A Way to observe your thoughts during stressful situations to improve your self-respect.
The Calming Writing Exercise
Whenever you are mentally stressed about a non-life threatening difficulty or stressful situation going on in your life, the best thing to do is to get a piece of paper and a pen and your Whitworth Stressometer. Look at the Stressometer at the levels 8, 9 &/or 10 and identify if you are into your most negative feeling patterns (i.e., level 8), your negative thinking patterns (i.e., level 9) &/or your negative behavior patterns (i.e., level 10) in your mind and body. Write down your current level of stress. When we are at the 8, 9 & 10 regions in our minds and bodies, the state of mind we can experience is limited to fight, flight and freeze only. Identify which one of these mental states you are in now. Next, identify if your life is safe enough today and if you want to be at your best to deal with your current problems.
If you do then begin relaxing your shoulders, your jaw, your forehead and your ribs just a little bit. Exhale slowly and completely so that you release all of the trapped air from your lungs. Continue relaxing in your upper body and exhaling slowly over and over. Next, write down your most negative level 9 fight, flight &/or freeze thoughts. Please note: extreme thoughts can, also, come in the form of extremely positive points of view of oneself or world. When the extreme thinking is extremely positive it can lead to feelings of invincibility, grandiosity and high risk behaving. However, most of the time extreme thoughts are negative. Usually our level 9 reflexive thoughts have sentences like: I can’t stand it; I must be worthless or have something very wrong with me; It’s always going to be this way and never change; &/or this is totally awful. Also, level 9 negative thoughts in general are obsessive, intrusive and invasive to the mind and body experience. These extreme thoughts, either euphoric or devastated or hopeless, are not delivered to the mind by choice. Instead, extreme thoughts are delivered to the mind reflexively by your stress hormones. These either very negative or very positive unbalanced thoughts about yourself or your life, are only relevant to the situation you are experiencing in a life-threatening emergency. If the situation is not immediately dire, these same thoughts are irrelevant, inaccurate and can be referred to as Cognitive Distortions. It will be helpful to your performance and problem solving abilities to edit your distorted thoughts out of your internal dialogue about your non-emergency situations. Your goal is to internally talk to yourself about your situation using as accurate as possible information for yourself to process. The cognitive distortions mentioned above are reflexively delivered to our brains for all stressful situations no matter how large or small, good or bad the stressor is. The reflexive cognitive distortions lead to what I call ‘adrenaline brain.’ The process of switching to your more relaxed and preferential state of mind instead in a personally stressful situation is a slow and deliberate relaxation process done by choice, not a reflexive process done for you. Take your time. It may take 3 minutes to 3 days to calm your body and sort your thoughts out depending on how reflexively freaked out your mind and body were to start with.
Begin rewriting your negative thoughts about your difficulty and replacing your cognitive distortions with sentences like: I can stand this, I just hate it a lot; I hope this gets better someday, I don’t know how this will go really; These kind of hardships happen to normal people, not just to me; &/or Something good may come from this somehow, someday, I hope. Be accurate. The problems in our lives that we are most likely to distort are matters of health, finances &/or significant relationships. Relax your shoulders, jaw, forehead and ribs a little more as you exhale slowly and completely. The more important something is to us the harder it is to stay relaxed and accurate in our internal dialogue about it. Be kind to yourself. This is supposed to be hard. Continue to relax your shoulders, jaw, forehead and ribs just a little bit as you exhale fully. Thinking more accurately about the hard times you are having allows your mind the freedom it needs to preferentially roam around and creatively problem solve for you. More accurate thoughts allow for calm reasoning, kindness, confidence, playfulness &/or gratitude to be felt which makes it possible to feel just a little better during tough times.
Once your thoughts are feeling a little better to you, re-examine where you are on your Whitworth Stressometer. For all of your non-life threatening situations it is best to be at level 7 or lower to perform at your best. Level 7 or lower puts your mind in a preferential state of mental processing and a preferential state for breathing, feeling and behaving. The preferential states of mind and body allow for free-will/choice/&speech. Once you can focus on your personal preference in your non-emergency, remember it is more important to your mental health to know what you want than it is to get what you want. Enjoy knowing what you would like to see happen, talk about it, write about it, meditate on it or pray about it. Self-respect is built on the slow and steady work of daily noticing, acknowledging and honoring personal preference with words and behavior. This work is gentle, compassionate and kind to the self. Who knew we didn’t need to get what we wanted nearly as much as we need to know what we want in order to be mentally healthier? This knowledge only dawns on the calmer, quieter mind. Enjoy your calmer mind.
©Pamela Whitworth, Ph.D. All rights reserved. whitworthstressometer.com
A Spanish garden, 2017