Sunshine Coast of Queensland Australia, Hypnotherapy Clinic, Hypnosis
Michael Grassel
Successfully guiding weight-loss clients since 1981.
Bachelor of Science, Business U.W.P., Post-graduate studies in Psychology, Social Psychology U.T.S.A., N.I.I.P.
Certified Hypnotherapy Practitioner; HH.Dip(P.H.)
Another
ridiculous diet is sweeping through the celebrity ranks, according to
recent reports. It's the lollypop diet, and its fans are said to include
Paris Hilton, Madonna and Britney Spears. But before
you race to the confectionery aisle, take not that it's not just any
candied sugar-on-a-stick that helps you shed the kilos, the lollies are
specially made and include ingredients that Canadian makers claim are
appetite suppressants, although the jury is out on whether they actually
have any weight-loss power at all...
By
the year 2030, Half the world's adult population could be obese or
clinically overweight if the present trends continue, according to a new
report from the McKinsey Global institute. [ Courier Mail Body and
soul article]
If you want to communicate with someone from across
the globe who speaks a different language, all you have to do is laugh.
Laughter is a form of communication that’s universally recognized, which
suggests it has deep importance to humankind.1
It's thought that laughter may have occurred before
humans could speak as a playful way for mothers and infants to communicate, as
a form of play vocalization, or to strengthen group bonds. Even today our
brains are wired to prime us to smile or laugh when we hear others laughing.
Yet, laughter is a largely involuntary response;
it’s not generally something you can force yourself to do. Instead, laughter is
thought to be triggered by mechanisms in your brain and impacts breathing
patterns, facial expressions, and even the muscles in your arms and legs.
It plays a role in your health, too, and has many
quirks and mysteries that make it one of the most fascinating physical
reactions that a human (and certain other species) can make.
10 Fascinating Facts About Laughter
Professor Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist and
stand-up comic, put together these surprising facts about laughter.
1. Rats Laugh When They’re Tickled
Rats laugh when they’re tickled, and the more they
play together, the more they laugh. Psychologist Jack Panksepp first observed
laughing rats in the 1990s; he needed special equipment to hear it, as rats’
laughs are very high pitched.
2. You’re More Likely to Laugh Around Others – Not
Because of Jokes
If you're laughing, you're far more likely to be surrounded by others, according to research by laughter expert Dr.
Robert Provine. The critical laughter trigger for most people is another
person, not a joke or funny movie.
After observing 1,200 people laughing in their
natural environments, Dr. Provine and his team found that laughter followed
jokes only about 10-20 percent of the time. Social laughter occurs 30
times more frequently than solitary laughter.
In most cases, the laughter followed a banal
comment or only slightly humorous one, which signals that the person is more
important than the material in triggering laughter.
3. Your Brain Can Detect Fake Laughter
Professor Scott’s research has shown that your
brain can tell the difference between real or staged laughter. When you hear
staged, or deliberate, laughter, it prompts more activity in your brain’s
anterior medial prefrontal cortex, which helps you understand other people’s
emotions.
This suggests your brain automatically goes to work
deciphering why someone is deliberately laughing.
4. Laughter Is Contagious
The saying "laugh and the whole world laughs
with you" is more than just an expression: laughter really is contagious.
The sound of laughter triggers regions in the premotor cortical region of your
brain, which is involved in moving your facial muscles to correspond with sound
and prepare to join in.3
5. Jokes Are Funnier if You Know the Comedian
Familiarity is a key part of humor and laughter,
and research shows people find jokes told by famous comedians to be funnier
than the same joke told by someone they’re not familiar with.
6. Laughing Burns Calories
Laughing raises both your energy expenditure and
heart rate by about 10 percent to 20 percent. This means you could burn about
10-40 calories by laughing for 10 to 15 minutes. While this sounds good in
theory, you’d have to laugh solidly for an hour or more for this calorie
burning to have any meaningful effect.
7. Laughing Is Good for Your Relationships
Research shows that couples who use laughter and
smile when discussing a touchy subject feel better in the immediacy and report
higher levels of satisfaction in their relationship. They also tend to stay
together longer.
8. Laughter Requires Timing
Laughter has a distinctive pattern. It rarely
occurs in the middle of a sentence. Instead, laughter tends to occur at the end
of sentences or during a break in speech, which suggests language is given the
priority. According to Dr. Provine:4
"The occurrence of speaker laughter at the end
of phrases suggests that a neurologically based process governs the placement
of laughter in speech.
Different brain regions are involved in the
expression of cognitively oriented speech and the more emotion-laden
vocalization of laughter."
Comedians also use the natural tendency for
laughter to grow and fade to their advantage, and will leave spaces at the end
of a sentence for the audience to fill in with laughter.
9. Laughter Is Attractive
Research by Dr. Provine found that women laugh 126
percent more than men in cross-gender conversations, with men preferring to be
the one prompting the laughter.
In a review of more than 3,700 newspaper personal
ads, Dr. Provine revealed that women were 62 percent more likely to mention
laughter, including seeking a mate with a sense of humor, while men were more
likely to offer humor in their ads.
10. Some Things Can Make Virtually Everyone Laugh
While there’s no one joke that makes everyone laugh,
Professor Scott found that one of the best tools for making people laugh in her
lab is a clip of people trying not to laugh in a situation where it
would be highly inappropriate to do so.
Laughter Is Good for Your Memory Too
Researchers at California's Loma Linda University
looked into the role that humor can have on your health. They broke 20 older
adults into two groups – one that watched funny videos and one that sat
silently for 20 minutes. Before and after the session, both groups took a
short-term memory test…
The humor group showed significantly more
improvement on the test, 43.6 percent compared to 20 percent in the non-humor
group.5 Those
in the humor group also had significantly lower levels of the stress hormone
cortisol. According to the researchers, laughter represents an enjoyable tool
to help counteract age-related memory decline in older adults:
“The study's findings suggest that humor can have
clinical benefits and rehabilitative implications and can be implemented in
programs that support whole-person wellness for older adults. Learning ability
and delayed recall are important to these individuals for a better quality of
life--considering mind, body, spirit, social, and economic aspects. Older
adults may have age-associated memory deficiencies. However, medical
practitioners now can offer positive, enjoyable, and beneficial humor therapies
to improve these deficiencies.”
Laughter Enhances Immunity, Improves Sleep, and
More
What else is laughter good for? Research has shown
laughter may reduce stress hormones and boost your immune function,6 while
also inducing optimistic feelings.7
Laughter has demonstrated a wealth of physiological, psychological, social,
spiritual, and quality-of-life benefits, such that increasing numbers of health
care centers are adopting laughter therapy as a form of complementary care.
Opportunities that provide for group laughter, such as laughter yoga and laugh
parties, are also becoming increasingly popular around the world. Just a short
list of the benefits of laughter therapy are noted below:
Relaxing your muscles
Triggering the release of your body's natural
painkillers (endorphins)
Improving sleep
Enhancing creativity and memory
Easing digestion
Enhancing oxygen intake
Improving well-being and positive emotions
Boosting immune function
Improving blood pressure
Laugh Each and Every Day
Children laugh easily and often, but adults may
forget to make room for laughter in their daily lives. If you can, incorporate
laughter into your daily routine by finding what makes you laugh. Remember that
you’re more likely to laugh in the company of others, so try to find the humor
in life when you’re spending time with friends, family, and co-workers.
Some experts even recommend everyone get 15 to 20
minutes of laughter a day, much like you should exercise regularly and eat your
vegetables. If you haven’t had your daily dose of laughter yet, check out the
video below. It’s living proof that laughter is contagious…
70% is the percentage of kids aged between 11 and 17 who have at least two communication devices in their bedroom at night - and they're stealing from their sleep, the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research in Sydney warns. [Courier Mail Body & Soul article]
Our little bundles of joy aren't born being kind and considerate - they need a helping hand from adults in the form of play, new U.S. research shows.
The recent Stanford University study found that children who engaged in reciprocal play with adults demonstrated greater generosity and a greater willingness to help others. The researchers believe this is because the adults were modelling that kind of behaviour. [Courier Mail Body & Soul article]
Everybody
wants what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy and
easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to
look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and
admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red
Sea when you walk into the room.
Everyone would like that — it’s easy to like that.
If I ask you, “What do you want out of life?” and you say something
like, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,”
it’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything.
A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never
considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you
willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant
of how our lives turn out.
Everybody wants to have an amazing job and financial independence —
but not everyone wants to suffer through 60-hour work weeks, long
commutes, obnoxious paperwork, to navigate arbitrary corporate
hierarchies and the blasé confines of an infinite cubicle hell. People
want to be rich without the risk, without the sacrifice, without the
delayed gratification necessary to accumulate wealth.
Everybody wants to have great sex and an awesome relationship — but
not everyone is willing to go through the tough conversations, the
awkward silences, the hurt feelings and the emotional psychodrama to get
there. And so they settle. They settle and wonder “What if?” for years
and years and until the question morphs from “What if?” into “Was that
it?” And when the lawyers go home and the alimony check is in the mail
they say, “What was that for?” if not for their lowered standards and
expectations 20 years prior, then what for?
Because happiness requires struggle. The positive is the side effect
of handling the negative. You can only avoid negative experiences for so
long before they come roaring back to life.
At the core of all human behavior, our needs are more or less
similar. Positive experience is easy to handle. It’s negative experience
that we all, by definition, struggle with. Therefore, what we get out
of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad
feelings we’re willing and able to sustain to get us to those good
feelings.
People want an amazing physique. But you don’t end up with one unless
you legitimately appreciate the pain and physical stress that comes
with living inside a gym for hour upon hour, unless you love calculating
and calibrating the food you eat, planning your life out in tiny
plate-sized portions.
People want to start their own business or become financially
independent. But you don’t end up a successful entrepreneur unless you
find a way to appreciate the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated
failures, and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether
will be successful or not.
People want a partner, a spouse. But you don’t end up attracting
someone amazing without appreciating the emotional turbulence that comes
with weathering rejections, building the sexual tension that never gets
released, and staring blankly at a phone that never rings. It’s part of
the game of love. You can’t win if you don’t play.
What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The
question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your
life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but
the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at dealing
with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life.
There’s a lot of crappy advice out there that says, “You’ve just got to want it enough!”
Everybody wants something. And everybody wants something enough. They
just aren’t aware of what it is they want, or rather, what they want
“enough.”
Because if you want the benefits of something in life, you have to
also want the costs. If you want the beach body, you have to want the
sweat, the soreness, the early mornings, and the hunger pangs. If you
want the yacht, you have to also want the late nights, the risky
business moves, and the possibility of pissing off a person or ten
thousand.
If you find yourself wanting something month after month, year after
year, yet nothing happens and you never come any closer to it, then
maybe what you actually want is a fantasy, an idealization, an image and
a false promise. Maybe what you want isn’t what you want, you just
enjoy wanting. Maybe you don’t actually want it at all.
Sometimes I ask people, “How do you choose to suffer?” These people
tilt their heads and look at me like I have twelve noses. But I ask
because that tells me far more about you than your desires and
fantasies. Because you have to choose something. You can’t have a
pain-free life. It can’t all be roses and unicorns. And ultimately
that’s the hard question that matters. Pleasure is an easy question. And
pretty much all of us have similar answers. The more interesting
question is the pain. What is the pain that you want to sustain?
That answer will actually get you somewhere. It’s the question that
can change your life. It’s what makes me me and you you. It’s what
defines us and separates us and ultimately brings us together.
For most of my adolescence and young adulthood, I fantasized about
being a musician — a rock star, in particular. Any badass guitar song I
heard, I would always close my eyes and envision myself up on stage
playing it to the screams of the crowd, people absolutely losing their
minds to my sweet finger-noodling. This fantasy could keep me occupied
for hours on end. The fantasizing continued up through college, even
after I dropped out of music school and stopped playing seriously. But
even then it was never a question of if I’d ever be up playing in front
of screaming crowds, but when. I was biding my time before I could
invest the proper amount of time and effort into getting out there and
making it work. First, I needed to finish school. Then, I needed to make
money. Then, I needed to find time. Then… and then nothing.
Despite fantasizing about this for over half of my life, the reality
never came. And it took me a long time and a lot of negative experiences
to finally figure out why: I didn’t actually want it.
I was in love with the result — the image of me on stage, people
cheering, me rocking out, pouring my heart into what I’m playing — but I
wasn’t in love with the process. And because of that, I failed at it.
Repeatedly. Hell, I didn’t even try hard enough to fail at it. I hardly
tried at all.
The daily drudgery of practicing, the logistics of finding a group
and rehearsing, the pain of finding gigs and actually getting people to
show up and give a shit. The broken strings, the blown tube amp, hauling
40 pounds of gear to and from rehearsals with no car. It’s a mountain
of a dream and a mile-high climb to the top. And what it took me a long
time to discover is that I didn’t like to climb much. I just liked to
imagine the top.
Our culture would tell me that I’ve somehow failed myself, that I’m a
quitter or a loser. Self-help would say that I either wasn’t courageous
enough, determined enough or I didn’t believe in myself enough. The
entrepreneurial/start up crowd would tell me that I chickened out on my
dream and gave in to my conventional social conditioning. I’d be told to
do affirmations or join a mastermind group or manifest or something.
But the truth is far less interesting than that: I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn’t. End of story.
I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not
the process. I was in love not with the fight but only the victory.
And life doesn’t work that way.
Who you are is defined by the values you are willing to struggle for.
People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who get in good
shape. People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate
ladder are the ones who move up it. People who enjoy the stresses and
uncertainty of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who
live it and make it.
This is not a call for willpower or “grit.” This is not another admonishment of “no pain, no gain.”
This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles
determine our successes. So choose your struggles wisely, my friend.
7 Strange Questions That Help You Find Your Life Purpose
One
day, when my brother was 18, he waltzed into the living room and
proudly announced to my mother and me that one day he was going to be a
senator. My mom probably gave him the “That’s nice, dear,” treatment
while I’m sure I was distracted by a bowl of Cheerios or something.
But for fifteen years, this purpose informed all of my brother’s life
decisions: what he studied in school, where he chose to live, who he
connected with and even what he did with many of his vacations and
weekends.
And now, after almost half a lifetime of work later, he’s the
chairman of a major political party in his city and the youngest judge
in the state. In the next few years, he hopes to run for office for the
first time.
Don’t get me wrong. My brother is a freak. This basically never happens.
Most of us have no clue what we want to do with our lives. Even after
we finish school. Even after we get a job. Even after we’re making
money. Between ages 18 and 25, I changed career aspirations more often
than I changed my underwear. And even after I had a business, it wasn’t
until I was 28 that I clearly defined what I wanted for my life.
Chances are you’re more like me and have no clue what you want to do.
It’s a struggle almost every adult goes through. “What do I want to do
with my life?” “What am I passionate about?” “What do I not suck at?” I
often receive emails from people in their 40s and 50s who still have no clue what they want to do with themselves.
Part of the problem is the concept of “life purpose” itself. The idea
that we were each born for some higher purpose and it’s now our cosmic
mission to find it. This is the same kind of shitty logic used to
justify things like spirit crystals or that your lucky number is 34 (but
only on Tuesdays or during full moons).
Here’s the truth. We exist on this earth for some undetermined period
of time. During that time we do things. Some of these things are
important. Some of them are unimportant. And those important things give
our lives meaning and happiness. The unimportant ones basically just
kill time. So when people say, “What should I do with my life?” or “What
is my life purpose?” what they’re actually asking is: “What can I do
with my time that is important?”
This is an infinitely better question to ask. It’s far more
manageable and it doesn’t have all of the ridiculous baggage that the
“life purpose” question does. There’s no reason for you to be
contemplating the cosmic significance of your life while sitting on your
couch all day eating Doritos. Rather, you should be getting off your
ass and discovering what feels important to you.
One of the most common email questions I get is people asking me what
they should do with their lives, what their “life purpose” is. This is
an impossible question for me to answer. After all, for all I know, this
person is really into knitting sweaters for kittens or filming gay
bondage porn in their basement. I have no clue. Who am I to say what’s
right or what’s important to them?
But after some research, I have put together a series of questions to help you figure out for yourself what is important to you and what can add more meaning to your life.
These questions are by no means exhaustive or definitive. In fact,
they’re a little bit ridiculous. But I made them that way because
discovering purpose in our lives should be something that’s fun and
interesting, not a chore.
1. WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE FLAVOR OF SHIT SANDWICH AND DOES IT COME WITH AN OLIVE?
Ah, yes. The all-important question. What flavor of shit sandwich would you like to eat? Because here’s the sticky little truth about life that they don’t tell you at high school pep rallies: Everything sucks, some of the time.
Now, that probably sounds incredibly pessimistic of me. And you may
be thinking, “Hey Mr. Manson, turn that frown upside down.” But I
actually think this is a liberating idea.
Everything involves sacrifice. Everything includes some sort of cost.
Nothing is pleasurable or uplifting all of the time. So the question
becomes: what struggle or sacrifice are you willing to tolerate?
Ultimately, what determines our ability to stick with something we care
about is our ability to handle the rough patches and ride out the
inevitable rotten days.
If you want to be a brilliant tech entrepreneur, but you can’t handle
failure, then you’re not going to make it far. If you want to be a
professional artist, but you aren’t willing to see your work rejected
hundreds, if not thousands of times, then you’re done before you start.
If you want to be a hotshot court lawyer, but can’t stand the 80-hour
workweeks, then I’ve got bad news for you. What
unpleasant experiences are you able to handle? Are you able to stay up
all night coding? Are you able to put off starting a family for 10
years? Are you able to have people laugh you off the stage over and over
again until you get it right?
What shit sandwich do you want to eat? Because we all get served one eventually.
Might as well pick one with an olive.
2. WHAT IS TRUE ABOUT YOU TODAY THAT WOULD MAKE YOUR 8-YEAR-OLD SELF CRY?
When I was a child, I used to write stories. I used to sit in my room
for hours by myself, writing away, about aliens, about superheroes,
about great warriors, about my friends and family. Not because I wanted
anyone to read it. Not because I wanted to impress my parents or
teachers. But for the sheer joy of it.
And then, for some reason, I stopped. And I don’t remember why.
We all have a tendency to lose touch with what we loved as a child.
Something about the social pressures of adolescence and professional
pressures of young adulthood squeezes the passion out of us. We’re
taught that the only reason to do something is if we’re somehow rewarded
for it.
It wasn’t until I was in my mid-20s that I rediscovered how much I
loved writing. And it wasn’t until I started my business that I
remembered how much I enjoyed building websites — something I did in my
early teens, just for fun.
The funny thing though, is that if my 8-year-old self had asked my
20-year-old self, “Why don’t you write anymore?” and I replied, “Because
I’m not good at it,” or “Because nobody would read what I write,” or
“Because you can’t make money doing that,” not only would I have been
completely wrong, but that 8-year-old boy version of myself would have
probably started crying.
3. WHAT MAKES YOU FORGET TO EAT AND POOP?
We’ve all had that experience where we get so wrapped up in something
that minutes turn into hours and hours turn into “Holy crap, I forgot
to have dinner.”
Supposedly, in his prime, Isaac Newton’s mother had to regularly come
in and remind him to eat because he would go entire days so absorbed in
his work that he would forget.
I used to be like that with video games. This probably wasn’t a good
thing. In fact, for many years it was kind of a problem. I would sit and
play video games instead of doing more important things like studying
for an exam, or showering regularly, or speaking to other humans
face-to-face.
It wasn’t until I gave up the games that I realized my passion wasn’t
for the games themselves (although I do love them). My passion is for
improvement, being good at something and then trying to get better. The
games themselves — the graphics, the stories — they were cool, but I can
easily live without them. It’s the competition — with others, but
especially with myself — that I thrive on.
And when I applied that obsessiveness for improvement and
self-competition to an internet business and to my writing, well, things
took off in a big way.
Maybe for you, it’s something else. Maybe it’s organizing things
efficiently, or getting lost in a fantasy world, or teaching somebody
something, or solving technical problems. Whatever it is, don’t just
look at the activities that keep you up all night, but look at the cognitive principles behind those activities that enthrall you. Because they can easily be applied elsewhere.
4. HOW CAN YOU BETTER EMBARRASS YOURSELF?
Before you are able to be good at something and do something
important, you must first suck at something and have no clue what you’re
doing. That’s pretty obvious. And in order to suck at something and
have no clue what you’re doing, you must embarrass yourself in some
shape or form, often repeatedly. And most people try to avoid
embarrassing themselves, namely because it sucks.
Ergo, due to the transitive property of awesomeness, if you avoid
anything that could potentially embarrass you, then you will never end
up doing something that feels important.
Yes, it seems that once again, it all comes back to vulnerability.
Right now, there’s something you want to do, something you think about doing, something you fantasize about doing, yet you don’t do it. You have your reasons, no doubt. And you repeat these reasons to yourself ad infinitum.
But what are those reasons? Because I can tell you right now that if
those reasons are based on what others would think, then you’re screwing
yourself over big time.
If your reasons are something like, “I can’t start a business because
spending time with my kids is more important to me,” or “Playing
Starcraft all day would probably interfere with my music, and music is
more important to me,” then OK. Sounds good.
But if your reasons are, “My parents would hate it,” or “My friends
would make fun of me,” or “If I failed, I’d look like an idiot,” then
chances are, you’re actually avoiding something you truly care about
because caring about that thing is what scares the shit out of you, not
what mom thinks or what Timmy next door says. Living a life avoiding embarrassment is akin to living a life with your head in the sand.
Great things are, by their very nature, unique and unconventional.
Therefore, to achieve them, we must go against the herd mentality. And
to do that is scary.
Embrace embarrassment. Feeling foolish is part of the path to
achieving something important, something meaningful. The more a major
life decision scares you, chances are the more you need to be doing it.
5. HOW ARE YOU GOING TO SAVE THE WORLD?
In case you haven’t seen the news lately, the world has a few
problems. And by “a few problems,” what I really mean is, “everything is
fucked and we’re all going to die.”
I’ve harped on this before,
and the research also bears it out, but to live a happy and healthy
life, we must hold on to values that are greater than our own pleasure
or satisfaction.1
So pick a problem and start saving the world. There are plenty to choose from. Our screwed up education systems,
economic development, domestic violence, mental health care,
governmental corruption. Hell, I just saw an article this morning on sex trafficking in the US and it got me all riled up and wishing I could do something. It also ruined my breakfast.
Find a problem you care about and start solving it. Obviously, you’re
not going to fix the world’s problems by yourself. But you can
contribute and make a difference. And that feeling of making a difference is ultimately what’s most important for your own happiness and fulfillment.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Gee Mark, I read all of this
horrible stuff and I get all pissed off too, but that doesn’t translate
to action, much less a new career path.”
Glad you asked…
6. GUN TO YOUR HEAD, IF YOU HAD TO LEAVE THE HOUSE ALL DAY, EVERY DAY, WHERE WOULD YOU GO AND WHAT WOULD YOU DO?
For many of us, the enemy is just old-fashioned complacency. We get
into our routines. We distract ourselves. The couch is comfortable. The
Doritos are cheesy. And nothing new happens.
This is a problem. What most people don’t understand is that passion is the result of action, not the cause of it.2,3
Discovering what you’re passionate about in life and what matters to
you is a full-contact sport, a trial-and-error process. None of us know
exactly how we feel about an activity until we actually do the activity.
So ask yourself, if someone put a gun to your head and forced
you to leave your house every day for everything except for sleep, how
would you choose to occupy yourself? And no, you can’t just go sit in a
coffee shop and browse Facebook. You probably already do that. Let’s
pretend there are no useless websites, no video games, no TV. You have
to be outside of the house all day every day until it’s time to go to
bed — where would you go and what would you do?
Sign up for a dance class? Join a book club? Go get another degree?
Invent a new form of irrigation system that can save the thousands of
children’s lives in rural Africa? Learn to hang glide?
What would you do with all of that time?
If it strikes your fancy, write down a few answers and then, you
know, go out and actually do them. Bonus points if it involves
embarrassing yourself.
7. IF YOU KNEW YOU WERE GOING TO DIE ONE YEAR FROM TODAY, WHAT WOULD YOU DO AND HOW WOULD YOU WANT TO BE REMEMBERED?
Most of us don’t like thinking about death.
It freaks us out. But thinking about our own death surprisingly has a
lot of practical advantages. One of those advantages is that it forces
us to zero in on what’s actually important in our lives and what’s just
frivolous and distracting.
When I was in college, I used to walk around and ask people, “If you
had a year to live, what would you do?” As you can imagine, I was a huge
hit at parties. A lot of people gave vague and boring answers. A few
drinks were nearly spit on me. But it did cause people to really think
about their lives in a different way and re-evaluate what their
priorities were. This man’s headstone will read: “Here lies Greg. He watched every episode of ’24’… twice.”
What is your legacy going to be? What are the stories people are
going to tell when you’re gone? What is your obituary going to say? Is
there anything to say at all? If not, what would you like it to say? How
can you start working towards that today?
And again, if you fantasize about your obituary saying a bunch of
badass shit that impresses a bunch of random other people, then again,
you’re failing here.
When people feel like they have no sense of direction, no purpose in
their life, it’s because they don’t know what’s important to them, they
don’t know what their values are.
And when you don’t know what your values are, then you’re essentially
taking on other people’s values and living other people’s priorities
instead of your own. This is a one-way ticket to unhealthy relationships and eventual misery.
Discovering one’s “purpose” in life essentially boils down to finding
those one or two things that are bigger than yourself, and bigger than
those around you. And to find them you must get off your couch and act,
and take the time to think beyond yourself, to think greater than
yourself, and paradoxically, to imagine a world without yourself.
The First Five Food Lies
When it comes to weight loss, there’s a ton of advice out there. The
problem is, most of it is terrible, outdated and scientifically
disproven. And if you believe it, it could be getting in your way. So
let’s take a look at the Top Ten Food Lies that keep you sick and fat. Food Lie #1: All Calories Are Created Equal
When I walked into an 8th grade class recently, I asked if
them if there was a difference between 1000 calories of broccoli and a
1000 calories of soda. You know what I heard? A unanimous, “Duh! Yes!”
The idea that, as long as we burn more calories than we consume, we will lose weight IS SIMPLY DEAD WRONG.
The lie is that losing weight is all about energy balance or calories
in/calories out. Just eat less and exercise more is the mantra we hear
from the food industry and government agencies. It’s all about
moderation. How’s that working for America?
The truth is there are good and bad calories. And that’s because it’s more than a simple math problem.
When we eat, our food interacts with our biology, which is a complex
adaptive system that instantly transforms every bite. Every bite affects
your hormones, brain chemistry and metabolism. Sugar calories cause fat
storage and spike hunger. Protein and fat calories promote fat burning.
What counts even more are the QUALITY of the calories.
What are high-quality calories? Whole foods – fresh foods, foods like
great-grandma made. Good quality protein: grass-fed animal products
(not factory farmed), organic eggs, chicken, small wild fish, nuts and
seeds. Good carbs: vibrantly colored vegetables, the brighter the better
(you can binge on these!). Fruits like wild berries, apples and kiwis.
And super foods like chia and hemp seeds. And good fats like avocado,
extra virgin olive oil, nuts and seeds, coconut butter and omega-3 fats
from fish. Food Lie #2: Don’t Lose Weight Too Fast, You’ll Gain it All Back
Slow and steady is what we are told. No quick fixes. Don’t lose more
than a pound a week. This is dead wrong. Studies show the opposite –
that a jumpstart leads to more weight loss over time. If you reboot your
metabolism with a quick detox from sugar, processed food and junk, you
will reset your hormones and your brain chemistry making it much easier
to sustain the changes.
The key is to use a healthy, sustainable strategy for weight loss
that balances your hormones and brain chemistry and doesn’t put you in a
starvation response.
That allows you to lose the weight and keep it off – I see it with my
patients all the time – if you see results, you feel empowered and get
inspired to keep losing weight. Food Lie #3: All You Need is Willpower
This is one of the most insidious lies pushed on us by the food industry and government.
Their mantra is this: Eat Less, Exercise More.
The implicit message in this idea is that the real reason we are all
fat and sick is that we are lazy gluttons. If we just stopped stuffing
our faces and got up off the couch and moved our butt, we would lose
weight. It is moral failing, weak psychology, apathy or worse that
prevents people from moderating their food intake and exercise. This is
nonsense.
If you try to control your appetite with willpower, you will fail. We
have short-term voluntary control and can starve ourselves but then our
bodies compensate by slowing our metabolism and dramatically increasing
appetite. It is unsustainable. If I asked you to hold your breath for
15 minutes – no matter how bad you want to make it happen, you’re just
not designed to pull that off.
When your taste buds, brain chemistry, hormones and metabolism have
been damaged by sugar and processed foods, willpower alone won’t do it.
If you are addicted to sugar
and refined carbs you cannot white knuckle it for very long. You have
to naturally reset your brain chemistry and hormones so your body will
automatically self regulate and the cravings disappear and hunger will
be in balance.
When your metabolism has been hijacked you need to detox from the
addictive power of sugar and flour and replace them with real, whole
high quality foods. That will allow your appetite and weight to
automatically regulate without willpower. Food Lie #4: Diet Soda Is Better Than Regular Soda
I call soda LIQUID DEATH. And you might as well call diet soda “New
& Improved Liquid Death,” because it may actually be WORSE.
In a 14-year study of more than 66,000 women,
researchers found that diet sodas actually raised the risk of diabetes
MORE than sugar-sweetened sodas. One diet soda increased the risk of
type 2 diabetes by 33% and one large diet soda increased the risk by
66%.
The truth is, diet soda slows your metabolism, makes you hungry for
sugar and carbs and packs on the belly fat. Stay away from all
artificial sweeteners, even natural ones. Just add a little real sugar
to your coffee if you want. It’s not the sugar that you add to your diet
that’s the problem. It’s the sugar that is added to your diet by food
corporations. Food Lie #5: Foods Labeled Low Fat or Whole Grain Are Good for You
The low-fat craze of the last 30 years has paralleled the dramatic
rise in obesity and type 2 diabetes. When food companies took the fat
out of the products it was replaced with sugar. And in those 30 years
our sugar consumption has doubled. Fat actually makes you satisfied,
curbs your appetite and a review of all the research on fat and weight found that fat does not make you fat.
The latest health buzzword is “whole grain.” Food companies add a
few flakes of whole grain to processed foods and try to convince us its
healthy. A whole grain Pop Tart? Really?
Most cereals are 75% sugar, even with a little bit of whole grain
added. They shouldn’t be called breakfast, they should be called
dessert. And we are feeding sugary cereal to our kids for breakfast
thinking we are doing something good for them. In fact, we are killing
them.
My basic rule for food: If it has ANY health claim on the label, it’s probably bad for you.
To read more about these other food lies, please check out my new book, The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet.
I rarely write publicly of my struggles with severe depression and
anxiety. For several years, I have been answering reader questions
privately via email, and I hope that by blogging about it here, more of
you will find the help you are looking for.
During my recovery, I not only learned powerful tools and techniques to help with my mental health, I learned how to optimize my brain for better living, learning and working in general.
Spending time in and out of hospitals when I was younger left me unable to travel like I always dreamed I would. By creating a lifestyle business, I am now able to work anywhere in the world with just a laptop.
So, I’m making up for lost time, and I’ve noticed that travel brings up some little devils… One of those is fear. You can insert your own fears
here, but for this example, I’m going to take you step by step into how I
stopped one particularly crippling fear from preventing me from living
fully and having some fun.
A couple of weeks ago, I made my way to London for the first time.
While I thankfully don’t suffer from a fear of flying, I do struggle
with a peculiar fear of heights.
Taking a break on top of a mountain hike. Scottsdale, AZ
I spend as much time as possible hiking high in the mountains here in
Scottsdale. Interestingly, hitting the top and taking in the view never bothers me – no matter how high I climb.
But put me in a glass elevator or take me to the top of a skyscraper, and in my mind, the world is ending. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), introduced to me
by a wonderful therapist, was critically important in my recovery from
depression. A bonus of learning it is that I have a toolbox to help me
navigate the challenges of daily life. Step 1) Catch The Thoughts
One aspect of CBT is catching automatic thoughts. This is a term coined by Aaron Beck, who along with Albert Ellis,
pioneered the therapy. I like to look at CBT as a ‘crowdsourced” tool
as there have been many brilliant people who have contributed to its
development. Negative automatic thoughts go on throughout our day without us even being aware of them.
For this example, I’m referring to three recent outings:
Going to the Top of the Eiffel Tower.
View of the Eiffel Tower from the top of the Arc de Triomphe. Paris, France
Riding in the London Eye.
The London Eye.
Big Ben. Inside The London Eye.
Going to the top of The Shard, the Tallest Building in London – Which Opened in 2012.
The Shard. London.
Night View of Tower Bridge from the Top of The Shard. London, England.
The Thoughts I Caught:
(While going up in the elevator): “Damn it, they have put WAY too many people in this elevator. The cables are going to break, and I am going to die.” (Out on the viewing deck as I inch closer to the window): “Is this thing swaying?! Oh my God, this building is going to fall over and I am going to die.” (Trying to walk right up to the window and look down): “If I go too close to this window, it might break and I’m going to fall out and die.” (And the more general beat down I give myself): “I will never get over this. Why am I even doing this to myself? I should just quit going up in these things.” Step 2) Acknowledge The Thought.
Once I catch one of these thoughts (and that part takes a little
practice), I talk back in my own words. For me, it’s important that I
talk back to myself this way. You’ll want to talk in a way that is
natural for you.
“OK, Erin. Here it is. This is just a negative automatic thought.
This is fear talking. You hardwired your brain for this by letting fear
win for so many years. You can listen to it or you can go on with life.” 3) Counter The Thought
I was taught long ago to counter these thoughts as soon as I catch myself thinking them.
And by the way, it’s OK if you don’t believe your counter-argument.
You are slowly rewiring years (in some cases a lifetime) of irrational
thought pathways.
Catching the thought and countering it doesn’t cure it on the first
try. This is a life practice, but stay with me, because it works. Thought:“Damn it, they have put WAY too many people in this elevator. The cables are going to break, and I am going to die.” Counter: “These elevators are safety checked, weight
tested, and there are posted limits as to how much weight is allowed at
a time.” (And believe me, I am counting heads and doing some math to
hold the operator accountable.) Thought:“Is this thing swaying?! Oh my God, this building is going to fall over and I am going to die.” Counter: “Buildings don’t just fall over. This
building was designed by expert architects and constructed by highly
qualified engineers. It has passed rigorous safety inspections.” Thought:“If I go too close to this window, it might break and I’m going to fall out and die.” Counter: “These windows are made to withstand
enormous amounts of pressure. A few people pushing up against them will
never cause a break. I will not fall out of a closed window.” Thought:“I will never get over this. Why am I even doing this to myself? I should just quit going up in these things.” Counter: “I am ‘getting over this’. By continuing to
confront my fear, I am slowly but surely overcoming it. Look at how
much I have done. Remember, rewiring the brain takes time.” 4) Confront and Carry On
This is a saying I created to remind myself to keep going. It’s a
throwback to the old “Keep Calm and Carry On” quote we see all over the
internet. Be open to chances to be uncomfortable because it means you
are working through fear.
It’s common to try this once and quit. As I mentioned above, there is no magic button. I practice, and I improve. 5) Reward Yourself
This is another of my additions. Each time I make progress, no matter
how small, I take time and celebrate. Whether it’s a glass of
champagne, your favorite coffee, a delicious meal or a simple high five
with your partner in crime, remember to be kind to yourself. Why Put Yourself Through This?
A friend once asked me why I insist on doing these things if it causes me so much stress. Depression robbed me of a large chunk of my life. After
recovering fully, gaining perspective and looking back, it also gave me
great gifts. One of those gifts is knowing that fear doesn’t have to win.
There was a time when I wouldn’t have even dared to go to the top of
the Eiffel Tower, and now that I have (although it was a bit messy), it
counts as one of the favorite moments of my life. I can’t imagine not having that.
(Please note:) While these techniques work for me, I am not a
licensed therapist and certainly do not prescribe them. My goal is to
write more about the struggles I have had and hopefully shed light on
solutions that you may want to investigate further. If this makes sense to you, I encourage you to find a local therapist who specializes in CBT.
And if you have techniques that have helped you, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.
Note: If you have not read Part One, please do so before embarking on this article. Thanks! In
Part One, we looked at how therapy can change our brains regarding
relationships. Now, let’s look at how therapy can change our brain in
another way.
Let’s imagine our brain is a large (very large) collection of roads,
ranging from dirt roads to superhighways (or freeways, depending on
where you’re from). These roads get built
according to what we learn as we go through life. They allow the mind
that emanates from our brain to locate information that the brain
collects. In childhood, these roads get built and information gets
collected at a frantic pace. Then things start to taper off in our late
teens and early twenties. After that, our brains continue to collect and
connect information, but more slowly.
Along the way, new roads get constructed. Old, unused roads get
destroyed. Some small roads become larger. Some large roads become
smaller. Highways acquire entrances and exits. All this happens in the
service of more effective access to collected information.
Now, imagine a child whose brain is building roads like crazy
connecting all the various things he (for sake of pronoun ease) learns.
Some of what he learns comes from his father, say, in the form of
insults, criticism, and outright neglect. The more the boy learns these
negative “facts,” as the boy’s brain comes to treat them, the more roads
his brain builds heading toward them and the larger those roads become.
In the parlance of brain science, “the brain cells that fire together,
wire together,” meaning the more a road gets used, the more substantial
it becomes.
Sooner or later, the boy grows up to become a (chronological) adult.
For better or worse, this man carries with him into adulthood all the
facts his brain collected and all the roads his brain built between
those facts while he was growing up.
Can you see where this story is headed?
Let’s say that within our hero’s brain lies a pile of information
with the basic message, “I am worthless.” This information has formed
into a “fact” as far as his brain knows. Along with the pile, there is a
superhighway, with lots (billions?) of entrances, heading right into
“Worthless Town.” Our hero’s sense of worthlessness gets “triggered” or
“activated” constantly, as a result. You get the picture?
If our hero enters into therapy, the therapist helps our hero become
aware of his “fact” of worthlessness and helps him change the roadway
system. This might involve building exits off the highway. Some of the
highway entrances (e.g., negative self-talk) might get identified and
demolished. Maybe our hero will spend more time visiting Worthless Town
and either start to feel more accepting of life there or develop the
ability to leave whenever he wants to. This all happens due to the
plasticity of our hero’s brain, its ability to change, re-wire itself,
create and undo connections within it.
At some point, our hero either spends less time in Worthless Town,
feels OK with being there, or never gets there in the first place. This
feels wonderful to our intrepid hero and he gets to experience his brain
after therapy.
(this is a re-post of an article from, we have had a number of requests for info on self sabotage so here it is again...) {The Mind Academy Newsletter}
So
you've been trying to make a change for a while, and it doesn't matter
what your doing or what you have done, the change you want is not
happening…
You want to get to the next level with your finances but keep on 'sabotaging' yourself.
You want to recover from a long standing illness, yet it still lingers.
You what to stop attracting a certain kind of person in your life, but they keep on turning up.
That weight that you have been trying to shed for the last 5 years just doesn't seem to budge.
You keep on making life decisions that increase your burdens rather than relieves them
Why?
Some might say that self sabotage is at play, but that doesn't help us
very much. So let's take a look at a major factor that prevents lasting
change from happening that often appears to be 'self sabotage'.
An answer to making a change permanent might be easier than we think
when we understand a psychological principle called 'Secondary Gains'.
Secondary Gains. AKA Hidden Benefits.
In simple, lay terms a secondary gain is "a hidden or unacknowledged
benefit that is derived from having the presenting problem".
At The Mind Academy we use the concept of Secondary Gains across all of
the modalities we teach, in fact we see it as one of the integrating
principles of almost all change work and the first place we look if an
issue does not resolve itself rapidly with a simple intervention or if a
change only 'half occurs' or a change happens but then appears to be
replaced by a new problem behavior.
Let's Take a Look At Some Examples:
1. An elderly woman with a chronic illness that should have responded
well to a simple nutritional regime change,yet made little to no
progress, this meant that her son and daughter needed to spend time
helping her around the house during the week. She had been lonely before
the illness and when asked what she stood to lose if she got well, she
caught her self saying almost immediately 'I would be lonely again'.
Given the choice between being ill and lonely, she unconsciously chose the illness. Not being lonely was the hidden benefit.
2. A woman with a severe phobia of spiders was not responding to the
normally very effective and simple phobia elimination solutions of NLP
and Hypnosis. When asked what would change in her life or relationships
if she lost the phobia, she responded that it was the one area in her
life that her husband really took the time to make sure that she was OK.
No phobia, no check in from husband… translates to the unconscious as 'I'll keep the phobia, thanks !'
3. A woman broke her leg on the ski slopes, had a full cast and was
immobile for a few weeks, the kids and husband did more around the house
and treated her with greater care. When the cast came off, she started
having 'phantom' leg pain. It would often get so bad she couldn't move.
After a year of this she ends up at he hypnotherapists office. The
secondary gain was identified. Leg pain equals the desire for fairness
in house duties. Once she took charge and set boundaries around the
house, the leg pain disappeared.
Here are a few more:
If my back was fixed, I'd have to go to work.
If my rash/headaches cleared up, I'll have to be intimate with my husband/wife again
If my depression went, I'd have to take full responsibility for my life
It can be incredibly revealing, healing, helpful, life changing or just
plain old informative to identify how secondary gains are affecting our
lives and
preventing the changes we want from happening.
You might find it useful to identify a long running issue in your life
and ask a few questions to see if you can pinpoint any secondary gains
connected to it.
Here are a few questions (some have an unusual linguistic structure)
that will help you unravel the secondary gains/hidden benefits of an
issue you may have.
Secondary Gain Questions:
What do you gain, how do you benefit from having this problem?
How would not having this problem change your life/relationships for the negative?
How does having this problem benefit you?
What do you not gain by having this problem?
What don't you gain by having this problem?
What don't you not gain by having this problem?
What would you lose if you didn't have this problem?
What wouldn't you not lose if you didn't have this problem?
It can also be useful to go back into your past to where the problem
first started and became habitualised or normalised as a response and
see what possible resources, needs or benefits you can find in starting
the problem back then.
For example did it help to protect you or keep you safe in some way?
Was it an attempt to get some control or perhaps the approval or
acknowledgment of someone or some group? Let your mind really explore
all possibilities, sometimes they are obvious and sometimes revealing
the true hidden benefits of having or maintaining a problem can require a
little digging.
Quite literally 9 out of ten times if an issue is being stubborn or
self sabotage appears to be involved then a secondary gain/hidden
benefit will be at play in some way.
Dr.
Dan Metevier is a psychologist from Carlsbad, California. He works with
a variety of clients and helps these people feel better about
themselves, their lives, and their relationships. You can visit Dan’s
website here.
So, what really happens to your brain when you go to a therapist?
Let’s start from the very beginning (a very good place to start). In
the beginning, our brains have a lot of ‘hardware’, estimated at one
hundred billion brain cells, but they have very little ‘software’. We
only have ‘programs’ that let us do things like cry, sleep, poop, suck
etc.
As we grow up, our brains act like little organic computers that
program themselves by creating or undoing connections between brain
cells, estimated at about 10,000 connections per cell, or about one
quadrillion (that’s a one with 15 zeroes after it) possible connections
in all. That’s a lot!
The connections we can make in our brain reflect the ‘genetic
potential’ we receive from our parents. It’s like your parents each had a
deck of cards and threw in some of them to give you your hand. So, you
play with the cards you were dealt, so to speak. If both your parents
throw in a ‘smart’ card, then you have a good chance at being smart. The
same holds true of height, eye color, hair color, temperament,
attention deficit, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and so on. You would
have the potential/possibility for those but may or may not realise
(acquire or fulfill) that potential.
Let’s look at a scenario…
The connections we do make in our brain reflect how we use this deck
of cards to deal with our environment as we grow up. If Person A has an
easy, pleasant, nurturing childhood, their brain will get ‘wired up’ or
‘programmed’ to process that kind of input. If Person B has a rough,
abusive, lonely childhood, their brain gets programmed to deal in some
creative manner (sometimes called ‘a defense mechanism’) with that kind
of life.
Person A can readily deal with nice, pleasant, friendly people, but
may have difficulty knowing what to do with a mean, unpleasant, abusive
person because they have no program to process input from that kind of
person. They may assume the mean person is just having a bad day (or
life) and will change sometime in the future. This assumption may get
them into trouble.
Likewise, Person B can deal in some way with abusive, mean people,
but may have difficulty knowing what to do with a healthier person. They
have no program to process input from a healthy person. To them,
abusive behavior seems “normal” and they feel in some way comfortable,
or at least familiar, with it. Person B may even find they are attracted
to abusive others again and again because that’s the kind of person
their brain (thus far) can deal with.
What kind of picture forms in your mind right now? Do you recognize any of this in yourself or others you know?
Both Person A and Person B can benefit from going to therapy (therapy
is not just for crazy people any more!!). Person B may have suffered
through a string of bad relationships, not knowing why, or unable to
figure out, how to establish or keep a healthy relationship. Person B’s
brain does not ‘do’ healthy. Person A, on the other hand, may have
stumbled across a relationship that doesn’t make sense or may even have
traumatised them, since Person A’s brain doesn’t ‘do’ unhealthy.
Enter therapy. Please! (Apologies to Henny Youngman.)
So let’s say Person B seeks relief by entering therapy with a
relatively healthy therapist (not guaranteed, by the way, but that’s a
whole other Oprah). At first, Person B may feel uncomfortable with the
therapist because his or her brain doesn’t process input from the
healthy therapist. Luckily, however, Person B’s brain has plasticity (a
fancy word meaning it can change) and during every encounter with the
therapist, Person B’s brain gets slightly rewired or reprogrammed.
Almost regardless of what happens during these encounters, as long as
the therapist behaves in a healthy manner, Person B’s brain creatively
adapts to deal more effectively with ‘healthy’. Person B’s brain cells
slowly undo unhealthy connections and create healthy connections. After a
while, Person B finds they too can act in healthy ways and they can
enter and maintain healthy relationships (well, healthier, at least).
Person A can benefit from working with a healthy therapist, too.
Possibly some brain-expanding education, role-playing, or other method
provided in therapy will help add to the existing programs in Person A’s
brain that they can call upon when encountering unhealthy people.
So, your brain-on-therapy makes subtle shifts, disconnections,
re-connections, new connections, and so on, leading to greater and
greater health. And then one day you’ll wake up in the morning and
realise your life feels much better.
What
unpleasant experiences are you able to handle? Are you able to stay up
all night coding? Are you able to put off starting a family for 10
years? Are you able to have people laugh you off the stage over and over
again until you get it right? 
In
Part One, we looked at how therapy can change our brains regarding
relationships. Now, let’s look at how therapy can change our brain in
another way.