There is evidence that some individuals are tempermentally prone to perceiving more negative threats when they are exposed to stress. Some become hyper-vigilant and sensitive and they catastrophise the level of threat they have to deal with. Others are just vulnerable individuals who are worn down by the many stressful and traumatic events they have to deal with.
But there’s good news that we can shout out from the rooftops. Irrespective of genetic or enviromental infleunces, family upbringing, or a history of negative experiences, every individual can learn to build the capacity to cope with adversity and stress. Everybody can train their brain to acquire a capacity for self righting and to keep going.
One clear message is that you don’t have to go it alone. Another message is that it is OK to wobble sometimes – everybody has weak moments. However, if your feel like you’re continously wobbling without experiencing any joy or fulfilment in your life then you need to seek help to learn new coping strategies.
Negative thoughts and feelings can get locked into your brain. Some of these can be self generated, others can be messages from parents or others in your life. They can be so powerful that you allow them to oppress you and undermine your self esteem. They can become a default part of your thinking process – being the first thoughts that come to mind when you are faced with adversity to threat.
Here are some steps for retraining your brain and freeing yourself from these negative thoughts:
Step 1: Challenge those thoughts.
You are a lawyer in your own court, facing your accuser – the negative you. With confidence, you are going to dispute the negative you. You are going to state that thoughts are opinions, not facts, and they don’t belong in your brain because they are not helping you. Such simple positive reasoning can be enough to shift your thinking. It may happen slowly, but repeated often enough it really can change your mindset.
Step 2: How do you measure success?
It is important to ask yourself how you measure success. So many of us experience sadness because we feel we don’t measure up or we don’t have the material possessions that others have, or we did not get that dream job or achieve the perfect life. So we resort to beating ourselves down, maybe feeling jealous and deprived. If success is regarded as a key goal in life regardless of what is done to achieve it, then when it doesn’t happen there can be adverse emotional consequences. It further entrenches negative self esteem and negative self belief. So rethinking what makes you feels successful and happy can be a life changer. That does not mean settling back or coasting through life without achieving your potential. It does mean appreciating even your small successes – and retraining your brain to value yourself. It has the benefit of calming your mind because you are not striving to the point of mental exhaustion. There is nothing worse than constantly focusing your mind on what you need to do to gain success and approval.
Step 3: Put those negative experiences behind you
You may feel angry or sad about something that was done to you. You may want other people to hear that awful story of your life or you may nurse it to yourself so that is hard to think about anything else to the point when you have closed yourself off to joy and happiness. It becomes your identity. who you are. A person who, perhaps, was mistreated, or who had a traumatic experience, who was not valued enough or who was just unlucky. Sharing this story can be helpful but then it is time to move us, to look forward, to find ways to heal yourself and open yourself out, creatively, intellectually and experientally. That is the nub of it. In your brain, you have taught it to be closed off, to be obsessed and all consumed by negtaive experiences unintentionally or subconscously. So part of your retraining of your brain is to place other positive thoughts in there. Distract your mind if you are feeling you are slipping back. You challenge the role of victim and state clearly that was then, this is who I am now.
Step 4: Helping others can help you
That means not thinking about yourself all the time. Helping others fires up resiliance and improves mood. It can help you feel good about yourself which is turn enables you to cope better with life because you are now a good person who thinks of others. How does your brain respond to kind actions? Being kind boosts serotonin and dopamine, which are neurotransmitters in the brain that give you feelings of satisfaction and well-being, and cause the pleasure/reward centers in your brain to light up. Endorphins, which are your body’s natural pain killer, also can be released. So instead of the stress shormone cortisol flooding through your mind and body, you have the happy hormones making you feel so much better in yourself.
Step 5: Take mental breaks
Mental breaks stoke up resilience and feeds the brain with lots of calming positive experiences. if you think of a plant that is never nourished, then that plant is going to wither or if you think of a piece of wood that is constantly being chipped away, that is what the brain feels when you are only thinking negatively and never relax. Nourishing your brain helps you to be a better person and cope more effectively with with stress. The bonus is that you build a wider social network. People you can laugh with and share stories, people who can normalise the kind of things you have experienced in life so you don,t feel you are special or differant from others. The Havard Medical School carried out a long term study with thousands of people and their main finding is that relationhips or connections is what guarantees happiness and well being.
So relaxation and mediatation is often the go to but if your mind is in a traumatised or emotional, it can difficult to truly relax into these activitiies so it is not for everyone. One of the consequences of the pandemic is that people are taking more, exercise, walking swimming, cycling and feeling the better of it. Yoga has also become very popular and can be quiet tranformative for many people. Just experiencing nature or green therapy also helps calm your mind and the real benefit is you are often not thinking, you are giving a mind a break. This pattern of behaviour becomes a habit and decreases obsessiveness and rumination.
Understanding the need for physical and creative breaks during periods of high stress helps to reduce negative impact of stress on the mind and body and your brain will thank you for it.
Susan Lindsay 