How Your Brain Can Turn Anxiety into Calmness
(whooshing) – [Narrator] This
program is a presentation of UCTV for educational and
non-commercial use only. (upbeat music) – Marty is a delight to have here and a delight to introduce, especially to a room full of people who are interested in learning
about mind-body medicine. Marty Rossman has probably done more to bring integrative
medicine to where it’s at, especially regarding mind-body medicine than any other person I
will ever get to introduce or perhaps even get to shake hands with. Marty was very early on was one of the proponents
of medical acupuncture. He was a founding board member of the American something or other. American Board of, American Academy of Medical
Acupuncture, he tells me. He has been instrumental in
developing guided imagery to the robust field that it is today. He works as well a great
deal with hypnosis, with many different techniques to help calm us down to help us get
to a point of relaxation.
Using hypnosis, health hypnosis,
biofeedback, bodywork, but especially guided imagery. He is a member of the advisory board for the Osher Center for
Integrative Medicine, and I was interested to
discover he’s also a member of the advisory board
for the Rosenthal Center for Complementary Medicine at Colombia University in New york. I’ve known Marty for
a number of years now. I’ve been privileged
to attend several talks that he’s given. I know that he’s a great speaker. – Well, thank you very much. That was very kind of you to say. Good evening, everybody. So how many of you have
ever worried about anything? (audience laughing) Has anybody here ever
worried about anything? Okay, good, that’s our topic tonight.
And of course, everybody
worries sometimes, and some people worry all the time. And if you’re one of those people who finds themselves worried all the time, I think that you might
get something very useful. I hope that you get something very useful out of tonight’s talk. If you just worry intermittently, I hope you get something useful anyhow, but you don’t probably
don’t need it quite as much. So I’m calling my topic
tonight Worrying Well, and I’m still looking for a subtitle, but tonight we’ll call
it how to use your brain to relieve anxiety and stress and turn it into more desirable things like calmness and confidence. Worry, I think, gets a lot of bad press because we don’t use it very well, and so when I call it Worrying Well, it’s really about what is worry? How do we do it? What’s the purpose of it? Is it possible that worrying
has a positive function, which it does?
Worry basically is an adaptive function. It’s something that allows us
to go over and over something in our minds in an
attempt to solve a problem or resolve a situation, so I think that that’s adaptive. We humans have been born
with faculties in our brain that as far as we know don’t belong to any other creature on Earth, and it has allowed us to come from being a pretty
vulnerable prey animal on the African savanna to becoming the dominant
the creature on Earth.
We don’t have many tools for survival if you look at a human as an animal. We’re pretty vulnerable. We don’t run very fast. We don’t have big teeth. We don’t have big claws. We can swim a little
bit but not very well. We can’t fly very well. So out there, without a lot of technology and on the African savanna,
we are meat basically. And we’ve got systems
built into our system that we inherited from the development of other prey animals that lead to things like fight and flight response, which are adaptive in some situations and maladaptive in others. But one of the things that are, that one of the qualities
that we’ve developed is, or one of the mental abilities
and functions is imagination. I could really make a
strong case that imagination is one of the key things, and
maybe the key mental faculty that separates the human
from all other forms of life.
Imagination lets us remember things from the past. It lets us project things into the future and think about how things
would be in the future if we did something this way or that way. And everything that exists on Earth that wasn’t made by God or nature, take your pick, or some
combination of the two. Everything else that exists, everything that humankind has created started in somebody’s imagination. That’s where it made its
first appearance on Earth, as somebody’s imagination. “Ooh, we could do that. “Could make it round, it’ll roll. “We could chip these.” They noticed that two rocks
chipping together make fire and they figured out a way to do that. So imagination, you could make a case that outside of God or nature, the human imagination is the most powerful force on Earth. And the thing is, very few of us have ever really
been taught how to use it. Most of our education, especially all the way
through to higher education, is on using other mental faculties, which also have made us very powerful. The ability to analyze. The ability to calculate.
Linear, logical, rational,
scientific ways of thinking have also contributed to
us being very powerful because they allow us to take the things that we imagine and make them real in a certain way, but a lot
starts in the imagination. Worry is a function of imagination. If you didn’t have an imagination,
you wouldn’t be worried. That’s what lobotomies are about. (audience laughing) And that’s what a lot of
certain medications are about. So we used to joke at our
academy for guided imagery that if we could find a simple, non-toxic way to do a vaginectomy, we could resolve everybody’s
worry and stress problems. You just wouldn’t be very worried. You wouldn’t do much, either.
You wouldn’t be creative, but you wouldn’t be worried
if we could do that. So I think rather than
taking the imagination out, what we wanna do is learn
how to use it better, and so a lot of what I’m gonna share with you about Worrying Well or worrying more effectively has to do with how you use your imagination. So worry and stress have
a lot of overlap, right? And we often use them interchangeably. I’m gonna spend a little time to differentiate these
things a little bit, but they do overlap quite a bit. And then anxiety also overlaps
with worry and stress. They’re all a little bit different, and they’re very interrelated. They share in a lot of
different kinds of ways. The reason this is important
is that our consciousness and our ability to become self-conscious is potentially the
greatest tool that we have for improving our lives. And it also, if we don’t
know how to use it, can be something that can
make our life miserable.
So I like this Ashleigh Brilliant quote. “Due to circumstances beyond my control, “I am master of my fate
and captain of my soul.” So you’re it. If you wanna do something about
your anxiety, your stress, the way that you think, the
way that you create your life. You are the captain
whether you like it or not. So we might as well learn
how to use these capacities ’cause there’s really no going back.
I think sometimes
unconsciously we try to go back with other ways of
managing anxiety and stress like drinking too much or taking drugs, medications, or eating too much. All the millions of ways we
have of going unconscious and kind of trying to just
put our head in the sand and maybe it’ll go away,
which it frequently does. So it’s not that it’s not a
good strategy in the short run, but as a total life plan,
it’s kind of lacking, okay? It won’t take you where you want to go. So how are worry, stress,
and anxiety different? So worry is a type of, this
is how I think about it, and I can be argued with. I’m not sure that any of
this is actually true. I’m kind of throwing it out there. I’m writing a book on it. So if I’m wrong, please tell
me before the book is written.
But it seems to me that worry
is a type of thinking, okay? And our friend here Ziggy says, “The figments of my
imagination are out to get me.” That’s kind of the most
common use of the imagination is just letting your imagination kind of go to the worst scene scenarios, getting kind of entranced or
hypnotized by your worries and letting your imagination scare you. ‘Cause I think in a sense, the most common unconscious
use of the imagination is to drive ourselves crazy
or worry ourselves sick. So the bar is set pretty low. That’s the good news. We can learn to use it more on purpose and do better than that. So worry is a type of thinking. It’s a repetitive kind of thinking. Sometimes a rumination,
it’s generally troubled. It often has to do with
things that are either in the past or in the future, okay? It’s the opposite of being here now.
It’s the opposite of the present center. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, and that doesn’t mean that
it doesn’t have a function. But we’re in our brain, we’re
thinking about something. We’re going over and over it. And again, I think that’s because of the adaptive function of worry, I always assume that something
is there is an attempt by nature or by life to solve a problem or to give us an advantage.
So if you think about what
could the advantage be of being able to go over a
problem over and over in my mind? Well, I think it’s kind
of like if you have a big, tangled ball of yarn or thread. And you’re trying to untangle
it and you find a place that’s loose and you pull it for a while and you get some looseness, and then it gets stuck again
so you turn the ball over and you find another loose place and you free up some more stuff, and you turn it over again and
you free up some more stuff. And if you keep doing that,
turning it over and over, looking at it from different angles, finding the loose places, finding where things are knotted together. Excuse me, if you persevere
with it, more often than not, you’re gonna get that
whole thing untangled and then go on to the next
tangled mess that you find, okay? But you are likely to
get that one untangled, and I think that’s the function of worry.
It lets us, it makes our
concerns transportable so you can think about it at any time, and that can be an
advantage or a disadvantage. And I think that that depends on whether you’re using your brain or you’re being run by it. That your brain is an incredible organ. Your mind has something to do with it. And at least in certain circumstances, your mind can learn to use
your brain in better ways. That’s what this is about. So it’s very easy though
for this adaptive function of problem-solving and turning things over and over to become a habit or to become repetitive
and to become ruminative and just kind of become its own thing.
And I think there are a
couple of reasons for that. One is that worry can serve kind of a magical function. There’s a magical,
unconscious function of worry. A couple of ’em actually. So one is that most things that you worry about never happen. Most things that you
worry about never happen, and if you, that’s an old
rubric that we’ve all heard and I found myself wondering, “Well, is that really true?” So I’ve been teaching
this as a six-week class, this Worrying Well class.
I’ve taught it a few times now, and I’ve asked people at
the beginning of the class to list all the things
that they find themselves repetitively worrying about. And then sometime later on, we’ve just checked in
with the first class, which was about nine months ago, to see how many of those
things have happened, and not very many of them have happened. So I don’t know if anybody’s ever studied that really before, but you could do it yourself
by writing them down and then checking it in
about six months or a year.
Now the interesting thing about that, the way that the brain works is, at some unconscious level of the brain, the brain could conclude
that the thing didn’t happen because you worried about it, right?
(audience laughing) That’s the function,
and there’s an old story about a woman who walks around her house. She’s an old woman. She’s walking around her house every day. Mumbling, walking around her house. She walks around her house all day long until she’s curved a rut around her house, and that goes up to about
the middle of her thighs.
And finally, one of their
neighbors can’t take it anymore. He goes over and he says, “I hope you don’t mind if I ask you “why you walk around your
house all the day, every day.” And she says, “Well, I’m
keeping it safe from tigers.” And he says, “Well, we’re in Indiana. “There aren’t any tigers here.” And she says, “See?” (audience laughing)
(laughs) So it’s possible that we
get rewarded for worrying because so many of those
things don’t happen, and at some magical,
unconscious primitive level of thought those two things
could possibly be connected. The other thing that has been researched is that sometimes, worrying
about things distracts us from things that are
actually bothering us.
So that worrying about
little things and do-lists and so on and so forth, always
fussing and always worrying and always having
something to fuss up about and to worry about actually distracts us from something that might
be deeper and more emotional and actually be harder for us to take. So, and we know that that’s a function. That’s actually been studied. So that worry prevents deeper, richer, more emotional-laden thinking, which typically comes in images and comes in the quiet times. So if there’s a lot of feeling
there that’s hard to process or hard to feel or that’s unprocessed and that we’ve never dealt with, it’s in a sense useful to
keep the mind very busy.
Because if you get quiet,
your emotions will come up. And ultimately, we think
that that’s a good thing. Emotions are natural, they’re healthy. They have a wisdom to them that most of us have not also been educated in. But they can be hard to feel. Nobody, very few people have
very much trouble feeling joy. Although a lot of times we’re
blocked from feeling joy because we are unable or
unwilling to feel other emotions. When you start feeling one emotion, the others go, “Hey, the door’s open.” And they might wanna come up and be felt.
So there are functions of worry, and again, some of them
unconscious, magical, maybe not in our best interest over time. Others adaptive, problem-solving,
go over the problem. So it behooves us to kind of learn what we’re doing with the worry, and that gives us choices in terms of what we’re doing with the rest, okay? So worry’s a thinking function, whereas anxiety, anxiety is
an uncomfortable feeling.
It’s usually in the chest
or the upper abdomen. Not always, but it’s most often up in this area or this area. It’s an uncomfortable feeling of fear or apprehension or dread. Dread is, it’s that feeling, “Oh my God, something bad is
going to happen, I know it. “Something bad is going to happen.” You don’t know. It may be attached to something or it may be free-floating
and not attached to anything. And anxiety often comes
with physical symptoms like rapid heartbeat, pain
in the chest, sweating, shortness of breath.
There’s often a feeling of anxiety if anxiety is very strong,
like panic attacks. There’s often a very
characteristic feeling that comes with panic attacks and the feeling is of impending doom. People with panic attacks
feel they’re about to die. And it’s often, again, since the symptoms are often
in the chest or in the abdomen, we see these things in
medicine all the time. And you could really make
a case for one of the maybe the primary functions
of a primary care doctor is seeing if there’s anything
else but anxiety going on because anxiety can cause so many symptoms in so many systems of the
body and make us afraid.
A sense that something
bad is gonna happen. Anxiety is a function
of a part of the brain that is the emotional part of the brain. It’s called a limbic system
or the emotional brain, so worry belongs to the
thinking part of the brain. And there’s a lot of interaction, but worry belongs in the thinking part of the brain, the cortex. Anxiety typically comes from the limbic or emotional part of the brain, and I’ll show you what that looks like. And stress, which is the third leg of our uncomfortable stool here, is actually a physical
response to a threat, real or imagined. And in modern life, most of the threats are either perceived or
imagined, but they’re not.
So somebody’s probably told you the story of the saber-toothed tiger and the fight-or-flight
response and so on. That this was a response we
think was designed by nature. So when you walked out of the cave and you ran into a big predator
like a saber-toothed tiger, part of your nervous system fires off and you get a big shot of adrenaline and your heart beats faster
and your blood clots faster and your blood pressure goes up and your muscles get super charged and you’re ready to run, or run the fastest two miles
you’ve ever run in your life or fight the tiger to death.
And then it super charges you. It’s that kind of thing we hear about when a mother moves a
car to save the baby. The thing is that this response can go off in response to threats
that are not predators. That are not, it can go off in response to stock market movements,
economic changes, thinking about aging, thinking about whether you can
meet your responsibilities. All kinds of stuff, and
all kinds of stuff that is, that unless you know
where the off button is on your television or your
radio or your computer, that you can just literally
pump into your brain 24/7 if you stay up. All the bad news of every bad thing that has happened around
the world to anybody, or if it’s a slow news day,
what could happen, okay? Like the H1N1 flu, ’cause
it’s not a terribly, doesn’t look like a terribly
dangerous flu right now, but it could become really dangerous.
And that’s what’s got everybody scared and everybody freaked
out and standing line. What could happen, so. And yes, there’s a balance between, again, being able to predict the future and take measures to
prevent things happening that don’t need to happen, and freaking out for
months about something that probably will never happen. It’s a yin-yang kind of relationship. So stress is, the important
thing here is that stress is a physical response. It’s not stuff that happens to you. It’s a physical response
that your body has to survive a short-term stress. And if you survive that short-term stress like fight like the saber-toothed tiger, you’ve either killed it or
you’ve run away from it. And run as fast as you can, climb the highest tree that you can.
You’ve burned up all
these stress chemicals, and when the tiger goes away, you kind of limp back to the cave and breathe a big sigh of relief and tell everybody about
how you killed the tiger or ran away from the tiger. And your body rested and
compensated and recharged itself and replaced all the
chemicals that it used during that intense 20 to 30 minute fight. Or else the tiger has eaten you and you don’t have anymore stress.
(audience laughing) But one way or another, it’s all over in about 20 or 30 minutes. (audience laughing)
Okay? So there’s none of this years of stress that go on if you’re a good worrier, where you wake up in the morning and the first thing on your mind is, “Oh my God, what’s gonna happen with this? “Am I gonna be able to do this? “Am I gonna be able to beat that?” And so on and so forth.
And of course, the really good worriers are not only doing it during the daytime. You’re up at night, too,
because you can’t sleep, right? And so it’s taking your, and that takes your resilience away, and it becomes a real
negative, vicious cycle. So, to review. Worry is a type of
repetitive, circular thinking. Anxiety is an uncomfortable
feeling of fear or dread. Stress is a physical response that prepares you to meet challenges and so it’s interesting to look at. This is sort of a somewhat
dated model of the brain. It’s called the Triune Brain, but it’s good enough for government work.
We can work with this model, okay? This is that, there is what’s
called the cortical brain or the neo-cortex. The big, gray matter, wrinkled, big brain that we’re so proud of
that allows us to speak and add and calculate and
reason and so on and so forth. And imagine, and do all
these things that again, as far as we know, no other
creature on Earth does, and that is really the most adaptive thing that’s helped us survive and dominate. Lower down, limbic
system, mid-brain, okay. The basic brain, we call
it the reptilian brain. That’s the brain we share with lizards and reptiles and amphibians. That’s the oldest part of the brain.
That part of the brain basically
concerned with survival. It basically sorts things
into two or three categories. “Can I eat this? “Can it eat me? “Can I mate with it?” That’s basically what
it’s concerned with, okay? (audience laughing) It sorts down all the
information that you receive into those three things, okay? And it acts like that. It acts reflexively and instantaneously. Just like if you come
across a lizard on the path and you make a move towards
it, it’s gone like that. It doesn’t go inside. It doesn’t do a Woody Allen thing. “Should I move? “Should I not move? “Would it be better for me? “Is this dangerous? “Is it not dangerous? “How dangerous is it?” It doesn’t do any of it,
it’s just gone, okay? If there’s any indication
that there’s a threat, it sets off the stress
response and it’s gone.
The thing is, this
developed evolutionarily from the bottom up, okay? This was, this part of
the brain developed first. And then as animals developed, the limbic system pretty
much developed in mammals, and other, in warm, furry creatures, who characteristically
have social relationships. And for mammals, for most
mammals, not all mammals, social relationships like prides of lions and packs of wolves and families of people and things like that have adaptive value. We do better when we’re
connected to groups. We have more strength. We have more problem-solving ability. We have emotional support. We are social creatures, and our social positions mean a lot to us. And all that emotional
processing happens mostly in this limbic system,
and then on top of it, the big, smart, intellectual brain. Every layer added new
possibilities and new complexity to our ability to understand our world and to navigate our world. And part of the problem when
we look at this whole issue is that the new guy is very
entranced with himself, okay? The thinking brain thinks that nothing was important before he came along.
And I saw he kind of deliberately. It could be she too, but it’s a kind of, it’s not that there
aren’t tremendously bright and intellectual women, but it’s kind of thinking analysis, logic, that kind of thinking on a yin-yang scale we typically characterize as a
kind of a masculine thinking. Not that it doesn’t belong to women too. Whereas the feeling, the intuitive, tends to be a more kind
of receptive, softer. It has its own logic,
but it’s not the same as the logic of mathematics
and science, okay? So this brain is very good at, especially part of the brain, the part that’s suited for
verbal and mathematical skills, which typically is in the
left hemisphere of the brain. And there’s some variation, but that typically is in the left brain, which is called the dominant hemisphere.
Speech capability, mathematical
capability and so on. Whereas in the right side of
the brain in the same area, lie areas of the brain that
have to do with the body image, with emotional recognition
and facial expressions, and tone of voice, and
those kinds of skills. So they each have their place. I mean, logical skills have to do with building buildings
like this and building MRIs and doing the kind of incredible science that goes on in a
university setting like UCSF and looking through electron microscopes and doing chemical analysis. And these are tremendous
feats, don’t misunderstand me. They’re completely useless
in a relationship, okay? It doesn’t matter how many
Nobel prizes you have. You may not be able to
maintain a marriage. Would be if that’s the only kind of intelligence you have, right? And you may not be able to maintain good
relationships with people.
Whereas somebody who emotionally, and in terms of social networking and understanding and
compassion and empathy, may have a different kind of intelligence, as well as an intellectual
kind of intelligence. So my point is that these are different kinds of intelligences that are useful in different situations. What has happened since the
advent of the age of reason and which is, and the
advent of discovering the immense power of our
intellectual capabilities, I think has been a devaluing and ignoring of the earlier kind of
intelligence that has to do with our relations with each other and with other living things
and with our environment.
And I think that a lot of
the crisis we’re seeing is we’re trying to come back to that and own those relationships while still maintaining our
ability to be technically creative and help solve
those problems that way. I think that these have
been around a lot longer. This guy’s really fascinated with himself and sometimes thinks he’s
the only game in town. So the reason we used to say, when we’re talking about
left and right hemisphere, and I don’t wanna go into
it too deeply tonight, but the reason that the left hemisphere is called the dominant hemisphere … Can anybody guess? It does dominate, but the main reason that it’s called the dominant hemisphere is that it’s the one that names things. It’s the verbal hemisphere. It’s the one that gives people, thinks, “I’m the dominant hemisphere, “and you’re the subdominant hemisphere. “I’m the major hemisphere,
you’re the minor hemisphere.” And it’s kind of a joke,
but I think it’s also true, and we have valued that.
Think about your education. How many hours of emotional
education did you get? How many hours of education in using your imagination did you get? Or your intuition? So your education, and I’m
not saying that it was, hopefully, at least when I went to school, it was reading, writing, arithmetic. It was those left brain,
analytic, logical skills. Tremendously useful, but not all of us. And this other kind of intelligence, I think we need a lot more
education experience with it. Learn how to communicate with it, and that’s why in a little while I’m gonna talk about imagery,
which is its coding language in a sense of this more
emotional and intuitive brain. So here’s a kind of a picture of a real brain cut in half this way. And I don’t know how
well you can see this, but there’s the wrinkled
cortex, neo-cortex. It goes all the way around. And then in the center,
this area here more or less is the limbic or emotional brain. And you can see that there’s an, and then this would be the reptilian, reflexive, survival brain. And you can see there’s lots
of connections between the two, so that this brain could
send messages into this brain and create an emotional reaction, which would send messages
down to this part of the brain and sent it out to the
body and vice versa.
Like for this guy. So this guy’s having a,
he’s not having a good day. He’s having a rage reaction, and without going through
all of these things, just if you want to study this, you can, but something didn’t match up
with his expectations, okay? That’s where most anger comes from. He had an expectation. Something didn’t come up to it. It sent some kind of a message of danger or threat to this emotional brain. It’s signaled his lower brain
that to get ready for a fight, and this thing sends out, through all the cranial nerves
and spinal cord and so on, messages to every organ in his body and your physiology
changes very dramatically. When you’re angry, when you’re frightened, when you’re sad, when you’re
happy, when you’re calm, you are physiologically
different than, okay. So there’s plenty of connections and this is basically just to show yes, there’s a real wiring diagram and a real chemical messaging system.
So anxiety, stress, and worry are interactive, they’re bidirectional. If you have a tendency to be anxious, that emotional brain is gonna be pumping out more
messages of, “Look out.” It may not know what it’s looking out for, but it’s gonna be more vigilant. It’s going to raise the, it’s gonna send more
messages to the cortex to be on guard for problems. And then the cortex is gonna be able to imagine all the problems
that there could be out there, and it’s gonna send messages back and they can get into a real, kind of a reverberating circuit.
All these parts of the brain
are chemically sensitive, and of course in medicine, typically we try to chemically
manipulate these things if somebody’s got a real anxiety disorder. We’re not talking about anxiety disorders which where the anxiety
level is just cranked up high in spite of the thinking here. But we try to manipulate
that with medications. Those of us who have studied
nutritional medicine know that there are naturally
occurring molecules. That there are molecules in our foods that can be used as nutraceuticals
to modify how active or upregulated the nervous
system is or downregulated, so we try to do it through
more natural molecules, but the other thing to know about this is that they’re also thought-sensitive.
That thoughts that become
chemicals at a certain level and those chemicals stimulate
the physical mechanisms that underlie our reactions, so. And that’s gonna be our focus
tonight, is about thinking. For any of you who have any
doubts that the mind and body are really connected
and create physiology, just a real quick, this
is biofeedback data. And to make it simple,
this is muscle tension. This is electrical response in the skin. This is fingertip temperature, which is a sign of either
stress or relaxation. This nice, even white
line here is respiration. So this guy is sitting in a
biofeedback therapist’s office with a bunch of sensors
hooked up to his muscles and his fingertips to measure the way that his circulation responds to stress.
And he’s got a belt around his chest, and he’s just breathing
nice and around his abdomen, this is actually his abdomen. And he’s breathing nice
and normally, even. He’s just sitting there relaxing. There’s not much going on, so. You won’t be able to read all this stuff. Just watch what happens here. So he’s a guy. This is an actual patient who has a phobia about driving over bridges and he lives here. (audience laughing)
Okay. Bad combination, right? So he’s sitting, so he goes
to the biofeedback therapist. Here he’s just sitting there relaxing. Then the biofeedback therapist
asks him just to think about, just imagine approaching
the Golden Gate Bridge.
And all of this goes
in the same direction. There’s an immediate
fight-or-flight response. Just goes off from imagining
driving across the bridge. You can see it best here,
what happens to his breathing. It just goes to pod. It’s just very shallow, very irregular. Stops breathing into his abdomen. His skin temperature,
actually this reversed. It should go decrease. His muscle tension goes up. He’s physiologically
ready to defend his life by imagining going to the bridge. Now, if he can learn to get his breathing under control again and his therapist can guide him to think about some other things
that are more relaxing. They typically break it down. “Just think about coming down the stairs “and seeing your car keys.” In a person who’s developed a phobia, that would be enough to
stimulate a huge reaction. Now, if the person then can
learn to breathe more deeply and to induce a relaxation
response, which most people can, while he’s imagining that, go
back to the calm physiology. By the time he gets to the place where he can actually imagine driving across the bridge and staying calm, he’ll be able to go across that bridge.
That could take months to get to. There’s a lot of practice in here, but it’s a good example
of a mind-body connection and how much we respond to
just thinking about things. So there’s a lot, how many have heard the
term neuroplasticity? Has that been talked about here? So it doesn’t mean your
brain is made of plastic. It means that your brain is changeable, and there’s been a lot
of literature lately about how changeable the
adult human brain is.
Up until very recently, the dictum was we have an
adult brain, that’s it. Your cells die off, but that’s about it. And you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, and all that kind of stuff. And we know now, how many of you have read
this book by Norman Doidge, “The Brain That Changes Itself?” It’s an astounding book on brain science. A couple of, an example,
there are researchers now that have developed techniques, sending, taking people who
have been blind since birth. Hooking up a little video
camera to an electric device that kind of draws a picture
on their back by poking ’em. Kind of a thing that puts
multiple little pokes and gives them a picture on their back, and they start to see.
Okay, they can see so
that they can walk around. Now they have it where a
little video camera and a glass goes to a little wafer on the tongue that sends out little electrical signals. And they start, and they are able to see. Probably not like most of us who are able to see naturally and normally, but they are able to see. They can walk around the room
and not bump into objects and so on and so forth, okay? And what happens over time, what they found was, in these people, that watching a device
called a functional MRI, which can show us what parts of the brain are active while people are thinking, that it was the part of the
brain in the occipital cortex that processes visual information, that took all of this data
from their back or their tongue and started putting pictures together.
So the brain’s taking this data and putting pictures together
’cause that’s what it does. Normally it gets the input from your eye, but if we can get it the
information some other way, it can create new pathways
that create these abilities. Isn’t that astounding? So part of Jeffrey Schwartz at UCLA, his research has been with people with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, which has been traditionally a very difficult condition to treat, and finding very structured,
repetitive exercises, which fortunately,
obsessive-compulsive people are very good at. (laughs)
(audience laughing) By focusing their mind in a certain way, that they literally can change, not only their behavioral patterns, but that their brains change
after a decent period. We’re talking about months of practice so that you can actually
lay new hard wiring down, as well as changing your mind.
You can change your mind in a nanosecond, but it seems to take weeks to
months to change your brain. But when you change your brain, now you’ve got a new
default position installed, and you don’t have to be the
same way that you were before. Louann Brizendine, who’s a professor of psychiatry here at UCSF, wrote this, how many have read this
book, “The Female Brain?” If you never read another
book in your life, and if you’re either male or female, (audience laughing) you should read this book. This is an astounding book. A really astounding book about the brain and how it’s organized and what different capabilities there are. Both genders have similar capabilities, but it’s a bit of a digression, but it was tremendously useful
to me to learn from this book that all fetuses as they’re
growing in the womb are female, are male at the beginning. And at eight weeks,
yeah, they’re all female. They’re all female. At eight weeks, the fetus
with the Y chromosome gets a wash of testosterone, and do you know what that
testosterone does to the brain? You’re gonna love this.
(audience laughing)
It explains so much. (audience laughing) It kills 80% of the
neurons in the male brain that process emotional communication. (audience laughing) This is apparently brain science. And when they get it again
when they’re 14 or 15, I don’t know how many of
you remember being 14 or 15, or if you have a 14 or
15-year-old son who sits at the table like this
and looks like a cretin and spends all of his time in
his room and is barely human, and he was a brilliant, loving little kid. He’s got testosterone poisoning, which is again, seriously,
(audience laughing) is again, killing neurons in his brain that have to do with
emotional communication. And increasing the parts of his brain that have to do with sexuality
and aggressiveness, okay? While the female’s brain is
still maintaining this big part about four to five times
as much brain area devoted to emotional communication.
To talking about sensing
emotional nuances. Which is why in general you ladies are so much better at it than we are and you like to talk to each
other about all that stuff. You like to talk to us about it. You don’t understand
why we don’t understand. Okay, this would be like,
and this is no offense.
I need a better archetype, but this would be like my dog who has 20,000 times the smell neurons in his nose than I do. This would be like my dog asking me, “Why don’t you smell that
Jake was here earlier? “I’m sniffing his book. “Why don’t you, I’m living
in a world of smell. “Smell is all around us.” It’s a world of smell to the dog, right? I don’t smell any of it. I don’t hear the high-pitched sounds ’cause his brain is tuned differently, so. This is has saved my marriage. (audience laughing)
This discover. And when you wonder, and when the guys, these are all overgeneralizations and I’m playing it up a little bit, but your guy may not be able
to tell what you’re feeling as easily as you can
tell what he’s feeling.
It’s a different world. He just may not, he’s just like, and this is what guys
always say to each other. “Why is she mad? (audience laughing) “I don’t get it. “Why is she mad? “I asked her out to lunch on Tuesday. “She got mad at me. “I don’t know why.” So one mystery not exactly solved, but the brains are organized differently. It’s really fascinating. That is a great read. All right, I’m gonna go ahead and go on before I get stoned here.
The brain changes throughout life and here’s the basis of my interest in thinking about how we think. Thinking about how we worry. That if the blind can learn to see, then the anxious should
be able to learn to relax. I would think it’s much
easier to learn to relax than it is to see when
you’ve never seen before. I may be wrong, but this is
kind of at the center of it.
If our brain is capable
of that kind of learning, then what do we need to
do in order to teach it? And this is a great term that comes from Jeffrey Schwartz
self-directed neuroplasticity, which is fascinating because
you’re using your own mind to change your own brain. Really an interesting concept. As one of my favorite Gary Larson cartoons that has to do with this, this is the ultimate self-help technique. And the guys here are reading these books, like “Do It By Instinct”
and “Dare To Be Nocturnal.” (audience laughing) “Predator-Prey Relationships.” And the best one of course is “How to Avoid Natural Selection,” which is (mumbles).
(audience laughing) So this is ultimately, I mean,
our greatest self-care tool. So let’s talk about how
we can think about this, and this is how I’m thinking about it now. I’m thinking that there’s
good worry and bad worry.
And by that, I mean good
worry is functional worry. It’s worry that’s trying
to solve a problem and that has some potential
to solve a problem. And that, and if we separate our worries into good worries and bad
or futile worries, okay, we can treat each one of
them in a different manner. We can use our brain in a different way. So good worry is, “I’m worried about this project. “I’m worried about where to go to school. “I’m worried about
whether I’m gonna be able “to pay for my kid’s education.” Real stuff to worry about. It’s not that there’s any lack
of real stuff to worry about, but stuff that, if you asked
yourself, “Is it likely “that I could actually
do something about this?” That you would say either yes or maybe? As opposed to, when you actually write out the stuff you’re worrying about, a lot of times you find out, you look at stuff and you say, “Well, “I can’t do much about that, ‘2012.’ “Gee, I’m worried that the
world’s gonna end in 2012.” What are you gonna do about that? Okay, are you likely to be
able to do anything about that? You might wanna put that on
your bad worry list, okay? And just enjoy the movie as
a great roller coaster ride.
So good worry anticipates
and solves problems. Bad worry, circular, habitual, magical. Doesn’t go anywhere. Doesn’t lead to solutions, scares you. In a sense, it starts to become a type of auto-suggestion, right? ‘Cause you’re thinking about
this thing all the time, you’re scaring yourself. You’re sending out those
fear pathway and that makes it harder to use your brain
when you’re feeling that way. And so, how many of you are familiar with the Serenity Prayer? How many of you have heard of it before? Okay, now I wanna ask how many of you are in 12-step programs? (audience laughing) The 12-step programs
adopted the Serenity Prayer. The Serenity Prayer goes back probably as far as Roman times, and then in modern times was attributed to a theologian in WWII, but the 12-step programs have adopted it. It’s a brilliant prayer thought. If you don’t like prayer, just
take off the God word, okay? But the Serenity Prayer goes, “God,” or whatever, “grant me the serenity “to accept the things I cannot change, “the courage to change
the things I can change, “and the wisdom to know the difference.” Okay, so if we use the Serenity Prayer as kind of the skeleton of
our Worrying Well practice, we wanna think about separating
things we’re worrying about into things you can change, things you probably can’t change.
And then if there are
some that are left over that you’re not sure of, where you need the wisdom
to know the difference, I’m gonna talk to you at least about ways that you can use imagery to help with all three of those things. So the first question is if
you’re not sure about something and you need more wisdom,
how do get more wisdom? Besides living another
30 or 40 years, okay? By which, I mean that’s
not all that useful when you’ve got an immediate problem. So there’s ways, ordinary
ways to access more wisdom. Talk to people that you think are wise. If you have wise friends,
if you have wise teachers, see if they’ll talk to you and
you can share your problem, listen to ’em, consider what they say. That’s one good source of wisdom. This stands for what would Jesus, Buddha, Dalai Lama, or Yoda do? (audience laughing) So if you don’t have access
to a wise friend or teacher, this is a type of imagery technique. Think about what would somebody that you imagine is genuinely wise, what would they say in that situation? Remember Hillary Clinton got all kinds of flack from people when
she was the First Lady ’cause she said she was in a circumstance where she wasn’t sure what to do and she thought a lot
about Eleanor Roosevelt and what Eleanor Roosevelt would have done in that situation, and of course, all the kooks got up on her.
“She’s into spiritualism,”
and so on and so forth. She was conjuring the
ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt. She was imagining what a wise, ethical, role-model would do in that situation. It’s a perfectly natural and
very intelligent thing to do. What would somebody with
class and wisdom and caring and morals do in this situation? And if you took it another step and you do it a guided imagery
where you actually relax, you go into a meditative or
relax, just a relaxed state, and you kind of daydream
that you were walking in the garden with Eleanor Roosevelt, and you told her what was going on and you imagined that
she spoke back to you. That’s not spooky. As long as you know that it’s
not really Eleanor Roosevelt, or if it is, that she’s, that you’re not identifying with her.
You’re not the person in the crazy house who thinks that they’re Jesus, but you could imagine
what Jesus would say. What Jesus would do, if Jesus is important
and meaningful to you. Or if what the Dalai Lama would do or what your wise grandmother would do, or what your wise grandmother would do if you had a wise grandmother, right? So you start accessing, what would it be like if I were to approach this from a wise place and you take the time to quiet down and take the time to get deeper inside. And that’s what we do with an imagery we sometimes call inner wisdom imagery or inner advisor, inner guide,
inner ally, inner whatever.
You can have your higher
power, guardian angel. People have called this by different names throughout history, and some people feel like, “Well, you are calling on on a spirit.” And other people feel like, “It’s just a way to get
to the part of my brain “that has this wisdom.” Because there is a part of all of us that has a lot of wisdom. You know when it comes out? It comes out when your
friend’s in trouble. When your friend comes to you for advice ’cause they can’t figure it out, right? And have you ever noticed how easy it is to give advice to your friends? Good advice, usually.
And if it’s a serious thing, you take time to think about it. You don’t just give them a glib answer. You take some time and you think about it. You go down as deep as
you can inside yourself and you give them that wise advice. The thing is, it’s probably easier for you to get to your wisdom than your friend if your friend is really frightened. Because when we are frightened, when we’re anxious, when we’re worried, there’s a psychological
phenomenon called regression. We tend to regress. We tend to feel like we’re
too little, we’re too weak, we don’t have the resources,
we don’t know what to do. We’re wishing that somebody
bigger, wiser, stronger were there to tell us what to do. And we feel more childlike and that blocks our
access to our own wisdom. And that’s why taking the time to go to actually do a relaxation practice, relax your body, shift your mind, imagine that you go to a place that’s beautiful and peaceful and safe, so that you get out of that fearful loop.
You imagine, or you invite an
image, of someone or something that’s wise and loving,
and that cares about you, whether it’s someone or
something you’ve ever met or something you just make up. You just imagine, you imagine
what it would tell you or show you or do with you, and it’s quite remarkable what can come from a meditation like this. Does that make sense to people? And so it’s easier to
do that for your friend because as much as you love your friend, you’re probably not gonna be
as freaked out as they are if it’s a serious situation. We see this all the time. The most common place that
I see this in my practice is with people who’ve just been
newly diagnosed with cancer, and they’re just shocked and
freaked out as most people are. And in the meantime,
they’re visiting all these different doctors and oncologists, and trying to become an
oncologist in two weeks and learn the whole field of oncology and figure out their best option.
While emotionally, they’re
feeling like a three-year-old. So, and it’s very difficult for them to make the decisions that way. These kinds of techniques,
if you start early and help them connect
to a deeper level enough that scared child can
really make a difference in terms of wise decision-making. So sometimes they give, your inner advisor will say something like this. “The secret of living
without frustration and worry “is to avoid becoming personally
involved in your own life.” This is definitely a good
treatment for worry, okay? But usually, and that’s not bad advice.
Here’s how I think this
thing kind of works. So if we go through this process of thinking about the worries, I actually have people
in class write them down and then go through and separate them. I mean, it sounds mechanical. It’s just using our ordinary intelligence. Separate them into three columns. Things you think you could
change if you wanted to, things you think you couldn’t
change if you wanted to, and things that you’re not sure about. And people rarely do this, so we carry it around in our head. Just writing it down is often very helpful for people in sorting it out. And then where we want
to get to is down here, either if it’s something you can’t change, basically what you wanna
do is get to a place where you either get to a place
of some kind of acceptance.
Some kind of coming to terms. Or you turn it around into
an intention or a prayer. So in other words, you’re
worrying about something. That something’s gonna
happen, but it’s not something that you can physically
do something about. It’s interesting to see what happens if you take it and you turn it around and you put it into a
positive visualization of what you would rather
have happen, okay? So, and I’m gonna skip the
whole argument here about whether or not that has a
physical effect and the secret. Whether we just make something happen by changing our intention, and sometimes it seems that
we do and sometimes we don’t. But what does happen when
people, in other words, some friend gets diagnosed with cancer and you are overcome with worry because you are just worried
that she’s gonna die, okay.
Or be sick or go through
some horrendous thing ’cause you care for your friend. That’s a typically normal reaction. But you find yourself losing sleep and you’re thinking about and you’re just getting obsessed with it and so on and so forth. Well, and there’s nothing
more that you can do. You’re bringing her
food and you’re a source of support and so on and so forth, but you aren’t personally going to be able to cure that cancer, okay? But now you start to say, “Okay, instead of constantly imagining “what I don’t wanna have happen, “I’m gonna think about what
I would rather have happen, “so I’m gonna start to imagine
that she gets great treatment “and that her cancer responds “and that she comes through that treatment “and she survives it
and she comes out being “an even stronger and healthier person.
“That if it’s up to, if it was up to me, “if I was God, that’s what would happen.” And I don’t know if that’ll
make any difference, but that’s where I’m gonna put my energy, instead of putting my energy over here. And whether it changes the
outcome or not, way beyond me, but what it does do is that when people start focusing on that image, they become less anxious. You become less anxious
because you feel like, “I’m doing what I can be doing “and I’m putting my energy
into what I wanna see happen.” Does that make sense? And there’s a lot of
principles of suggestion that are at work there. There’s a couple analogies
I use for people. One is, I’m not a skier myself.
A mountain biker and I skied. I don’t know how many of you are, but you can imagine being a skier. So imagine that you’re up
on the top of a very steep, very challenging ski run. What you wanna do when
you’re up there at the top before you start, before you push off, you wanna check it all out. You wanna see, “Hey, there’s
a big rock over here. “I don’t wanna bump, hit that. “There’s big trees over here. “I don’t wanna hit those.” Then what you wanna do, and
any skier will tell you, that you wanna see what the line is that takes you through
safely through those things.
And once you start skiing
and you’re going fast or riding your bike downhill or any other thing that’s like that, what you wanna focus on is you wanna focus on where you wanna go, not on where you don’t wanna go because if you fixate on that
rock, you will crash into it. Because that is how your
body-mind is put together. It tends to go where you look. The other example I use for people is if you wanna hit a
bullseye in a dartboard, it helps if you look at it, okay? If you look at it, you’re
not guaranteed to hit it but you’re much more likely to hit it than if you close your eyes or your attention is
just all over the place. And if you keep looking at
it, even if you keep missing, your whole nervous system is
wired to recruit resources and to control your body
so that you get closer and closer to it and that you
hit it more and more often. So it’s goal-setting, it’s
focusing your intention on what you wanna have happen. Does that make sense? Without doing that, I was
talking to a psychiatrist friend of mine the other day
about this and he says, “I think you’re talking about
intention deficit disorder.” (audience laughing) ‘Cause a lot of this comes down
to whether how much control we can have about where
we put our attention.
So we put our attention in this case on a, if you’re a prayer, if
you’re a religious person and you have a way of praying, then you pray for the
outcome that you desire. If you’re not a religious
person, if you don’t pray, you visualize or you intend it. You say, “If it’s up to me, “I’m worried that my friend will succumb. “I don’t want that to happen.” “But the way that I’m gonna put my energy “into her getting better, “into imagining that she gets better.” And if nothing else, it’ll help you. It’ll help reduce your anxiety level. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.
So the other thing is, is
that on the other side, is if something that you can change, there’s a couple of
processes for doing this. One of the questions is
sometimes people don’t act on things that they can change because they feel like they
don’t have enough creativity. They haven’t been able to solve a problem. They don’t have the guts,
the courage to act on it. They don’t have the assertiveness. They don’t have the confidence. So imagery, and I’m gonna hopefully share with you an imagery that you
can experiment with yourself is a fantastic way of both accessing and building these kinds of
personal qualities in yourself so that you can be more
effective in making changes that you want to, okay. And leading to an action that can actually resolve these problems.
So imagery is a type of thinking, people often say that
it involves your senses. Thoughts that you can see,
hear, smell, feel, daydreams. It’s a language, it’s
an emotional language. It’s a synthetic, just thought language. It’s a language of the arts. It’s all the visual arts,
drama, poetry, painting. Even music, dance, images that bring, convey a lot of information, but not in the same way that an equation conveys information. That it makes sense. It’s the difference between listening. I think Einstein once said, “You could break a Beethoven sonata down “into wavelengths and frequencies, “but you’d be missing the point.” So there’s that linear, scientific part. There’s that experiential part. We’re after that. So imagery, it’s a
natural way that we think. It’s very closely linked to the emotions. It’s a natural, if you think
about it as a coding language, it’s a coding language of the
emotional, intuitive gray.
And it’s just that we haven’t had much education in using it, and runaway imagination is
probably the primary source of modern stress. It’s not just what’s happening, it’s what you think will happen to you, and how it will affect you that sends the signals
down into your body. On the other hand, developing
a skillful imagination, one that you can use to
send messages of calmness, of confidence, creativity,
of there’s a lot of different ways to use it. Your most potent tool for stress relief, but you need to learn some skills in order to use it on purpose. So the imagery, what the
imagery does is if we’re having a problem that we can’t
solve in that cortex, the imagery brings the
limbic brain into it. It brings the emotional,
intuitive intelligence to that issue or problem, so it just brings a whole
other big area of the brain to bear on whatever the problem is.
So it doesn’t take anything away. It adds intelligence to
your problem-solving. So you can calm your brain with imagery, just like you can make it anxious. I could take you through a little imagery, just ask you to imagine the scariest thing you’ve ever been through. Don’t do that right now. If we went through it and had you really, “What do you see? “What do you hear? “What do you smell? “Imagine you’re there again.” You could work up pretty good anxiety.
If I asked you instead to
imagine that you go to a place that’s peaceful and beautiful to you and that you just loved to be in, we have nothing to do and it’s safe and it’s the right temperature and notice what you see and hear and smell and immerse yourself in that daydream. Your brain will send messages down through the limbic system,
down into the lizard brain. It’ll say, “It looks
beautiful, peaceful, and safe. “It sounds beautiful, peaceful, and safe. “It smells nice. “It’s peaceful here, it’s safe. “Hit the All Clear button.” And your body will shift into that. So there’s that place is, “Where right now do I
wanna focus my attention? “What train of thought do I
wanna put my attention on?” And again, few people have
ever really been taught this, so we have got … I’ll get to the commercial aspect later, but it’s one reason that
I’ve devoted as much time as I have to writing books and
doing audio CDs and downloads for to teach people these skills.
They’re very, they’re simple skills. Your imagination is your birthright. It’s built into you. Nobody ever really just taught you how to do some fairly simple,
but potentially profound moves with them that can
literally change your life depending on what you’re doing. It can certainly improve your life. So rather than talk with you more, I wanna offer you a chance. Let’s do, would you
like to do some imagery? Some guided imagery instead. We’ll rest your left brain. We’ll fan it off, cool it off. So I wanna share with you
a fairly simple imagery that we call evocative imagery. How many of you have used guided
imagery on purpose before? So a fair number. Maybe half or a little more than half. So this is a way to use imagery to help you access particular quality that you might wanna have more of. Okay, and that could be, it could be courage,
it could be confidence, it could be creativity,
it could be patience, it could be humor, it
could be assertiveness. Any quality that you wanna think about. And the way that we usually use this, and you could do this is to think about the situation that
you’ve got going on, that you have had difficulty
solving or resolving.
And you just feel like you just haven’t been able to resolve it and it seems like something that you could potentially
solve or resolve. Well, you just don’t feel you have enough fill in the blank to do this. You need a little more,
again, courage, assertiveness, patience, humor, whatever it is, okay? If you can’t think of
one right off the bat, just think about a quality
that you would like to experience more of in yourself. Joy, calmness, again,
confidence, self-love. Whatever floats your boat. Just some quality you’d
like to experience more of. And give it a name. Think about what the name of it, and you could do a couple of qualities.
I wouldn’t do more than, sometimes it’s unclear
what you need more of. I feel like I need more, I don’t know if it’s courage
or I need more strength, so you could do them
both kind of together. Kinda know what you’re after. But think about a specific
quality or a couple qualities that you would just like to
feel more of in yourself, okay? And then let yourself be as comfortable as you can be in your seats. You can close your eyes. You don’t have to. But it’s usually easier to pay
attention to your imagination and your inner world if you do. And then just let yourself take a couple of deeper breaths in your breathing. Let your breathing get a little
deeper into your abdomen, and-
(exhaling) let your out breath be kind of
a letting go kind of breath. Without forcing anything
or straining anything, just, again, drawing a deeper breath into your abdomen and to your belly, letting the out breath be
a letting kind of a breath. Just inviting your body to
begin to soften or relax. And just another time or two as you welcome the breath into your body.
Just notice that you’re
literally bringing fresh energy and oxygen into your body. You can invite it to circulate
and flow around your body in the bloodstream to
every cell of your body. Brings fresh energy. And as you let the
breath out, if you like, just let it be an invitation to your body, your mind, even your spirit, to just let go of any tension or discomfort you don’t
have to hold right now. And you don’t even have to worry about whether you need to hold
or what you can let go of. Just invite the body to soften. The mind to begin to quiet. And invite your body to
continue to soften and relax. Perhaps to become a little more spacious without worrying about how it does that. Feel free to shift or move
to be even more comfortable.
And if you haven’t already
let yourself go inside to a place that’s very beautiful to you, let yourself daydream yourself to a place that’s very beautiful, peaceful, safe. And that might be a place that you’ve actually been in your life. Either in your outer life
or even in your inner life. Or it might be a place that
just comes to mind right now, an imaginary place or some combination. It doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s a place
that’s beautiful to you and peaceful and safe. And if more than one place comes to mind, just pick whichever one
attracts you the most right now. And imagine in your own way
that you’re actually there. And take a few moments to just look around and notice what you imagine seeing in this beautiful, peaceful place.
Notice the colors and the shapes and the things that are there, and don’t worry about whether
it’s very vivid and clear like your usual eyesight or
whether it’s kind of vague or it comes and goes, but just notice what you imagine is there in this peaceful, beautiful
place, safe place. And notice what you imagine
hearing in that place, or if it’s just very quiet. Notice any sounds you imagine hearing. Notice if there’s an aroma or a fragrance or a quality of the air. And notice what time of day
or night it seems to be. And I wonder if you can tell
what season of the year it is. Just notice, find the spot in that place where you feel most
comfortable and at ease.
And just trusting your instincts just like a dog or a
cat will circle around and find the most comfortable place to be and let yourself get comfortable there. And then think about a quality that you think you’d like to feel more of. The name of a quality, a
particular quality or feeling state that you’d like to feel more of. And then let yourself
go back in your memory to some time when you experienced yourself having that quality in yourself. Just let your memory go back to some time when you felt that quality in yourself. And some of you may not have a memory of having that quality, so
let yourself go to some time when you witnessed
somebody else expressing that quality or embodying that quality. that could be a real person
or a fictional person or a historical person.
And if you found a time when
you yourself had this quality, imagine that you’re there again now. And notice what you see,
what you hear, what you feel as you’re feeling that
particular quality within you. And if you’re imagining somebody else embodying that quality, imagine that you bring them inside you so that you can feel what it feels like to have that quality inside you. And then notice where you feel that quality most strongly in your body. You might want to just
gently scan through your body with your attention from
head to toe and back up, as if your attention were a
sonar beam or a radar beam, and just see if you, where do you feel that particular quality
most strongly in your body? Strongest in your feet or your legs? Your pelvis? Abdomen? Chest? Your neck and shoulders? Arms and hands? In your face? Just notice wherever it
seems to be strongest.
And let it grow a little bit larger. Imagine that you can just allow it to grow a little bit larger and
stronger, just a little bit. And notice how it feels to
feel that quality in yourself. And notice what your
posture wants to be like as you feel that quality
more strongly in yourself. And if you’re comfortable with it, imagine that you turn up the volume on that quality like you had a control, like a volume control on
a radio or television, and you turn it up so that it radiates out from wherever it’s
centered in all directions. Radiates out and fills your body with that particular quality. And as you feel that in your face, notice how your face feels.
And as you feel that quality, notice what you imagine
your voice would be like if you were in touch with
that quality when you spoke. And if you like the
feeling of this quality, go ahead and turn it up even more so that it overflows the space of your body and fills the space around your body for a foot in every direction. And imagine that it
radiates inside your body and touches every cell in
your body with that quality. From the deepest part of your
bone marrow to your bones. To your connective tissues, your muscles. The organs and your pelvis. In your abdomen. In your chest. Especially in your brain. Your spinal cord and your nervous system.
As if every cell of your body were touched by a ray of this quality. As if you were a sponge and you
were bathing in this quality and could soak up as much as you’d like. And if you like, you can turn it up even stronger and bigger, fill the space around your body for several feet in every direction. You can experiment with that. Never turn it up so strongly
that you’re uncomfortable, but if you like the way it feels, imagine you can turn it up. That there’s an abundant
source of this quality, and you can turn it up so
that you fill the space around your body for
12, 15, 20 feet around. Fill the room with it. Fill the bay area with it. Fill the world with it. Just experimenting, and then
let yourself turn the volume into whatever’s most
comfortable for you right now. No matter how strong or weak,
how big or small that is, just give yourself permission
to let it be like listening to music when you’re all by yourself.
Whatever volume is most
comfortable for you right now is exactly the right volume. And just let yourself rest in
that for a few more minutes. And just take a moment before you bring your awareness back into the room. Just take a moment to
review what’s happened in this brief imagery experience. What quality you were looking
to experience more of. Whether you have or not. What it was like. And if there’s anything in particular that you want to bring
back form this experience and remember when you come
back to the outer world. And before you come back to
the outer world, take a moment. If there’s a particular situation that you wanted more of this
quality in order to address, imagine addressing that situation while being in touch with this quality. And just notice whatever you notice. Notice whether it seems the
same or different in any way. Whether bringing more of this quality into the situation seems
to change anything about it or your relationship to it. And before you come
back to the outer world, just remember that you
can recall this quality, access it, feel it, built it more strongly in
yourself anytime you like just by going through this process again.
And so when you’re ready, just let the images go back
to wherever they came from and become aware of the
room that we’re in together. And just gently start
to bring your awareness from your inner world back
out to the outer world. Us in this room here together. And if you like, just very
gently stretch your body and feel your fingers and toes
and everything in between. I wanna give you just
a few minutes to write or draw anything that you wanna remember about this experience. This is just for you. I’m gonna give you about
three or four minutes just to write or draw anything, and I would recommend that
you do it, whatever happened. Even if nothing happened. Let’s take three or four minutes and write about the experience, especially about anything
that you want to remember that you thought was important or that you thought was
interesting about this experience.
Let’s just have some discussion. Comments, questions? Did everybody hear that? It sometimes you get into
such a stressful state and an anxious state, it’s just. She’s had experiences where relaxation, guided imagery have been very useful. And other times when
she’s been so stressed and so anxious and upset that
she couldn’t even get into it, or if she did, it just
didn’t even touch it. And yes, that can happen. This is not a magic panacea. So sometimes that’s a place where you can use
somebody else to help you or to take enough time, or
to do some things that are, get a massage, take a hot tub.
Talk to a friend. This is a place where
medications may come in. I find a double shot of Jack
Daniels works really well. I wouldn’t recommend it as a daily diet, but it certainly helps really
get your anxiety level down, and you may be able then to
relieve enough of the anxiety that you can pay
attention to these things. So there are many other things we can do, from medications to
nutrients to other relaxants to doing whatever you
need to get to that place, where you can focus. One of the qualities of imagery thinking is that it can help you
connect with the bigger picture and how things are connected
in kind of a bigger picture, so that can include your faith. Or you may find, “Well, if that happens, “I don’t want that to happen. “But maybe there’s a good part of it, “or maybe I’ll just deal
with it the best that I can.” So that’s just to expand
the picture and let yourself kind of go out to what
the consequences might be.
Because that’s part of
really sorting it into things that you might be able to do, something about things you
can’t do something about, is to let yourself run it out. Does that make sense to you? Yeah? So sometimes when people
are making treatment choices that are very difficult, I’ll invite them to imagine
that they’re at a crossroads. Again, this happens when, and
if they go down this road, they choose this kind of treatment, and just imagine walking down that road and just imagine it
going as far as you can and see what you imagine go down this road or go down as far as you
can see what you imagine. Along the way, you’re just
gonna flesh out the picture, and part of that’s gonna be able to see, “Is there something I can do about that? “Is there not something
I can do about that? “Which one do I imagine “is gonna ultimately be better for me?” And kind of make that choice.
What’s the difference between
imagining going to the beach and being at the beach? So imagining being in a
quiet, peaceful, safe place is the next best thing
to actually being there. And it has certain advantages in that you can go anytime you want. And it’s, you can be there very quickly, and it’s very inexpensive. So you can go, so I’d like to go to the beach in Hawaii a lot.
But I can’t go every day ’cause I work and I have responsibilities and so on, and I’m lucky if I can
go every couple of years. But, I can, when I decide, “I’ve had enough, I need a break.” I can take a few deep breaths
and I can close my eyes and I can be back in a particular, floating in the water just off of a beach. And I can immerse, when
I do immerse myself and take the time to notice the
different sensory qualities. What we know now from looking at brains on the functional MRI, is that if I make an effort to notice what I imagine seeing
and hearing and feeling in the weightlessness of my body as I’m floating and the lapping
of the waves on the surf and the smell of the plumerias
and the humidity in the air, and I go through all that sensory stuff, that when I’m noticing what I’m seeing, the part of my brain that
processes vision is active.
When I’m noticing the sounds I’m hearing, the parts of my brain that
process sound is active. When I’m noticing the sensory details, that part of my brain’s
sensory cortex is active. So what you have is you
have more and more parts of your cortex sending
messages down to those lower, more reflexive parts of your
brain, and they’re saying, “It looks like I’m in Hawaii,
sounds like I’m Hawaii. “It feels like I’m in Hawaii. “It smells like I’m in Hawaii.” And that part of your brain just goes, “Okay, all clear.” Sends out the All Clear signal, and a lot of things in your
body start to go to work in a more effective manner
that haven’t been able to work as well when
you’re constantly reacting to messages of, “Look out. “What’s next? “How am I gonna get that done? “Danger, threat, problem.” So on and so forth.
Which is where we spend
so much of our time, and that, so this little lizard brain is sitting there, “Look out.” Right? And it’s constantly
getting the body prepared for that and that’s exhausting. So if we’re spending
98% of our waking time and half our sleeping time dealing with those kinds of things, we see why we get exhausted. We get wired and tired. We have trouble sleeping. The body starts to signal
that it needs something. So finding a way to get
to those deeper levels and plug in a couple of
those relaxation places as just a basic tool is I think one of the real fundamental
benefits of guided imagery, which is a type of
meditation at that level.
And I really appreciate your attention. Thank you very much. I hope it was useful. (audience clapping) (upbeat music).
