free course on how to make a change plan.)

You may have heard that we only use 10% of our brains. (You may even have seen the saying incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein.) Of course, it isn’t true; we use all of our brain at one time or another, though usually much less than 10% of it at any one time. And this is one reason that it’s sometimes hard to change our behavior.

No part of the brain remains unused for long. From the point of view of the brain’s neurons, it’s like working in a busy kitchen; the moment you finish one task, someone nearby will grab you to work on another. Nobody is allowed to stand around idle.

chefs
Chefs In Action by argearge

Scientists who investigate neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to change) have pointed out the paradox that, because of this neural ability to swap tasks and the imperative to keep doing the task you have as long as the demand for it exists, change is actually quite difficult sometimes.

It’s like having a bookshelf that is crammed with books; in order to put a new book on the shelf, you first have to take one of the existing ones off.

crammed bookshelf

books by robina

Or, in terms of real estate, think about wanting to build a new building in the inner city. To do so, you first have to knock an existing building down.

demolition
Destruction Zone by mzacha

What this means is that if you have a habit, for example, that habit is taking up a certain amount of space on the mental bookshelf, a certain amount of real estate in Downtown Brain, and in order to create a new habit you have to do something to shift the old one.

Something like what?

Well, as Norman Doidge notes in his remarkable book The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (around p. 60 for those who have it; if you don’t, I recommend it), there are a few strategies that work to shift habits to make room for new behaviors.

The first is to pay attention. Another excellent book on brain plasticity for intelligent laypeople is Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, which discusses the power of attention extensively. It describes, for example, a fascinating experiment with monkeys.

monkey
Mico – Sagui by Auroquero

You take your monkeys, and you set them up with headphones through which you play sounds, and little devices which gently stroke one hand of each monkey. Every monkey gets the same sounds and the same hand stimuli.

Now, you reward half the monkeys when they make responses that coincide with changes in the sounds, but not when they respond to changes in the hand stimuli, and the other half of the monkeys you reward the other way round. Pretty soon, half the monkeys are paying attention to the sounds and ignoring the hand stimuli, and the other half are paying attention to the hand stimuli and ignoring the sounds, even though both groups are getting both sets of stimuli.

After some time, you map the monkeys’ brains. You mapped their brains before you started the experiment, so you know how large the section of brain was that’s concerned with distinguishing changes in sound, and how large the section was that notices stimulation to the hand. What you’ll find is that the monkeys that paid attention to the sounds are now using more of their brains for sound, and the monkeys that paid attention to the touch are now using more of their brains for touch. Attention reshapes the brain.

brain
Brain in hand by juliaf

And how do you affect attention? People, just like monkeys, pay attention to things that are important to them in some way – either as a threat or as a reward. And something that is associated with a reward gets the same attention that you would pay to the reward itself. So, step one, pay attention; step two, reward attention, and to make it even more effective, step three, reward change. You won’t succeed in changing your habit if you’re not paying attention to it.

So, each time you catch yourself in your habit, ask yourself these three questions:

  • “What am I doing?” This focuses your attention on the behavior.
  • “Why am I doing this?” If you understand what you’re getting from the behavior, you can start thinking of strategies to replace it with behavior you would prefer.
  • “How can I deal with it better?” This starts to replace the old behavior with the new, desired behavior, and, importantly, it associates the new behavior with the circumstances in which you had the old behavior.

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