CHAPTER 4

Deep State Dive to Dissolve Worry and Rumination

We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it.

—John Newton

Evelyn was late to work. Again. She couldn’t explain it. Every day she set her alarm with plenty of time to get dressed, eat breakfast, and drive the 5 miles to her job located in a bland corporate office park in the Woodlands, just north of Houston. And every day, she was at least 30 minutes late, even when she set her alarm a half hour earlier. This time, though, the minute she slid behind her desk and started up her computer, a chat box popped up on the bottom of her screen. It was from her boss, Mark, and its brevity was ominous: Please come to my office.

The meeting with Mark was almost as brief. Evelyn was informed that she was on probation for 30 days. If she couldn’t be on time every day for that month, she would be fired. As Evelyn trudged back to her desk, she had no doubt her boss hoped she would fail. She was sure he and her colleagues would like nothing more than to be rid of her. What a shame, she thought sarcastically. They had to go through all the paperwork and documentation before they could kick her to the curb, unlike her ex-boyfriend who had simply texted her the day after Valentine’s Day to say, “I can’t do this anymore. Sorry.” She opened up her desk drawer and pulled out a jumbo-sized box of Junior Mints, popping a large handful into her mouth. What was another pound when she’d already put on 20 in the last six months? She chewed hard, hoping that the intense cold sweetness and exaggerated motion of her jaws would help keep her from crying where everyone could see.

Evelyn came to see us for the first time shortly after getting her boss’s ultimatum. We asked her to walk us through her morning ritual to help us figure out what was slowing her down before she could get out the door. We noticed that she interspersed her description of her actions—getting out of bed, taking a shower, picking out her clothes—with a number of negative asides about her job, calling it everything from “stupid” to “dumb” to “pointless.” It didn’t take much prodding to get her to admit that she was utterly unfulfilled by her work but was afraid to leave because she didn’t think her boss would give her a good recommendation. “Because of your tardiness?” we asked. No, that was the least of it. Her relationship with her boss and most of her colleagues had been strained long before she started having trouble making it to work on time. She held a lot of responsibility, but they apparently didn’t like the fact that she didn’t just smile and shrug her shoulders when they refused her repeated requests for more help. To prepare herself better for the challenges of her day, every morning she would mentally check off every troublesome task and project she knew she would face and try to figure out how she was going to handle it. Her worry that she was going to fail meant that by the time she got to the office, her tension was so high she had started craving the cigarettes she’d quit a decade earlier. After her breakup, her negative thoughts about work were compounded by her grief as she indulged in vengeful thoughts against her ex-boyfriend. She often vacillated between feeling tired and numb or combative and angry, but found that sinking her teeth into a soft, oversized coffee chocolate-chip muffin from the office cafeteria often calmed her nerves. Come to think of it, she craved carbs all the time lately. She knew that medicating her feelings with baked goods and fast food was what had caused her rapid weight gain, but eating felt like the only pleasure she had left. She was disgusted with herself.

Visiting us was not the first time Evelyn had made an effort to turn her life around. She had read self-help books and tried to change her negative thinking patterns, she had explored her past in therapy, she had started taking yoga at the local gym. But still she constantly felt like the little old lady in the long-running Discount Tire Company television commercial, ready to hurl a tire through a plate glass window. “It is what it is,” she often said in morose tone.

A little worry can be helpful, lighting a fire under us to motivate us to start on a task. But too much hijacks our brains. It was obvious to us that Evelyn was in limbic-system overdrive. Her morning ritual of trying to get a grip on her day and problem-solve ahead of time was keeping her stuck in a flight-fight-freeze mode and training her mind to stay in a permanently worried state, which was raising her arousal levels and causing her to snap at her boss and coworkers, as well as seek out the soothing comfort of fat, sugar, and salt. She desperately needed to reset her neural circuits.

Evelyn had good reason to be unhappy, but she—not the job, not the boss, and not the boyfriend—was responsible for putting herself into such a negative state of mind. The good news was that this meant she was wholly capable of getting herself out of it. To do so, she had to begin identifying what she was doing to heighten her worry to such extreme levels. We identified three different culprits: a stress mindset, a stress generator, and stress overload. Let’s look at these in greater detail.

Stress Mindset

A study published by Yale psychologist Alia Crum found that a stress mindset—the mental “frame” or “lens” that you use when you approach and understand an experience—makes all the difference in whether you worry or you don’t.¹ If you have a negative stress mindset, you believe that stress saps your energy and inhibits your ability to grow, and that therefore you should avoid stress at all costs. If your stress mindset is positive, however, you feel that it makes you healthier and enhances both your performance and productivity.

Crum and her colleagues found that people with a positive stress mindset were better able to handle stress. They were more likely to ask for feedback on their performance, whether at work or in other contexts, and absorb it in a constructive way.

Unfortunately, Evelyn suffered from a negative stress mindset. And there was more.

Stress Generator

According to the “stress generator” hypothesis, people play an active role in creating their own stressful life events by virtue of the way they handle their everyday situations. In other words, a negative approach to life generates more stress, and a positive approach generates less. Someone who generates stress for themselves might have an “Eeyore Syndrome.” Eeyore is the sad donkey in Winnie the Pooh. On a sunny day, he might say, “I’ll probably get burned”; on a rainy day, he’d grumble, “My lunch will get soggy.” Evelyn was getting close to developing a full-blown Eeyore Syndrome. She didn’t know how to hold on to the enjoyable experiences she had. Even when pleasant things happened to her, it was difficult for her to appreciate them. She could only notice what was wrong and imagine everything that might go wrong in the future. Her boss’s and colleagues’ negative reactions to her chronic tardiness and hostile attitude reinforced her negative outlook. “They don’t understand me,” she thought. “I’ll probably get burned.”

There are three consequences to allowing your feelings of stress to dominate your interactions with others. First, it can cause you to overlook the support they offer you. When people feel unacknowledged when they try to support you, they eventually become tired and pull away. Second, when you can’t acknowledge other people’s support, your emotional batteries lose energy and you may withdraw. Third, all the worry that stems from stress can cause a secondary depression, which can lead you to develop avoidance strategies. We suspected all three consequences were derailing Evelyn’s life. Were her boss and coworkers really that critical, or was everyone caught in a feedback loop of action and reaction? Even a little pessimism will increase the negativity in yourself and those around you. Negativity eventually triggers anger, which interferes with your ability to make great decisions. After a while, you may not even recognize that you feel anger: It just becomes your normal default state, as natural as breathing.

Stress Overload

If you live in daily stress and finally plunge over your stress threshold, you dramatically reduce your prefrontal cognitive abilities. Worse yet, prolonged stress changes the structure of this part of the brain. Because the prefrontal cortex regulates our thoughts, behaviors, and feelings through neural connections with other brain areas, it also helps us correct our perceptions and decisions when needed. If those neural connections begin to wither due to stress overload, these important corrective functions are compromised, leaving us incapable of changing our minds or recalibrating our feelings once a situation changes or we gather more information. Stress overload combined with an inability to hold positive feelings leads to personal and social handicaps that can prevent us from having a successful life.

But you can rewire your brain and learn how to avoid reactive responses by spending more time in what’s called the liminal state. Liminal means “the space between,” or the transition between one place, one state, or one thing and another. When the sun begins to set, you are in a liminal space watching the transition from day to night. When friends leave after a wonderful visit, their departure signals the transition between social engagement and being alone again. A little sadness accompanies the transition, and you must make a slight mental adjustment. When it comes to your brain, the liminal state is the transitional level between waking consciousness and sleep.

You’ll recall from Chapter 1 that we generate Theta brain waves when we’re drowsy and on the edge of falling asleep or waking up. In fact, the liminal state is just another term for the Theta state. This state is different than the one you’re in when you’re taking a nap. Though naps are regenerative and important, as is rest in general, the Theta state is a special and distinctive state from sleep. Theta triggers an endogenous relaxation healing process that may act as therapy for the limbic system, and it begins the process of associating new and more positive perceptions to events we call neuro-association. And Evelyn’s limbic system sorely needed a break.

Neuro-association is based on the idea that we represent our experiences through images, feelings, smells, sounds, or a combination of these elements. This process can be useful and problematic. If the representations cause us pain, we can re-associate them by eliminating the emotional charge that may have been attached at the time we had the experience. For example, if your father was harsh and yelled at you, you may hear your partner “yelling” when he or she isn’t even increasing the volume in speaking to you. In this case, the ability to distinguish the partner from the father is important in eliminating the reaction. Another more positive example is to picture these word images: waves, moon, sand, ocean, water. Now think of a laundry detergent. You may have come up with the names Tide or Surf laundry detergents and felt a sense of comfort if this brand is what you use. Your brain makes associations to the words.

The link between images or thoughts and emotions can unconsciously influence your behavior. These connections can make a difference in how much money you make, what kind of diet you eat, and what possibilities you believe in for your life.

For decades, researchers have known that putting people into a state of deep relaxation can help eliminate all kinds of problems related to worry such as weight, anxiety, depression, and physical pain. The deep state tends to de-charge the links to problems, and in profound relaxation, your mind moves into solutions you haven’t thought about. You can achieve all of these positive changes without psychotherapy or biofeedback when you know how to practice what we call the deep state dive, which is basically holding yourself for long periods of time in the liminal state so that Theta can work its healing magic.

Why Theta Heals

Long lampooned as loopy accessories for the New Age crowd, flotation tanks, also known as isolation tanks, have actually long worked as excellent scientific testing grounds into the effects of restricted environmental stimulation (REST) and what happens when people gain access to their unconscious mind. Scientists in the 1980s wanted to know why people floating in a soundproof, skin-temperature bath of Epsom salt water, often while listening to piped-in meditation music, experienced dramatically improved psychological and physical wellness. In record time, people reported losing weight, decreased rheumatoid arthritis pain, vanishing worry, and increased happiness. Best of all, these startling changes lingered long after the flotation experience was over.

Why would immersing oneself in a flotation tank work more quickly than other therapy approaches? Relaxing in the flotation tank puts people in a Theta state. Remember: When you start to relax or go to sleep at night, your brain begins to produce more Alpha waves. As you deeply relax, your neural processes move into Theta and then later Delta for deeper sleep. These states of sleep are important to regenerate the brain, mind, and body. While in these states, the brain releases endocannabinoids that facilitate a “cleansing” and healing process. One of the main endocannabinoids released in the Theta state is anandamide, whose name derives from the Sanskrit word for “bliss.” Anandamide diminishes stress and physical pain and produces wonderful feelings of well-being. In fact, anandamide has the same chemical structure as marijuana. Yes, that’s right, your brain can get you stoned using its very own natural marijuana-like neurotransmitter. In the liminal state—Theta, in between the initial relaxation of Alpha and the deep sleep of Delta—through a process we don’t quite understand yet, our brain’s natural relaxation chemicals create such deep relaxation that the mind enters a profound quiet space. And in that quiet space, we often see dream images without being asleep. These are called hypnogogic imagery, and they tend to be vivid and transient. It is here when Theta is more dominant than the other brain-wave frequencies, and where healing can begin: “Deep relaxation places humans within a ‘target zone’ for the endogenous release of any of the family of neuropeptides of relaxation. The target zone is a state of Theta, sometimes referred to as a state of hypnogogic reverie, and it is the bull’s-eye of the deep healing process.”² When you access and stay in this state for 10 to 20 minutes—otherwise known as a deep state dive—the dream images that emerge can help point you to solutions to problems that plague your waking state. In fact, anandamide helps create more neural connections and uploads a huge increase in creativity, often by 700 percent.³

How Theta Heals Worry

The neuro-association process that occurs by hovering in Theta for a while allows you to automatically let go of worry, and to release mental baggage, those troubling thoughts, memories, and ruminations that have frozen your mind in the past. In Theta, fear dissipates, a problem transforms into a doable challenge, and it gives you the ability to tolerate life’s trials more easily. It is where you find intuition, creative ideas, perceptions, insights, and deep awareness. Within Theta you find a deep pool of self-compassion and a calm, quiet center that “knows” everything will be all right, no matter the difficulty. Even if you have great worries much of the time, deep down beneath the worry resides that still space. You can find it when you access your deepest relaxed state.

A deep dive in the Theta state can help you begin to realize that a fixed reality is illusory. What does that mean? It means that no matter how convinced you are the world works a certain way, or that life is on a fixed path, change is always possible. In fact, your perception shifts to see new possibilities that you have not noticed before. When you’re in that still, internal space, Theta provides guidance from the deepest level of your mind about which fork in the road to take, and how to move into the future you would like to experience.

Theta can help you access clarity in thinking. Without the overlay of worry, your ability to think outside the box you created expands. It’s incredibly useful for when you’re faced with a seemingly impossible goal. With broader and flexible thinking, you can tackle that goal even if you’re not sure how you’re going to get there. You’ll also find it’s hard to worry when you’re approaching problems creatively; you’re more likely to replace that worry with a sense of curiosity. Applying a new twist or perspective jolts lateral thinkers out of their habitual frame of reference and triggers novel solutions. For example, a choir wanted to fund a trip to sing in Europe. Although they had put on events before to raise money, including bake sales, they were rarely able to attract people outside of their own music circles to participate. Someone in the choir council who had tried several deep dive sessions for another unrelated problem started to think outside the box and came up with the idea to construct edible gingerbread houses that looked like old European castles. This novel idea enticed more people than ever before to purchase the desserts for the holidays, and the choir sold enough to pay for the trip.

Theta has also been shown to cure addictions. Drinking excessively, for example, is really a symptom of underlying stress or conflict, which causes worry. Worry hurts, and some people turn to alcohol, food, or other substances to medicate their pain. Addicts are seeking comfort; they use these substances to change their psychophysiological state. Unfortunately, the addictive cycle is extremely difficult to break. But not too long ago, Eugene Peniston, a psychologist from a Veterans Administration hospital in Colorado, decided to test a question: If Theta provides comfort to the brain, could it also provide comfort for chronic alcoholics?⁴

The statistics were grim: The relapse rate for alcohol and drug abuse programs was 80 percent after one year. In other words, a rehab program was considered a success if a mere 20 percent of patients who completed it were still sober after a year. Those alarming statistics reflect the power that chemical addiction has in making significant alterations in the brain and how the chemicals take away an individual’s ability to provide self-comfort.

For his study, Peniston created two groups out of a selection of individuals who had been hospitalized for alcohol addiction. One group received only the hospital program; the other group received deep state dive training in addition to the hospital program.

Those alcoholics receiving deep state dive training were asked to do three things two times per day for 30 days: visualize themselves rejecting alcohol; use autogenic exercises, relaxation, and imagery techniques; and training in how to raise the temperature in their hands to trigger their relaxation (see Chapter 1 for instructions on raising temperature without biofeedback). Before the deep state dive experience, the men practiced warming their hands, and warming different areas in the body. During the deep state dive, the men visualized themselves rejecting the alcohol. Finally, the men trained on biofeedback machines to raise and condition their alpha and theta frequencies so their brains could restore the ability to provide self-comfort. Often, when people drink excessively or use drugs, their Alpha disappears and Beta rises, which makes them become anxious. Their normal reaction to this problem is to increase their alcohol intake, at which point the brain just gives up producing its own Alpha. By dipping down into Theta two times a day, the patients’ brains normalized their ability to provide their own deep comfort—without the aid of outside substances.

Eighty percent of the men who received the deep state dive treatment remained sober five years after the study. Those who only received the hospital program had returned to drinking within a 36-month follow-up. Peniston literally turned the relapse numbers on their head. This study was replicated in Houston in XS2005, measuring a larger number of people with poly addictions, and revealed similar results.⁵

This kind of treatment for alcohol and drug abuse is best done in a hospital with neurofeedback as part of the treatment, but the studies demonstrated the remarkable healing power of Theta on the brain, mind, and body.

Re-Programming With Theta

Our families, culture, and personal experiences shape us. We develop certain frames of references that affect our understanding of and judgments about the world, ourselves, and other people. Many of these judgments limit our functioning and our level of happiness; chronic worriers have allowed them to become a negative part of their internal programming that underscores their life experiences and directs their personal rules for living.

What are your frames of reference? Are they dominated by worry? Take a few moments and answer the following questions:

1. Do you spend a great deal of time thinking about certain areas of your life such as your finances, health, job security, children, family relationships? If so, how much?

2. Does this thinking intrude on other activities and keep you from enjoying yourself?

3. Do you find yourself trying to distract yourself from these thoughts and do the distractions affect your life negatively?

4. Do these thoughts lead you to take specific action to solve the problems or do you spin around the questions?

If you answered “yes” to two or more of these questions, you’re stuck in a worry spin cycle and you need to get out.

The answers may be related to a long-standing structure of beliefs that you created years ago when you were a child. We’ll explore your architecture of beliefs, and how they play a role in fostering experiences that can make you feel like a victim, in the next chapter. For now, begin to notice how you use these worry filters daily. For example, do you often worry that others don’t value you or don’t want to be with you? Do you feel self-conscious when you walk into a room of people and have trouble starting conversations? These are the sorts of difficulties that stem from high Beta worry and can have long-term consequences, for example by making you feel like you can never belong to a group.

When you experience more time in Theta and reduce high Beta, you have better access to motivation, creativity, self-control, and better sleep. Continued exposure to a deep state dive in Theta leads to less of the self-criticism, guilt, and shame we often carry over with us from our childhood. When you accomplish the deep dive state four times a week for five to 10 weeks, worry dissolves. The effects are cumulative and the feeling of relaxation lasts long after you complete the exercise. In fact, this amazing state of mind helps you think outside of the rules you have created for yourself to live by. Some are necessary, but some might be dysfunctional. Shake those up, and you can create a breakthrough to the success you deserve in life.

How to Practice Deep State Dive

You will want to follow the script below four days a week and spend 20 minutes at a time in the deepest state. When you find you only worry once in a while, you can continue using the exercise once per week to reinforce its effects.

Notice when you experience your “favorite” worry thoughts and when they occur. As you begin the deep dive experiences, keep track of how worry diminishes over time. Most people like to read the script aloud into a digital recorder or their phone so they can play it back and relax into the deepest mental space possible without having to read instructions. As you follow the exercise and script, you’ll notice your mind becoming tranquil and your body following by relaxing deeply. You’ll likely see images behind your closed eyes or hear sounds. Try to pay attention to how those images might symbolize a solution that will ease your worry, or what the sounds might be trying to tell you. Your mind will be trying to give you guidance.

The Autogenic Exercises

1. My head and face become relaxed and warm.

2. My tongue relaxes and floats in my mouth.

3. My right arm is heavy and warm.

4. My left arm is heavy and warm.

5. My heartbeat is slowing as I relax more and more.

6. My stomach is relaxed and warm.

7. My back is relaxed and warm.

8. My right leg is heavy and warm.

9. My left leg is heavy and warm.

10. My right calf is heavy and warm.

11. My left calf is heavy and warm.

12. My right foot is heavy and warm.

13. My left foot is heavy and warm.

14. I am now completely and deeply relaxed.

Now complete the next phase. Read the script once all the way through before beginning the exercise so you know where you are going. Once you begin recording, pause at least 15 to 30 seconds between each new set of instructions. They might sound unusual, but put your questions and doubts aside; the material is not meant to be cognitively processed, just experienced. So don’t think about it too much. Then play the recording back to yourself.

Deep Dive Script

You have to relax all the way to the edge of sleep in order for you to receive information and healing while in the Theta state. To enhance the effect, try doing this exercise near a source of running water. Nature sounds tend to calm the mind quickly, diminishing emotional charges and worry thoughts.

Begin:

1. Find a place to sit and relax without any distractions. Place your feet flat on the floor. Make sure your phone is off and the pets are in another room. If you don’t, they will be attracted to the meditative state you produce and want to sit on you, and though it is very sweet of them, a wet tongue on your face can disturb your deep state. Ask your mind for an answer to a question or for information to guide you on a particular problem that worries you before you begin the relaxation process. Once you ask your mind a question, it will go on an internal search to find the best solution for you. Once you’re in a deeply relaxed state, let it go out of your conscious mind.

[Pause 15 to 30 seconds.]

2. Imagine your worry thoughts are like steam rising on a lake in the early morning when the weather is cool. Your worry thoughts move up and out and disappear.

[Pause 15 to 30 seconds.]

3. Adjust your body so you are extremely comfortable. Take a couple of nice deep breaths and begin to allow the sense of comfort it gives you to flow over and through the body. As you sit in your quiet place, just allow the natural calming sensation of the flow of your breath to move from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet.

[Pause 15 to 30 seconds.]

4. Now, slowly, begin to count yourself down from 10 to 1. As each number becomes smaller, feel your relaxation deepening.

10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . . 6 . . . 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 [Pause 15 to 30 seconds.]

5. Allow yourself to relax even more so you can begin entering a deeper state of mind. Your unconscious is the deepest part of you and a storehouse of everything you learned throughout life. It has amazing abilities to access the most positive resources from within.

[Pause 15 to 30 seconds.]

6. Place your attention on your breathing and imagine you are sinking down to a place where you are twice as relaxed, someplace beneath any sadness, anxiety, depression, or tension and concern. Imagine a blue pool of water. This is your personal pool of self-compassion. You can notice how blue the water is and perhaps you will want to dangle your feet. It’s fine if you jump all the way in to feel the soothing quality of the water where love and compassion flows around and into you.

[Pause 15 to 30 seconds.]

7. Now breathe more deeply so that you keep moving down to a place right above sleep. This is your inner sanctuary where remarkable changes can occur. It is a place of no thought, the deepest mental state possible, and a state of miraculous healing where your brain has the capacity to reset the mind and the body. Allow yourself to float in this space for five to 10 minutes without interruption. If you fall asleep momentarily, it just means you are tired, and gently wake yourself back to the edge of sleep.

As you float you may see dream images arise. If so, allow them to come in without feeling excited. Consider your unconscious mind your oracle, retrieving information and communicating wisdom and advice to you in the form of images, impressions, symbols, or sounds. Ask yourself, “What is my oracle trying to reveal to me?”

[Pause 15 to 30 seconds.]

8. After 10 minutes, begin to give yourself positive suggestions like “The deepest part of my mind knows that I can solve this problem. My mind is powerful and wise. I am more and more confident in my ability to accomplish my goals. Worry leaves my mind like evaporating steam and disappears into the air. A worry thought is a distraction from my best self, so I can let it go. It is a butterfly that for now flits in and out of my head, but I will see it less and less often.”

9. Now very gently begin to allow yourself to slowly come back to consciousness as you re-alert. Slowly begin to count up from 1 to 10—1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . 5 . . . 6 . . . 7 . . . 8 . . . 9 . . . 10. Gently return your waking attention back into the room. As you count, make an effort to feel your feet, your hands, and your back. Sit quietly for a few minutes. Notice the lighter feeling and sense the internal shift you have made. If your unconscious mind gave you some information, write it down to explore later. If you received interesting images, jot those down. Like any dreams, they will quickly disappear.

10. While you’re sitting quietly, consider any information you received in the deep state and how that may help you let go of worry. What other internal resource do you need that will guarantee you behave in the way that allows you to succeed? Is it more confidence, more calm, more knowledge or experience? Now think of someone who has these characteristics. When you are in a stressful situation without knowing exactly what to do, you could emulate the aspects you admire about a real person or a character in a movie or television show that you want for yourself. We had one client who chose Jethro Gibbs, a character on the TV series NCIS who seems to always know the right thing to do in a crisis. In doing so, you’ll engage the brain’s mirror neurons, those brain cells that respond equally whether you’re actually watching or merely imagining someone else perform an action, so you can replicate it. Asking, for example, “What would Gibbs do?” puts you in a resourceful mental state and gives you a moment to think about your reaction and behavior so you can make better choices. Practice imagining what your behavioral model would do in a difficult situation and try copying the mental state and behavior you think he or she would exhibit.

Evelyn Goes for a Dive

We were sure that a deep state dive would help Evelyn calm her mind for longer periods of time than any yoga session or relaxation strategy and get her worry under control.

We helped her descend down to the edge of sleep—the Theta state—and hover there for 20 minutes while going through the script you just read. After a couple of sessions, she began to notice the relaxation she experienced while diving stayed with her for several days, and that her threshold for stressful events increased so she wasn’t reacting either as quickly or as violently as before. After 10 sessions of doing the deep state process, she began to notice that her calm state remained with her through the entire week. To her surprise, she began to develop an awareness of her impulses, thoughts, and feelings before she acted on them. It was as though the space between the thought and the consequent action stretched into a moment of reflection that lasted long enough for her to determine whether the behavior would be in her best interest, such as speaking her mind to her boss or staying quiet. She was able to get enough distance to examine how she was interacting with her colleagues and boss and what part she might have played in alienating them as well as inviting her boss’s criticism. Once she was able to lower her reactivity and look at her situation at work with clarity, she could set the reactivity aside and consider whether there was another job she might find fulfilling. She began to reprioritize her activities, evaluate what really would be interesting work, and think about how she wanted to contribute to society. She realized that what really interested her was social justice, so she started making specific plans to change her job to one that would allow her to pursue that path. Interestingly, as soon as she made up her mind to start doing what needed to be done (registering for certification classes, perusing the real estate market in case she had to downsize to accommodate her lower salary), she noticed many opportunities coming her way. Her worry, rumination, and resentment dissipated, and she realized that she had all of the internal strength to make the changes she wanted.

Evelyn’s time in the deep state of Theta reorganized her thinking. By surrendering to a deep sense of comfort over and over, she was able to access a new sense of self. She found out how empowering it was to be compassionate with herself, and to be able to witness her judgments, worries, fears, and thoughts impartially. She told us they just floated up and out. An added benefit to her newfound awareness was that her taste buds became sensitive to the sugar and chemicals in fast food. As it started to taste bad, she began to lose weight and be attracted to healthier food choices.

She became aware that as a child she had adopted an internal belief that drove her worry and anxious behavior: Like her own mother, whom she frequently heard repeating this mantra, Evelyn often told herself, “I have to worry to make sure things turn out right.” Evelyn had watched her mother worry so much she began to believe that it was a necessary condition for solving problems. She thought constantly worrying would ensure she didn’t miss anything important and help her avert tragedy. Even though she had left her parents’ home long ago, the superstition had followed her and stalled her ability to shift from an agitated mental state to one that was calm and relaxed.

We suggested that Evelyn keep practicing the deep state work a couple of times a week and use the other tools of bilateral stimulation and Mind Wandering to help her calm down when she needed to and continue her personal growth. We also urged her to continue doing deep state work in Theta to gain more control over her thoughts and build immunity to stress.

Another Remarkable Transformation

Don, a middle-aged man, came into the office for help with his second marriage. He was concerned because his wife, Joyce, was communicating with an old boyfriend by email. She swore she had no intention of becoming emotionally involved with her ex, whom she had dated decades before and was also married and living in New Zealand. She had let Don read her emails, and he could see that they were infrequent and brief, and mostly just offered updates on work and family. Don couldn’t help feeling skeptical of Joyce’s efforts to reassure him; he was really worried he was going to lose her. He knew that he had been overly stressed and emotionally unavailable since enrolling in an MBA program that was taking most of his time, and he feared that even without realizing it, she was seeking companionship.

On top of everything, Don suffered from terrible stress headaches. The more he worried about school and his wife, the worse the headaches became.

We suggested Don might be able to deal with his life better if he could manage the pain and stress first. After 10 deep dive sessions of 20 minutes a session, his headaches disappeared, and his stress was much less intense. (It helps to spend a longer period of time in the deep state if you have headache problems.) Nothing had changed in Don’s environment. He was still in a high-pressured graduate program, and his wife was still infrequently interacting with this old friend, but his stress threshold had risen and his emotional reactions were stable.

After the tenth session, Bill asked Don how his marriage was going. Don happily replied that he and his wife had found their way back to each other. In the end, he had realized that his stress was causing him to overreact and the problem was really his own insecurity. As his habitual stress reactions disappeared, he had greater clarity and insight, and he was no longer mistaking a rock (the boyfriend) for a lion (a threat). He took up meditation. A few years later, Bill ran into Don. Don still was headache free, and he and his wife were closer than ever.

Power Thought: You can dissolve worry and find peace and comfort by resting in the deepest mental state before sleep for five to 10 minutes.

Now you have a better understanding of an ancient yet modern brain-change tool that melts worry. The next step is to look at the underlying ideas you carry around that promote worry. In Chapter

5 we will examine the architecture of your belief system, how it limits you, and how to use future-oriented visualizations and questions to guide your actions to create the best day and life possible.