When you feel the thoughts are not productive, and you're going into rumination,
you know, there's some questions you can't answer,
like, “why does nobody call me?”
“Why did my boyfriend leave me?”
That's rumination, you'll never come up with an answer to that one.
When you notice the thoughts are not really working for you,
you send your attention, and this is hard, to something physical, to a sense in the body,
so either your foot on the floor or sound, if you just listen.
You cannot use the insula and the amygdala at the same time.
So I went to Oxford and I learned that you can change the way you think,
that there is a way of self-regulating, now, this doesn't get to the public.
If we understand how this little baby works, how it really works, and what the chemicals
are that drive us to this kind of frenzy, it isn't
what's out there, it's what it does to our cortisol.
And we're always in a high state of alarm, always in a high state of alarm.
And we really have to understand that in order to deal,
in order to be creative with each other, in order for me to understand who you are,
I've got to cool it, I've got to bring down that cortisol.
So it's actually separating yourself a little bit from the oncoming thoughts,
you know, because it's a bombardment.
There is a part of your brain, the amygdala is up all the time,
that's the alarm system, there's a part of your brain called the insula.
And everybody has it, you don't have to go on Amazon.
When you feel something in your body, like a stomach ache or something,
you know, in your body, the insula becomes active.
If you practice just a few minutes a day when these voices, and you have to be the
judge of that, sometimes they're really useful,
you problem solve, you got a deadline.
But we're creatures of habit, and if we don't watch it,
we're always we're always on it.
“When it's the last email, when can I stop?”
We don't have braking system.
When you feel the thoughts are not productive and you're going into rumination,
you know, there's some questions you can't answer.
like, “why does nobody call me?”
“Why did my boyfriend leave me?”
That's rumination, you'll never come up with an answer to that
one.
When you notice the thoughts are not really working for you,
you send your attention, and this is hard, to something physical to a sense in the body.
So either your foot on the floor or sound, if you just listen.
You cannot use the insula and the amygdala at the same time.
And this is what science is so great about.
If you listen and send your attention, just listen for a minute, the anxiety automatically
goes down.
So when your mind grabs you back, you really hear the nature of who you are.
Mine says, “I'm so embarrassed, people are looking at me,
how dare I do this?”
We all have our recordings.
But here's the other part, is you learn to not make judgments.
You learn to say, “ok, that's my recording”.
“I'm going to go back to listening”.
So it gives you a little bit of an anchor and have a view
of who you are because this is what a shrink does.
He sort of sits there, has compassion and whatever garbage you come up with, he
holds it.
So now, in a sense, you're viewing it, but you're also giving
yourself a break.
Because I said a few minutes a day, it's just like developing a muscle.
It's like doing a sit up.
The insula gets a lot more grey matter around it.
So then when the shit hits the fan, right, and I send my attention to either the bottom
of my feet or listening, or actually you can trace your breath, but
that starts to sound too fluffy, you actually are developing this thing.
So when there's a lot of stress, you have an alternative,
you can bring it down into your body, which we never use,
it's just this lump of meat we drag around.
So actually, you're learning, you're learning an anchor,
you're learning cognitive therapy, you have to work with a therapist, with this
you do it on your own.
You do it at a bus stop, you know, when you're going,
“come on, come on, come on”.
Looking at your watch isn't going to make the bus come any faster.
So if you just stop and breathe or you feel the ground or you actually look
at another person, I mean, just look,
and when your thoughts go back, which they will,
because they've been going for twenty five years or thirty five years
and saying, “I'm an idiot, why am I here?”
At least you’re present, because you can't listen yesterday or tomorrow,
at least you're present and this is something none of us are trained for.