How We Produce Adrenaline And Cortisol

If we make a movie of ourselves interacting with fun people, laughing and relaxed, we get a good feeling and that leads to a different decision. He was working with a patient who had lost his confidence, his direction and his mojo. He called me, because during one of their sessions, his patient said, I need a hypnotist. I need someone to put a suggestion in my mind so that I believe in myself again. Many years earlier in his life, he’d been struggling, and he’d been to see a local hypnotist who’d put him in a trance and told him to believe in himself. It didn’t just make him confident – he became hugely successful. So, I did just that, I hypnotised this extraordinary man and got him to remember times in his life that he’d succeeded and imagined what he would look like if he was totally confident, his ultimate self, how he would stand, smile, how his voice would sound and to picture the light shining behind his eyes. I then told him to step into that ultimate self and become him, like a method actor, and that was it. This is because when we are in a state of excessive stress and are continually looking for threats, we do not have enough bandwidth for other kinds of positive thoughts and feelings. This is more than just being able to tough it out when challenges arise. Resilience is about adaptability, creativity and resourceful thinking. Once we are feeling confident and resilient, we need to decide what it is that’s important in life and point ourselves in that direction.

Major Minus

Through a process of getting clear about what’s really important to us, we can then find massive motivation to go for what it is that we truly want. When we recall something or imagine something, we create movies in our mind – often with a soundtrack – so put simply, it’s the internal pictures and the sounds that create our feelings from moment to moment. All day long, we navigate our way through life with the movies we make in our minds and the things we say to ourselves. Once we have more control over our thoughts and feelings, we have control over our choices and behaviours and ultimately control over our lives. Obviously, we can’t control everything that ever happens to us in life, but we have a big say in how we think and feel about them. Unfortunately, many people don’t know how to have control over how they feel and behave and ultimately the results they get. As I have already mentioned, many of the things they do each day are just habits. I have noticed that far too many people spend too much of their lives running negative movies in their mind to motivate themselves – constantly moving away from fear rather than towards happiness is not a very enjoyable way to live life. As you use this system, you are going to train your brain to feel good more of the time and move towards what you really want. If I could give people one gift from all the techniques that I have, it would be for them to be able to have more control over their mind and body so that they weren’t unnecessarily stressed. Psychologists refer to thinking about all the worst things that could possibly happen to us as catastrophising – worrying about things that will never happen, preparing for emergencies that are never going to occur and getting worked up about imaginary threats, instead of focusing on the moment and the reality. Not only is this exhausting, but it doesn’t allow for us to be creative, optimistic and happy.

Wasted Time

If you are in a state of stress, you are looking for threats everywhere. I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life – some of which actually happened. Particularly since the pandemic, many people understandably have trained themselves to continually think about worst case scenarios. The body’s stress response mechanism works like a car alarm. If a threat is detected or perceived, the internal alarm system lets us know something is wrong by creating a change in our body chemistry, producing adrenaline and cortisol. We then feel alert and get a burst of fear or anger. In an extreme situation, we experience the ‘fight or flight’ response which dates back to when we were cave people and had to either fight a wild animal or run away. However, the stress response is not just triggered when there is a physical threat to ourselves, but also a threat to our ego. So, if there is a chance of us looking bad – say giving a presentation – then the stress response is triggered. These things may not seem like real ‘threats,’ but your nervous system can’t tell the difference between a physical threat and an imagined threat to your ego. In modern life, there are lots of minor stresses every day – an argument, a traffic jam, running late, etc, and all these small threats add up. So, you don’t have to have a gun to your head to experience lots of stress if you have accumulated many small stresses throughout the day.

Here Comes Trouble

However, how we interpret things makes all the difference. It’s not the event, but rather our interpretation of it that causes our emotional reaction. Using this system means your perception and interpretation of events that used to stress you changes, and you will begin to respond differently, have more bandwidth in your thinking for resilience and creativity in solving problems which ultimately leads to more positive results in life. The better you feel, the more you can see the world as it is, rather than how you fear it might be. So, let’s do our first thought experiment – because it’s not just what we think about, but the way we think about it that’s important. At school, we are taught what to think, but we are not taught how to think. You should be feeling really good.