Lighten up in hard economic times……

I received his inquiry from a reporter today:

“I am working on an article pitch for an article titled Lighten up:
Tk good reasons to stop being so hard on yourself. I think an
article like this is really important during these economic times
when everyone is just trying to get by. I would like to hear from
doctors and psychologists regarding this issue. “

I am in the self help business and we run into this all the time not just in hard economic times. It could be social anxiety, public speaking., relationships, asking for a raise or any other problem. To understand what is going on you have to examine what is really happening to these people.

The real problem is that their identity has been challenged. It is the same with most problems. You go through life and you tell yourself you are a certain kind of person. Then something happens that changes all of that. You go from someone who is secure and has the identity of someone who can handle the world and provide for their family to an identity of someone who can’t do those things.

In some people’s minds they are now a loser, pathetic, weak or vulnerable. This cause them to go into a flight or fight mentality that drives their desperation. This amps up their anxiety and they begin to filter the world through the belief that they are a loser, ect.  That snowballs into their relationships, marriage, sexual performance and many other areas of their lives. That only makes them feel like more of a loser, ect and the whole process spirals out of control.

This is a chemical process that occurs in the brain. We learn most quickly when there is a lot of novelty in a situation and a lot of emotion. It triggers acetylcholine a neurotransmitter associated with learning. This was very important to our survival when we were cavemen and had to remember “ Tiger near this tree”. In the modern world it betrays us and associates things that are not necessarily related. The more intense the emotion the less access we have to the problem solving and creative adaptive parts of the brain.

This triggers a primal brain response to situations that does not fit the modern world. We begin to react without rational thought even when we rationally understand what we should be doing. We lose the ability to adapt to new situations. Our problem solving ability diminishes. This is when people can turn to immediate gratification to generate dopamine so that they can feel good. Drinking, drugs, compulsive shopping, and even physical abuse can be driven by this dopamine cycle. They feel good for a short while but then when they are not doing the activity that makes them feel better they have to do it again and more intensely than last time.

That is because it is like an alarm system that gets more sensitive every time it is tripped. Like those annoying car alarms that go off when you walk by. At first it is just when you get close. The  when 5 feet away. Then ten. Then 100.  People get more sensitive every time as well. That is how a good phobia is formed. See snake in the words and get scared. Then the next time it is see snake at a distance and get scared. Then think of going in the woods and get scared. Then see hose and think it is a snake and get scared. Then think of snakes and get scared.

This cycle continues without any effort. Sometimes people can use willpower for short periods of time but will eventually tire and fail. You can try to desensitize them but that is cruel and most often makes the problem worse. You can find your local self help stage show and have dancing girls and experience over powered positive feelings but then you just become addicted to self help seminars that seem to get increasingly expensive with each “level”.  You can use Prozac like drugs to alter your mood but that just mask the problem and are just as addictive and harmful as any other addiction. All of these will eventually fail because the problem is effortlessly still there……waiting.

The answer is to learn to re-access the creative adaptive part of the brain. This is done by associating resource states and beliefs and balancing them with the problem states and identity.  This allows you to be able to adapt to new situations while still being able to have equal access to the primal drives that are useful and productive. The are important because the primal brain generates movement so that you actually do the things you create. It helps you take action and actually solve the problems you have figured out.

What you end up with is a balanced mind that can both create/adapt and react/move.

If you are interested you can check out our site. Http://www.essential-skills.com. Specifically the page on the 3D Mind process, https://www.essential-skills.com/3dmind/?page_id=394

The site is just now being rebuilt so it is not as clean as I would like but you will be able to get the idea.

Let me know if this is useful

Tom Vizzini and Kim McFarland

Www.essential-skills.com