I intended to talk about stress and anxiety

We had an open-air interview on Monday — under the trees because of the plague restrictions at Raglan Radio! Aaron, my interviewer, realised at the beginning that his mic wasn’t working and asked me to explain about NLP and introduce myself while he got that sorted.

A synopsis of the interview is given below. Or surprise yourself and just click to play. 😜

After the brief introduction, Aaron asked me about the sort of things I might help people work through. I spoke about the influence limiting beliefs can have and how people might not even realise they have such beliefs.

I’ve found that “I’m not good enough” is a very common belief. If people have this belief, their experiences will reinforce the belief. When they can identify and change that belief (with some help), their entire world changes for the better. Most beliefs of this nature are unconscious — like the personal one I used to have, revealed during the interview.

I describe the differences between the conscious and the unconscious minds and how we can develop these unwanted and not-very-useful beliefs when we’re very young and naïve. We talk about the Reticular Activating System (RAS) and how it focuses our mind on what we deem important (with more examples). There’s a little exercise you can do that I took Aaron through to show how this works.

Then we discuss ‘truth’

Yep, and that truth is really an individual perception and can be constantly changing as we consider new information. Life isn’t black and white, there are many shades of grey — apparently 50!

Finally, we get to stress and anxiety

We discuss the ‘fear porn’ pushed by mainstream media and how much stress and anxiety that causes. How anxiety stops people from learning. Most people feel miserable after watching the news, rather than uplifted. Aaron admitted that he’d stopped reading the news on air because he felt awful after doing so — and this was at the start of his working day!

How stress affects our bodies and colours our judgement.

Some people have become desensitised to the negative news, and it prevents them from seeing the good in the world. I reveal how anxiety is self-induced, and the process we go through to create it; worrying and creating worst-case scenarios. These things cause anxiety in your body and can begin from the time you get up and continue until you go to bed.

Useful tips

I share some tips to help you feel more relaxed, such as focusing on and engaging in your environment (listen for the details). How looking up makes things look brighter — we even say ‘things are looking up’. While, as humans, it’s easy to empathise with those in difficult situations, it does nothing to help our stress levels, or prevent us from feeling anxiety, especially if we can’t do anything to help.

When we’re anxious and fearful, we’re easily controlled and manipulated. We can’t learn or take in new information in these states. I give an example of a course I used to run for people who had struggled to learn at school, and how important it is to create an environment where folk feel relaxed.

Then there’s another exercise that will help you counteract anxiety

It takes five minutes, but the calming effect can last from 4 to 5 hours.

My free Guide will soon be available

My guide, ‘5 Secret Mind-Set Practices To Take You From Anxious to Zen’, will be accessible soon. As I write this, I’m putting the finishing touches on the Minding Your Mind course, which will be online in the next few weeks. The course contains many tools to ‘take care of’ your mind so you can ease stress and anxiety and live a calmer and more peaceful life.

I’m on to it!

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Tags: Learning and memory, Perception, Podcasts and audio tips, Thinking and mindset