Post layout Test

4am. Awake. Familiar fears: future, money, relationships.

Heart racing. Language merciless (‘how could you have ..? you must …, you better …, if you don’t, then …’).

It was as if the voice inside my head was some kind of special forces’ commander, all the teachers I ever had, all my bosses and my parents, rolled into one.

The theory of constructed emotion tells us that fear isn’t a thing. What I call fear might be very different from what you call fear. What we describe as fear is an interpretation of a bodily state, plus,

– the situation we’re in

– the people we’re with

– our memories and personal experiences

– the language we’ve learned to describe our conscious feelings.

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett says,

“An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world”

When you look at the chart below, you see that cortisol levels start to rise at around 3am and reach a peak at normal waking up time. Cortisol is a stress hormone and when it’s rampaging through your body, you will feel … stressed.

When you have cortisol goggles on, life will look terrifying, and normal events will look like catastrophes.

Back to 4am this morning.

I applied concepts from Rapid Resolution Therapy (RRT) (The Institute for Rapid Resolution Therapy, Inc.), #and this is how I got out of it:

1️⃣Acknowledging the impact of my bodily state; bathing in cortisol soup means I will feel what I have labelled as fear.

2️⃣ And that my racing heart racing and tense jaw are adding to the effect.

But it’s not just this that is producing the emotion. As Lisa says, it’s also what has happened and is happening.

3️Knowing that in this physical state, my mind will be misreading data and creating wild, exaggerated meanings. It will claim definitive knowledge of who I am, and my ability to survive – to live and be part of a group I want to be part of.

I call these mis-reads of data because my mind seems to have forgotten that it is only an interpreter. It does not, and cannot know why I did anything, nor does it know what is going to happen in the future.

This mental theatre might be very convincing, but it’s fiction.

4️Seeing all of this – from the body sensations to the mental images – as unnecessary strength.

5️⃣Knowing that none of this is any use at all in solving the problems I am facing. Fear is worse than useless when it comes to making life better for you and those around you.

After this, I was laughing.

Also a little weird, but a whole lot more useful.

RRT isn’t intended as a self-help technique, but applying these concepts enhances my life. It also helps me become a better facilitator.

This the RRT way of looking at things. It is not presented as ‘Truth’, but I have seen how transformative the process is, and how it frees people from suffering.

#fear #anxiety #insomnia