Stress Management - A Journey Part 3

“Shut your eyes and see.” — James Joyce

This is part three of an on-going series about stress and anxiety management.

For maximum benefit, I do suggest you read the first two articles which will give you more background. Linked here:

In this episode I will be discussing how stress and anxiety manifests mentally, physically and emotionally using a number of different examples. I have included two audio files. The first you can play by itself or as you read the text. The second is a relaxation exercise that runs about 18 minutes. If it is your first time through, I would recommend you read/play both files. If you are returning the second audio file should be sufficient.

A read through of the following article.

Journey Part 3

In this emotional, opinion based world of doomscrolling and rabbit holes, it is vital to take care of our mental, physical, emotional and spiritual well-being. If we can find ways to centre ourselves and maintain our own unique path within the chaos it will strengthen us and allow us to better deal with the changes that are only going to accelerate from now on. While crazy people surround us it is so important to be calm. If you are calm and relaxed when all hell is breaking loose around you, you have a much better chance of dealing with it. If you are stressed and uptight it is controlling you. It is really time to take responsibility for your own well-being. Starting today.

Even though this is quite a deep dive, my goal is to simplify and explain stress in its many forms, from an angle you might not have previously experienced. By the time you get to the end of this article, I am sure you will be thinking differently about certain aspects of your life.

Stress

Stress is a normal part of life. There is good stress and bad stress. Good stress motivates you and helps you achieve things. Bad stress stops you, often in your tracks.

If you are reading this right now, it is a sign.

Below are some of my ideas, developed in over 40 years of working on Stress Management with people just like you. They are ideas on understanding more fully how to deal with the chaos and confusion of modern life. Whether it be stress involving personal issues, family difficulties, AI freakout, politics or whatever. There are simple, effective methods of dealing with stress and anxiety, or whatever you want to call it, you can start using today.

Whatever stage you are at in your life journey, take this time to understand yourself better. To actually take care of yourSELF from the inside out.

Dealing with Stress, Anxiety and Bad Habits

I am going to interchangeably use the terms stress, panic attack and anxiety attack. From a practical point of view there is no real difference, they are really just general and often confusing labels. These explanations and treatment methods will work effectively in most cases.

Understanding what is going on in the mind and body when someone has a panic or anxiety attack is vitally important to effectively learning how to deal with these unpleasant experiences that so many suffer from.

I offer this practical, if slightly alternate guide, for sufferers and those who treat them.

In this article I am going to explain in some detail my views on how we can alleviate, or at least lessen, many if not all of the symptoms and manifestations of stress with a simple and practical method to manage these conditions. I call myself a Hypnotherapist and Stress Management Consultant. What one person calls hypnosis, another might call mindfulness, meditation, relaxation, even lucid dreaming. Again the labels don’t matter. It is doing the work required that is important. It could also include martial arts like Tai Chi, Chi Gong, Aikido or practises like yoga or swimming laps or in the ocean.

As mentioned, I have included a specific relaxation audio at the end of the article that you can freely use any time.

A Few Ground rules

To better explain my thinking I am going to use a variety of examples of different ways stress manifests and the ways some people try to deal with them. This will include smoking and nail biting. Even though you may not suffer from these things, work with me here because understanding how they work will give you a good overview of anxiety in general terms.

I need to lay down some explanation of how the mind body connection works. At least from my point of view.

I have constructed this framework over many years, working with many different kinds of people. If you have not read the previous two articles in this series, now might be a good time to do that.

From time to time, as you will know if you have read my previous articles, I will suggest you take a deep breath every now and then. in fact do it now, take a nice big deep breath, hold it in for a moment and really relax as you breathe out. Very good.

Dealing with Bad Habits

If we want to manage panic attacks, there are four main areas we have to deal with.

There are two physical areas and two mental areas.

The first physical area is the habit of doing it.

Habit

What do I mean by habit? For the sake of this discussion, it is something we do with seemingly no ability to stop or change. In simple terms, there are many good habits we do. Brushing your teeth, for example, is considered a good habit. Biting your nails, most people would agree, is a bad habit.

All you really have to do to stop any bad habit, whether it be smoking or chewing your nails, or indeed stressing out all the time, is to just stop doing it. It will depend on a number of circumstances, but work with me on this. I will explain in more detail as we continue.

The opposite is also true for good habits, just start doing them and focus on the new things you are going to do instead of the old habit.

Replace the bad habit with a good habit

Sounds pretty simple and surprisingly it is, if you practise. To get good at anything we have to practise. Replace the bad habit with a good habit. It will take some work and some self-awareness, but it will be worth it and very quickly you will incorporate the more positive habits into your being. As one understands how their bad habit manifests, something can be done about it. We create what I call an interference pattern. The important part is learning to notice the behaviour, then you can do something about it.

The interference pattern involves learning to tune in to when the behaviour is beginning, that is, when you start worrying about the things that stress you, or when your hand moves to your mouth if you are a nail-biter. Once you learn to notice this, you can incorporate a new pattern.

Practise when you don’t need it so you have it when you do need it

This requires understanding your behaviour as much as you can and practising some relaxation and self hypnosis exercises aimed at alleviating the problem. It is important to practise these exercises when you don’t need them so you have them when you do need them. There is no point practising breathing exercises only when you are stressed.

Elite sports people spend enormous amounts of time perfecting their skills, when they don’t need them so they have them on game day. You must practise relaxing when you are calm, so that you know what calm feels like. That way when you notice the stressor beginning and you take your breaths and relax your body and mind, you have some experience of the feeling of calm, of relaxation. The more you practise the better you will get and you will surprise yourself at how quickly you can make these changes. You will also notice a positive change in your mental attitude and general well-being as you realise you can take control of it.

Initially, it is important to practise these exercises several times a day, just for a few minutes. This is how you learn to interfere with the old pattern. So for example you might relax for five minutes at morning tea time. Five minutes at lunch time. Five minutes at afternoon tea time. Five minutes when you get home from work. and then when you are in bed at night before you go to sleep. By doing this you are spending about 25 minutes a day interfering with the normal run of stress in your day.So that instead of getting home worn out or hassled, you will be at least a bit calmer than usual. It is like having a short phone conversation with yourself a few times a day. Practising in bed is really important because it will help you to sleep more peacefully. If you wake up in the middle of the night, practise your relaxing then too. You can do this relaxation exercise as many times as you like but if you can do it four or five times a day you will quickly get good at it. It will change how you deal with stress. It will change. how you deal with your day and the stresses that arise.

As I said, there is a relaxation exercise similar to what I am talking about at the end of this article. I have several others on my home page.

The second physical part of this problems is what I loosely call the addiction.

Addiction

This is a bit more complex, so bear with me. I will continue to use the examples of smoking and nail biting because they are quite common and an understanding of their dynamic can assist in understanding how similar many of these problems are.

Even if you are a non-smoker or have never smoked and you are reading this, keep reading because the following examples have relevance to many other associated stress problems people suffer from. With something like cigarettes, you get physically addicted to them. I used to smoke 60-70 cigarettes a day. I haven’t smoked for over 40 years, but I know I am still an addict. If I were (to give myself permission) to puff on a cigarette or have one, I would be back on them before I knew it. If I don’t have one. I don’t have a problem.

I have helped thousands of people to stop smoking, as did my father before me. I understand the nicotine addiction and no matter what anyone else says, nicotine is addictive. Smoking is addictive. The habit of smoking is addictive. If you smoke or vape, you are a slave to whichever company sells the product you consume. Sad but true.

I think STRESS is addictive too!

Nicotine and the habit of smoking is addictive. Every time you have one cigarette, it makes you want the next one. Like it or not, that drug, nicotine is making you have the next cigarette, the next bowl of pipe tobacco, the next cigar or the next vape. Addiction is predictable. Most smokers smoke pretty much the same number of cigarettes each day, give or take one or two, because that is their level of addiction. Most smoke at the same times, like clockwork, throughout the day. I will go into much more detail about this in a later article.

On the other hand, if the habit is biting your nails, there may be a secondary gain that you get from biting your nails. Perhaps it seems to make you feel a bit more calm . It's a distraction, but it's still a habit and you know it's a habit. Most nail biters, or pickers, get to the point where they have bitten their nail all the way down to the quick or made it bleed or whatever, before they even realise that they stuck their finger in their mouth or picked at it in the first place.

If you can begin to notice when you are starting whatever your habit is, you can do something about it. If it is chewing your nails, ideally when your hand starts to move towards your mouth, you become aware of it and stop before your finger is in your mouth. The interference pattern is becoming aware of the behaviour and replacing a bad habit with a good habit.

When you start thinking about having a cigarette , when the idea pops into your head, that is when you can do something about it. So, if you can pay attention, if you can notice, right then, you can do something about it. You have to find a way to catch it before you do it again.Replace the bad habit with a good habit. The interference pattern.

It is exactly the same for most habits.

Hypnosis is great way to alleviate these habits.

You have to draw a line in the sand.

You have to say, okay, I'm not going to do this to myself anymore.

I want to quit smoking. I want to stop biting my nails, whatever it is, once and for all. Most people who have panic attacks are confused because they know that there is no real reason, at that moment, for them to happen.

You have to make the hard decision to stop the behaviour.

Once you've made that decision, then you can do something about it. Until then, you are kidding yourself.

So if you have a bad habit, whatever that bad habit is, all you have to do is stop doing it .

I can’t help it, every time I say or write this I think of the famous Bob Newhart skit. “Stop It”He was so wonderfully astute. just search for “stop it bob newhart”. A pearl in his jar.

As I said, you also have to be aware of when you're doing it and how you are doing it.

When you accept the fact that you're addicted to a drug like nicotine and you say to yourself, well, I don't want to do that, I don't want to put that drug in my body anymore. Then you just stop doing it.

A little diversion.

About Smoking

Smoking is a great example for how addiction works. One of the main reasons that nicotine, for example, is so addictive is because it goes in and out of our body very rapidly.

Four hours after your last cigarette, there's no nicotine in your bloodstream.

About 72 hours after you had the last cigarette, there's no nicotine in your body.

After that time, there is no physical craving because you cannot have a physical craving for a drug that isn't in your body. Once you go through the physical withdrawal of any addictive drug, the only craving is a mental craving. Many people don’t understand this bit. They go “cold turkey”, a terrible phrase, but don’t actually deal with the psychological aspects of the habit/addiction. I once had a guy come along who hadn’t had a cigarette for 18 years but every time he was with someone smoking he would say something like. “I’d love to have a cigarette, but I’m not going to do it.” He hadn’t quit smoking. He still thought about it all the time. It’s like counting the days since you haven’t done something. You are constantly reminding yourself of what you don’t want. Why? Thinking like that is a bad idea.

Good Ideas and Bad Ideas

It seems to me that everyday we have good ideas and bad ideas. Normally, when we have a good idea, we develop it and nurture it and turn it into an even better idea. On the other hand, normally when we have a bad idea, we discard it and let it go. Even if it sneaks back into our consciousness, we throw it back out again. I always look at it from the point of view that if you think about what you don’t want you have a pretty good chance of getting it, and if you think about what you do want, you have a pretty good chance of getting it, so you may as well think about what you do want. To me, worrying is thinking about what you don’t want.

Using meds to stop smoking might stop the use of the drug, but they feel as if something is missing. Many people think they have a physical craving, they say things like,”I feel like a cigarette”. They don’t actually feel like one. They think they want one. It is just a bad idea creeping in, because part of them still thinks it will help them relax or deal with stress better, but it won’t. They haven’t actually dealt with the psychological addiction to the habit. We have to be vigilant, we have to have a strategy, a plan for dealing with these bad ideas.

Alcohol takes about 72 hours to leave your body, heroin takes about 72 hours to leave your body. Nicotine takes about 72 hours to leave your body.

The trick is to find a way to get through those first three days as quickly, easily and comfortably as you possibly can.

The techniques I teach can help you to do that, by practising simple and effective relaxation exercises.

I believe that you can break out of nearly any habit within three days once you make up your mind that that's what you want to do. If you are determined and have a strategy that can help you can find a way to get through the first week or so as quickly, easily and as pleasantly as you possibly can , you can quit anything.

The techniques later in this article can help you to do that. One has to realize that the cigarettes are not the problem.

As I often say, the problem is not the problem.

Biting your nails isn't the problem.

The problem is why you are biting your nails?

What is it that you get from it that makes it something that you keep doing? Addiction, habit?

The same thing with many anxiety or stress or panic attacks. Many people seem to think that the stress or the anxiety is the problem. It is a symptom of the problem. It is not the problem.

In my experience, most cases of anxiety can be treated very effectively by understanding the dynamic of how the body deals with stress and practising some simple techniques. Not just doing them when the attack happens, because by then it is basically too late. You have to practise when you don’t need it so that you have the skills when you do need them.

If I had another dollar for the number of times I have had clients come to me with stress related issues saying I’ve tried everything. Psychologists, Doctors, Psychiatrists, meds… You are my last hope. No pressure.

I could buy a Tesla.

Oh hang on I would never do that.

On my website it says. “Make Hypnosis Your First Choice, Not Your Last Resort.”

Take a deep breath.

Stress

Most therapists do not explain to their clients or patients how stress works in the human body. To effectively deal with stress or anxiety you need to understand it as deeply as possible. I have found that once you explain. it to people, they change very rapidly. Refer to my previous article, Stress Management - A Journey Part 2, here on Substack for a brief explanation of how our bodies deal with these situations.

There I go into some detail about the way our body deals with stress via the autonomic nervous system & etc. It might be worth revisiting.

Once something becomes a habit, and you are “addicted” to doing it, you’ll find that there are many more triggers that can set off those kinds of situations . Now, it may seem strange to be bunching all of these seemingly different things together, smoking, nails, anxiety… but ultimately they all stem from the same root They all have very similar situations or reasons for doing it.

Most of them are stress related, but they probably didn’t start that way.

Many people smoke because they think it's going to help them to relax.That’s probably not why they started smoking but almost universally people have been mass hypnotised to believe that smoking can help them relax.

It can't.

It doesn’t. It makes your heart beat faster. It makes your lungs breathe more quickly.

It affects blood circulation. Nicotine is a vasoconstrictor, it makes all your blood vessels contract… ALL of them.

Take a deep breath.

Smoking affects how your brain works, by cutting down the amount of oxygen getting to your brain as well as pumping carbon monoxide into your system and particularly your brain. Not a good thing.

Stress does a similar thing. When someone has an anxiety attack, a panic attack, whatever you want to call it… a freak out, the same thing is happening. We start breathing shallowly and rapidly, cutting down the oxygen getting into our system. Our heart, not getting sufficient oxygen, starts beating faster, trying to get blood into our brain. Our brain begins to shut down, we can’t think clearly, we get tunnel vision, perhaps we start sweating, tingling, many things can happen. It can all happen in a few seconds. In a few moments, I’ll discuss this further.

Back to smoking. A smoke doesn't actually help you to relax. It just can’t. Some of the things you do when you smoke might help you relax but it isn’t the cigarette. You might go outside and get away from the stress and have your smoke. It might seem like it is helping you to relax, but you would be much better off if you just went outside and took a few deep breaths. You are still getting away from the ‘stressor’ and by taking a few deep breaths you actually are relaxing.

Take a big deep breath now.

Biting your nails will probably make you more tense because once you've done it, you go, “oh, look at my nails. I can't possibly show someone something by pointing with my finger because my nails look so horrible, I have to hide my hands.” You could end up spending a fortune on fake nails or just being embarrassed.

Coming back to anxiety attacks.

Well this is certainly an interesting and controversial area.

Once again I need to digress. Let us take the example of someone who has a fear of flying. One example might be that this person is invited on a holiday or has to go to a conference for work, They want to go but are terrified of flying. Maybe they had a bad experience with turbulence or don’t like confined spaces or the perceived lack of control of being a passenger. All real problems I have seen many times in clinic.

Perhaps the flight is in a few weeks, however, the moment the flight is booked, they start worrying. That is, thinking the worst case scenario, whatever that may be for them. From that moment on they are pretty much uptight and stressed. Every time they think about the trip they get anxious. Every time someone mentions the trip, they get anxious. Maybe they see a plane on TV and get anxious. Nothing is wrong at that moment, there is absolutely no reason to be stressed at this time, but they are. They are pre visualising how horrible it will be to be on the plane. Maybe even getting on the plane or to the airport is a perceived problem. They might start telling people how stressed they are or they most probably just bottle it up inside because they are embarrassed about feeling like this. The tension builds. The whole situation just gets worse and worse.

You don’t want to limit what you can do in life because you have panic attacks.

There are much better ways to handle these things as well as many other problems endemic in modern society. Many phobias can be very effectively treated with Hypnotherapy.

So as I say, the problem is not the problem.

The cigarettes can't buy themselves.

They can't stick themselves in your mouth.

They can't light themselves.

Vapes are a little different, but it is the same thing.

Vapes are the same as cigarettes, except that they're worse for you and more dangerous and more addictive. There is a lot of propaganda implying they are better for you than smoking cigarettes, but they aren’t and it is still an anti-social habit. The problem is still not the problem.

The problem is that many people think it's the problem.

They use it as an excuse, they say , I'll just go outside and have a cigarette that'll help me relax.

It's not the cigarette that helps you relax.

It's getting away from the stressor that makes you relax. The difficult person, the difficult situation. Whatever that is and it could just be a negative thought or idea. A worry.

So once we come to that realization, the next thing we have to do is deal with the mental aspects and there are two mental aspects.

The Conscious Mind

The first part is the conscious mind, it is the bit we are using right now, it is what I am describing with, what you are thinking with, what you're hearing with, right at this moment, the part that deals with the world as it happens.

And the conscious mind processes information very rapidly.

It's very good at doing it. It takes in huge amounts of information all the time. It also filters out a lot of information all the time. The conscious mind has a big problem because it forgets things very quickly, because so much information is coming in.

It forgets things very quickly . If I ask you a simple question like what did you have for dinner last night?

It probably takes you a second or two to remember because it's not in your conscious mind anymore.

So many things have happened since then.

It's been pushed out of the way.

But you do remember within a second or two because your conscious mind, when you're asked the question, sends a message to your subconscious mind, which is the part that remembers stuff and your subconscious mind goes through a little routine.

The Subconscious Mind

It says, okay, where was I last night?

Who was I with?

Oh, yeah, that's what I had for dinner.

And then you know what you had for dinner.

The information is pumped up into the conscious level and that's great because now you know what you had for dinner last night.

But if I said to you, what did you have for dinner two weeks ago last Thursday? Suddenly it becomes a much more complex question.

It's not easy to answer in a couple of seconds in most cases.

If two weeks ago last Thursday was an important occasion , it might be easier to remember.

If you have an eidetic memory, you might be able to remember it instantly.

But for most of us, it's very difficult to recall exactly what you had two weeks ago last Thursday, instantly . Because it's not important.

It doesn't really have any relevance to today. Most of us eat a few meals every day.

We don't pay that much attention to the meals that we eat and we eat so many meals that they get confused and mixed up. On the other hand, if I ask you to remember something very important in your life, like getting married or having a child or getting a new job or having a terribly unpleasant experience, the subconscious mind will remember those events very rapidly.It is as if those kinds of events have their own little pigeon hole somewhere in our brain and there is a direct path to that memory. The meals we eat are all stacked up on each other , but those sensitising, unique, special events have their own little spot. When the right (or wrong in the case of anxiety) trigger goes off, we instantly reference that piece of information.

Let me give you another personal example. My daughter is just over 40 years old , but every time I think about her birth, I remember cutting the umbilical cord and I actually get a tingle in my fingers that reminds me about that.

Every time.

And to me, that's the most interesting thing about hypnosis… mind over matter.

I recall the circumstances of her birth and cutting the umbilical cord with sharp, brand new surgical scissors and having to hack through the umbilical cord. I get a tingle in my fingers every time I think about it And that tingle is very interesting because it's my brain sending a message to my fingers.

Firstly, I recall the event.

I get certain visual memories of it in my mind and my brain somehow sends a message down to my fingers and makes them tingle. Over 40 years later. This is a positive manifestation.

Mind over matter.

These kinds of things happen all the time, every day. We may not really notice the thoughts, but they are happening to us all day. Little memories, little skills. All the time. Little things like knowing how to wash and dry a sharp knife without cutting ourselves. Driving our car. We made mistakes, we practised at getting better and it becomes ordinary.

Exactly the same thing happens with the bad habits.

And we play out our little habits, whether it's smoking ten or 20 cigarettes a day, whether it's biting our nails when we get tense, whatever it happens to be . So once we come to this realisation, then what do we do about it?

The subconscious mind is very good at recalling unique, special events As I said, those events are basically stored in a unique spot in our mind somewhere.

We don't really know where it is.

There's a lot of research being done on these things, but we don't actually know how each thought is stored or how each memory is stored, but we do it anyway.

We do have a stored version of the experience, from our point of view. That version can change over time But that's another story.

The important thing from our point of view, at this time, is that we have memories of these events. We can use those memories to help us to change our lives for the better . The subconscious mind is also the part of us that remembers the things we teach it. Reading and writing, how to drive, any skill that we learn, the more we practice, the better we get.

The problem is that the subconscious mind is literal.

It doesn't care what we teach it. If we teach it good habits and patterns it'll say, sure, I can do that, no problems at all.

If we teach it bad habits and patterns, it'll say, sure, I can do that, no problems at all.

It doesn't care. It doesn’t make a judgment.

Now obviously it doesn't make sense to do these kinds of things to yourself. to keep having panic attacks, biting nails smoking cigarettes.

When you can learn to understand what is happening when you react like this, to catch it before it takes over and to have a strategy for how to deal with it, you can learn to stop it. To change your life for the better. So much depends on how you think.

But the subconscious mind is being programmed by you to do these things. The more you do the habit, the better you get at it.

And the subconscious mind says, “well, you must know what you are doing, I’m going to be become an expert at it.”

And the more you practice the better you get . If someone is smoking 20 cigarettes a day, the average person takes about 12 puffs per cigarette, that works out to about 87,000 puffs a year . That's a lot of practise… 20 cigarettes a day.

It's about an hour and a bit of their lives, maybe two hours spent smoking. Getting away, finding some way to do it, all that thinking about it. I saw an article today that states that each cigarette someone smokes knocks 20 minutes off their life. That doesn’t include the six or seven minutes it takes to smoke it. Nearly half an hour for each cigarette. If you are a smoker, think about that.

The expense, the danger, everything . It works out to about a month every year, 24 hours a day for one month, spent smoking, pumping toxins into your body.

A huge amount of time, a huge chunk of a life, wasted on cigarettes. A life literally going up in smoke!

It doesn't make any sense.

You wouldn't sit in a room where smoke was being pumped in for a month, you wouldn't do it, but because it is spread out over time, we don't notice the actual amount that we're doing.

It doesn't make sense.

Take another deep breath.

Any bad habit is ostensibly the same. There is a lot of practise, a lot of expertise.

So we have to find a way to reprogram the subconscious mind so it doesn't want to do the bad habit anymore at the same time to give the conscious mind some tools that it can use.

So when we are back out in the real world and the triggers go off, we can stop and think, I'm not going to do that to myself anymore. This is what I'm going to do instead and whether it's biting nails or smoking cigarettes or having panic attacks, that's what you need to do.You replace the bad habit with a good habit.

You need to stop and think, okay, how am I going to handle this differently?

And that's where hypnosis and self-hypnosis comes in. Hypnosis is an incredibly effective tool for assisting with addiction on any level.

If you can consistently replace the bad idea with a good idea you will soon reprogram yourself to carry out the good idea

You have to be strict and careful to carry out the new good idea, no matter what,

The following audio hypnosis session will give you a taste of what I mean.

Take five minutes right now to start changing your life for the better.

Here are some links to some other articles and exercises you can begin using now to help you deal with your stress.

If you have gained some benefit from this article, please consider subscribing or buying me a chai.

If you are interested in making an appointment with me, please DM me here on Substack, or go directly to my website:

https://williambullock.com.au

Thank You.

The Relaxation Exercise