Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Okay, I'm Dawn Walton, and I am a cognitive hypnotherapist.
Most people have no idea what that means;
all they think is, "You're going to make me cluck like a chicken."
And I have no idea how to make you cluck like a chicken.
However, if you find that information really disappointing,
then I'm a therapist, and I can help you with that problem.
(Laughter)
I'm going to talk to you today a bit about the way the subconscious works
and help you understand the way our brains work,
and because of the way our brains work,
how we end up with the problems we have in life.
So the first thing is our subconscious is in charge at least 90% of the time.
And part of the thing it does is it keeps your body working.
So your heart pumps without you having to go beat, beat, beat, beat.
You can walk without having to think about your muscles.
When a virus attacks your system,
your subconscious fights the virus automatically and kicks it off.
So it does lots of stuff to keep you safe and well internally.
But in that 90% of the time, it's also looking after you externally.
It's looking after things that are going to cause you harm
that are outside of your body.
And it's equally kicking off a protective response
when it thinks something is going to hurt you.
And our brains are constantly pattern matching.
While you've been listening today, while you're listening now,
you're not here,
you're not set in the chair in the steeple,
you're somewhere else.
You're thinking, "Oh, yeah. Yeah, now I think about it, that happens."
Have you ever driven through a set of traffic lights
and thought afterwards, Was that actually on green?
Because we do; we're never really here.
Have you ever made a cup of tea or a cup of coffee with cold water
because you were tired?
You're not here most of the time, and that's normal and that's fine -
not a problem.
We're pattern matching all the time - not in the present.
The problem is every now and again, your brain goes,
"Oh, hang on a second. Something's going to hurt you."
And in that pattern matching, you reach what I call an "alert point."
An alert point that says,
"Quick, take evasive action. Something's going to kill you."
The first thing it does is switch your brain off
because the brain is going to get in the way; thinking's simply too slow.
Switch your brain off, take evasive action,
and then you lose yourself until the threat has passed,
and then you get your brain back.
And then what do you do with the 10% that's so precious to you?
You beat yourself up for all that time where it was outside of your control.
So where do these alert points come from?
Well, the problem is these alert points are based on primitive rules for survival:
they're based on the caveman days of things that are going to hurt you,
based on when saber-toothed tigers attacked.
And so your subconscious is constantly being really jumpy,
switching off your brain, taking you into a protective state
because it thinks you're going to die.
But you're not dead; you're all here.
Unless you're zombies, in which case you're really good zombies.
(Laughter)
So according to Google,
you have experienced, approximately,
8 million, 415 thousand, 180 minutes by the time you're 16 years old.
Any one of those minutes could become an alert point.
Any of one of those minutes could sit in your brain,
in the 90% of the time where you're pattern matching,
and fire off a protective response.
And the alert points aren't based on the big things.
There's nothing to learn
from something really rubbish that happens in life.
You learn from the little tiny things, where your subconscious,
as you're growing up, when you're a kid and you don't really understand the world,
goes, "Ooh. Best learn from that
because I need to keep you safe once you're an adult
and I need to protect you."
And there are three, in my experience,
three basic rules that your subconscious is following.
They're very basic and they're very simple.
The first rule is if something hurts you, then it's going to kill you.
And so you must not let something hurt you at any cost.
So if you're a caveman
and you went around a bend and there's a saber-toothed tiger there,
if you take the time to go, "Is this a good spear?
I wonder if I can outrun it in my Maf shoes" -
probably wouldn't have had them in the caveman days -
then you're going to die
because by then, the tiger will be eating you.
So, first, it switches off your brain,
increases your heart rate,
floods your body with adrenaline,
gets you ready for that fight or flight response
or freeze, if you want to [inaudible].
Bet every single one of you is familiar with that.
The speakers that came up here certainly will be.
Your heart going, adrenaline going through your body -
a bit shaky.
Yet where are the saber-toothed tigers?
There's no predators, nothing here that kills us,
and yet we can all relate to the fight or flight response.
What's that all about?
Because what happens now is as you grow up,
your brain is looking for things that hurt you emotionally
and saying, "Well, that's going to kill you;
I'm protecting you from that."
So let's say you're three years old and it's Christmas,
and you've persuaded your mother that you can sing Jingle Bells
to the family when they turn up on Christmas Day.
And you know what it's like with a three year old.
They're going to practice. Lots.
They're going to drive you mental, singing again and again.
Then Christmas Day comes, the family's sitting around,
and you stand up there,
and you sing Jingle Bells to the best of your ability.
But you've got a little lisp when you say "bells."
It's ever so cute; it's ever so funny.
And what happens is your family laughs:
"Oh, it's so sweet and it's so funny."
But you've been practicing for days to sing Jingle Bells,
and now everybody's laughing at you, and that really sucks.
And sucks hurts.
And hurts is death, so we can't have hurt.
So your subconscious creates an alert point,
an alert point that says, "Don't stand up in front of people
because if you do, you're going to die."
And then one day,
you finish university, and you go to work,
and you sit around with all your colleagues around the table,
and the boss says, "Stand up and tell everybody who you are."
And your subconscious goes, "Woah a second. We don't do that.
You'lll die if you do that."
Switch off brain, engage fight or flight response
or freeze because you're shut up and can't say a damn thing.
And suddenly you find that you can't stand up in front of people.
And then your brain gets given back to you,
and everybody goes, "Look, it's okay. Imagine everybody naked" -
not a good idea, by the way.
(Laughter)
Or just breathe.
Which is all great
because all those things, they need your brain.
First thing that happens
when your subconscious thinks you're going to die is it switches your brain off,
so won't work very well.
So you have an alert point set in stone from when you were a kid.
Second rule - also very simple.
If your parents don't love you, you're going to die.
So, when an animal is born,
if it doesn't bond with its mother, it will have no chance of survival.
This was the same in the caveman days.
If we didn't bond with our mother, we had no chance of survival.
What it means is we're programmed to make everything about,
Am I loved more or am I loved less as a result of the behavior?
So, let's say, you come home from school,
and you brought your exam results with you,
and you're a bit scared
because you're supposed to get an A and you got a B+.
And your dad goes, "I'm so disappointed in you.
You are capable of so much better."
But you see, the thing is,
you can only ever be the best version of you that you are right now.
None of us can time travel.
You can't go back and do anything differently.
You can only ever do what you're doing right now.
So when you got a B+ on your exam,
that was actually the best that you could do.
But your dad doesn't love you because you didn't get an A.
So now what happens
is we must learn a rule to keep you safe once you're an adult.
And the rule is
"No matter how hard you try, you're never going to be good enough."
Because when you tried your best, your dad didn't love you,
so now you'll never be good enough.
And then when you're an adult,
you become one of those people that never takes a compliment,
that is always worried
because no matter how hard you try, it's just never good enough.
Simple alert points,
triggering, switching off your brain, and that taking over.
Last rule, also very simple.
If you don't fit in, you're going to die.
I did mention it always ends up in death, right?
So in the caveman days, you couldn't survive on your own.
It was simply impossible.
You had to be part of a pack.
And again, this means that we are programmed to fit in.
All through childhood, we're programmed to fit in.
Usually, as we get a little older, we start noticing about fitting in.
And so somebody says to you,
"Ha, you speccy four eyes," because you wear glasses.
Big deal, stupid playground insult.
But to your subconscious,
you've just been identified as the weakest person in the pack,
and that's a problem
because you're going to die if you're the weakest person in the pack.
And that's a bigger problem because,
How do we change that?
Because that's who you are.
Oh my God, how do I change that I'm the weakest one in the pack?
Only way to learn from that to keep you safe
is don't mix with the pack,
because then they'll never spot that you're the weakest.
So then you get in your adult life, and you always feel on the outskirts.
You never feel like you quite fit in or never quite good enough.
Because you don't want them to spot
that you're the weakest person in the pack.
All three rules can happen
anywhere in the 8 million odd moments that happen when you're growing up.
Your subconscious could decide -
you could take a hundred kids who bring a B+ home for their dad,
and only one of them might end up with an alert point;
the other, it's just another one of the millions of moments growing up.
You have no control over these alert points.
And even this wouldn't be a problem,
except that we all think we're in control of ourselves.
So we think if a thought's in our head, it must be there for a reason.
It's a thought, so it's rational, it's logical.
Of course that's true to the 10% of your brain
where you're cognitively in control.
It's not true of the 90%
where your ninja thoughts are getting in there from your subconscious.
So when something comes into your head, you believe it.
You walk into a room -
How many people have ever walked into a room
and worried what everybody thought of them?
Nobody here? Okay, a few people.
So those people who worried about that,
Do you think you're that important
that when you walk in room, everybody thinks about you?
(Laughter)
Same kind of question, asked a different way.
And the thing is you can't read minds.
None of you can; I can't, you can't.
Nobody can read minds.
And the other thing is we're all screwed up:
so everybody has a subconscious in charge 90% of the time,
everybody has a bunch of crazy alerts that think you're going to die.
So if you could read minds and if you did try to change yourself,
you'd be changing to be as screwed up as somebody else,
and let's face it, you've got enough of your own.
So, we stuck with this?
What can we do about this?
Well, to some degree, we are.
We can get rid, can reprogram the alerts and get them out of the way
as it's clearly not true you're going to die,
and it's clearly true that your subconscious cares
and tries to look after you.
So those two good things are starting points,
but in the meantime, there are a few things you can do.
Basically, you can stop believing your thoughts,
and there are three ways to stop believing your thoughts.
The first one is to deflect,
to imagine yourself, let's say, in a bubble, for example,
and that the things that come towards you
bounce off and never get in your head in the first place.
My daughter has that; she's seven years old.
She uses it for mean things people say at school.
It slaps them back in the face.
Now she has the problem of giggling every time somebody is mean to her,
but it's a better problem.
The other option is distraction.
"Oh, look, there's a squirrel," and suddenly we're like cats:
see a shiny thing, and we start thinking of it.
So the minute you start worrying what you're thinking about somebody else
when you don't know,
just think of someone else.
Go do something else; change the topic totally.
Doesn't matter; any sort of distraction will work.
And the last option is transformation,
and this is all assuming that thoughts are kind of like an energy,
so you let the thought in, but you don't let it stay.
Don't let it build a house and invite the family for tea.
Let the thought straighten out again.
So, yes. you have the thought, "Ooh, they looked at me funny,"
but instead of going, "Ooh, they looked at me funny
because I said I would do that thing I didn't do.
They looked at me funny yesterday; they probably hate me.
Now I need to be super nice because they probably hate me."
Before you get that far, just let the thought out again.
So imagine it popping like a bubble or flowing down a river
or whatever you like.
Add some new ticker tape across the head.
Doesn't matter.
Just don't let the thought stay, because the thoughts aren't true.
So, in conclusion,
we're all screwed up -
just accept it; it's okay.
We all have a subconscious in charge 90% of the time,
and it's trying to protect us from dying by saber-toothed tigers.
If you could read minds - everybody seems to believe they can -
but let's say you could, just for a moment,
and you try to adapt your behavior
to fit in with what you believed other people were thinking,
then you'd be trying to be as screwed up as them.
And that would be a bit crazy.
So when you leave here today -
If I tell each and every one of you not to think of a pink elephant,
you can't, it's impossible.
Unless you think of a blue elephant or think of a different animal.
You cannot not think of something.
This is why if you try and not eat chocolate, by the way,
it's not going to work.
Because you're going to think chocolate until you eat it.
You can't not think of something.
So now you know that you can't read minds,
and now you know we're all a bit screwed up,
then next time you're interacting with somebody
or standing up on a stage or doing what you're doing
and you're worried what people think,
just don't worry, because you can't read minds.
And now you know that,
you can change a little bit
about everything you do and every interaction in your day.
Okay. Thank you very much.
(Applause)