INTRODUCTION
What’s That Noise?
Is that bathroom faucet dripping again? Are you sure those documents will get to your client before noon? Does it seem like your mom’s health is going downhill lately? Can you afford any of those colleges your daughter is applying to? What’s up with that “check engine” light on your dashboard? Why doesn’t your spouse understand that—wait. Did you remember to sign those documents before they went to your client?
At 3:30 a.m., the hamster wheel in your head is going 90 mph. At 4:30 a.m., you tell yourself, “I could still get two hours of sleep.” At 5:30 a.m., you’re still hoping for a catnap. At 6:30 a.m., your alarm clock jolts you awake to face another exhausting day. Multiple stout coffees power you through nine hours at the office. At home, a glass of wine helps you unwind for the evening. After a few hours of fitful sleep, though, your thoughts are spinning, and you’re staring at the clock. Again.
What if You Could Flip a Switch and Reverse That Seemingly Unstoppable Cycle?
The day-to-day demands of work and family will always be there; the fear, uncertainty, and stress, however, is a choice you make— or unmake. How would it change your life, health, and relationships if you replaced your fatigue, self-doubt, and constant worry with energy, confidence, and calm? If you’ve been wondering why the negatives in your life seem to overwhelm the good things, or why your mind won’t turn off that incessant worrying, it’s time to take control.
With our easy-to-implement tools and exercises, you can:
• Shatter the illusions that keep you in a constant state of worry.
• Meet everyday challenges with clarity and confidence.
• Free your mind for the larger, more joyful task of being fully, gladly alive.
We’ll help you think outside the rules and boundaries you’ve set for yourself—consciously and unconsciously—and upgrade your beliefs and habits to break the cycle of worry that’s been wearing you down.
Discover a Calmer, Happier Version of Yourself
How do you go from worry and rumination to a calm and peaceful mind? Tim Ferris, New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, said, “You don’t have to be Superman to get Superman results; you just need a better toolkit.” We’ve got that toolkit right here, filled with transformative tools and practices that are exploding people’s expectations of what is possible. Groundbreaking research in neuroplasticity, epigenetics, and quantum physics has revealed that you don’t have to be a victim of genes, circumstances, or your mind. The construction of your physical and emotional reality depends on where you choose to place your attention. If your mind focuses on the negative, your reality will look pretty negative, too, which can cause you to live in a constant state of worry. But now the ability to heal your negative thinking, enjoy the present, manage your mind, and change the harmful habits, perceptions, and behaviors that fuel your worry is at your fingertips.
In The Worry-Free Mind, we’ll teach you how to quickly calm yourself whenever worry or fear threatens to overwhelm you, and how to set up your environment to support the change you desire. Through easy, approachable applications of the latest neuroscience, we’ll enable you to tangibly, quantifiably retool the way your brain works so you can break free from damaging patterns and wake up to a happier, healthier, more vibrant life.
How We Know It Works
Together, we have more than 60 years of experience helping people just like you calm their fears, ease their worry, and take steps to create a better future. The Worry-Free Mind is for anyone who finds that incessant worry is ruining his or her quality of life. By identifying the main factor in the brain change process and developing ways to harness the dynamic and healing capabilities of the mind, we’ve been able to help thousands of patients overcome difficult circumstances and devastating life shocks, as well as cope with the ordinary day-to-day troubles that can wear a person down. We expect you’ll be as surprised and delighted as they were to discover that it’s possible—and not even that complicated—to rewire your mind and transform your life.
The primary goal of this book is to help you build a resilient inner life that can manage the life shocks—those sudden unpleasant jolts that come out of the blue and knock you off your path toward your goals and slow your progress toward becoming the person you want to be. We take you through eight powerful brain change tools based in research from neuroscience, biofeedback, clinical hypnosis, and the best psychotherapeutic approaches that we have successfully used to get results.
In our work as clinicians we know what works to help not only calm the worrying mind but develop the mental muscle you need to cope with simple and extraordinary life challenges. We will show you how to move from merely getting over worry to living in states of joy, happiness, deep connection, and emotional growth.
What’s Inside This Book?
The Worry-Free Mind is divided into four parts.
PART I: Place Your Worry Mind on Hold offers an overview of why we worry and briefly explains the neuroscience behind how our brain is wired to protect us. When you learn how your brain operates, you’ll be able to use its amazing resources to find the calm, creative center inside that promotes your best possible life and steels you against life shocks.
Chapter 1: Why We Worry begins with a crash course in Worry 101 and introduces the brain-science fundamentals you need to know to understand how and why the tools we give you throughout this book will help you develop and maintain a worry-free state of mind. It also shows you how to interrupt your most worrying mental movies by changing how you pay attention and what you pay attention to.
Chapter 2: Calm Your Fears to Work Through Tough Times explains how to manage the different brain wave frequencies that cause our various mental states—including the ones that make us worry.
Chapter 3: Zone Out to Make Big Decisions explains how you can work to solve problems by encouraging your unconscious mind to provide you with multiple solutions.
Part II: The Brain’s Super Powers builds on the strategies that interrupt worry and moves toward teaching you how to change the pattern of your brain’s activity through a process by which mental states link to certain thoughts and feelings. Just as a song combines certain patterns of musical notes, thoughts and emotions are created by a certain pattern of neuronal activity. Just as if you change the patterns of notes, you’ll have a different song, if you change your mental associations, you will behave differently and recondition the beliefs you hold about yourself that cause you to worry. When you worry your brain fires in a certain sequence; when you change the firing pattern significantly enough, it makes it more difficult to fall back into worry because the brain perceives a different and more successful reality.
Chapter 4: Deep State Dive to Dissolve Worry and Rumination discusses a powerful way to create new associations to old habitual patterns through the process called neuro-association. Instead of changing your thoughts—an arduous process—or endlessly processing your feelings, you will learn to associate a problem to a specific challenge, a perceptual shift that will open new possibilities. By teaching you to take yourself to the edge of sleep, this brain-change tool will help you automatically access new, healthier thoughts that can have an amazing transformative effect.
Chapter 5: Future Think to Regain Your Optimism continues to build your brain’s worry-diminishing neuro-associations “muscle,” introducing positive future-thinking and explaining how to align the three pillars in your architecture of beliefs to create the future you desire.
Part III: Train Your State is all about training yourself to access the emotional states you want to experience more often. With intentional and easy practice you’ll learn to replace fear with curiosity and develop a nonreactive mind. This neurorepatterning practice will free you from the emotional baggage of your past and lead you to live a new life in the present.
Chapter 6: Change Your Emotional Channels identifies seven emotional circuits that you can learn to turn on and off at will so you can overcome old emotional conditioning. Through simply practicing the emotional states you desire, you can recondition the mind to avoid allowing your negative emotions to determine your behavior.
Chapter 7: Neuro-Wellness Rituals to Break Through Crises explores the existential crises most of us experience at some point in our lives that may often stimulate the apex of worry. These practices help you quiet the chaotic worry-chatter so you can connect to your desires and dreams and take steps toward making them come true.
Part IV: Ignite Your Life helps you move far beyond the worry mind and gives you the steps to build the Whole Brain State: a mind that is positive, clear, non-reactive, and frequently in flow.
Chapter 8: Banish Worry for Good With That Whole Brain State takes you beyond interrupting and repatterning worry so you can inoculate yourself from worry in the first place. This balanced state, achieved by focusing on the space around the physical objects near you—literally what’s not there—eliminates any story the mind might create that leads to worry.
Chapter 9: Flow Into SuperMind takes you past the inoculation process into your SuperMind of Flow States, giving you step-by-step directions for using the advanced tools we teach in our workshops. You’ll take your mind to the next level where worry has subsided and life is more joyful and optimistic.
In The Worry-Free Mind, we not only give you easy and practical tools that really work, we share stories of real people we’ve treated who overcame their worries to live the life they desired. The stories have more than one purpose. At one level they are reminders that our problems and worries are rarely unique, and reassurance that they can be resolved. At a deeper level, the stories can tap into your own creative unconscious source of solutions and wisdom. They may lead you to recognize positive aspects in yourself, help you identify your untapped potential, build your self-assurance, and stimulate your imagination to take action in your life. We have seen many people make extraordinary changes in their lives by using the strategies and brain-change tools in this book. Our hope is that you will try them, too. We are sure you will find that you are stronger than you realize, that you have greater abilities than you thought, and that your mind is far more powerful than you know. Don’t worry, we’ll show you how.