A reader shared this awesome adventure he took his brain on recently: I can experience anxiety and panic attacks pretty regularly. They used to control my life. Any work meeting, restaurant, confrontation, exercise, bodily sensation would send me into an hour long panic. I dealt with this for years-not knowing what was going on with me. I’ve never really been an overly anxious person but after my daughter was born my brain and my body hit their limit. I had …
Tag: ACT
I think back to when I was a pre teen and there was so much happening, not only physically but also mentally… That’s when I first recall OCD happening to me–I was around 12 years old and I began to count and touch doors, handles, count my steps, turn off the TV at the “right time”. I had no idea what was happening, it all seemed innocent to me back then, just a little quirk I had. I just wanted …
When we’re struggling with mental illness, it’s often the compulsions that get all of the focus, both when we’re trying to figure out what’s going on and when we’re getting treatment. Many disorders are defined only by the superficial characteristics of the compulsions they’re engaging in when they show up to get a diagnosis. But the coping, checking, and controlling compulsions we engage in are a tiny part of a much bigger system. If you don’t learn address the beliefs …
When it comes to dealing with horrible, weird, upsetting, terrifying intrusive thoughts or whatever else your brain is throwing up when you’re struggling with mental illness, learning to practice accepting the stuff in your head and shifting your focus to doing the things that will actually make you healthy, can stop the struggle in your head.
Here’s the beautiful paradox of Acceptance: If you accept all of your worries and intrusive thoughts instead of trying to fight them or be certain about them, you’ll gradually get rid of them. This is not the goal of Acceptance because there’s nothing wrong with those thoughts. But it’s a wonderful side-effect of Acceptance. When you fight intrusive thoughts, you place value on them in your brain, particularly to your subconscious, the part of your mind that’s throwing these thoughts …
This post looks at how you can practice Acceptance after making an error while doing a presentation at work. This is an experience that many people often go to intense, life-limiting lengths to avoid: Step 1: I’m giving a presentation at work and I make an error during the presentation. I say an incorrect number when talking about some projections. All sorts of thoughts pop into my head about being a bad employee, a terrible presenter, that everyone else must …
Your perception of your self can be a barrier to practicing Acceptance. We conflate our fears with our identity. It’s known as “cognitive fusion”. We say things like, “I’m not good with people,” or “I don’t like people,” when it’s simply that we experience many fears and uncertainties around people. That leads us to invent myths about our identity so that we have an excuse to avoid situations that make us anxious.
Meditation is to your brain what running is to your heart. Until very recently, meditation was treated as something spiritual. It was mostly confined to religion, hippies, and yoga classes. But that’s quickly changing as neuroscience research uncovers the very real impacts and benefits that meditation has for your brain.