Mental hygiene. It's critically important to healthy and rational emotions. We make assumptions that chemistry causes emotions, but chemistry is altered in the brain by our thoughts. Emotions are created by our thoughts. So, let's start with the source of chemical shifts.
Thoughts.
If we cross a bridge and think the entire time "It's going to break, I'm going to drown," we will send out the chemical release of adrenalin.
I have been actively in the field of anxiety disorders for over 20 years sponsoring folks as they recover. The tools I have shared with them changed my entire life. I now know what extremes of emotions are created by cognitive distorting thoughts. I will share with you now, the handout I give to people when they tell me they are having issues. I honestly wish this was taught in school. It would change the world and so many human issues.
Mental Hygiene
(They
Don’t Teach You This In School, Why?)
4 people get
a flat tire.
There are 4
different emotional reactions to the event:
One man
thinks, “I get to use my new pneumatic jack,” and he’s excited.
One man
thinks, “My boss is going to be mad I’m late,” and he’s anxious.
One man
thinks, “This always happens to me,” and he gets angry.
One man
thinks, “This is a bad part of town,” and he is afraid.
Basic tenant of mental
hygiene
You cannot have an emotion without
first having a thought that is either illogical (creating out of proportion
emotions) or logical (creating an appropriate emotional reaction).
Suggested reading:
A New Guide
to Rational Living by Albert Ellis, Robert Harper and Melvin Powers.
The Feeling
Good Handbook by David Burns, M.D. (I
used this one as the guide book for my anxiety self-help group-well written,
great exercises and ways to measure depression and anxiety).
Extremes of all emotions; anxiety,
panic, depression and anger are all the result of distorted interpretation of
the world and very illogical self explanatory style.
I work in
the paranormal investigation realm and I can tell you that 10 investigators
will have 10 different reactions to noises and shadows in their environment.
Anyone who has run from a building that was supposedly haunted had an inner
dialogue that included, “this can hurt me, possess me, wants to get me!” Hence,
the reaction to run, which is the action that suits that inner dialogue. We are built to evaluate a situation,
determine danger and act upon it. But was there a real danger from a slamming
door? Had this person said to himself, “is there an open window that caused the
door to slam?” he would have gone to check and the reaction would have been a
logical thought, logical emotion and logical action.
The sequence
goes like this –
First, an
event happens
Then, a thought
about the event
Then, a
resulting emotion
Followed by
an action
It could go
like this –
The clerk at
the store doesn’t give you the usual happy greeting
You think,
“she’s mad at me”
You feel
sad, guilty
You avoid
her line at the checkout stand the next time
Perspective:
Close your
eyes. Imagine a lemon tree with dark green waxy leaves. Pick a lemon, hold its
shape in your hand, feel the bumpy surface, the waxy peel, raise it to your
nose and mouth, and take a bite into it. The burst of saliva in your mouth is
the result of a thought-not a reality. This is the power of the mind. It
prepares the body, whether there is true threat or not.
Simple exercise for fast perspective:
Sit down and
on a piece of paper write 10 negative things you assume about yourself and
leave space between these entries to write between them. These may be things
you’ve assumed, people have intimidated or told you; either parents, friends,
coworkers, bosses, or others, or ones you have adopted and believe without
knowing why you came to these conclusions.
We are going
to put your assumptions on trial and give evidence against them.
For example
“I am lazy”
Now, write
after that all the things in your life that disprove that assumption, eg., “I do my laundry, clean the apartment, go to
work every day, workout three times a week, take on charity work…” When you
have filled up all the examples of why that statement is not true, now change
that statement to be more accurate, “I have lots of initiative on projects of
importance.”
Go through
all 10 statements and give evidence against them and rewrite the TRUTH about
you.
Cognitive Distortions
(your roadblocks to healthy
appropriate emotions and actions).
Any time you
thought about taking someone down, you likely had thoughts circulating in your
head like, “how dare he do that to me!” “He’s a jerk and needs to be stopped!”
or “he just wanted to hurt me.” These kinds of thoughts create extreme anger,
but they are not necessarily logical thoughts or emotions. The assumption that
someone should take us into consideration, do things the way that is “right” or
jumping to conclusions about their motivations are cognitive distortions that
lead to extreme emotions. The same goes for depression, believing “I am
worthless” is a sure cognitive distortion to lead to self-destructive
obsession.
Cognitive
distortions include things like black and white/all-or-nothing thinking,
minimizing the positive, jumping to conclusions, and many more. In the books
mentioned in the reading list, you will find the list of all the kinds of ways
we can cognitively distort things.
Example of taking our thoughts too
seriously:
I remember
one time when I was in the thick of panic attacks, I went to wash my hair after
my workout. I looked down into the bathtub and saw a ton of hair. My first
thought was, “why is my hair falling out? Am I sick? Do I have some kind of
cancer?” (jumping to conclusions) I rushed in my mind to remember every health
issue I’d had lately to determine what kind of cancer I had. By the time I left
the shower, I was feeling weak and frail, gripped the counter, and looked at my
face in the mirror, searching for signs of gauntness. I then looked down and
found my hair scrunchie, tied up with tons of hair. I had ripped it out to take
a quick shower, and it had taken my hair with it. In the matter of minutes, I
went from fear of dying to relief. But, it was in those moments of thinking I
might be dying that I gave my own thoughts so much credibility, I accepted them
as fact without all the evidence.
We tend to think that because we had a thought and we are quick-minded
intelligent people, that our conclusions are valid. This is why, putting all
your thoughts that cause excessive emotions on trial and proving them wrong is
critical to mental health. You must get all the information and not act on a
thought. Remember: The thought of the
lemon had you salivating and it wasn’t real.
Mental hygiene for kids
When my son
was little, I played a game with him. We would be out places and see someone do
something weird like yell at someone or dance across a store. I would say “why
did he do that?” and my son would give an explanation. Then, I would give one,
then he would give one, and we’d do this until we ran out of possibilities. The
lesson here was that, we may never know why people do things and it is their
own issue, not our own. Remember, they have that internal dialogue that makes
them mad, sad, or anxious too!
Mental hygiene in daily
situations
Joy hates
her job. She hates her coworkers. She dreads Mondays. She thinks everyone hates
her. They all seem to have cliques and go to lunch together. No one asks her
out. It all began with Joy joined the new team at work and everyone knew each
other, but her. She said to herself, “I’m
an outsider, they won’t accept me.” And this made her feel sad. Then, it
made her act on that feeling by withdrawing into her cubicle where she assumed
there was no place for her and kept busy to avoid the loneliness. Her coworkers
saw a woman with her nose to the grindstone and didn’t ask her to lunches
because she already had her food spread out on her desk and ate through her
lunch hour while working.
Joy’s
thoughts created an emotion and she acted upon that emotion and the world then
reacted to that action.
Had Joy
joined the new team and opened up about her background and interests and how
long she had been with the company, she would have felt relief that they
understood her and they would have reacted by inviting her out to lunch to get
to know her more. She might have thought, “I
am excited to be meeting a new group of future friends and coworkers” and
she would have smiled, been warm, and open to their approaches, excepting to
make friends with them.
Obsession can disguise
other issues
I had a friend who was dating a guy
who would ignore her on weekends. She couldn’t get a hold of him; he couldn’t
go out and do anything. It was driving her nuts, but instead of letting her
mind wander down the path of things she didn’t want to think about, like issues
in the relationship, she focused instead on a bruise on her skin. That bruise,
she wondered, was unusual for her. She asked herself, “am I sick?” She then
preoccupied with other ailments she imagined she had, like diarrhea and
tiredness. She was certain it was a sign of a dreaded disease. She went from
doctor to doctor, read online reports of people with symptoms, and fussed and
fretted over her “ailment” when the entire time it was a way to focus on
something “real” she could “deal with” rather than the issue that was
uncomfortable and one she didn’t want an answer to, like, “is he married?”
These obsessions can become OCD-like
control of environment, control of body, fixation on a new hobby, spending,
sex, alcohol, drugs, anything that can consume the mind from the REAL issue.
Some people
take to drinking or doing drugs to avoid things they don’t’ want to deal with
and end up with a secondary problem –addiction. For people with anxiety, it
tends to be things like hypochondria.
Obsessing on one thing is a way of avoid other things. It’s often good
to pull your head up and look around. What are you trying not to deal with by
making something else the hot priority?
Where are
you now?
Make a list
of the things that are in the background of your life right now that upset you.
For example:
My mother keeps criticizing my
parenting. (What do you tell yourself about this? “My
mother doesn’t approve of anything I do.” That is a cognitive distortion. You
are taking one incident and making it represent everything. You went from
criticizing parenting, to criticizing your entire life. Become more logical.
Rephrase: “My mother wants me to be the best parent I can be and she worries I
will do things wrong that she did.”)
I am behind on my bills. (What do you tell yourself about
this? “I don’t do anything right.” Generalizing – you have one arena you are
not up to date on, but that does not mean that in all arenas you are woefully
behind. Rephrase: “I would like to be as good at paying bills as I am about
cleaning the house.”)
It’s
important to often sit down with paper and pen or computer and word program and
list the ongoing issues in your life and figure out what kind of fearful or
angry things you are telling yourself about these events and then rephrase to
something more realistic and logical. We often focus on what we don’t want and
not what we do want. It’s important to visualize what we see unfolding in a
clear and positive manner so we can open the way for it to happen. I highly
suggest the documentary “The Secret.”
