This is a very important thing to understand about overcoming anxiety and worry:
It’s impossible to control thinking when you’re anxious.
Anxiety is a “fight or flight” state. It’s do or die, survival…
It’s a state that is intended to save your life. In the modern world we have so many pressures on us that just were not there as human beings evolved.
Anxiety has nowhere to go
And so we become anxious when we cannot fight or run. And all that anxious energy has NOWHERE TO GO. That’s very important background information to know before you can deal with this… Continue reading “How to overcome anxiety and worry”→
Depression is one of the worst afflictions anyone can suffer because no matter what the outer circumstances of life, the EXPERIENCE of life is dark, painful, hopeless.
Words can’t describe the awful pain that is depression. It’s torture…
The reason I’m so desperate to speak about this is that the truth about depression is just not common knowledge.
Depression, like so many other health conditions, is treated as if something suddenly went wrong with your brain. Anti-depressant prescriptions are taken en-masse…
These drugs attempt to alter the chemistry of your brain to try to FIX a lack or excess of brain chemicals like “serotonin.” The SSRI (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors) anti-depressants for example aim to stop serotonin being lost from the brain and therefore keep you happier. But there’s a real lack of evidence that these drugs help, and even short-term benefit seems likely to be the placebo effect.
Drugs can only ever treat symptoms
The short-sightedness of this whole approach makes my blood boil. I feel angry about it. Very angry. Because MILLIONS of people are being duped into thinking that they need drugs which can only ever MASK an underlying problem… Continue reading “How to beat depression without prescription drugs”→
I’m always banging on about the power of habit. Habits are at the root of all outcomes… good or bad because habit is the power that repeats behavior.
But habits can be so subtle and automatic, even unconscious that it’s difficult to see clearly JUST how powerful they are.
So try this…
Get the clock or watch that you look at twenty times a day and stick it in a drawer for 3 weeks. If you want to know the time, you can go look in the drawer :-) You’ll be amazed what happens and the power of habit will be laid bare.
I did this a while back because we were moving some stuff around and the clock had to be moved into another room. This is the clock I always look at when I need to know the time. Continue reading “HABIT POWER laid bare”→
Recently, I talked about why we self-destruct. It’s because we want to feel good.
When our lifestyles make us feel bad, we habitually turn to the quick fix. This fuels a never ending downward spiral of self destructive behavior that’s hard to stop…
One day you find life has gone pear-shaped, you’re not functioning, not coping.
And you know… big steps don’t work because by the time you’re not coping, you NEED that fix to even function…
It’s so easy to get bogged down in the details of health and neglect the BIG STUFF. But the big stuff is where your attention needs to be — checking health boxes every single day.
There are six key lifestyle elements — six health boxes for you to check every day by developing good habits… With our busy lives this is a big enough job on its own without getting distracted…
In my 20 year search for health and happiness I wasted a lot of time researching the fine details of this and that.
I studied all the little biochemical effects, promising remedies, the debates and so on… desperately trying to get a handle on everything and how it all interacts…
It slowly but surely dawned on me… it’s an IMPOSSIBLE task.
Your body is probably the most complex thing that exists. It’s magnificent and wonderful. When you really consider it, it’s just AWESOME. Just have a look at one of those tiny hairs on your arm… really LOOK. Doesn’t it fill you with wonder?
The TRUTH is that even the greatest minds know NOTHING about your wonderful body. Even the greatest minds can only hold a little part of how it works. And humanity as a whole has only uncovered the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how your body works…
In short, we self-destruct because we want to feel good.
It seems a very strange thing to say but wanting to feel good is behind self destructive behavior. Feeling good is natural to us and when we don’t feel good we will do whatever it takes to feel good again.
The problem is that the quick fix we choose makes us feel even worse after the short-term high. It’s dysfunctional because it doesn’t work. Self destructive behavior only makes things worse but it’s the way we’re wired…
In nature we couldn’t fall into this trap. There are no pizza trees, no ice-cream or chocolate trees.
It’s SO important because what most folks are doing will almost certainly keep them stuck.
When we identify a change we want to make and take action, most often we simply fall flat on our face because the change was TOO BIG and that causes pain and misery.
What most people do in this scenario is DOUBLE THEIR EFFORTS… they PICK A BIGGER CHANGE!
Seems even funny reading that doesn’t it… illogical. And yet that’s what nearly everyone does…
Happy Guide 