CHAPTER 2

Calm Your Fears to Work Through Tough Times

Every state of consciousness we experience is a combination of one or more of the four categories of brain waves.

—Anna Wise, Awakening the Mind

Apollo 13 gained fame as the problem-plagued 1970 mission to the moon, memorialized by the movie of the same name. But it turns out the mission was bedeviled even before an explosion forced its astronauts to abort and jerry-rig their way back to Earth. During their training, the astronauts became repeatedly nauseous and several suffered seizures. The project directors thought escaping rocket fuel fumes might be the culprits, so they called up research psychologist Barry Sterman at UCLA to see whether he could determine if this was the problem. Sterman had been studying sleep patterns in cats, and had determined that when they were relaxed, the animals generated the 14 Hertz brain wave frequency called sensorimotor rhythm (SMR). Curious as to whether the cats could produce this frequency at will, he hooked them up to an EEG machine, which allowed him to read their brain waves. Whenever they elevated their sensorimotor rhythm, he rewarded them with milk and chicken broth. The cats were quick studies and soon were elevating their SMR rhythm to get milk more frequently.

The NASA request was a completely different project, but Sterman agreed to test the rocket fuel for NASA by exposing a group of his cats to the fumes. Sure enough, many had the same reaction as the astronauts: The rocket fuel was indeed causing the seizures. The researchers learned one more astounding thing: The cats that had been trained to elevate their sensorimotor rhythm reacted very differently than the untrained cats to the toxin. Sterman discovered that the cats that had been conditioned to produce more 14 Hz brain waves were able to overcome the effects of the toxin in their systems. By accident, Sterman had discovered a brain training process, now called neurofeedback, that would eventually have remarkable positive effects on the way we treat anxiety, depression, and a host of other mental health issues. His research brought us amazingly good news. If cats could change their brain activity and improve their well-being, so could humans.

Altering your brain’s activity and in turn your corresponding mental states (for example, from sad to happy) also allows you to control your reactions to what happens to you. The trick is to learn to shift your attention away from whatever is causing you stress or anxiety. When you interrupt a worry train of thought, you trigger important physiological changes. Just shifting your attention away from a problem releases nitric oxide, which reduces inflammation and activates a healing process that blocks stress hormones, lowers blood pressure and heart rate, and leads to clarity of mind. It’s a conditioning process that takes practice, but once you master it you can calm your mind and body at will, which will make a dramatic change in your outlook on life.

When you focus on something calming rather than your internal ruminations, you can’t worry. Several exercises in this book will teach you how to develop this attention shift. Their effectiveness will have a ripple effect. Once you learn to live more frequently in a positive, less-worried mental state, you will be able to dissolve the obstacles that are keeping you from your goals, which should make you feel more in control and able to take greater responsibility for your life, which should in turn set you on a path for success and greater happiness.

Almost any activity that absorbs your attention and puts you in a positive frame of mind will help banish worry. For example, Kelsie, a therapist and one of our students, took a fall that resulted in a severe brain injury. It was debilitating, and afterward she had trouble focusing and thinking clearly. When her doctor told her there was nothing else he could do, she devised her own mental training using repetitive word games and memory practice. Every day she did three crossword puzzles, memorized five new words and their definitions, and also reviewed the words she had learned the previous day. Then she made herself read something boring followed by something interesting, asking herself questions about what she read. In addition, she played Tetris, a game that requires intense concentration. She discovered that her memory especially improved when she made herself replay conversations from the previous day and week. She also learned that she performed better when she was rested. Overall, she found the training invigorating and uplifting, especially as she began to feel that she was making progress. Over about nine months, during which she trained for 20 minutes a day, Kelsie found that with practice her brain circuits could retrain her memory, focus, and stamina, and that the training held over time. She completely recovered her ability to think clearly, and she returned to work.

Word and memory games worked for Kelsie, but you might prefer video games, playing an instrument or singing music, puzzles, athletic play, or exercise. Flow is a state of highly concentrated focus, and while in that state, it becomes impossible to have a worry thought. As with all brain training, the more you do it, the more long-lasting the effects.

The Brain Is a Creature of Habit

Many years ago Donald Goodwin and his colleagues at the Washington Department of Psychiatry conducted a fascinating research study. They had no problem finding volunteers: The experiment required college students to drink to inebriation. Once they were drunk, the students were instructed to memorize nonsense words. They were then tested to see how well they remembered the words they had memorized. After analyzing their scores, the researchers waited for the students to sober up, then tested their memory again. They found the students didn’t do as well sober as they did when they were inebriated. To ensure that the difference in scores was not due solely to the passage of time between memorizing the words and the second test, the researchers asked the students to get drunk again. Without allowing the students any time for review, the researchers administered the test again. What they found out was startling. The students did as well on the third test, drunk, as they had on the first test, drunk, and better than they had on the second test when they were sober. The results demonstrated that what you learn in one state of mind, you remember best in that state of mind. So the next time you’re frustrated because you’ve forgotten an important piece of information, try to put yourself back in the state of mind in which you learned the information in the first place. That’s how the information was encoded, so that’s where it will most likely be retrieved.¹

The same thing is true for retrieving emotions. We’re often taught that in order to solve a problem we should stay with it, worrying it like a dog with a bone, until we find the solution. But that’s all wrong. Our brain lays down neural pathways every time we experience something troublesome or worrying. Focusing on the problem or event (such as reliving a past event over and over trying to see what you could have done differently) only keeps those neural patterns active and leaves you stuck in the same mindset you were in when you first encountered the problem. As Einstein himself said, the same level of consciousness that created a problem cannot solve it. However, resources such as confidence, courage, persistence, and optimism are generally encoded when we are in positive mental states. So to gain access, we must return to that positive mental state.

Willing ourselves into a desired mindset takes practice and patience, as our client David discovered. David was trudging through a difficult divorce. He was surprised to find that in addition to the emotions he expected to feel, like anger and sorrow, he was also overwhelmed by worry. Every glimpse into the future gave him heart palpitations. Would the children want to spend holidays with him? Would they turn to some other father figure for support and guidance? What if they never accepted his girlfriend and she found all the drama too much and left him? How was he going to pay for college now that he had lost all his money in the divorce?

David had read many self-help books and followed their advice to the letter, trying to breathe deeply, think pleasant thoughts, and stop worrying. But when he tried to relax and breathe more slowly, he discovered his tension and heart rate increased. The result was a cascade of negative thoughts and feelings, especially at night when he tried to go to sleep. By the time we met with him, he had tried half a dozen techniques, none of which had worked.

We reassured him that he wasn’t doing anything wrong; these techniques didn’t always work because they didn’t take into account how the brain actually operates. The brain is methodical, recording patterns of emotions and behaviors, placing them into memory, and translating them into particular mental states. Unconsciously, we remember which events make us feel a certain way. By calling up our memories of those events, we can trigger the corresponding mental state we were in at the time. But trying to move from a state of intense worry to extreme relaxation in one go is too taxing. You have to build a bridge to get yourself from one extreme state to its opposite. David would need to learn to ease into a new mental state if he wanted to get rid of his worry.

We asked him to imagine that on his way home that night his level of worry was going to be at a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being totally relaxed and 10 at panic (it wasn’t a stretch; he was already really close). What activity could he do that would help bring him down to a 9? He said the first thing he would do is turn on some music when he got home. Then we asked him to take the next step and ask himself what would he need to do to move down to an 8? He said he often found it relaxing to take the dog for a walk. We had him plot out every step he could take to get his emotional level down to a 1, and take his mind away from all of the unanswerable questions and fears. These issues don’t occur all at the same time, so we would help him figure them out one at a time. Walking with the dog was a superb way of relaxing the mind and connecting with nature. Walking also stimulates the creative mind, so that would be a good time to focus on coming up with a plan to attack one of his fears. We suggested that David visualize himself able to devise creative solutions. It didn’t matter if he didn’t know specifically what they were because creative solutions often take some time to simmer in the back of the mind. The point was just to imagine having the eureka moment. David experimented with walking and visualization, and soon he reported he felt much better. He believed that he’d find a way to successfully cope should any of the what-ifs he’d once worried about come to pass.

David’s worry was fueled by his lack of confidence in his ability to handle all the changes in his life and especially maintain a relationship with his children. To free himself completely, he would need to escape the mindset in which he had learned to worry in the first place. We also reassured him that he would feel better if he stopped trying to predict every issue that could arise as a result of his divorce. In the meantime, however, he needed to find the emotional resources that would eventually allow him to confidently problem solve. With our prodding, he started remembering all the times when he had felt resolved to accomplish something, from getting his master’s to learning to play the harmonica. Remembering these moments whenever he started feeling the anxiety creep up on him helped boost his confidence. The more he conditioned his mind with nonreactive states and thoughts, the more creative, resourceful, and resilient he became, until he was able to navigate his post-divorce world with grace and calm.

Experimenting with different relaxation triggers will provide you with a blueprint for altering your emotional make-up. You’ll know that if you just need to take the edge off, a quick jog in place will do, and if you need to completely relax, you need to head to the hot tub. And if you’re not in a position to do either because you’re on an airplane or at work, just remembering how it feels to do that activity will be enough to trigger the corresponding mental state. Accessing the appropriate mental state, whether it is courage, curiosity, or believing that giving up is not an option, is the prerequisite to overcoming any adversity.

Mind Control Is Possible

Our state of mind and emotions are a product of our brain waves. As your neurons fire electrical signals they activate a process in the brain that allows you to accomplish tasks. When everything fires well, you are mentally agile, calmly rocking through the day with ease, comfort, and clear focus. For example, when you are paying bills you must be focused and alert. This requires a fast brain frequency called Beta. When you need to reflect on when you are going to get paid, your brain easily moves into somewhat slower Alpha. If you start to wonder how you will pay for something in the future, your brain will produce even slower Theta to help you come up with a solution. When you then congratulate yourself for resolving your potential problem, your brain will return to Alpha.

A balanced brain—one that easily shifts between brain states with ease and proficiency, sees the world as friendly, safe, and inviting. An unbalanced brain has difficulty shifting brain states, which alters its perceptions of the world. For example, if it gets stuck on a repetitive thought, the stagnation can make you perceive life through a narrow lens colored by threat, danger, and disconnection. If you have trouble shifting from a daydream to paying attention in class, your brain is struggling to move into a new brain state. The good news is that you have more control over your brain states than you think.

The Body/Brain Electric

Your brain is constantly firing electrical impulses that can be measured in hertz, which refers to cycles of electrical activity per second. There are five types of brain waves that range from .05 Hz 100 Hz. The dominant bandwidth determines your brain state, which triggers your emotions. Spend too much or too little time in any of these ranges and you won’t function well.

All of these five brain waves are always working at the same time, though their ratios change as your activity changes. However, sometimes one becomes dominant over the other and doesn’t retreat even when a new activity calls for a different brain wave. When that happens, trouble ensues. Reading requires a fast frequency to keep you interested in the text; if you get dreamy and bored when you read, it means your slower frequencies are rising instead of your faster ones. If you go to bed but your faster frequencies won’t come down so your slow brain waves can come up, you’ll be counting sheep for a long time. To know which brainwave bandwidth you need to aim for when trying to eliminate worry, you need to know more about each.

Our brain uses Beta waves (12 to 35 hertz) for accomplishing cognitive tasks and paying attention. The body is always trying to stay in balance. When you spend too much time in dominant Beta, especially when you need to unwind, you can end up feeling anxious and depressed. For example, let’s say company is coming over. You realize you need to clean up, so your Beta kicks in to help you do that. Normally, as you start to clean and see the fruits of your efforts, a new brain wave should take dominance. But if your Beta stays dominant, as you clean you’ll start to fret over whether your house is clean enough for company, which will lead you to worry that you don’t have enough time to finish, which will make you worry about what your guests will think of you if the house isn’t clean. One worry turns into another, and you go around and around until you feel anxious. It can make it difficult to turn off worrisome thoughts and relax. People stuck in Beta tend to hyperfocus, which can then lead to catastrophizing and making problems seem bigger than they really are.

For example, if a mother stuck in Beta hyperfocuses on her son’s bad grade, her imagination may go hog wild and convince her that he will never get into the right college.

The mother thinks that by focusing on how to raise her son’s grades she is digging for a solution, but repetitively going over a problem without trying to lift yourself into a different mental state leaves you in a box that won’t allow a creative solution to emerge. The only way to move out of such rigid thinking is to shift brain states. In this case, the mother would need to expand her frame of reference and connect with different solutions by consciously move from Beta to Alpha.

Alpha ranges from 8 to 12 hertz and provides the comfort we need so we can regenerate our energy after performing a tiring cognitive task that requires Beta, like figuring out our taxes. Alpha is the range of frequencies that can give you the power to ignore discomfort and worrying thoughts, and return to a more comfortable internal place where you can take in information without judgment. An easy way to access Alpha is through meditation or just counting your breaths from 1 to 5 repeatedly for five minutes.

However, you can get stuck in Alpha, which could cause you to be overly chilled out with no sense of urgency about anything. A young person watching television might be hungry, but still not move when his mother tells him it is time for dinner. This is because Alpha has made him so mellow he not only doesn’t hear his mother he also doesn’t register hunger. Though it is really comfortable, without shifting back into Beta, Alpha doesn’t allow you to accomplish much.

Theta provides a slower rhythm at 4 to 7 hertz. Brain waves in this range put you in the mental state right above sleep. They can dissolve worry and rumination, which is why it would be good for the mother we described earlier, worrying herself to pieces over her son’s grades, to learn to shift them by deeply relaxing. They also help you heal from illness. Repeated exposure to Theta can reduce emotional eating and enhance feelings of well-being, as well as take you to a highly intuitive state. Unfortunately, too much time in Theta can make you even less connected and less productive than Alpha. Although Theta enables you to pick up intuitive information that could prove to be useful, you must be able to shift into Beta to actually do something with the information.

Delta takes you into the deepest sleep for regeneration and renewal. It reduces cortisol and links to the unconscious mind. During the sleep cycle, Delta releases human growth hormone, dopamine, and serotonin. Delta is important for regenerative sleep. When awake, people with high amounts of Delta have been found to have increased empathy. In Delta, the electrical activity in your brain is only at about .05 to 3.0 hertz. That’s one half to three cycles of energy per second.

If you are chronically in Delta, it could be a sign of brain injury or disease. Though brain-injured people can function somewhat with dominant Delta waves, it slows their capacity to think clearly and they may feel foggy. People caught in Delta tend to have difficulty completing cognitive tasks or suffer major problems with short-term memory. If not treated, chronic Delta that makes the brain sleepier over time is a potential sign of further deterioration of the brain from a degenerative illness. This problem requires intervention by a neurologist.

Finally, there’s Gamma. At 35 to 70 hertz, this state encourages a highly focused mind and allows you to increase happiness, have more creative ideas, and formulate plans to accomplish goals. In fact, when you have a sudden intuition, you can thank Gamma. It spiked right before you formed your new idea. Your brain uses this state to block worry and rumination. Increasing Gamma often rids people of their worst worries and enhances feelings of peace and centeredness. However, in order to actively produce it, you must spend quite a while in meditation training. Buddhist monks who are advanced meditators generally show more Gamma activity than novice meditators. Though it might seem ideal to stay in Gamma as much as possible, you must shift back into other brain states to operate in the world. Even Buddhist monks who spend hours meditating must come out of this state to work in the temple.

We tend to learn our dominant mental state through our birth families and life experiences. If you walk around in dominant Beta, you may be hard-driving, task-oriented, and high strung. Those who have a meditation practice often live more in Alpha and are slower to react to people and situations. A Theta-dominant person tends to pick up information about others and may show psychic tendencies. People in whom Delta is dominant may have difficulty getting off the couch and getting things done even as they can also be more thoughtful and deliberate in evaluating data and making decisions. Gamma-dominant people tend to either be Buddhist monks or have logged more than 10,000 hours of meditation, generally focusing on compassion. They tend to have a stable sense of self that creates a sense of inner security no matter the external stressors.

As we get older, each of these five frequencies wax and wane depending on several factors, such as where we focus our attention, our level of physical activity, and our levels of emotional arousal. There are several exercises you can use to deepen or activate your brain waves and eliminate your worried feelings.

Shift Your Attention

How you focus your attention changes your brainwave frequencies, your mental state, and leads to default patterns of thinking that affect how you perceive reality. You view the world through your “default” or favorite mental state. For example, Buddhist monks who meditate on compassion experience the world through the lens of deep abiding connection and compassion. Someone who has been abused is often on hyperalert and in high Beta most of the time; they therefore will have trouble responding to compassion and support, and will tend to hear personal criticism in everyday comments. This state of being hyperalert serves to protect him from being wounded again, but until he learns how to accept help and support, it may be difficult for him to get beyond his pain.

If you can control your attention you can control your feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, which means you also have the ability to increase your own motivation, persistence, courage, curiosity, and even willpower. When you control your attention on purpose, you can accomplish anything humanly possible. As you go through the coming exercises, you will discover you are more powerful than you ever imagined.

Your ability to maintain attention is affected by normal cyclical fluctuations in the neurotransmitters that chemically regulate attention. These fluctuations occur in 90-minute cycles across 24 hours.² That means that every 90 to 120 minutes you begin to lose concentration, get sleepy, and need a break. Your slow brain waves increase and efforts to pay attention don’t work. In fact, glucose and blood pressure drop every 90 minutes. That’s why we usually take our coffee breaks at 10 a.m., 2 p.m., and 4 p.m.— those times dovetail with our biological needs.

But this natural biological cycle works to regenerate energy and attention if we allow it to occur without trying to short-circuit it with stimulants. Our energy is restored once our brain waves are back on track and appropriately balanced in the correct ratios with each other for specific activities. One way to make that happen is to take a little rest until your sleepiness disappears. Don’t use caffeinated coffee or worse, the energy drinks that have extremely high levels of caffeine to jolt you into staying with a task longer. You risk sabotaging the immune system that takes care of you, making you vulnerable to illness.

Unfortunately, we can’t all just follow our bodies’ rhythms and lie down when we get tired. So another way to boost your energy, believe it or not, is to breathe through one nostril at a time. Every 90 to 120 minutes, one of your nostrils has more air coming in and going out. Check it out now. Close your right nostril with your finger, pressing lightly on the outside of the nostril. Notice how much air flows in and out. Then close the left nostril. Which side has more air? If your right side is more open, the left hemisphere is more dominant; and if your left side is more open, the right side is more dominant. When you need new ideas or solutions to problems, lie down on the floor on your right side until the left nostril opens and watch new ideas come flooding in. The result is a balanced brain with equal blood flow to each hemisphere, which makes you feel rested.

Pay Attention to the Big Picture

Rachel was always worried about what people were thinking of her. In work meetings, social gatherings, and even on the phone, she paid close attention to how people responded, the tone of their voices when they spoke to her, and whether they smiled at her. She was convinced people didn’t like her much, and she ruminated about it all the time. It was exhausting. The thing is people did like Rachel. But she missed their smiles, their words and sounds of encouragement, their twinkling eyes, and supportive behaviors. Her attention had simply become too narrowly focused on what she perceived to be negative, which had led her to expect only negative interactions.

We always shift our focus from wide to narrow to diffuse and back again. Wide focus gets the bigger picture, like when you drive, and narrow focus picks up details like when you look at one part of a painting. Diffuse attention is more like noticing a mosaic.

Those who worry tend to narrowly focus on a problem, which raises their Beta frequency, which limits their ability to solve the problem and causes them to start ruminating. Narrow focus activates their fight/flight/freeze response and places them into emergency mode. Yet even after a problem has passed, they may still find themselves narrowly focusing on the “what ifs” as a means of protection. The result is that they never move to a state of regeneration, and this intensely focused tension spills over into sleep, recreation, and relationships.

In order to feel more comfortable around others, Rachel needed to learn how to develop flexible attention.

Use Flexible Attention

Having flexible attention means that you can shift from a narrow focus, where all you see is what’s in front of you, to a broader one. If you worry and ruminate like Rachel, you may have been unintentionally practicing problem-focused attention for a while instead of giving yourself a break. Only when Rachel finally stopped looking at individual people’s expressions for signs of acceptance, and started taking in the generally positive response she got when presenting to or navigating groups, did she learn to let her guard down and stop worrying so much about what kind of impression she was making.

Use Your Peripheral Vision

One common cause for worry and losing flexible attention is major change and uncomfortable situations, the more stressed you feel, the more narrow and inflexible your focus. We met Jodie as she was struggling to adapt to a new job, a new city, and a new relationship. To help her regain her balance and composure, we taught her to use her peripheral vision. It works like this:

Look straight ahead while noticing what is on either side of you. Now focus just straight ahead and let your attention become absorbed in one spot on the wall for a few seconds. Shift your attention and while looking straight ahead begin to notice your peripheral attention. While you are noticing the periphery try to have a worry thought. It is likely difficult. Why? You have just turned on a calmer state.

Mastering the flexibility to move your focus back and forth from narrow to wide is a skill you need every day. We have demands that need both the ability to focus on things that are going well, those that aren’t, and then to shift to the bigger picture to keep things in perspective. It’s like driving. People with a fear of driving on the highway get stuck because they’re focusing too much on how close they are to the side of the road or how close other cars are to them. They miss what’s straight ahead, what’s behind them, as well as any interesting sights. Overfocusing on everything close up makes our immediate surroundings look scary.

But you can achieve instant calm no matter where or what you are doing when you can shift from a narrow focus to a diffuse one—when you can see the big picture—merge with it, and feel safer, calmer, and more intentional in your day-to-day experience.

Change Your Language

When you worry and ruminate, you turn on the sympathetic nervous system, thus raising your arousal levels. The same thing happens when you feel excitement. That’s why the research of Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School is interesting for anyone trying to stop worrying. She found that when you stop trying to control your nervous energy, and instead allow it to flow through you and even call it something more positive, you have the ability to manage it better.³ It is normal to feel a surge of nervous excitement, for example, when speaking in front of a group of people. Rather than avoiding it or stifling the feeling, though, which makes it more pronounced, imagine a wave flowing through you. As you mentally step to the other side where you feel more comfortable, you will relax. Instead of stifling your nervousness, tell yourself, “I am excited,” or urge yourself to get excited. This strategy is not about trying to persuade yourself that things are easy when you know they’re not, but about changing your threat mindset to a challenge mindset.

Warm Up to Calm Down

Believe it or not, another way to calm your worry is to warm your hands. Did you know you can actually increase blood flow to your hands?

When you’re stressed, blood leaves the extremities and pools in the center of the body. That’s why you get cold hands when you’re scared or upset. By using your home thermometer as a feedback tool to measure your finger temperature instead of body temperature, you can learn to activate a relaxation response that changes your mental state from anxious and upset to calm, focused, and comfortable. In other words, by moving from Beta to Alpha.

Here’s what you do: Take your baseline finger temperature first by attaching your index finger to the end of a thermometer with a piece of tape. Wait about 30 seconds and write down your finger temperature.

Now begin to think about your hands warming. You may want to imagine being at the beach or standing in front of a fireplace. Or just imagine your blood flowing down the arm into the hand. You might sense a little vibration or tingling. Moving the blood from the center of your body to your extremities stimulates your Alpha, or relaxation frequency. If you take your finger temperature again, you’ll probably find that it has increased by one to two degrees or more. Any temperature in excess of 90 means you are really relaxed.

You may ask, why not just rub your hands together? Because warming your hands with this exercise shows you how powerful you are. And when you begin to understand the power of your mind, your self-confidence grows in other areas. If you can do this, what else can you accomplish?

The process of warming your hands also slows your breathing. This is good to know because often we’re told that if we just breathe more slowly or deeper we can calm ourselves, but many times it is easier to raise the temperature in our hands than it is to change our breathing. This exercise is a nice preliminary to our next tool for eliminating worry: bilateral stimulation.

Bilateral Stimulation, or Walk for a Change

Use this next exercise when you feel really worried. Normally our mind resolves our negative emotions—worry, sadness, guilt— while we sleep. REM (rapid eye movement) action tends to reprocess our negative experience and place it in long-term memory, where it doesn’t hurt as much to think about. Interestingly, this innate healing process that occurs for most of us in sleep can also occur through any bilateral movement you engage in, such as walking or hand tapping.⁴ When you walk with your focus on the scenery and your rhythmic pace, and let yourself enter a meditative state, your brain produces Alpha. These brain waves are what stimulate interesting thoughts and ideas to pop into your head. You may enter a natural relaxed trance state where time slows, and you are less aware of the list of “must do items” you’ve made for the day. It is a simple but powerful tool that disrupts and diffuses anxiety by stimulating blood flow and electrical activity on both sides of the brain. That’s why so many people feel better after exercising and why doctors recommend walking to lower stress.

Walking is particularly healing. It stimulates hemispheric balance by equalizing blood flow in both sides of the brain. When you are upset, the left hemisphere where rational processing occurs slams shut. The bilateral stimulation of walking, however, unlocks the right side of the brain and allows us to process our emotions. When you walk for 10 to 20 minutes and shift your attention away from a problem at the same time, your worry usually disappears, your anger floats away, and you can put yourself in a calm state. Who wouldn’t want that? And it’s free!⁵

Instead of walking, sit and move your eyes back and forth. The actual side-to-side eye movement replicates REM action. You can use a ball that you toss from hand to hand while you track the movement from side to side, and you can quickly calm your nervous system. Your problems don’t go away, but your intense feelings about them do, which puts you in a better frame of mind to solve it or decide it isn’t a problem after all.

Any repetitive bilateral movement like patting your knees one at a time or drumming can have the same effect. Some of our clients have even tapped their hands alternately on the steering wheel while driving. Be sure to keep hold of the steering wheel while you do this exercise. When sitting down, you could even just take two fingers and move them back and forth at eye level.⁶

Strike a Pose

When you shift your posture or stand in a confident way, you shift your mental state. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy discovered that when you change your physiology and stand in the “power pose” (imagine Wonder Woman with her hands on her hips), you activate feelings of confidence and certainty.⁷ This pose is a great thing to do right before a talk or performance of any kind, including at work. When you stand up straight and take up more space, your personal power increases. Physiologically, the body begins to produce more testosterone and less cortisol. This chemical shift makes you feel less vulnerable and more powerful. But you can accomplish the same thing just by imagining yourself as Wonder Woman or your own favorite superhero, because imagining ourselves to be strong and powerful can actually make us more strong and powerful. Why? Because it shifts our brain waves from Beta to Alpha.

This does not mean you should go to your next meeting dressed in Spandex and a red cape. What it does mean is that if you train your brain to put itself in a superhero mindset, your mood, emotions, and even your body will reflect some of that superhero’s confidence and strengths. By engaging in certain imaginary activities, you activate certain thought and neural patterns, and over time those thought patterns become second nature.

If none of these five exercises help you shake off your chronic worry, you may need to see a specialist. A combination of psychotherapy and neurofeedback can help you learn to relax and resolve issues that you may not even be aware of yet that perpetuate your worry. If you have difficulty relaxing, biofeedback can teach you this important skill.

In Summary

You can change mental states in a variety of ways. You can change your:

1. Physiology: When you shift your posture or stand in a confident way, you shift your mental state.

2. Language: By changing the words you use. Instead of, “I can’t learn to play the piano,” try changing it to “I choose not to learn to play the piano.” Instead of “I can’t stop myself from overeating,” you could say, “I always choose what to put in my mouth.”

3. Level of Arousal: If you are anxious and make impulsive decisions, focus on changing your internal worry state by calming the mind. If you are slow to get off the couch, set up a reward for going to the gym (this can’t be donuts).

4. Mental Imagery: Imagine yourself in the mental state you want to experience. Remember a time you felt that way yourself and go over the details.

Power Thought: You have more control over your thoughts and emotions than you ever imagined.

Now you have discovered tools that put you into a more balanced state. By doing these exercises, you demonstrate just how much control you have over your physiology. Changing your physiology allows you to manage your thoughts, mental states, and behaviors. In the next chapter we will discuss how you can use a brain change tool called Mind Wandering to launch your mind into Alpha, thus accessing the most creative ideas and solutions you can imagine.