Meditation intro and chapter 1

Over the next few weeks I will be posting a series of videos taking you through the process of meditation. I hope you find them useful. Please send me feedback on how you're getting on. 

How to Use ‘Fear Setting’ to Become Fearless

You have far more control over your fear and your stress than you probably realize. A lot of us think that we are at the mercy of our brains and don’t realize that in fact we control the emotional response we want to give.

When you’re stressed, it’s because you’re focussing on all the things that could go wrong. This is essentially you telling your body ‘I need to be stressed’. And when you do that, you trigger a sudden and powerful hormonal response. And if you don’t believe this is how it works then just consider the power of the placebo – this lets us fool ourselves into the most efficient hormonal response simply through belief.

You can do the same thing by removing the stress surrounding something and by telling yourself ‘I don’t need to be stressed’. So how do you do that? One option is by using Tim Ferriss’ ‘Fear Setting’ technique. Read on to find out how that works:

What is Fear Setting?

Fear setting is so named because it is based on goal setting. The idea in goal setting is to write down all your goals and how you’re going to achieve them. By writing them down, you make them concrete and you actually work out how to accomplish them.

Fear setting is similar and as counter-intuitive as it might sound, making your fears concrete can be very useful.

Because very often, we think about something we’re afraid of and we don’t really realize why it scares us. But if you use fear setting you can find the exact cause for the fear or the stress and you can look at it in a more realistic and scientific manner. In fear setting, you do this by writing down a) how likely each eventuality is to actually happen and b) what you would do if it were to happen. In doing that, you can rob it of its power over you.

And once you do this, very often you find that there really is nothing to be afraid of. Without wanting to be a cliché… there really is nothing to fear except fear itself.

How to Remove Your Fear of a New Job

Let’s take starting a new job as an example. This is something you maybe want to do but you might be frozen by fear or by anxiety.

So ask yourself: what are you really afraid of?

Perhaps:

- Losing your old job and not having any work to come back to
- Upsetting your partner and being divorced
- Ending up on the streets with no money and no prospects

But now be honest about how likely these are to happen – most of them are pretty extreme. What’s more is that you can remove the likelihood of each one happening in a number of ways. For example, if you don’t leave your current job until you’ve been accepted somewhere else, then there’s no chance of being jobless. Likewise, if you did lose your job you could always take up unskilled work in the meantime. Or stay with your parents.

As you can see, there’s very little to be afraid of!

How to Get Started With Meditation

Meditation has a huge number of incredible benefits – it decreases stress, it improves the memory, it aids mental calmness and much more.

The only problem is that meditation is also very difficult to get started with – or at least that’s the perception. Meditation often seems almost ‘mystical’ and can come with religious connotations. It involves a big commitment of time and a lot of discipline. And many people will work hard at it and still not see any results.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. If you’re keen to give meditation a go and to see the results for yourself, here are some ways to get started…

The Right Approach

The first tip is simply to approach meditation in the right way and to have the right expectations. If you’re expecting to become enlightened overnight, then you’ll be disappointed. Likewise, you shouldn’t expect that something is going to ‘happen’.

Instead, try to view meditation – to begin with at least – as a tool for helping you relax and just feel a little more at ease. The idea here is to let your thoughts pass by without engaging with them and to thereby get a ‘break’ from stress and anxiety and busy thoughts. Eventually, this can become a very relaxing place to ‘escape’ to whenever you need to take five.

And if you practice it regularly, the benefits will start to come.

With this in mind, try not to be too harsh on yourself. You’re allowed to scratch your face and you’re allowed to occasionally have distracting thoughts – just keep recentering and keep bringing yourself back.

Find somewhere quiet for 10 minutes

The Right Strategy

To do this then, try just sitting down somewhere quiet and for ten minutes let your mind relax. Don’t engage with thoughts and instead just be aware of your body in space – and of any sounds you might notice in the background. Don’t ‘do’ anything, just ‘be’.

If you find this hard, then you can use something external to focus the mind. That might mean counting your breaths, or it might mean watching a candle flame. Another method is to use ‘worry beads’ which you can roll between a finger and thumb absent mindedly.

Tools

Another great tool to help you get the hang of meditation faster is the Headspace app. This app provides simple meditation sessions that you can digest in small chunks and will talk you through mindfulness. Another option is to use something like Mindwave. Mindwave is an EEG machine that can read your brain waves and thereby assess the level of activity in your mind. This is a very useful tool for gamifying the process of meditation – but it’s not cheap so keep that in mind.

In fact, you can even try using virtual reality in order to combat stress and that would allow you to visit a ‘happy place’ in a much more tangible way!

What You Need to Know About Panic Attacks in Order to Stop Them

It’s one thing trying to improve your ability to control your own stress response so that you can combat anxiety and improve your health. But it’s quite another when you experience serious panic attacks that leave you crippled and that prevent you from engaging in normal activities.

But in fact the tools you will use to achieve both ends are similar. The difference is just that panic attacks might require a more intense and a more focussed approach.

And in either case, understanding the biology behind the experience can be a fantastic tool to help you take control more effectively.

Let’s look at what panic attacks are and how you can take them on head-to-head.

The Basics of Panic Attacks

When you experience any kind of stress, it’s because your sympathetic nervous system is releasing specific hormones and neurotransmitters into your system. Specifically, these are:

- Adrenaline (epinephrine)
- Noradrenaline (norepinephrine)
- Cortisol
- Testosterone
- Estrogen
- Dopamine
- Serotonin

When these occur together, your experience of pain is dulled, you become more attuned to your senses, your thoughts are focussed, your strength increases your muscles contract. Your heart rate accelerates significantly and more blood and oxygen are sent to your muscles.

But the thing is that this increases your overall strength your reflexes and your ability to fight or run. This is a useful response in the right context.

The problem is when you misinterpret these signals and cause a panic attack. What happens in this case is that you notice yourself get anxious and you become worried that this is going to cause you embarrassment or make you faint (perhaps because you have previous experience with panic attacks). You begin to hyperventilate and this combined with the elevated heartrate causes chest pain. And some people mistake that chest pain for the signs of a heart attack.

All this makes you more anxious and that in turn means you ramp up the response even more. Your heartrate increases more, you get more anxious and eventually you might even start to get dizzy from all that oxygen.

The Solution

The solution then is to recognize that you’re having a panic attack but not to give it any power over you. And the way you do this is to try and detach yourself from it and essentially continue to go about your normal business. Of course this is easier said than done but as soon as you stop letting it control you and as soon as you aren’t afraid of panic attacks, you’ll find they end a lot more quickly and eventually they can stop happening entirely.

Cognitive behavioural therapy can help with this, as can using the technique known as AWARE which is simply a set of steps to remove yourself from the experience and to avoid being afraid of the stress.

Most people will have a panic attack at some point in their lives but if you can understand what is happening and control your emotions you’ll find it can disappear as quickly as it arrived.