Written by Geraldine Joaquim

We live in a fast-paced modern world with a huge amount of distractions and pressures on our every day lives. It’s easy to dismiss our ‘first world problems’ as rather self-indulgent, and to some degree they are. The majority of us (the lucky ones) don’t have to worry about a roof over our heads or where the next meal will come from or physical threats to our existence.

But we still have the same physiological makeup as our caveman ancestors. We still utilise the freeze-flight-fight mechanism irrespective of the cause, be it a life-threatening incident or simply being late for a meeting.

Within our original Primitive Brain, the Amygdala (the fight/flight centre) kicks into gear and sends messages to the Hypothalamus which gets the body ready to act. The Hypothalamus floods the system with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, this makes your heart beat faster, palms go sweaty, churning stomach, increases your breathing rate – all symptoms of your body being under stress. Eventually your issue resolves – you get to your meetings or find that parking space – and the more we use this system, the more efficient it becomes. And this is how we can spiral into panic attacks, road rage, tearfulness, etc. All in all, not being quite ‘us’.

So how can we reign this back, how can we live with our stresses but not give in to our inner caveman?

The good news is you can, with a little practise, train yourself to cope. It’s all about creating spare capacity to deal with whatever life throws your way. Imagine in your brain you have a space where all your stresses, negative thoughts, worries, fears, etc are stored – we call this the Stress Bucket. Every time you encounter a situation that your brain perceives as a threat or barrier, or you worry about something that’s going to happen (imagined or real), or dwell on past regrets, losses or sadness your bucket gets filled a little bit more.

The problems arise when all these seemingly small things pile on top of each other until your bucket fills to the brim and you just can’t fit any more in. This wipes out any spare capacity you might have for dealing with new issues – and it’s when we flip out over a seemingly small incident such as not being able to find a parking space or going into road rage mode because someone didn’t wave a thank you when you let them in, or losing your temper at the children. Literally the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

We very quickly become adept at focusing on all the negative aspects in our lives and forget to appreciate the good – in fact it’s hardwired into our DNA to be negative and to worry, it’s what kept our ancestors alive and why we’re sitting here today but it’s not helpful in our modern daily lives.

So, in order to counter-balance this natural propensity towards negativity, the pessimist in us, we need to focus on the positives in our lives. And it’s not the firework moments, rather all the little things that we take for granted and don’t ‘see’ anymore: a bright sunny morning, birds singing, a hug from a loved one, a smile from a stranger, being let into traffic… these are the things that make up our daily lives and the firework moments (birthdays, parties, reunions, holidays) enhance our already enjoyable lives. This stops us piling things into our bucket and ensures we have plenty of spare capacity to cope when we need to, in times of real pressure.

And in order to empty our stress bucket, we need to get good quality sleep – not necessarily longer but better. During our sleep we go through stages of deep sleep into REM (rapid eye movement) into light sleep, and we do this four or five times throughout the night.

During the REM phase we re-run the events of the day and move it from our emotional Primitive Brain to our Intellectual Brain, so out of our stress bucket and into the memory bank. Slowly, any arguments or unpleasantness, losses, sadness, worries, anxieties, etc are released. They are of no further use to us and whilst we know these things have happened we don’t need to hold on to them anymore.

When we don’t have good quality sleep we feel it physically and mentally: reaching for sugary foods to boost energy levels, slipping quickly into anger responses, or panic, wanting to pull the duvet over our heads and not have to face the day, being tearful… these are all signs of an over-full bucket.

The hypnotic trance also replicates the REM state and helps with bucket emptying, and using hypnosis at the point of sleep can turbo-charge that essential REM making it super-efficient!

This two-pronged attack (not filling and emptying your stress bucket) can help you regain control on the here and now.

It really helps when we understand why we react in a particular way to certain stimuli, we get an insight into what is going on physiologically which can help us break that reactionary cycle. So, next time you feel the pressure rising, think about that stress bucket and gaining control over your actions instead of allowing your emotions to rule you.

Geraldine Joaquim
QUEST HYPNOTHERAPY LTD
London Road, Petworth, West Sussex
07919 415900
geraldine@questhypnotherapy.co.uk
www.geraldinejoaquim.co.uk