Over the last few blogs, we have been looking at ways to help become a calmer person by not letting underlying habits trigger internalised anxiety responses. Our minds are black and white and even if we are pretending to ourselves that we feel ok, our inner minds won't believe what isn't true. I am sure we are all at times living in denial about things that are happening in our lives. We pretend to ourselves that it isn't an issue and that we are not bothered about something, when we are bothered, scared, living in denial, and pretending this is not an issue.

Anxiety can be increased within us in many different ways and the last few blogs have been looking at this. Avoidance can be a massive instigator of increased anxiety within you. Your mind is amazing, but it is always looking to protect you. If you are avoiding things then your mind will automatically think that this is something that is super scary and will react in these ways. A few thousand years ago we used our fight, flight, and freeze (FFF) response many times, every day, to protect ourselves from things that could cause us harm. If we saw a grizzly bear then we would, of course, avoid it, and if anything came up that could be similar, our minds would be reminded of the fact it could be a sign of a grizzly bear. This might be broken branches from trees, big footprints in the earth, or the place we last saw a grizzly bear, these are just a few of the things that could trigger your mind into a FFF response. Which of course was amazing and made us the most overpopulated species on the planet.

The last couple of blogs were about worries and anxiety, and how many different habits you might have developed that maybe negatively impact these levels. Moving away from anxiety will not only mean letting go of worries, but it will also lead you to live life in several different ways. One of these things is reassurance, whether it be we are searching for it from others, or we are giving it to ourselves. Our mind is very clear in how it holds all the information that comes to us, and we have to understand that this is such a vast amount. Everything we do is held and stored in our unconscious minds and if this storage aspect of ourselves was not set up in this clear way, then we would struggle to live our lives in the way that we do. If we think about some of the things we do in life, like walking, driving, talking, etc, these are all formed by the build-up of memories. These memories are all stored in the same place, and as we learn a new skill the mind expands this part of its storage to hold all these experiences. Over time it creates a solid learned and developed habit and many of these we now do with hardly any conscious effort. If we think about walking, when was the last time you thought about picking your foot up or putting it down? We have this great ability to just walk naturally because your unconscious mind has stored all those memories in a way that allows your mind to automate those habits.

We discussed in the last blog ‘Worries’, about these pesky worry habits, plus the way you are living your life which could be increasing your internal worry and anxiety levels. This blog will look at how to fill the spaces, that worry, reassurance, denial, and avoidance, may have left within you. Worrying about things can take up lots of time and if we are choosing to break from these habits then it is important to make the most of that time in ways which won’t inadvertently allow our inner mind to continue to worry. The key to not worrying is to distract yourself, if you are fully distracted you won't be worrying. But it has to be a full distraction or it won't have the results that you are hoping for. Being distracted is not about just being busy doing something, we can all easily be busy but still be worrying at the same time. Being distracted is when our mind is so involved in the moment that we just don't have room for worries. This is one of the most important things in helping us to become worry-free. These are the key things to understand; if we can take the time to understand how our minds work and if we are fully distracted, then we can’t worry. Getting our minds on our side is the key to helping us in every area of our lives, as our minds are the most powerful force we have in our lives.

We all get worried from time to time and that is quite normal. But if we are allowing this to take over and become a habit then this will negatively impact how we feel. The thing about worrying is that the more we worry, the more worried we can feel. Also, worries can be impacted by how we react to ourselves and the world around us. If, say, we are worrying about going somewhere and we keep telling ourselves, “It's ok, we will be fine”, this you might think is no big thing, but to our unconscious mind, it is a massive thing, as your mind automatically looks at everything. If you were ok, then you wouldn't need to tell yourself that you are ok. So, you are not actually telling your mind that you are ok, each time you say to yourself that you will be fine, you are telling yourself on a deeper level that you are the opposite. You might be thinking really?! But the fact is your mind is so black and white in how it places things and without any grey area to put things, it has no choice. The thing is, you do know that you're not feeling ok so you can't think on any level that you can trick your mind to think otherwise. This is the same if you ask other people to reassure you, if we are always asking people if we are ok or will be ok, this is not helping us to stop the worrying, it will only be adding to our worries.

Let’s have a look at the things that can be limiting you moving forward, being positive, happy, grateful and being the best version of yourself. You might not have looked at life in this way, but many of us, if not all of us, are following the path of least resistance. This means that you choose to do what holds the least fear for you, you might be saying now I don't feel fear or I am fearless which may be the case. But beneath the surface is the more complex and primitive parts of our mind they do operate on a different level to our conscious mind and sometimes we just haven’t stopped to see it this way.

Life is now so competitive, about who we are, what we have, how we look and the lifestyle we lead, if we don’t fit in, we can easily feel inadequate. For teenagers and young adults, life is super competitive and social media is the king who tells us how we should look and be. With all the social media, we have a window into people’s lives, or do we? Or is it just all the amazing bits and lots of great camera angles and airbrushing? Nearly every week there’s a new story on some celebrity who has altered their images and has been caught out, but we still can’t help getting pulled into the images. It's not just social media, it's everywhere in our lives, it's the mums waiting at the school gates, kids in school, the office, and the workplace, all of these can have the same pressures to conform and fit in. But what happens if we don’t? We can be left feeling inadequate, isolated, weird, not good enough and not feeling able to fit in. This can lead to anxiety, fears, and depression, as we find ourselves retreating into our minds and as we’re already feeling not great this can compound the negative feelings.

Every moment in life is gone by the next moment. How about taking a few days to just embrace as many of those moments as you can? It is a challenge to catch the moment and be present to fully enjoy it. I think we have to remind ourselves to stop and pause to embrace the moment. Being in the now is one of the most pleasurable times we have. When we are in the moment we just forget about everything else and just enjoy what is happening in the now. This might seem an easy task but for many of us, this is something we don't do that often.

All over the world, we lived in fear of a neighbour from the beginning of time, to the 1950s and in fact, this might still be the case in some places in our world. We have also lived with another country invading our homes, villages or territory. Slaughtering our friends, family, and community, to take over and occupy our land and resources, or if they didn’t slaughter us, they brought health epidemics which did it for them. We are also at a point where we can experience less helplessness of being in this powerful world, out of control with the force of nature. Of course, we do see many disasters and devastation, caused by earthquakes, tsunamis, and extreme weather conditions, and being caught up in those must be terrifying for anyone. But over the last 100 years, we have learnt so much, and we can now build houses to withstand earthquakes and even install earthquake protection beds - google them, they look amazing! We can now predict the weather more easily and send support to help when a disaster happens, to help minimise the loss of life.

Every moment in life is gone by the next moment. For most of us, we just don't appreciate the moments as much as we should. We can be lost in the habitual mundaneness of parts of our life and then we just get stuck in habit and find ourselves lost to them. This can be fine when we need time to speed up, when we are maybe doing things which don’t bring us as much joy or pleasure. But for some of us, we can get stuck in that cycle of disconnection and then the task or the job stops, and we can forget to bring ourselves back into the moment. Maybe it's less about forgetting and more about our unconscious mind just getting stuck into a pattern of behaving and then we just keep going with it. It's worth thinking when you do drift into these disconnected habits, are they just helping you get through the mundane tasks or things that you don't enjoy or are there times you are zoning out. Once you have thought about your life and how it is broken down into being fully present and then partly disconnected into the habits of your life, it can give you a good overview of how your life is. Then just evaluate if this is making the most of your life. Are you wasting time and losing parts of your life? Could you be more productive and get other things done while doing those mundane tasks? Are you not switching off and becoming present when these tasks finish? Maybe there are other questions you find you need to ask yourself that help you fully consider your life and how much of it you are present for, and how maybe there are parts of your life you can rethink and develop better ways of living.