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March 23 - March 24, 2022
Anxiety, depression, burnout, frustration, angst, anger, grief, and so on are emotional and physical warning signals telling us we need to face and deal with something that’s happened or is happening in our life. This pain, which is very real, is a sign that there’s something wrong: you are in a state of disequilibrium. It’s not a sign of a defective brain. Your experience doesn’t need to be validated by a medical label. Mental health struggles are not your identity. They’re normal and need to be addressed, not suppressed, or things will get worse.
we all have to learn how to catch and alter our thoughts and reactions before they become toxic neural networks and habits.
although events and circumstances can’t be controlled, we can control our reactions to these events and circumstances. This is mind-management in action.
Whatever we plant in our minds and nourish with repetition and emotion will one day become a reality. EARL NIGHTINGALE
our minds are messed up, our lifestyles are messed up, and when our lifestyles are messed up, our mental and physical health suffer.
Mind-management is a skill that needs to be learned and constantly upgraded as we grow from childhood into adulthood. For every new experience we need a new set of mind-management tools.
When our thinking is toxic, it can mess up the stress response, which then starts working against us instead of for us. This, in turn, can make us more vulnerable to disease, which is why many researchers now believe that toxic stress is responsible for up to approximately 90 percent of illness, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Only 5–10 percent of disease is said to come from genetic factors alone.1
One thing is certain: if you don’t shape your life, it will be shaped for you. And to shape your life, you need to know how to shape your mind—you need mind-management.
Happy today doesn’t matter a whole lot. It’s hope for the future or lack thereof that’s really linked with premature mortality.”
Fear, isolation, pain, purposelessness, despair . . . these are the symptoms of a society that is broken and hurting, and they can lead to an early death not only from suicide but from very real damage to the heart, immune system, GI system, and brain—the entire body goes into states of low-grade inflammation that can increase our vulnerability to disease by up to 75–95 percent when we are in a constant state of turmoil.7
A new analysis of more than half a century of federal mortality data . . . found that the increased death rates among people between the ages of 25–64 extended to all racial and ethnic groups and to suburbs and cities—from suicides, alcohol, drug overdoses and lifestyle diseases—children are losing parents and the workforce is sicker.
A large part of the problem is that we’ve lost much of our ability to think deeply. We’ve forgotten the art of deep and focused mind-management. We want things fast, quick, now. We often don’t want to put in the hard work that leads to true change, or we’ve never been taught what this kind of work looks like.
Gathering information without processing and applying it is counter to how the mind works and how the brain is structured and has a deleterious effect on our mental and physical well-being, creating a mental mess in the mind and a physical mess in the body.
In conflict-affected countries, 1 in 5 people suffer from depression versus 1 in 14 worldwide, indicating that socioeconomic and political issues are important factors in mental health and need to be given far more attention that they currently receive.
And depression and anxiety are not labels but rather warning signals, telling us that something is going on. As we embrace the warning signals, we find the actual message behind the messenger.
However, it’s only through the process of embracing and interacting with our pain that we learn how to manage it and get to the other side.
What this essentially means is that although we can’t control the events and circumstances of life, we can learn to control our reactions, which help us deal with and manage the many challenges we face. This goes beyond mindfulness, positive psychology, and the self-help industry into sustainable life management.
Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain. SANTIAGO RAMÓN Y CAJAL
Everything we do begins with a thought. If we want to change anything in our lives, we first have to change our thinking, our mind. When we know how to change our mind, we rewire neural networks in the brain that create useful, sustainable, and automatized actions and attitudes—good habits that make us happier and healthier. We get from good advice to a good life with our mind—hence the term mind-management.
so obvious that we miss it because we’re looking for some elusive, complex key.
if our mind isn’t managed, everything downstream will be chaos—a mental mess produces a messy life.
It is estimated that one doctor in the United States commits suicide every day.1
The mind-in-action is how you uniquely think, feel, and choose.
This is a lifelong journey, a lifestyle, and one that’s well worth the effort. Just like cleaning your home, washing the car, bathing the dog, or brushing your teeth, a little bit of daily work goes a long way toward helping you feel clean, refreshed, and healthy.
Gather. Read, listen, and watch what you are thinking and how you are feeling.
Reflect. Ask, answer, discuss this with yourself.
Write. Journal and organize your thoughts. Put what you’re going through down in your journal or the notes section on your laptop or smartphone, whatever works for you.
Recheck. Reanalyze and examine what you have written down.
Active Reach. Apply what you have learned in some tangible way.
The bottom line is this: we cannot improve our lifestyle until we learn how to manage our thinking.
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. MARIE CURIE
Nearly eight hundred thousand people die by suicide in the world each year, which is roughly one death every forty seconds. Suicide is the second leading cause of death in the world for those ages fifteen to twenty-four. Unmanaged depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide.1
Empowerment Is a Missing Link to Cleaning Up the Mental Mess
Empowerment is that missing link that gets you from point A, hearing or reading good advice, to point B, actually applying it in a meaningful and sustainable way.
TABLE 1. The Five Wave Frequencies in the Brain Delta (0–4hz) Deep nREM sleep, repair, complex problem-solving. High amplitudes of delta are also found in people who are in touch with the nonlocal spiritual mind even when they’re wide awake, such as the brains of meditators, intuitives, and healers. Theta (4–8hz) Creativity, insight, healing, light sleep, vivid dreams (REM sleep). The dominant frequency in healing, high creative states, remembering emotional experiences (good and bad), memory retrieval, and encoding. Theta frequency activity is increased, especially at frontal sites, during
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TABLE 2. Brain Structures Brain Structure Description Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) Active when we are awake and consciously thinking, feeling, and making choices, and very active when we are intentional and deliberate about doing so. Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) An area in the PFC specifically active when switching attention, working memory, maintaining abstract rules, and inhibiting inappropriate responses. Amygdala Responds to emotional perceptions, like a library holding the emotional feelings attached to memories. Hippocampus Active when we convert short-term memory to long-term
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New thoughts are formed over twenty-one days, and these new thoughts are formed into habits after sixty-three days.
the conscious mind lags behind the nonconscious mind by at least ten seconds.
more unmanaged toxic stress you have in your life, the more your telomeres will shorten, and this is bad for your mental and physical health.
if we don’t manage our minds, the organs in our physical bodies will get older than our actual chronological age.
True change takes time and effort—there’s no escaping it, no magic pill when it comes to our thinking. Working on something like identifying toxic issues needs to be approached not as a one-off 63-day event but rather as an ongoing lifestyle. We’re always going to be fixing something in our mental space, so this is a lifetime commitment.
When people learn how to tell their own story, their lives change in ways they never imagined. When you feel you can control your own mind and life, you can live in peace and find healing regardless of your past, present, or future; we observed this in my clinical trials. Autonomy and independence are predictive of healing, while people who feel like everything is out of their control tend to be more susceptible to the fluctuations of life.
So, awareness without a sustainable mind-management plan made them worse and not better.
Our brains are always generating energy in response to how we think, feel, and choose, and the more we deal with our stuff, the more coherence we will see in our brain and the clearer we’ll be able to think and the more resilient we’ll become. When the energy in the brain drops too low in the frontal lobe and loses coherence between the two sides, it can result in depression and impulsivity and the feeling of just wanting to give up.
in the delta frequency in the image above. However, the blues, particularly the darker blue colors, indicated that they did not know what to do about how they felt—the deep sense of “everything is just too much.” This finding was corroborated by the subject’s narrative description of their experience, which suggested they felt stuck, helpless, and hopeless, and by their psychosocial test scores, specifically the results on the
You will learn to tolerate more emotional difficulty without falling apart or feeling guilt or shame as you go through something. This will help you feel more present with yourself and your loved ones. There’s no shame in this. In fact, the feelings you experience are important—they are an awareness of your humanity.
We then react negatively to daily stressors over long periods of time, which compromises instead of enhances the immune system.
Our society overemphasizes physical self-care, such as diet, exercise, and sleep (which are important but not the whole picture), to the exclusion of mind-management.
Here are some bonus tips on how to deal with the pain of uncertainty: Talk to someone you trust; having a friend makes things a little less scary. Balance out the uncertainty by focusing on what is certain. Repeat this mantra: “Things are uncertain, but I can handle it. I’ve never experienced this before, but I can handle it. These are uncertain times, but I can handle it. I have no idea what’s going to happen, but I can handle it.”
Depression and anxiety are highly correlated with burnout, so we’d expect to see a reduction in anxiety leading to burnout if depression and anxiety are managed.
