Know What You Want & Go After It

In the last couple of chapters, we’ve focused on using CBT to reduce stress. And we’ve seen how this can indirectly lead to advancements in your career thanks to things like the law of attraction.

But what about motivating yourself toward something? What if you’re not frozen by fear and stress but simply by tiredness and indifference? What if you don’t know what it is you want out of life, or how to structure a goal so that you can get there? You can’t very well work toward what you want when you don’t know what that is! 

The first thing we’re going to do is to introduce just a very subtle shift in the way you approach these ideas. And specifically, this will mean having a vision and not a goal.

What is the difference between a vision and a goal?

A vision is much more abstract but at the same time, more tangible.

A goal is to lose 15 lbs in 10 weeks. A vision is to be the same you, but fitter, healthier and more attractive – running outdoors with a healthy looking tan and waking up every morning with tons of energy to get up and attack the day.

Which of those things is more motivating? For most people, the answer will be the vision.

The other great thing about visions is that most of us already have them, even if we don’t know it. If I ask you what your goal in life is, then you might not be able to answer. But if I ask you to just imagine your perfect life, then you might find it easier to do. Perhaps you’re sitting on a beautiful beach somewhere? Perhaps you’re living in a massive mansion? Maybe you’re rich in a skyscraper somewhere?

If you’re still struggling to come up with a vision that you can work toward, then some other questions to ask are things like: who are your role models (and what do they have in common)? When was the last time you were truly happy? What did you want to be when you were a kid?

It doesn’t have to be super concrete – wanting to be rich, wanting more time with your family or wishing you weren’t at work is fine! And if you do have something really concrete – wishing you were a famous rock star – then that’s fine too.

From here, the next thing to do is to take that vision and break it down into steps. This is another important point and it’s once again something that a lot of people get wrong. If you are working toward a goal rather than a vision, then you might, as per our previous example, be working toward losing X amount of weight in N amount of time.

This is a fine aim but it’s far too distant and too outside your control to be useful. When it comes to the crunch and you need to force yourself out the door to exercise, it’s all too easy to just tell yourself you’ll catch up on what you’ve missed later. You end up putting it off or making excuses and by the time that amount of time has passed and you haven’t achieved what you were hoping, you just feel disappointed, disheartened and possibly depressed. Eventually, this leads to you giving up entirely!

So instead, we make steps toward our vision. This means coming up with a plan first and often you’ll find it’s easier than you think to accomplish the impossible – it just requires a bit of creative thought. For example, if you want to be a rock star you might take a less obvious route such as creating your own YouTube channel and posting your music regularly. If you build up a big enough following and you have enough obvious skill, then eventually this is highly likely to lead to an offer for a recording contract!

In other scenarios it might be a very easy set of steps – in order to lose weight you might eat no more than 1800 calories every day and workout five times a week for 30 minutes. If you want to write a best selling novel, your goal might be to wake up one hour early and write for 40 minutes before work.

These are now incredibly simple steps that are highly within your control. You either fail or pass but it’s entirely down to you. And if you do fail? You can simply try again the next day. Each day is a fresh challenge and there is no putting things off. Ultimately, this makes a goal much easier to stick to – especially if you use the chain technique a lot of people use: creating a string of X’s in a calendar so that you will find yourself not wanting to break the sequence by missing a workout or writing session!

This will seem detached from the goal at times but if the steps are good, then taking them every single day, week or month on a consistent basis will mean you’re getting gradually closer to your aim.

Now all that’s left is to motivate yourself and to get yourself in a mind set where you’re willing to put in the time and work to get to where you want to be. How do you get yourself to get out of bed to go for a run at 5am when it’s pouring with rain outside?

The answer is that you need to use a slightly altered form of CBT by focusing on the emotional reasons behind what you’re doing. In other words, you need to think about the vision and you need to feel the vision. This is what will give you the release of the correct neurotransmitters to have the motivation to do it. You can also focus on what it is you’re trying to avoid.

So if you’re thinking about running in the morning and you can’t find the willpower to do it, the answer is just to make the connection in your mind so that you link that step to the outcome you want. Visualize that version of yourself who is fit, healthy and ripped and picture yourself running in the sun during the summer. Think about how it feels to never have this low energy and think about the alternative – getting gradually less and less fit and feeling gradually worse and worse with nothing that you can do to fix it.

And if you try this a few mornings and you find it doesn’t work, then another consideration is to try setting yourself up some kind of video or script that you can read or watch when you wake up to do that for you. Feel the emotion, know that the step you’re considering is what can get you there and then take the next step!

Next week we'll talk about increasing your confidence.

Mindfulness & CBT

By using the techniques from last week, you’ll find you’re able to increase your wakefulness, your mood and your general performance on a regular basis.

But now we come to the next trick – changing your mood instantly and switching from one mental state to another. What we really need to be able to do in order to perform at our very best is to switch to a stressed and motivated state when something requires our attention, to become angry in a controlled manner when we’re arguing and to switch off and relax from work when we get home in order to allow our brain to recover and to actually enjoy ourselves. Having an understanding of our neuroscience will help and so will having a good foundation of health. But now we’re going to take full control of our mental state and our attention.

It’s All About Perception

As mentioned earlier, our experiences are largely what control our emotions. Simply seeing a lion is enough to trigger a cascade of different changes in the brain that ultimately result in us becoming highly aroused both mentally and physically.

When tired, you could wake yourself by taking that cold shower or by seeing a lion!

When you’re drunk, it’s because you have excess GABA in your brain. But if your friend gets hurt, the rush of epinephrine and dopamine will be enough to actually make you feel sober and sharp again so that you can deal with the crisis.

But what if the lion wasn’t there and you only thought the lion was there? What if the lion was there and you didn’t see it?

Ultimately, it is not the actual lion that triggers the response but rather your perception of that lion and your beliefs about the lion. Put it another way: if you were to see a lion and you didn’t know what a lion was, then you probably wouldn’t have the same fight or flight response – you might even think it looked cute and get an oxytocin release instead!

It’s your understanding of the situation that impacts on the way you react to it and this in turn changes the way you feel and the way you behave. And this is actually what happens all the time throughout our lives to a lesser extent. This is why some people are calm and relaxed all the time (we call them ‘laid back’) while other people are constantly stressed and anxious.

Let’s imagine you’re in your office and you have a very bad deadline that you don’t think you can meet. Some of you might now feel incredibly stressed and thus experience that fight or flight response. But others among you might not have that response at all and you may instead find you’re able to stay very calm and collected.

There’s of course an ideal middle ground here – being too stressed is bad for your health and can actually cause you to become less productive in some cases (the response is sometimes actually referred to as the fight, flight or freeze response!) while being too relaxed as mentioned can cause you to end up not actually doing anything about the situation.

The simple fact of the matter is that in these situations, some people see a lion and some people see a cat. The scenario is the precise same but their reaction to that situation can be very different. This is based on your life experiences, diet, health and personality – but you can take control of it once you know how.

The Idea Behind CBT

CBT is ‘cognitive behavioral therapy’, which in turn is a type of psychotherapeutic intervention that is based almost entirely around the concepts we’ve just discussed. This asserts that our behavior is a result of our associations (this is behaviorism) and of our thought processes that actually allow us to reinforce an idea in our heads.

So when faced with a stressful situation, you will be stressed partly because of the beliefs and associations you hold regarding that situation. At the same time, you’ll then start playing out what you expect to happen in your head and when this happens, areas of the brain fire almost as though that thing were really happening. You might imagine getting fired, having your house repossessed, or being injured depending on the scenario.

This then causes the release of even more stress hormones, just as though you were really in those situations and you can end up anxious, aroused and potentially less effective. This is where a lot of phobias come from but it’s also what can make us less self-confident, less likely to take positive risks and generally less successful than we otherwise could be.

So CBT aims to change this, partly by creating new associations and partly by changing the way you think and changing what you’re visualizing. There’s more to it than that of course but this is the central concept and the tools used to this end are collectively referred to as ‘cognitive restructuring’.

So let’s say that you want to be calmer at work, or you want to overcome a fear of heights. How might you do that using CBT?

The first step would be to become more aware of your existing thoughts, beliefs and emotions. You can do this in a number of ways. One common tool is journaling, whereby you keep a journal of your thoughts, feelings and emotions pertaining to the thing that frightens you. This way, you can really deconstruct the thought process that is leading to your fear.

Another option is to use mindfulness. This is a form of meditation that doesn’t focus on making your mind blank but instead focuses on letting your mind become detached while you watch the contents of your thoughts. This process in itself is very calming and can help to prevent a fight or flight response.

Once you have the thoughts that make you stressed though – or you’re aware of what you’re visualizing – you can then go about deconstructing them. For example, if you’re afraid of public speaking then this might mean that you picture yourself stuttering and being laughed at. If you’re afraid of heights, you might think things like ‘I’m going to fall’.

What you don’t realize is that simply thinking these things is strengthening those neural connections and coding the experience as ‘bad’ and ‘dangerous’ making the response stronger in future.

So now you’re going to unravel those beliefs and try to remove them. One way to do this is with ‘thought challenging’. Thought challenging essentially means that you’re going to really analyze your belief and decide if it might actually be true or not. So if you’re afraid of being laughed at on stage, you’re going to think about how likely people really are to laugh at you and whether or not this is something that you would do in their position. The reality? Most people are kind enough and mature enough to just politely wait for you to get it back together. If anything, they’ll probably only sympathize.

You can also help this process by coming up with contingency plans. In other words, if you do stutter, what can you do to make it less devastating? Probably just make a joke of it to ease tension!

Also: do you really care if these strangers who you’ll never see again think any less of you?

Another scenario might be low level anxiety that you’re holding about your job because you’re afraid of being fired. Let’s say you made a big mistake on a report that won’t come to light for two weeks – now you’re worried you’ll be severely reprimanded.

So let’s address this situation logically with thought challenging: is your boss really that harsh and unfair? Aren’t there laws that would protect you? Can’t you explain that it’s an honest mistake? Could you blame it on your tiredness or stress at the time? If you really did get fired, wouldn’t you be able to land back on your feet? Now picture the way it’s much more likely to go and let that sink in. Suddenly, it’s not so scary.

In both these situations you have taken that mental lion and turned it into a small kitten! You’ve neutered the dragon and you can thus remain much calmer thanks to your new perception of the situation. And the more you practice this, the more you’ll find you start to adopt it and it starts to become a part of who you are. Suddenly, you’ll be able to stay calm and collected during all kinds of crises at work and eventually people will start to turn to you for advice whenever something goes wrong!

Another tool is even more powerful than this and it’s called ‘hypothesis testing’. The problem is, that in order for you to really be able to overcome a fear or phobia, you have to really believe what you’re thinking and visualizing. It’s not enough to just keep saying that it’s a cat and not a lion – you have to really believe it right in your heart.

So the next logical question at this point, is how you can convince yourself of your new thoughts and beliefs. And one way to do that is to use hypothesis testing – simply proving to yourself that your old beliefs were wrong and your new ones are right.

In the case of a person afraid of public speaking, such as myself (wrote about it in 2013), what would that mean? It would mean actually making a mistake in public on person – or even standing there not saying anything for a while. You’re facing your worst case scenario, trialing the worst outcome and hopefully proving to yourself that there’s actually nothing to be afraid of. In doing this, you should find that no one laughs and people just wait politely. At this point, you now know that your fears were unfounded and you will find they bother you much less in future.

This is also a little like re-association or exposure therapy. By consistently exposing yourself to the situation you used to be afraid of, you can create new associations and remove those old negative ones. You can even eventually become desensitized as you learn that there’s nothing to be afraid of. A paratrooper's heart rate can remain at 60bpm throughout the entire jump. Why? Because he’s done it hundreds of times before and his body knew that this was nothing to be afraid of.

You can work your way up to this if you’re unsure but just exposing yourself to these dangerous situations will eventually be enough to help you overcome an unwanted physiological response.

One of the most powerful and effective uses for this? Becoming socially bulletproof; this is what I'm working on. Almost all of us have some kind of natural anxiety when talking to strangers and this causes us to have a minor stress response. As mentioned, this then makes us appear to lack confidence and sends the signal that we are the inferior party in the interaction – again, it all dates back to our evolution.

But if you keep exposing yourself to new social situations and even make them purposefully awkward, then eventually you can completely get rid of any anxiety you previously felt at all. Try going to a shop (not one near you) and ordering your items in a funny accent. You’ll find they politely nod and give you your things without saying anything. Try chatting to people you don’t know on the street – even picking up the phone a bit more and calling people by typing in random numbers. The more you do this, the more accustomed you’ll become to speaking with strangers and the less of a stress response you’ll have in future. By the end, you’ll find that you’re perfectly able to speak with complete, calm confidence in almost every situation!

Has anyone done a challenge for being purposefully awkward?

 Next week we'll talk about "dressing" ourselves for success.

The Power of Neurotransmitters

In the case described last week, we saw how releases of dopamine, epinephrine and cortisol among other neurotransmitters could result in the fight or flight response.

But something very similar, albeit much milder also happens when you experience chronic stress. Chronic stress is the kind of stress that ‘doesn’t go away’. This is not a lion but rather an impending deadline at work, wedding planning, property investment, debt, relationship problems, etc.

This triggers a very similar stress response, which results in continued changes in your body such as suppressed immune function and digestion, a certain amount of tunnel vision, dread and anxiety etc. So when you’re stressed for long periods, this negatively affects your ability to relax and to enjoy any experiences – but it also impacts negatively on your health in more ways than you might immediately expect.

Dopamine makes us more driven and focused for instance but only on the thing that is causing the stress. This reduces activity across our brain so that we are more tightly focused on specific thoughts, emotions, ideas and inputs. That’s why ‘eustress’ can actually be a good thing and make you more likely to revise for an exam. But it has also been shown in studies to make us less creative because we’re less able to let our mind explore different, diverse ideas. Likewise, stress also makes it hard for us to focus on anything other than that thing that has our attention.

What’s more, is that stress can seriously undermine your ability to impress or influence others. That’s because stress is a sign that you’re nervous or afraid. If you give of these signs in front of a competitor, then it makes you appear to be less confident and thereby sends the signal that they must be the alpha to your beta. Likewise, if you are anxious when approaching a potential mate, it suggests on an unconscious level that they must be a better potential mate than you – that they are out of your league or at least that you perceive that to be the case!

As you can see then the ability to control your stress response can be a fantastic asset and help you to focus more when you need to, to run faster and to fight harder – or just to appear completely confident and in control in stressful situations.

More Neurotransmitters and What They Do

Conversely, other neurotransmitters can be released in response to pleasure, exercise, sunlight, tiredness, darkness, excitement and more. And these all affect our mood and our ability to focus in other ways.

• Serotonin is the neurotransmitter that we think of as the ‘happiness hormone’. This is what makes us feel content and happy and it also has a range of other roles such as suppressing pain and decreasing appetite by stimulating the production of leptin. 
• Melatonin is the neurotransmitter that makes us sleepy! 
• GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter that reduces activity in the brain and can thereby suppress stress and further encourage sleep. 
• Dopamine is essentially a neurotransmitter that is related to goal-oriented behavior. It makes us more focussed and increases memory among other things. 
• Acetylcholine is one of the principle excitatory neurotransmitters and also plays an important role in memory. 
• Nitric Oxide is a vasodilator and helps get more blood to the brain and muscles. It also activates neurons that aren’t directly connected and thus has an important role in helping us to wake up. 
• Testosterone is the ‘male hormone’ that is linked to aggressive thoughts and behaviors as well as drive and confidence. 
• Estrogen is the female hormone and can have a big impact on mood. 
• Cortisol is the ‘stress hormone’ and makes us more alert while creating feelings of dread. It’s also linked with appetite, this time making us hungrier via another hormone/neurotransmitter called ghrelin. 
• Substance P is the neurotransmitter related to the transmission of pain. It also happens to be linked to anger according to some recent research. 
• Oxytocin, often called the ‘love hormone’, makes us more agreeable and creates feelings of loving protection and bonding. 
• Glutamate is another of the most abundant excitatory neurotransmitters and exists in vast quantities compared to any other neurotransmitter. 
• Anandamide is the ‘bliss’ neurotransmitter and also appears to stimulate creative thinking.

Once again, these neurotransmitters are released in response to our experiences and thoughts. When a mother sees her child, her brain floods with oxytocin which makes her more likely to bond with the child and feel the need to connect.

When you go on a rollercoaster, your body produces epinephrine and anandamide. When you have just had a great day out, you will be filled with serotonin and feel happy and positive.

In short, your happiness, productivity, creativity, attractiveness, relationships and much more are all responsible for different quantities of these various neurotransmitters.

Neurotransmitters for Incredible Abilities

Certain ‘states’ can be triggered via the release of specific neurotransmitters and this can be incredibly desirable/positive in some cases.

One example is the much-studied ‘flow state’. A flow state is a term for that moment when everything seems to fall into place and you are able to perform at your very best. This results in absolute focus, heightened reactions, improved problem solving and more. It happens when you’re snowboarding for instance and the world seems to suddenly slow down, allowing you to pull off incredible moves with expert timing. It also happens when you’re so lost in your work that you forget to the toilet or even look up from the computer. And it happens when you talk to a friend all night without realizing how long the conversation has been going.

In short, this experience is what total, creative focus feels like. And chemically, it is very similar to the fight or flight response but minus the sensation of fear or dread that normally comes from that. Instead, there seems to be a release of anandamide, which enhances creative problem solving while creating that sense of exhilaration that is so addictive to adrenaline junkies. At the same time, brain scans show that the prefrontal cortex – the part associated with planning and self-doubt – appears to shut down. This is what removes our sense of time passing and allows us to stay completely fixed on the moment. It’s known as ‘temporo-hypofrontality’.

It is thought that all major athletic records were set by flow states and that most highly successful start-ups get to where they get to thanks to flow states. So imagine if you could trigger a flow state at will and thereby achieve complete focus and perfect problem solving!

The opposite of this state is what’s known as the ‘default mode network’. This is a network of brain structures that light up when we are completely lost in thought, often while our bodies carry out mundane tasks like showering. This is what allows us to explore diverse regions of our brains and find new connections between ideas – and it’s what is believed to have helped Einstein dream up special relativity while working at the patent office.

The ‘flashbulb memory’ meanwhile shows us how our brains can be capable of laying down much clearer memories during times of extreme shock, such as the moment you heard about 9/11. Likewise, ‘hysterical strength’ shows how a strong enough fight or flight response can actually increase muscle fiber recruitment to the point where women have been able to lift cars off of their children trapped underneath.

One underground movement that is interested in the idea of using neurotransmitters to accomplish more is the ‘nootropics’ movement. Nootropics are ‘smart drugs’ which tend to work by blocking certain neurotransmitters and encouraging the production of others. These can work like the film ‘Limitless’ but on a much less powerful scale – slightly increasing memory, focus or even confidence.

The problem with nootropics is that they often come with side effects, haven’t been tested in the long term and generally make it harder for us to switch mental state as we need to. It’s no good being highly focused if it means your creativity will be suppressed!

Luckily, there are other ways to encourage the production of the correct neurotransmitters to invite the mental states we want.

Next week we'll look at how healthy eating and sleep help to improve our mental health.

Some Basic Psychology

What most of us aren’t aware of is just how much of a slave we typically are to our biology – and especially when it comes to neuroscience.

We have the illusion of self-control. That is to say that we feel like we choose what we do and we choose how we feel. If we’re angry, it’s because of some injustice – we’ve thought about the situation and decided that anger is the correct response.

If you’re happy, it’s because all is well with the world and you’re content.

We then take all this information and decide what we want to do next and how we’re going to perform at that activity.

But the reality is that we are not in charge of our brains. Rather, our brains are in charge of us. And they’re largely controlled by our bodies and our situations too. Unless we understand the workings of our brain and we’re able to take conscious control over the processes that dictate our moods, our motivations and more, then we are destined to remain at the whim of certain chemicals – and completely oblivious to that fact.

Okay, so let’s go deep right off the bat. Who are ‘you’? What makes you, you?

The answer is your brain to a large extent. And your brain in turn is made up of billions of neurons – small cells that have tendril-like extensions reaching out and into the different corners of your skull. These neurons can be created, destroyed or changed via our experiences and they represent all kinds of things including memories, sights, smells, thoughts and ‘commands’ to move our body.

When an electrical impulse moves through a neuron, this means it is ‘firing’ and thus we experience whatever correlates with that firing. If you open up someone’s skull and use an electrode to stimulate individual neurons, then one might make someone see a point of red light, one might make someone move their arm and another might make them remember their Mother. 

These neurons are all interconnected and the more often two neurons fire at once, the more connected they become. Thus, when one neurons fires, it is likely that others around it will fire depending on the strength of the firing (called an ‘action potential), other activity in the area and the strength of the connection. Some ‘clusters’ of neurons form the major brain structures like the occipital lobe, motor cortex or hippocampus which are responsible for particular behaviors. Other neurons reach from one end of the brain all the way to the other!

Already you can see how your brain is not always entirely under your control. If you see something specific, then this will cause certain neurons to fire based on your memories and understanding of that object. But it might also cause surrounding neurons to fire, depending on the associations you’ve formed during that life-time.

And when certain neurons fire, they cause particular emotions. That’s because neurons communicate across synapses – small gaps between the end of one neuron (the axon – which is like a tail) and the dendrites (like arms) of another.

At the end of each axon is the synaptic knob, which is filled with chemicals called neurotransmitters, held inside ‘neuro vesicles’. When the synapse fires, it causes these neurotransmitters to be released and that then alters the behavior of the transmission and the surrounding cells. Some neurotransmitters are ‘excitatory’ and make other neurons more likely to fire. Others are ‘inhibitory’ and make them less likely to fire – and more suppressed.

Others have more complex roles. Some for example will make you more likely to remember something, while others will make you feel happy or sad. This is what controls the way you ‘feel’ about certain experiences.

Neurotransmitters are linked closely with hormones too. Some hormones act like neurotransmitters while some neurotransmitters can act like hormones. Essentially, hormones are longer lasting and generally produced in the body, while neurotransmitters have shorter-lasting effects and are produced in the brain. Even hormones produced in the body though are largely triggered by the pituitary gland, which is located in the brain. 

 

See a lion for instance and your brain will sit up and take notice owing to the associations you form with that image. Relevant neurons will fire and because those neurons are coded with danger, they will release a number of neurotransmitters like dopamine and cortisol to increase activity and say that something important is happening. This increased activity causes more of the brain to light up and areas around the hypothalamus will then begin to trigger activity in the pituitary gland, producing adrenocorticotropic hormone. The adrenal gland will also be triggered at this point, releasing the hormone epinephrine, which is essentially a form of adrenaline. This is then what causes changes in the sympathetic nervous system.

This triggers physiological changes, including:

• The acceleration of the heart and lungs
• Vasoconstriction (thinning of the blood vessels) 
• Dilation of the blood vessels leading to muscles
• Dilation of the pupils
• Sense of dread/anxiety
• Tunnel vision
• Thickening of the blood to encourage clotting after injury
• Pain reduction
• Contraction of the muscles
• Shaking
• Suppression of digestion and immune function

Essentially, the body now directs all blood, oxygen, nutrients and resources to the muscles and the brain, in order to aid in combat, escape or other physical activity.

All this is involuntary and all of this is controlled entirely by automatic responses throughout your body. And it completely changes the way you now think and the way your body operates. It changes the way people see you and it drastically effects the way you perceive everything that happens subsequently.

But it’s not just during times of high stress that you see such uncontrolled changes throughout your body. And there are many complex interactions of chemicals and hormones going on inside your body all the time…

Next week we'll dive further into neurotransmitters and how they interact with our bodies.