Tag: anxiety

Why Is Rumination Bad For You?

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I’m not closed about the fact that I’ve experienced mental illness in a major way twice in my life, post-natally, after the birth of each of my daughters. I had post-natal anxiety and depression both times, although my experience of each time was different. The second time I was prepared, and was also introduced to Havening by my lovely friend and colleague Lynley. The first time I was unwell for a whole year before I started to heal, and the second time was done and dusted within 4 months. What a relief that was!  And certainly no more babies for us.

Although the illness manifested slightly differently each time, rumination was a huge problem in both. Was it a symptom or a cause? Who knows. but it needed to get under control.

There’s disagreement in psychology as to whether it’s a mental illness in and of itself, or whether it’s a symptom, or, whether it is a cause of mental ill-health.

As with many things in the understanding of human psychology, there is no definitive conclusion! Most of my undergraduate essays would end with the rough conclusion: It’s considered a bit of both…

What exactly is rumination? Google says:

Rumination is a thought processing disorder meaning that worrisome thoughts or even neutral thoughts are given excess analysis by the person who ruminates.

And is considered to be demonstrated as four different types:

Brooding, reflection, intrusive, and deliberate rumination.

I think regardless, a good way to label it is simply: overthinking.

Here’s the thing: overthinking is absolutely correlated with depression, anxiety, OCD, and phobias. It can also be part of a healthy person’s every day life, they just don’t know that they’re doing it: it can cause sleep issues and, aside from the things I’ve mentioned, it’s also just highly unpleasant being stuck in your head and not being able to turn off your thoughts, which just loop and loop and loop… you burn your friends and partner out seeking a circuit breaker from them… a little wisdom to give you and out. It can be TORTURE! Your head is working WAY TOO HARD and you’re giving it WAY TOO MUCH OXYGEN!

Imagine being able to notice your overthinking patterns, observe them, and have a way of simply letting them go? Not just now, but every time? Come and learn how:

Sign up from my upcoming in-person workshop Use Your Body To Solve A Problem and learn how to get out of your head.

Sigh up to my internal dialogue eCourse – Inner Critic to Inner Coach and get those thoughts under control.

 

 

 

How Head-Brain Dominant Are You And What Can You Do About It?

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No matter who you are, you’re likely to share a common problem with most other people: you’re head-brain dominant.  I can relate to this, as I am too.

Here’s the thing: a lot of us aren’t aware or focused on what goes on below the neck on a daily basis, hour by hour. It makes sense, doesn’t it, that we’ve become accustomed to being in our heads. With the exception of sports, our schools are focused on what the head-brain can do. When we get into university and/or employment, we’re valued for our thinking or our knowledge application, or the basic skills that only a head-brain can generate. 

We love our head-brains, they’re amazing, and of course we are going to want to keep using them, they’re kinda essential!!

And, there are some downsides to doing this at the exclusion of the rest of ourselves. If all our attention and focus is in our heads and on our thoughts and we’re solely relying on our thoughts to guide us, then we are going to run into problems. Some of these are:

  • Cycling or looping thoughts that don’t lead to solutions
  • Getting stuck in your head – indecision
  • Overthinking and under-action
  • Rumination – which can lead into depression
  • Negative self-talk, which feels bad and can also lead to and/or exacerbate depression/anxiety/stress/low self-esteem
  • Overwork / overload / burn out
  • Sleeping issues as can’t switch head off
  • Lack of emotional awareness or emotional numbness
  • Lack of emotional regulation – overblown stressful emotions or under-felt pleasant emotions 

What’s the solution?

Relying on your head-brain to work everything out is like buying a top of the line coffee machine, and only ever using the one basic setting. You’ve got the equipment in there, now let’s work out how to use it!

Modern neuroscience can now demonstrate that we have complex and adaptive neurological centres, not just in your head-brain, which is the biggest of course, but also in your HEART and in your GUT. There are reasons why we have in-built phrases referring to these intelligence centres, which have been handed down to us through the ages: 

What does your gut tell you? 

I had my heart set on it!

I can’t get my head around it….

We’ve always been aware on one level, and now we have the technology to scan the human body and confirm exactly what activity goes on and where. Here’s what we know:

  • Head: Cephalic brain: 50 – 100 billion neurons. Competencies are: cognitive perception; meaning making; thinking. 
  • Heart: Cardiac brain: 30 – 120 thousand neurons.  Competencies are: emoting; values; relational affect.  
  • Gut: Enteric brain: 200 – 500 million neurons. Competencies are: core-identity; self-preservation; mobilasation (action). 

On a more spiritual level, it’s believed that all three of your intelligences have a “highest expression” – meaning that when these brains are balanced and working at their best, they enable you to have access to specific resources, which you don’t have access to when they’re out of balance and misaligned. They are:

  • Head – it’s highest expression is CREATIVITY
  • Heart – it’s highest expression is COMPASSION
  • Gut – it’s highest expression is COURAGE 

(Source: mBraining.)

Who couldn’t do with a little more creativity, compassion and courage in their lives?!

Personally, I have found so much value in very consciously taking my focus away from what’s in my head, and placing it into my heart. Parenting is a GREAT example for me. My head can tell me all kinds of stories about how hard it is (I mean, it IS hard, but it doesn’t mean I need talk to myself about that all day). At the end of the day for me, the way to embrace parenting, is understanding that it’s a heart-led process, guided by love.

If YOU can learn how to acknowledge, connect to and balance out all THREE of your intelligence centres, you can start to solve problems, make decisions and process emotions more EFFICIENTLY, because you have THREE engines available to do the work for you, together, rather than burning out that one engine at the top. Imagine being able to let go of all that thinking, and allow your body to do some of the work for you? If you value efficiency as much as I do, it’s worth some discovery!

In this workshop – Use Your Body To Solve A Problem – you come with a specific life-challenge in mind, and we teach you how to access and align all three intelligent parts of you to get them working together, to process your problem. The aligned yoga postures help the body process this, and tap into your energy centres too. 

You’re allowing your body to DO THE WORK FOR YOU. 

Now, the question is, is your head-brain curious enough to come along and test it out?

Video 6: Getting Out Of A Funk

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Welcome to Video 6 of my free 8-day Video Series leading up to the launch of my Inner Critic to Inner Coach eCourse. Every day I’ll be talking about an area of significance to your life, and how negative self-talk either causes or perpetuates that problem. And then importantly, a quick-and-dirty instant solution that you can use right away to make a difference to yourself. In this case, changing the questions you’re asking yourself to get out of a ‘funk’.

So, what do I mean by a funk? My way of thinking about it is a negative ‘state’ – a state of mind and body that is undesirable to you and unpleasant. For example, worried, distressed, anxious, etc., and also an unhelpful situation that you’re in, which feeds into the bad state.

As we’ve been learning, your internal dialogue and the way you feel are infinitely connected. One feeds into the other. And your self-talk makes bad feelings worse by talking to you or asking you questions which are not helpful and simply take you further down a spiral.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say that you are in a lot of debt, and don’t have much money. When you look at your bank accounts online, and see your negative balance, you will feel bad. What you may not realise, is that in the back of your mind there will be a little guiding question, and it will be structured in a way that only looks for negative answers. For example in this case it’s likely to be some variation of:

How did I get into this mess?

How the hell am I going to get out of this?  

Why is this happening to me? 

This is what we call a Key Question.

These key questions pop up very quickly and are of course spoken to you by your own self-talk inside your own head only. They can be very quiet so you hardly notice them. However, they are powerful, and the nature of them are very unhelpful – inherently focusing on the past and on the negative and not moving you forward at all.

The solution to getting out of these types of funks is to pay attention to your key question in the back of your head, and change it. We want to focus on a future step that’s positive. So any of the above examples could be changed to:

What’s my plan to get out of this?

What’s my next useful step?

Who can I talk to that can help me with this?

Key questions need to be open and start with a what, how, who, how much, and not lead to yes or no answers. And remember, you don’t need to KNOW the answer!  It just helps your brain focus and begin to find a useful answer for you.

Try it and let me know how it works for you!
As always, any questions, you know where I am.

Love Charlotte.

Video 1: How To Control Anxiety

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Welcome to the first instalment of my free 8-day Video Series in the lead up to the launch of my new eCourse – The Inner Critic to Inner Coach online training.  Every day for the next 8 days I’ll be talking about an area of your life of significance, and how negative self-talk either causes or perpetuates that problem. And then, importantly, a quick-and-dirty instant solution that you can use right away to make a difference to yourself. In this case, one that brings you back to calm.

**NB: Just to be really clear and keep everyone watching 100% safe, this is only relevant to minor, low-level anxiety issues like nervousness or small and short freak-outs/panic. If you have major anxiety issues or any kind, major panic attacks or any unresolved trauma, please seek more appropriate help for those issues as they will need a broader spectrum of help and support.**

Your self-talk and your feelings/emotions are inextricably linked, and especially so for anxiety. This is what we call a cycle of bio-feedback. You will either get a direct anxious feeling first, or a self-talk though first. Either way, your self-talk will at some point notice the anxious feeling, and start talking to you about it – You’re nervous, they’re going to notice….. you’re freaking out, OMG what am I going to do? Oh shit, now I’m even more nervous….God, this is so stupid….And so on.

This increases the level of adrenaline in the body and sends you further into anxiety loops. I talk about this in much more detail in my Imperfect Parent eBook.

In a key piece of neuroscience, it was found you can you break this cycle deliberately. You simply notice what sensations or thoughts are going on inside of you, and describe them to yourself in as much detail as possible, using your internal dialogue. The key component that was crucial in the success of changing where the blood was orientated in the brain was if you addressed yourself in the 3rd person, and used your own name. So for example, saying to yourself “OK, I’m freaking out here…” didn’t have the same affect as saying “Charlotte, you’re freaking out… your hands are sweaty, your heart rate is up..”.

This successfully sent the blood away from the Amygdala, stopping Amygdala hijack, and back into your Prefrontal Cortex, your logic and reason centre. I had reason to test this two or three days after hearing about it on the radio when I physically reacted to eating some pineapple and started freaking out, and within 2-3 minutes my nervous system was back to normal again.

All you have to do is use your own name to address yourself in the 3rd person, and describe what is currently happening in your body and thoughts, and your nervous system will re-set itself and bring you back to calm.  I talk about this neuroscience in more detail in the eCourse.

Any questions?  Please let me know!

Otherwise – try it, it really works!

Charlotte x

P.s. See you tomorrow for How To Make The Right Decisions (no more self-doubt).