Mindset Matters

I wanted to take a little look at mindset and how it relates to our wellness experience. It’s certainly true that it can either help or hinder us.

We’ve looked at this already in the context of sleep. Failing to get to sleep or to stay asleep quickly undermines our confidence in our ability to get a good night’s rest, and of course nothing is worse for sleep than stressing about sleep. It’s a horrible place to be, and we need to find a way to take ourselves out of that stress spiral. What this looks like will be different for different people, of course, but for me reminding myself that so far I have always survived the day after a terrible night before often helps, and talking to myself in the most ridiculously over-praising way really turned things around: “well done, you actually almost fell asleep then!” And “hey! You woke up. That means you were asleep previously. Brilliant. Let’s see if we can stay asleep a little longer next time”. It seems a bit crazy, but it makes more sense than: “FFS! It’s so bloody late and you haven’t got to sleep yet. How on earth are you going to get through tomorrow? You’ve got so much to do as well” etc.

We’ve also talked a bit about the identity shifts that happen when we start to see ourselves differently, and this often comes about for women when they take up running, or weight lifting. Or in my case, Urban Combatives. “Am I the sort of person who….(fill in the gap)?” Mindset is a big part of how we can incorporate (using that in the literal sense, where “corp” means body) these shifts into our lives.

And the shifts we are talking about could be behavioural changes around our daily choices, but they could also be related to bigger events.

How do you feel about public speaking? Love it or loathe it?

Most people loathe it. In fact, there are people who fear public speaking more than they fear death. Which, followed to the logical conclusion means they would rather be in the coffin than delivering the eulogy.

If you have to give public presentations often, perhaps as part of your work, you are likely to find that you get accustomed to the pressure, and find it easier as time goes on. Assuming the talks have gone fairly well, you could draw on your previous experiences and reassure yourself that it’s probably going to be ok.

Of course, if you had a terrible experience previously, you will most likely find it hard to forget this and move on as if nothing has happened. And if you have two bad experiences, and then a third, you will almost certainly feel that a pattern has been established that you are pretty much doomed to repeat.

I once attended a lecture by a farrier. He started the talk visibly shaking, sweating, and stumbling over his words. “I’m always a mess for the first ten minutes” he said, “and after that I’m fine”. This was absolutely true. Ten minutes in and he completely relaxed, and delivered a very competent and interesting lecture. I remember thinking at the time - “why don’t you tell yourself you are a mess for the first ten seconds?!”. Or indeed, that you *used* to be a mess for the first ten seconds and now you are absolutely fine from the start? This is not an entirely rhetorical question, and we’ll look at “wishful thinking” here, too.

Most people who find themselves faced with a one-off event (such as a speech at a wedding) don’t do much by way of effective preparation for these challenges. They do a sort of “hoping for the best but fearing the worst” mental preparation. They might even visualise themselves freezing in front of a room full of people. Really, it’s remarkable that anyone ever survives these things!

And it can be a similar thing with our health and wellness approach: our previous experiences with trying to incorporate change will affect how we feel about our chances of future success. And it’s entirely possible that our “self talk” is not helpful.

So in this article we’re going to look at how we can “flip the script” to use current parlance, or in other words we’ll look at how we can talk to ourselves in such a way that it encourages our brain to make choices that are to our benefit not detriment.

So let’s address the question that came up above. Could the farrier have talked himself into a shorter “mess” time? After all, what he had was ample proof, from dozens of repeated experiences, that ten minutes was the suffering zone, and after that he got to relax and enjoy himself.

There’s quite a lot at play, here, and I want first to address affirmations.

So, the idea behind affirmations is that you replace habitual negative self talk with positive self talk, affirmations, and you place the talk in the present rather than the future, because future based affirmations are essentially goals.

Negative self talk? Do you do this? I mean, you almost certainly do, but how much you do it depends on a lot of factors, and of course a big part of it is how much criticism you have internalised. Or if not necessarily criticism than at least judgement, assessment. Were you “the pretty one”? “The bookish one?” Or heaven forbid, “the ugly one?” What I’m trying to say is that if you have internalised a lot of unpleasant criticism from your childhood, it’s no surprise if you don’t have a very positive view of self. Even if the judgements were made lovingly, without the intention of criticism, being defined in a certain way impacts how you perceive yourself and therefore how you act. If your parents thought being pretty and being clever were of equal value, and made sure you knew this, but still made a point of describing each of you in these terms, you are still likely to view yourself against those criteria. If you were each to apply for a job as a model or a job as a systems analyst, who would feel more confident in getting each job?

So affirmations seek to “pattern interrupt” your view of yourself and your life, and to replace your current narrative with one that is more helpful.

However, there is a difference between opening up the possibility for change, to see that you could be different, and fantasy, wishful thinking.

In the early days, it seems, affirmations used to be much more aspirational. You would be encouraged to look in the mirror and say:

“I am rich”

“I am beautiful”

“I am slim”

Or in the case of the farrier:

“I am confident at public speaking right from the start of my talk”

That sort of thing. The difficulty arises when these affirmations are so far away from current reality that rather than creating the possibility for change, they instead create cognitive dissonance.

Robert Fritz in his book “The Path of Least Resistance” (well worth a read) points out that affirmations that are a long way from current reality pose a problem, because of the “cognitive dissonance” we mentioned yesterday. Essentially, your brain knows you are lying to it, and this sets up a physiological stressor (the type measured by lie detector tests). This stress really just doesn’t help.

On the other hand, if the affirmation is clearly and undeniably true, he says, the brain will wonder why you bother mentioning it. You wouldn’t repeat daily to yourself; “my heart beats, my heart beats, my heart beats”, because it just isn’t something that you need to pay attention to (unless you have a heart condition, I guess, but even so, it wouldn’t be a particularly useful thing to repeat to yourself).

There is some middle ground between outright fantasy and stating the bleedin’ obvious. And this is where you guide your brain to making decisions and directing your behaviour in ways that are more advantageous to you.

Imagine, for instance, that you want to make food choices that are really nourishing for you. This is an interesting one, actually, because we often assume this is a question of willpower, when in fact there are many other factors at play: the proportion of bacteriodetes vs firmicutes in the gut microbiome; the level of glucose in our blood; the dopamine reward system seeking stimulation; social conditioning around which foods are desirable; what your sex hormones are currently doing; what level of cortisol you have in your blood; the levels of the “hunger” hormones ghrelin (that autocorrected to gherkin) and leptin, which fuelling system (sugar or fat) you are currently operating, and so on and so forth. You get the picture: there are a lot of influences on your decision, and they aren’t all based on pure logic.

So, a simple and not very effective affirmation might be:

“I always make positive food choices”

This has several shortcomings. It’s probably not true, it’s not very specific (what are the positive food choices?) and it doesn’t address the challenges you might be facing.

So rather than simple affirmations, think more of a short script, that will encourage your brain in a more useful direction. Then it might look something like this:

“Even though there are lots of food choices out there, I find myself leaning towards the ones that are full of nutrition and nourishing for my mind, body and soul. I find myself remembering to feed the good microbes in my gut microbiome with plenty of fibre and fermented foods. I can eat whatever I like, and very often what I like is really nourishing to me. If I am drawn to nutritionally “lighter” foods I remember to buffer them with more nutritionally dense foods. As time passes, I find myself more and more drawn to foods that truly nourish me and my desire for less wholesome foods is fading away”.

Or the farrier could say something like:

“When I find myself in a room about to give a talk, I remember how calm I feel once I’ve settled down. I remember that the students are friendly and interested in what I have to say. I take a big breath and find my anxiety abating. Surprisingly quickly, I find myself calm from the beginning”.

The use of the word “surprisingly” here is a nod towards the difference between current and desired reality.

These are just suggestions, you get the idea. It needs to be personal to you, and it needs to address the challenges and barriers that you are likely to face. Perhaps you still have notes from some of the “barriers” sessions we did. If not, it would be a good idea to address what these might be.

Many of us have absorbed the sort of “toxic positivity” that means we don’t dare look at what could go wrong, in case we bring it into being, in a sort of “be careful what you wish for” warning.

As I mentioned, we want to frame things in the positive, so “I keep going” is better than “I don’t give up”, because negatives are harder for the brain to process. No doubt you’ve encountered the “don’t think of a…. pink elephant/blue penguin/green bear” experiment - most people do in fact end up visualising such a thing, and then trying not to, and it leads some to say that the brain can’t process negatives. Whether or not this is really quite true, it is easier for the brain if we phrase things in the positive, indicating what we want to happen, rather than stating what we don’t want to happen. However, there is a massive difference between not framing things in the negative, and being scared to look at what could possibly go wrong. By identifying the difficulties that could arise and envisioning ourselves overcoming those challenges, we set ourselves up for success based in potential reality rather than fantasy.

If you are a tennis player preparing for a Championship, of course you would *love* to smash your matches in straight sets, and there is nothing wrong with putting that out as a possibility. But if you present that as the only option, it’s essentially fantasy. And if you find yourself down in the first set, you haven’t prepared for that eventuality, and are likely to panic. Much better to focus on how you keep your concentration, fight for every point, and suggest to yourself that even when things aren’t going your way, you find yourself able to keep your cool and pull things back around.

When you have created a script, or a set of instructions for how you want to behave and perform in certain situations, it can be helpful to record it, and then listen to it when you are particularly receptive - whilst going to sleep and before you are fully awake can be great times. If you are able to meditate into a state of relaxation, that is also a good time to absorb this approach fully. But you can also be fully awake and not even particularly relaxed and still gain benefit from repeating a more helpful narrative to yourself.