SNAP OUT OF IT!

This article is a Halo and Noose newsletter posted some time ago and introduced/ 'tweaked' here because of its relevance to the coronavirus pandemic situation 

(Szymanowski, J. 1988)

Here are 4 Key Ways to Proactively Regulate Your Day and Improve your Well-Being and Effectiveness - to be less prone to worry, irritability, anger, lethargy ....

In your frenetic, stressful world of work here are 4 powerful, common-sense tips for you to get past your own blockages, get through the day, get through to others, and get to thrive with more peak moments: 

• Worry less
• Self-sooth
• Reframe more
• Manage your energy levels

Worry less

"Our economy is not in a good place and our finances are stretched to breaking point', 'There are lots of unknowns', 'I am worried about lots of things', 'What if this lock-down is extended and goes on for months?', 'The news and FaceBook rumours add to my concerns', 'I don't like this feeling of being under house arrest' ...... 'I need to learn how to worry less'. 

Worry is an insecure, intense, unpleasant feeling that can overwhelm.

The thing about business and busyness is that we are mostly chasing future goals and by definition are not being fully present, experiencing quality, calm present moments. The exciting bit is that we can do both simultaneously - at least some of the time!

Paul Gilbert, clinical psychologist and founder of Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) explains that as our human brains have evolved we’ve been given the ability to imagine, contemplate, foresee, reflect - in short to think about the past and the future, so we now have the potential to imagine the worst and become really anxious, and have lingering regrets. His extensive research shows that antidotes to these ‘new brain-mind troubles’ are mindfulness and compassion – being aware and bringing perspective to bear, snapping out of it. And by cultivating a prosocial focus on others, we take our minds off ourselves and our worries, and thus benefit ourselves. (Gilbert, P. 2010)

In a way we don’t rest until we have something to worry about. The news. Other people’s opinions. Whether our Zoom presentation will be well received ...

40, 000 adults were surveyed to establish their aging-related worries: 

• Germans: loss of memory and mental acuity

• Dutch: weight gain

• Thais:  failing eyesight

• Brazilians:  sexual drive, teeth

• Belgians:  incontinence

• Indians: hair loss, going grey 

• USA: loss of energy, weight gain, memory loss, being able to care for self - all of the above (Siegel, R. 2010)

Consider being like a rabbit munching grass. If a snake passes ahead of it in the distance, the rabbit may freeze, but the moment the snake is out of sight it continues to eat. If that rabbit was like us, it would worry about whether the snake will return, creep up behind it, attack a loved one, if there are more snakes ….

Self sooth

Learn to breath consciously (deliberately and slowly) as you become aware of your worry, anger, discontent … Give this a chance. Pause and engage for a while in this diaphragmatic (belly) breathing practice - your Buddha belly expands as you breath in and you exchange oxygen for the carbon dioxide you breath out. Your heart beat slows, blood pressure drops. At the same time you can reset your disturbing thinking.

The secret is to catch yourself in the false thinking or unsettling behaviour, and immediately choose not to continue. Some place a rubber band around their wrist, and every time they catch themselves doing or thinking what they should not, they snap the rubber band and deliberately choose to use conscious breathing to calm their anger, replace negative self-talk with a positive statement, refrain from acting wrongly, put their worry into perspective ...  The rubber band is a pattern breaker, and a way of reinforcing a preferred automatic response.

(I use conscious breathing immediately prior to (and sometimes during) a talk, combined with a trigger (like snapping a rubber band) to evoke a positive association-anchor, elicit a good resource state. This impacts on voice quality, pitch. And introduces a good emotional state).

Another useful trigger is to spin a prayer wheel. On the surface it seems like a lazy, meaningless practice - but it is also a trigger - to pause, reflect, remember other's needs.

You can go further. Take a bit of time out to apply a DBT (dialectic behaviour therapy) technique of self-soothing. In a short space of time, sooth any negative emotions by using your 5 senses, one at a time, slowly. Maybe smell a lavender bush, gaze at a painting, listen to music that relaxes you, savour a snack, watch the sun setting at that time of day, light a candle, stroke your dog. 

(This technique is sometimes used to soothe the thoughts, images, blame, sadness that accompanies PTSED (post traumatic stress disorder).  I think that in some ways PTSD is a magnification and acceleration of where we are often "normally" at in our daily lives).

Scandinavians (often rated tops in happiness stakes surveys) find pause, quality moments to enjoy (Swedish fika), to savour good experiences like a shared cup of coffee or a sense of well-being (Danish and Norwegian hygge). And the Norwegian koselig loosely translates as cozy, warm, intimate, companionable – like the Afrikaans gesellig.

In South Africa, a thing to do is to go and sit on a stoep for a little while.  A stoep is a small porch or verandah outside a home, restaurant, sometimes an office building.  “The space between home and the world, between the inside and the outside … a place where we belong”, where we can relish silence or cozy-ness, daydream - particularly on a country farm:

“In this wild and tender place

May we ever hear the sound of truth

In the whispering of stars

In turning windmills

In the silence of the veld” (Osler, A. 2008)

Why not determine that tonight after you finish working, you are going to watch the sun going down, and focus on that alone?

Reframe

When something crops up suddenly that startles, annoys, irritates, stresses you - something said or read or a thought that enters unexpectedly - have a go at changing your perspective. See it from a different angle. Re-frame it.

When babysitting my 4-year-old granddaughter I saw that she was watching a movie about horrible green, slimy monsters catching and eating people. When I said to her, “Now Tiia, you shouldn’t be watching this – you’ll have nightmares”, she replied, “Oh, don’t worry granddaddy, it’s fine. What I do is put myself on the side of the monsters”. 

In his final book, Anthony de Mello tells about Brother Bruno being disturbed by a croaking bullfrog while trying to pray. But he learnt that when he let go the sound of ‘singing’ bullfrogs actually “enriched the silence of the night” and his “heart became harmonious with the universe and, for the first time in his life he understood what it means to pray”. (de Mello, A. 1989)

Doing mundane things in your work-from-home situation, a good thing to trigger in your mind is that the mundane is sacred, whether filing, attending to emails, feeding the dogs, putting out the dirt bins, washing the dishes …  

Every chore can be reframed into a mindful delight. Alana Levandoski reports: “I've planted about 400 seeds so far this year, and I have prayed with each one, that they become a part of a bigger story”. 
See https://www.alanalevandoski.com/

Viktor Frankl reminds us that what matters “is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment”.
Watching a sunset can become a sort of reframing from lock-down survival mode to an appreciation, bigger perspective state of being.

I’m working on showing gratitude for electricity when we are not having an Eskom power cut – instead of moaning about Eskom's rank inefficiency and corrupt dealings when we’re hit by load-shedding. 

And I'm working on re-framing my preparation and giving of talks - to take the focus off how the talk or my facilitation will be received (live or on Zoom). Instead I'm trying to develop a mindset that says "I'm sure that the audience or group that I'll be working with will be enlivened and enlightened, and feel free to take and use any of the material as their own, because that will advance the healing process that I believe in". 

Manage your Energy level

Zapping rather than Sapping our energy involves building bounce-back-ability, allowing ourselves to feel pain or sadness without taking on board their possible drag down effects, ‘sharpening the axe’ and refreshing and re-setting properly and regularly, being proactive, having an inner locus of control, taming a negativity bias, staying in the flow zone, practicing compassion (which takes focus off self, is empowering, liberating, energising – the jury is in!   Oh, and feeling free to practice self-compassion, to give yourself affirming ‘pats on the back’ in the form of good ‘mind tapes’). 

Here is a stock-taking template that I hope you find to be helpful. Click on it to enlarge it. (Please be in touch if anything on it is unclear - centserv@iafrica.com) . 

There are many other ways to enhance the quality of our work/ home lives of course, but the four areas outlined above provide for a good start. In a future newsletter - because good, refreshing sleep and wakefulness go hand in hand, and because a frenetic, racing mind that keeps sleep away is no good and needs to be calmed, so that we sleep better and get the most out of our days - we’ll look at things we can do to shift poor sleep patterns. And also explore the link between mindfulness and lucid dreaming.

References

De Mello, Anthony (1989) The Prayer of the Frog Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, Anand, India

Fynn (2005) Mister God, this is Anna Harper Collins Publishers, London  

Gilbert, Paul Ph.D. (2010) Compassion Focused Therapy: Distinctive Features (CBT Distinctive Features) Routledge, East Sussex, UK

Mankell, Henning (2010) The Man from Beijing Harvill Secker, London 

Osler, Antony (2008) Stoep Zen Jacana

Siegel, Ronald D. PsyD (2010) The Mindfulness Solution: everyday practices for everyday problems The Guilford Press. NY, London

Szymanowski, Janek (1988) Photograph of Belhaven stoep – Barberton Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:9_2_203_0003-Belhaven_stoep-Barberton-s.jpg