I've catastrophized like a champion in my time. I've said it before. Engaging
my capacity for rational thought helped but I needed something else
to close the loop. I needed something else to engage a clear quality of mind.
My name's steve and I coach professional people just like you to beat stress, clear your mind,
and raise your game, and a great place to start is with my free, simple, five-step guide to mastering
stress in the moment. In my last video I talked about how engaging my rational mind
was a key tool in getting out of the habit of always assuming the worst, and I promised I'd
add to that in this video. You see while engaging my rationality definitely, definitely helped,
it didn't always work, or at least not on its own. Sometimes I just didn't have the headspace
or the heart space for my more rational thoughts to have any kind of an impact, and that hit home
one particular day at work when there were rumors of redundancy, and I got it into my
head that if that happened to me, and I was sure it would, it would be absolutely catastrophic.
By the way our fear of so-called negative events, and our resistance to them, and our exaggerated
need to move away from them, comes from what's called Impact Bias. That's the tendency of human
beings to assume that events will have a greater impact on our lives for longer than they actually
will. Catastrophic thinking is that ramped right up. My head was racing with terrible
outcomes compounded by more terrible outcomes, and I terrified myself with the story I was
creating entirely in my head. Now I applied my rationality. I knew that I was responding
emotionally to something that was entirely fabricated, not what was actually happening, but
somehow even though I knew that on an intellectual level, it didn't stop the thoughts racing around.
I also knew at an intellectual level that the outcomes I was imagining were really worst case.
In fact they were beyond any reasonable worst case. It was like I was imagining the negative
version of winning the lottery twice in a row. I still couldn't see out of it though. I mean,
looking back on it now, I know that I was just too deeply associated with the story I was creating
in my head. I was too involved with it to step outside and look at it and see it for what it is.
Fortunately I met some teachers who were able to teach me some remarkable things: how to slow down,
how to clear my head, and raise the quality of mind that I was experiencing. Now I said "how to",
right? The thing is though, it's not so much a doing as a not doing, not so much a doing as a
seeing, not so much working as letting go of working. See for as long as our thoughts are
racing around and we're trying to fight thought with thought, or wrestle with thought, or trying
to push or pull thought into slowing down, then it becomes like two cars racing around a track,
not just one, and it's not necessarily the car of rational thought that wins. It basically becomes
an inner civil war of thought. I learned a metaphor that I love. It's that you can't
shake a snow globe clear, but if you just put it down and put it to rest it will eventually
clear all by itself because clear is its natural state. It's only us shaking it about
that makes it unclear. Of course it doesn't go clear instantly it takes a little time,
and it turns out our mind is a bit like that. If it doesn't seem that way it's only because
we're used to constantly shaking it up, we're used to constantly being busy up here, and even
if I'm being still and quiet but with the thought going round, "why hasn't my mind calmed down yet?"
That's still me trying to shake it clear. Now I don't mind admitting I struggled at first to truly
slow down but then I learned something that really helped me and it may help you. Find a room with a
comfy chair and no distractions. None. No TV, no radio, no mobile phone, no ipad, nothing, and just
sit still in the dark, in the quiet. Now I know that can be hard when you do have things running
around in your head. You might feel like you want to get up and pace around. I know I did. But being
mindful that what you're responding to emotionally is something entirely created in thought,
and not anything that's actually happening in reality, just don't fight those thoughts,
don't resist them, don't try and arrest them. Just sit still quietly and experience those thoughts
like some energy that's spinning around out there that you choose not to be involved with. Like,
I don't know, sitting on a park bench by a stream and watching two ducks have an argument,
and just sitting there not getting involved with it. And get into a trance-like or meditative
state. It might help to gaze into a candle light or something like that to relax the eyes and relax
the muscles around the eyes and defocus slightly and stare blankly slowing down on the inside,
and breathing slowly and deeply. Now when I started doing this it didn't always work first
time and let's be clear it's not that it's hard, it's just that sometimes we just can't resist
shaking the snow globe just a little bit, but the more I did it, the better I got, and the more able
I became to let my mind slow down, calm down, and settle. And from that higher quality of mind that
comes with that I was much better able to see my thinking for what it was, and listen more deeply
to my inner wisdom and my more rational thinking. Now in my experience people who
struggle with this kind of negative thinking also struggle to stop thinking about work,
so to deepen and continue watch this video here. This is steve wishing you health and happiness.