About you

Your brain is divided into two parts the conscious or intellectual mind and the subconscious or primitive mind.

When you run your life with your intellectual mind, you tend to make good and logical decisions. No one consciously decides to have a panic attack, for example, so we know it's a subconscious response.

The subconscious mind runs all the functions of the body and mind and generally does a good job. Its main function is to keep you alive and if your subconscious thinks you are in danger it seizes control from your intellectual mind and moves in with three primitive patterns Anger (Fight) , Anxiety (Flight) or Depression (Freeze), or a combination of all three.

These responses were useful options for cavemen faced with wild animals or bad weather but are not much use in the twenty first century, where anxieties tend to be caused by things like traffic jams or worries about the future.

Every time you feel angry, anxious or depressed you create stress. A good analogy is to think of yourself as having a stress bucket and every time something negative happens to you or you have a negative thought, you add a little bit of stress to your bucket.

Fortunately you do have a mechanism for clearing stress from your bucket, which is during REM sleep. At this time you convert all your anxieties of the day into dream stories that can simply be filed away and forgotten.

When REM is working properly you wake up in the morning with an empty bucket free from the anxieties of the previous day. Unfortunately if you create more negativity than you can cope with or you aren't getting enough REM sleep, you wake up in the morning with anxieties from the previous day still in the bucket. If this continues then eventually you become overwhelmed and you lose intellectual control. This prompts your primitive mind to evaluate your life as being in crisis and causes it to seize control and offer you three choices - depression, anxiety and or anger.

This will ultimately manifest itself in one or several of the following symptoms; anger, depression, loss of confidence, irrational behaviour, irrational phobias, insomnia, eating disorders etc.

The key to regaining control is to clear out the stress bucket so that your subconscious stops thinking that your life is in danger and allows your conscious or logical mind to regain control.

The simplest way to release stress is to practice the art of deep relaxation every day. Simply spending 20 minutes a day listening to a favourite piece of relaxing music will produce excellent results.

For more debilitating problems hypnotherapy is recommended as this will not only help you to reduce anxiety but it will also allow you to remove unhelpful ways of thinking and replace them with more positive ones.

Finally always try and look for a positive response to any negative situation as this will not only minimise the amount of stress that goes into your bucket but will also keep you in intellectual control of your life.

Example

A car cuts in front of you causing you to brake sharply

"You idiot!" - Negative response adds stress to your bucket

"Thank goodness I was alert, I am a good driver." Positive response no stress.