Archive for category: Blog

Why do we travel?

Having just come back from a long weekend in the Yorkshire Dales I can directly feel the benefits of ‘getting away’. From where we live it is a two hour drive, and an easy drive at that. For most people ‘getting away’ involves planes, airports, delays and a good deal of stress. I hear people say that they don’t know why they bother, coming back more flustered than when they went. Surely travel should be a joyful experience, if not why do it? It seems that it is all to do with the speed that we now need to do everything, time to slow down I think.

The human body was designed to move at a walking pace or, at a pinch, a jogging pace. Humans moved out of Africa, and the Garden of Eden, to populate the world but they did so at a walking pace, there were no boats, planes or cars. At a walking pace there is time to acclimatise to the new land and the flora and the fauna as our system adjusts. We don’t get Delhi Belly and can leave the Imodium at home.

But we do all seem to need to get away and, we need to get away now. We can’t stop doing it; we call it “going on holiday?” So, why? What does travel do for us?

There are lots of types of travel from the package all inclusive that can ensure that we get all the comforts of home abroad, the same food, same drink, same music and TV programmes, the only difference is that it is in the sunshine, through to cruises, holiday camps and activity holidays, to those where we go native and become a local. What do you do?

At a psychological level several things are taking place. The first is that when we travel we are learning and that may be social, cultural, cuisine and wine and so on, and that is stimulating. The second is that it is different. There are different smells, colours, tastes and sounds that expand the way that we see the world. The third, and perhaps the most important, is that travel is therapeutic.

We hear a lot about stress hormones, first on the list are normally adrenalin, epinephrine and cortisol. While stress hormones are associated with stress related illness they are also the fuel that keep us going in life. When we are working it is these chemicals that help to get us out of bed, give us drive and maintain our motivation levels. They are the high octane fuel that powers our daily life. When we are over worked and stressed the levels of these chemical become to high and we feel their effects as hypertension, raised blood pressure and stress related diseases.

When we take a break, when we travel, or go on holiday the levels of these chemicals begin to drop, though it takes a few days. If we leave on Friday we only feel that we have arrived on the Tuesday, when these chemical levels have dropped. At the other end of the holiday when we go home, the levels are low. We arrive at work on the first day back and we just can’t seem to get going. Over the next couple of weeks the chemical levels rise again to their normal levels and we say ‘I feel like I have never been away’.

The holiday gives our stressed system a rest. More importantly is that it reminds us of what life is like without the stress. This is what we should be aiming for.

As you will know I am a meditation junkie. When you meditate on a daily basis you have a daily holiday when your stress hormones drop to holiday levels. Over all you become calmer, more relaxed and more effective. When we become truly relaxed in life everyday is a holiday, yet at the same time we become more productive than ever before.

I love holidays, I enjoy going away and we try to do so several times each year. I also love the daily holiday in my meditation.

Where could you go today?

Take care and enjoy the trip

Sean x

At the start of everyday the universe gives you a cheque for time, that is 24 hours or 1440 minutes. The same happens everyday. That is 525,600 minutes per year or in a lifetime, if you live to ninety, and you probably will, a total of 47,304,000 minutes. What do you do with your time? Time can be invested well, producing great benefits (profits) or wasted creating negatives (losses) that then colour our experience and our wellbeing.

Time is the progression from what was, through what is, to what will be or, how we cope with past, present and future. However, time is a concept that does not really exist, or more accurately time is in the eye of the beholder. Our experience of time is relative. It depends on where we view it from.

The watched pot never boils

For most children time is a huge thing that lasts forever. It might be that feeling in school when we are waiting for the ‘home bell’ to sound the end of a seemingly endless day or the seemingly endless days of the summer vacation that were hot and sunny and went on forever. When we are children there seems to be so much to do and plenty of time to do it in. At this point the concepts of age and growing old are fantasies that belong to a future that we believe will never happen to us.

As we get into adolescence time pressures begin to occur. Perhaps we are warm in bed, having ‘wasted our time’ the night before, gone to bed late, and now we should be up and getting ready for school. Our mother is shouting up the stairs that we are late, will be late, miss the bus, no time for breakfast, and that we should have gone to bed earlier.

There does come a point when it feels that there are never enough hours in the day. The feeling is that the design is wrong; that twenty-four hours is never enough and thirty-six would have been a much better idea. Ask any busy mum trying to get the kids to school, the husband to work, do the washing, ironing, clean the house, all before the kids are back from school and then due at clubs and friends. The father juggling the needs of family, work, friends and so on. It appears that the day begins to shrink.

As we get older time flashes by faster and faster as “weeks turn into years, how quick the fly” (Bert Bacharach). It is always Monday and another week at work.

“Is it August already? It can’t be we’ve only just had `Christmas”

Every New Year is followed by another Christmas Eve and the years become decades as we transit from 20s to 30s to 40s. It is the ones with noughts on that now mark the passage of time. Sometimes the noughts are followed by depression as the experience of time passing becomes a fear that time will run out and it will be the end and a feeling of loss.

“What on earth have I done with my life?”

Actually it is not always true that time gets forever faster, there is a stop point. Many older people return to the experience of their childhood, not just in their memories but they begin to feel that everyday is lasting a life time. As a child this was an exciting experience that was full of things to learn and do, it was a world of discovery. In older life, for many, this expanse of time, rather than being a joy, becomes something to fear. Now it can feel that ‘it all’, time and life that is, now drag on forever. The elderly residential home can become like a waiting room full of people waiting wearily for their end.

It does not have to be this way

Here at Live In The Present we are forever banging on about things like ‘life time learning’. We live with the realisation that we will each only produce new brain cells in response to new learning and, at the point when we stop learning our system will fall into decline. The difference is that when we are learning we are occupied and when the mind is actively engaged time does not begin to drag or weigh on us, each moment is a joy of newness.

“Time is an illusion designed to explain the passages of history
History is an illusion designed to explain the passage of time”
Douglas Adams

Forget Einstein, the relativity of time is all in your head. Time is only ever the way that I experience it and your experience may/will be different to mine. Let’s say we go to a play at the theatre that you really, really want to see but I don’t. For you each minute of the performance will keep you engaged and the time will fly. For me, I don’t want to be here, I am hating every moment and the time drags painfully by. It can be the same on holidays and outings, Christmas and Easter, all these events are a joy or a curse depending on how we view them.

Living outside time

The present, the current moment, the now, is really all that there ever is. By the time you get to the end of this sentence the first word you read will be in the past, the full stop will be your present and, the next sentence will be the future. Your current breath is now, your last breath the past and the next breath your future. You current heart beat is the now, the last one your past and the next one your future.

Time is really a continual set of experiences of ‘now’ that when put together become our experience of past, present and future. There are many quantum scientists who would suggest that neither past nor future actually exist and that ‘Now’ is all that there is. It can all become a bit mind boggling.

Past and future

Those of us that do not live in the present moment are emotionally out of step with ourself. Those living in the negative past will be diagnosed with depression while those living in the negative future will be diagnosed with anxiety. Here come the happy pills.

Those able to live in the present will not be hampered by what was or be fearing what will be. Living in the present requires that we are in the ‘zone’. For some the zone will be something like meditation while for others it will be something more active like running. However, any task, even work, that we are fully engaged in, when we are truly present in the moment will, mean we are at our best, most efficient and potentially most happy and fulfilled.

Transcending time

When we transcend time we step out of time and space, this is known as a trance. We fall into a trance state when we are highly concentrated in the moment. Have you ever been reading a book and suddenly realised that time has passed by without you even realising it? Have you experienced your child watching TV who does not hear you when you shout out that their tea is ready? These are trance states. When we are highly concentrated in the moment, in the task, so that past and future are not impinging in the now, we are living in the present. In high states of concentration time, or the passage of time ceases to exist as we have moved into continuum of present.

This high concentration can be there when we are at work, at play, with our friends, family, making love, whatever, we are present to ourself in the moment, in the now.

Mindful meditation

To be the most effective and an efficient person you need to live in the present. Mindful meditation is the way I use to maintain my ability to be in my ‘now’. I use a ‘Vipassana’ style approach, which is also known as breath focus or body focus meditation taught under other names. Meditation is a process that allows you to let go of what was, also of what will be, and enter your present.

This involves:

Relaxation: a comfortable position in which you can relax your body without falling asleep
Contemplation: begin to focus your mind into breath/body awareness
Concentration: being able to hold single thought, focus or feeling without your mind wandering
Meditation: becoming so highly concentrated in the present that past and future no longer exist and in doing so all sense of yourself as a distinct individual ceases so that in this trance state you step out of time and space. This is also known as ‘self annihilation’.

Becoming a time lord

Dr Who was described as a time lord because he could travel through time. A real time lord is someone who is in control of their time world. When we are able to hold our concentration mindfully we are no longer controlled by time, we control it. As a time lord there is always enough time and time is never a burden and never drags.

The trick of being a time lord is to stay engaged in life, maintain life long learning, stay fit and healthy, have a positive attitude of gratitude and, live in the present.

Becoming a time lord is a choice. What will you choose to do with your 1440 minutes today?

Take care, be happy and, live you the present.

Sean x

Human beings, like most animals, live in groups. We have developed words to describe this. A shoal of fish, a flock of birds, a pride of lions, a herd of cows, a troop of apes and so on. Groups of people are called things like race, ethnicity, nationality, society, community, and family. We will even name our groups to give them an even more precise identity black, white, gay, straight, French, British, American. Within such groups there may be tribes and clans, regions and accents. When we get down to the level of the family we become the Smiths and the Jones, Steins and Khans. And the groups get even smaller as ‘our’ branch of the family has an identity that separates it from all others, “Oh you’re one the Hereford Smiths are you?”

What all these groupings tell us is that we belong, or that we do not.

As soon as the whole of humanity is divided into groups we introduce the concepts of ‘us’ and ‘them’ of ‘in’ and ‘out’ which means that either you belong or you do not.

Any group has a set of group norms, that is, the set of values or behaviours that are needed to be recognised as a member of the group. To belong to a union, religion, society, an order etc, requires that we all believe the same things and that we act in ways according to these beliefs. When these norms, or rules, are transgressed the individual may well be expelled from the group. We have developed words that describe individuals being thrown out of the group, expelled from school, defrocked by the church, court martialed by the army, disbarred, or dismembered.

In smaller social groups we may ‘turn our back’ on disgraced members. Someone may be ‘sent to Coventry’ meaning that we do not talk to them or someone may be separated and used by the group to be responsible for all the groups ills, we call this person the ‘scapegoat’.

Individual belonging

I guess the smallest group is a couple. One person says “I love you” the other person says “I love you too” and we have become ‘an item’, we are one. Whether or not this is formalised into a marriage the bonding has happened. Often we wear rings to signify that we are now a couple, in a relationship. Even on social media we will acknowledge our relationship status. The concept of this bonding, for most people in most groups is that this is now an exclusive partnership that has its own rules of fidelity and sharing.

Having worked with many couples over the years it is clear that these rules vary enormously, are never universal, so that all couples are different and have their own rules of engagement. Included in these smaller groupings I think we should include friendship that may be with one other person or with a tight intimate groups. Often in British society these would be termed ‘your mates’.

Breaking the norms

Once established the norms of the group or relationship have been established they can be transgressed or broken. When this happens the deal is broken, the belonging ceases to be, the relationship is over. This gives rise to concepts such as infidelity, being jilted or cheated on, stabbed in the back, cuckolded, thrown over, dumped, estrangement, divorced and separation.

In rejection you no longer belong

All groups offer some form of security, some form of safety, ‘there’s safety in numbers’. As one of ‘us’ the group offers us protection from ‘them’. It will come to our aid when we are threatened. Outside of this protection we are alone, isolated and vulnerable.

Broken elastic, hurt and anger

In my book “what Colour is your Knicker Elastic’ I describe the energy that connects us in relationships and an elastic bond. This elastic has energy so that if we move apart it pulls us back together. However if it is stretched to breaking point the snapping releases a huge amount of energy. Depending on the relationship and the nature of the ending this energy will be expressed as anger, hurt, loss, bereavement and so on.

The hurt of rejection

In most cases the feeling of rejection from a group, job, relationship, or whatever, is felt in terms of value ‘we were not good enough’. The rejection feels like a devaluation of who we are or who we felt our self to be. If we are being rejected in favour of another person it can lead to a confidence crisis. I am too fat or too thin, I am not sexy enough, I am boring, pathetic, ugly. No one will ever want me, I will be alone forever, I am a waste of space, who would ever want me, I might as well be dead.

Alternatively it might be, all men/women/families are all bastards I never want anything to do with any of them ever again, you can all sod off, I am done with the lot of you.

Dealing with rejection

When we feel devalued by rejection, beyond the normal feelings of adjustment that are loss and bereavement, it is because ‘we’ do not value our self enough. The feeling of rejection happens within us, it is not done to us we do it to our self. If you reject me, if you don’t want to be my friend, use me professionally or be my partner my thoughts may go one of three ways. The first is that I descend into a pit of despair and beat myself up for being such a waste of space. The second would be that I in turn reject you as being some sort of moron who doesn’t deserve me anyway and I am better off without you. Thirdly I stop and consider what has happened here, try to understand the why, and learn and grow from the experience.

We are not in the least affected by events.

We are affected by our response to those events

5000 years ago the Greek philospher Epicticus identied that it is us who are responsible for how we think, feel and act. Our world is full of choices. Either we have problems of opportunities.

In my world, I experience it to be full of ‘learning points’ where I have the choice to make decisions. In general one way will lead to a positive outcome and one to a negative out come. However, even a negative outcome is also a learning point and it will teach me and help me make decisions that serve me better in the future.

Confidence

As a last point, if you feel rejected and that feels bad, the chances are that you have some sort of confidence crisis. This is therapy time. Go and work it through with an experienced listener. I would say that you can only feel rejected if you, in someway, reject yourself, that you devalue, or undervalue yourself.

To the positive mind when one door closes another door opens, to have a beginning there needs to be an ending.

Give yourself value, be happy and confident.

Take care,
Sean x

Worrying is a habit, being happy is a habit. If you are a worrier, or if you are happy, where did you learn it? These, like all habits, are the results of consistent persistent practice over time. Most habits are learned at an early age through observation. We observe behaviours, usually from our parents or siblings and then we practice.

What you feed grows and what you starve dies

Habits can be either cognitive or affective (emotional); they are what we think or what we feel. Some psychology suggests that we learn the thinking part first and that leads to the negative feelings of worry. Others would suggest that the feelings lead to the negative thoughts. For me, it can be either, though it is usually a mixture of both.

Often we just feel lousy, anxious or concerned but we don’t know what about. Carl Jung described this as ‘something within us yet outside of our control’. When we just feel bad we can search for a reason and attach a negative thought process to make sense of it. Once we have attached the thought to the feeling, to that feeling, they are forever connected so that when we feel it we think it and when we think it we feel it.

Odd as it may seem we can make these associations with the strangest of things it may be a banana or the colour blue, a sound, smell or the tone of someone’s voice. Once we have linked thought and feeling together they have a symbiotic relationship that is there forever until we wake up to what we are doing and uncouple them.

The first step in developing mindfulness to overcome worrying is to become the observer of yourself, so that ‘I’ can observe ‘me’ thinking, feeling or doing. When we observe, we can begin to see the distortions of thinking feeling and doing that create anxiety, worry and stress. Often these are unconscious distortions, that through mindfulness become conscious and then we can deal with them.

So, the first step is learn to observe your distortions…

Common Distortions

Read all about it!

All-or-nothing thinking – black-or-white – Life or death

Where are the shades of grey? Life is never black and white, there will always be a compromise, a third point of view, another way of doing it. It is only by standing back and observing our thinking and feeling that we can move beyond this fixation.

Over generalisation

“It will always be like this…I’ll never be able to…it always happens to me…” I call this scripting. The habit of thinking this way leads to repeated behaviours. Life becomes a done deal. As soon as I make these statements I am ensuring that they will come true and that my life will be forever blighted.

Negative focus

The magic of perception is that we tune it so that we only see what we expect to see. This can be the glass half full or half empty. A clean car, with a patch of dirt, can be seen as filthy, a good person who make a simple mistake can be seen as bad and so on. When you tread in a cow pat do you see that as a good opportunity to grow or do you get angry and beat yourself up? When we focus positively all and every experience teaches us about our self and life. When life is faced positively there is no negative focus.

Discount the positive

This is magical because when we discount the positive we ensure that nothing will ever be any good. We either come up with reasons why positive events don’t count. “I did well, but that was just dumb luck.” or ” I hate it when good things happen because that means that something negative is just around the corner”. Stand back, reframe your thoughts and feeling, create a new script for the situation and say it out loud so that your ears can hear it.

Jumping to conclusions

Even when what is happening is plainly positive we can make negative interpretations without any actual evidence. We can act like a mind reader, “I can tell she secretly hates me.” Or like a fortune teller, “I just know something terrible is going to happen.” “I just know we are going to miss the plane.” Ask yourself the question why? Why should these bad things happen to you and not other people? Most importantly what evidence do you have of things working well?

Catastrophizing

It is easy to make a drama out of a crisis. Expecting the worst-case scenario to happen. “The pilot said we’re in for some turbulence. The plane’s going to crash!” A classic is a medical diagnosis when we convince ourselve of the worst outcome. In life difficult things will always happen. However, evolution has equipped us with some pretty good creative skills that enable us to solve problems.

Emotional reasoning

This is when the feeling clearly comes before the thought and we seek to make a connection and association between the feeling and the thought. Just like believing that the way we feel reflects reality. “I feel frightened right now. That must mean I’m in real physical danger.” It might even be “he just told me I am a bad person therefore it must be true.” Just because you feel something or someone says something it does not mean that it is true. Being able to observe your feelings and thought associations and questioning them rather than accepting them can lead to new levels of understanding.

‘Should’s and should-nots’

In my consulting room there are certain words that are banned. These are ‘ought, should, must and can’t, together with ought not, should not, must not’. Holding yourself to a strict list of what you should and shouldn’t do is beating yourself up. Often these things are related to what other people want or need and may have little to do with meeting our own needs. It good to look at why you believe these things, what is going on? This is a good time to look at reframing your thoughts and feelings, update them so that they serve you better.

Labelling

I hate giving people a diagnoses. A diagnosis is a label and once we become labelled we become limited by that label, both in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. My father labelled me as an ‘idiot’ and for many years I believed him. Later, in therapy, I realised that is was his issue and not mine and I relabelled myself to positive ones. Labelling yourself based on mistakes and perceived shortcomings. “I’m a failure; an idiot; a loser,” just creates negative scripts that you will play out in everyday life.

Personalisation

This may also be described as taking other people’s stuff on board so that it becomes ‘my’ issue when it is not. It is when we assume responsibility for things that are outside your control. “It’s my fault my son got in an accident. I should have warned him to drive carefully in the rain.” “It’s my fault he got lung cancer I should have stopped him smoking.”

Worrying

Worrying comes in many shapes and sizes. Importantly all of the versions described above are all habitual behaviours and like all habits they can be changed. If you follow these blogs or the podcast you will realise that to change a habit permanently normally involves a ninety day programme. All habits can be changed.

When you are a worrier it is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD. Rumination on anything will make it bigger and bigger. It follows that rumination on positive things will lead to positive feelings and happiness. So…

Don’t worry, be happy.

Take care,
Sean x

Some addictions are unconscious habits while others are avoidance habits. It can be easy to slip into habits of behaviour through family and friends etc. You may even have a genetic propensity towards certain behaviours. However, some habits are the results of displacing your energy so that you avoid solving your problems in favour of enacting the addiction. This could be as simple as having another cup of coffee or a cigarette. Either which way you avoid attending to the task that you ought to.

With the birth of neuropsychology, a magical science that returns western psychology to its older Ayurvedic roots, we can begin to make the connection between chemical markers in the brain and emotional states of feeling and motivation. The one chemical or endorphin that we all know about is serotonin. This is described as the “happy endorphin” and is concerned with mood. Anti-depressants work by, maintaining a useful level of serotonin in the brain. Depression is either caused by, or causes, a drop in serotonin.

The carb habit

With our increased understanding we now know that the levels of serotonin are promoted by eating carbohydrates. That means that biscuits, crisps, pasta, chips, and so on really are comfort foods. When we eat carbs the increase in serotonin production makes us feel good. This can become an addiction.

In psychology we now talk about the ‘carbohydrate cycle’. If someone is feeling down or depressed they will often eat carbs to make them-selves feel better. This is really a form of self-medication. The cycle works like this. I feel down so I eat the carbs to make me feel better. As I put on weight I see my body in the mirror and feel bad. So, I then go and eat the carbs again to make me feel better.

We are told that the population, in the affluent west, is getting progressively fatter. We are told that this is the fault of food companies and fast food outlets. However, the attraction that the population has developed to carbs just might be an indication of a more generalised depressive malaise that leads us all to self medicate on comfort foods in an attempt to feel better.

When I was kid I was told that fat people were always jolly. Well, I guess that if your system is awash with serotonin, after over indulging on carbs, you might well come over as pretty jolly. The point is that if we are getting bigger it might just be a mask hiding an incipient depressive malaise. It stands to reason that such a depressive state is destructive to both family and society, not good at all.

I am reminded that agricultural, village based societies, have very low levels of psychiatric and emotional disorders and that we only see the development of significant emotional disorders when societies industrialise and urbanise.

It leads me suspect that our generalised increase in weight is not so much an expression of affluence, more an indication of dissatisfaction and low mood. If we are to repair the emotional fractures in ourselves and society at large, we need to focus mindfully on creating a happy world to live in. Essentially in mindfulness we do not turn away from what is in front of us, rather we deal with whatever life throws at us acknowledging the lessons that we each need to learn. It can be too easy to turn away from our life path into alcohol, nicotine, caffeine and carbs etc rather than dealing ‘with’ and ‘living life’.

So what is an addiction?

When we are born we have a basic internal chemical environment. This is partly genetic, partly due to what our mother has been eating, or imbibing throughout pregnancy, plus what we have eaten or inhaled from the moment of birth. This is our baseline internal chemistry. As we grow and develop a liking for food this environment changes. It will also be effected by experiences and our moods and so on. In the end we have a sense of self, a sense of what feels right or normal, we have created our own addiction.

What is your poison?

We are all addicted to something. So, what is your addiction? Let’s say that you have taught your body to tolerate nicotine, or sugar or caffeine, or heroine, then you have created an internal chemical environment that is now your normal. If the level of these chemicals drops you will not feel right and go into withdrawal. The natural behaviour is to seek out the substance that will make you feel normal again.

Some substances that we are addicted to maybe more subtle. If we focus on being miserable or angry and that becomes our normal chemical environment and we have nothing to be miserable or angry about then, we will seek out situations that will return us to normality. The same is true of happy chemical states, of anxiety, depression and so on. Once the habit is established and is accepted as normal we will do what we can to maintain that chemical environment.

Some habitual addictive behaviours become displacements. Do you use it to avoid something, if so what? For example, someone who smokes may opt to nip out for a cigarette as a response to things that are emotionally difficult rather than face and deal with the problem. The same might be true of alcohol or just having another cup of coffee.

The magic is that if we do not like the way that we are, the habits that we have developed, we have the capacity to change them. Within 90 days anyone can change any habit.

What would you like to change?

Take care and develop happy habits,

Sean x