Tag: anxiety

Research shows your mind ranges from two mental extremes, which give you a radically different experience in terms of well-being and behavior. Here I’ll present these two extremes and suggest how to use this knowledge to improve your life.

One mental extreme is what is known as your defensive state. This is your animal brain having fully taken over command of your thinking and actions. Adrenaline is coursing through your veins. Heart-rate and blood pressure are up. Your amygdala is running the show and, because of that, it has bypassed your cortex, the part of your brain that does rational thinking. At the highest levels of defensiveness, you basically become a beast, scared and angry. I call this our dragon state. This may sound exciting, but it’s very unpleasant.

This state of mind is useful to save your life in situations of real imminent danger. The milliseconds your cortex needs to think about things could get you killed, so the amygdala takes over. If you’re running away from a flood or trying to survive an attack by a vicious animal, this is great. Not so great, however, if you’re just trying to deal with family and coworkers, traffic or something else equally non-life-threatening.

The other extreme is exploratory. In this mode, you’re engaged in something that greatly interests you. You’re absorbed in doing, studying and experiencing something to such a degree, your whole self is one with the here and now. In its purest form, this is known as the state of flow, where decisions and thoughts occur with lightning speed, with apparently no deliberation. The sensation experienced is one of joy, intense vitality and connection. I call this the angel state, where you’re more than a mere human. In this state, you’re operating at your very best, flowing with life and expressing your inner self brilliantly.

We’re very sensitive. Any perceived threat pushes us towards the dragon state. Even seeing someone’s grumpy face from a distance moves you towards defensiveness, even if the person is not looking at you. Thoughts are processed as reality by your brain. Feeling anxious about future events, fear of unpleasant outcomes or even reliving a bad experience are interpreted by your brain as actual events in the here and now, and thus trigger you towards your dragon state. You can see why we spend so much of our lives in a bad mood. We’re freaking ourselves out, though subtly, often unconsciously, all the time. And if we let our emotions take control, then we can go all out dragon in a fit of rage, over the silliest things, such as bickering over the choice of a restaurant with our spouses or in dealing with your teenager’s latest test of your limits.

Knowing this constant shifting of the mind, between dragon and angel, we can begin to assume control of our life experience. Here are three practical steps to achieve this:

• Engage constantly in self-observation. Be aware of your mind. Practice mindfulness of your own state of being and of your emotions. Be aware of your thoughts. This is a key habit to develop to live a better life and one that’s increasingly more emphasized by psychologists and gurus alike.
• Pacify your mind. As soon as you feel yourself uselessly drifting towards your dragon state, in anxiety of some future result, in lamentation of an unhappy memory, stop the downward slide. Do this by breathing deeply and calmly and bringing your mind to the here and now. Return to reality at hand, right now. Not the version of reality full of doubts and uncertainties your mind is freaking you out with, but with reality in the moment, happening around you. In short, practice mindfulness. If things are getting really agitated, then you’re entering the dangerous level of having your amygdala take over – full dragon mode. You have to take immediate action while you still have a little control of your cortex. The amygdala will shut down in response to slow steady breathing and the relaxing of the muscles and your mind will move towards your angel state again. Be aware and stop the dragon from rising before it’s too late. Check out this video on anger to understand better this process.
• Seek out your angel state. Do this by finding joy and meaning in everything you do. This is possible by becoming attuned to your dharma, your essence, and putting that into action. When you’re focused on living who you really are, you are taking your mind to the angel state. The more you can focus on living your essence, the closer you approach the perfection of the angel state. Full focus means being in the zone, blissfully absorbed in life.

In the book “The 3T Path” (https://3tpath.com/books/) I explain in much greater detail how to practice mindfulness and how to live and understand your dharma.

Watch my video on this topic here.

Look what they’re saying about The 3T Path book: “The 3T Pat is a book that connects yoga wisdom with your day-to-day, with practical tools and examples of how to keep your mind healthy, focused on the here and now.” – Taila Roncon

Though anxiety predominates our modern life, you don’t have to live with it. Here’s an immediate, scientifically-proven technique for lowering your anxiety and an overall take on it to help you lessen or avoid it altogether.

Anxiety is the fruit of illusion, of the mind out of the here and now, fantasizing about possible futures and their consequences. Studies show that you can lower your anxiety by simply writing out what it is that is bothering you.

Anxiety arises from “pre-occupation”, that is, from wanting to engage in an activity that has not yet begun and may not even exist. When there is, say, a trip or presentation that needs to be done, even though we have done everything we can to prepare for the event, we still dwell in anxiety, thinking we might have forgotten something or how something can go wrong. At other times, we are anxiously awaiting some event, be it the arrival of someone or the result of an examination, thinking frantically about the consequences of the event, the things we will have to do if we do this or that, or simply wondering what the result will be. All of this, of course, is crazy!

It does us no good to operate this way. In fact, it only makes things worse. It ruins our well-being without bringing useful results. We just need to do our best right now. Once we do that, we gain nothing from mulling it over again and again.

One of the secrets of the 3T Path is to understand that we cannot control the results. We can only do our best. There are innumerable facts and influences in any action, not least of which is God’s will. The laws of nature, the desire and influence of countless other living entities and providence overwhelm our efforts, making it impossible to predict the results, even in controlled situations, what to speak of general dealings in life.

And if an event has not yet happened, let it happen first. Sure, plan for it. But don’t stress over it. Don’t think you need a plan for every possible eventuality. You’ll go nuts doing this. You’ve experienced this over and over again: the future very seldom turns out the way you thought it would. Futurology is a very inaccurate activity. There is very likely something much more useful for you to do right now. You have other dharmas to enact, right now, without wasting your time planning for the unknown. Bring your mind back to reality, to the here and now, and immediately you’ll feel better, more grounded and useful. Back in the flow of life. Or as I say in the 3T Path, back to the reality paradigm, away from the fantasy paradigm.

So, write out your anxiety. Get it out of our head, in front of your in black and white. The act of writing it out engages the power of reason, which helps you diffuse the negative effects of worry and fear. Writing out your anxiety literally gets it out of your head. You can seriously consider if you’ve done what you can to deal with that concern and, if the answer is yes, then you can put it aside.

In my book, “The 3T Path” (www.3tpath.com/books/), I offer several other profound mindset changes to overcome anxiety, as well as proven techniques such as mindfulness and meditation to help you greatly reduce stress and anxiety in your life.

Here’s my video on this topic.

Check out what they’re saying about my new book: “Amazing book and life-changing, full of good advice and philosophical timeless wisdom! I highly recommend it!” – Radha Krishna

There is one root cause to our anxiety and you can develop the power to switch it off. It takes some training, but it’s something real you can work on. You can learn to switch off anxiety.

All our anxiety is born out of the habit our mind has to slip into future. We become anxious about what might happen and then dread the consequences of that, in a cascade of worry. Worry born out of nothing concrete yet. It’s just our mind playing tricks with us. Right now, nothing’s happened.

Look back, search your memory, and see how many hundreds and hundreds of times your heart rate went up, your stomach tightened and fear surged through your mind, making you miserable, for things that never happened. Search your memory further and notice that even when something unwanted happened, most of the time it wasn’t such a big deal. The anticipation of a problem is worse than the problem itself, most of the time.

The trick, then, is to train your mind to quit this horrific, useless, habit of living out disaster scenarios in the future. Does this mean we go through life like fools, with no planning, not a care in the world? Not quite. We can not only reduce useless anxiety, we can make ourselves more efficient at making our lives better with the same mental adjustment.

As soon as you feel you’re getting anxious, take a couple of deep breaths, and bring your focus to the here and now, more specifically, to the job at hand. Don’t put mental energy into fear, into foreseeing disaster. Perceive the best action now, and put your attention in that, as much as you can. Ideally, all your attention. Mindfulness – your full mind focused on the subject at hand. Even in life or death, or especially in life or death situations, being able to focus your mind entirely on the action, on the job at hand, is crucial to success.

Studies show that adventure athletes – those courageous types who kayak down waterfalls, sky jump, rush down uncharted trails on perilous slopes, etc. – have the greatest ability to enter the state of flow, sometimes called “the zone”, that golden state of maximum ability and concentration, precisely because they are dealing with life and death moment-by-moment decisions. If these athletes let their mind drift to anxiety, to the future, they die. So, they don’t and experience awesome states of wellbeing because of their high-level mindfulness.

You can bring this reality to your day-to-day life. Bring your mind to the here and now. Train your brain to live the moment and concentrate on the task at hand. No matter how much you have to do, you can only do one main thing at a time. Don’t be doing one thing, worrying about the other thing you should be doing AND anxious about the many unwanted future scenarios you’ll face if you fail. Shut those other programs down and fix your mind on what you’re doing right now. That way, you’ll switch off anxiety.

Learn more techniques, and many other important tools for a better life, by reading my book, “The 3T Path”, out now, by clicking here.

You can see my video on this topic here.