Living a calmer and more courageous life – Video 1

Welcome. I am John Glanvill, and this is video number one of my Calmness in Mind Process, where we explore common sense techniques (and perspectives) that you can use (on yourself) to increase your emotional well-being – that may complement (and supplement) any conventional medical advice and medication that you may currently be receiving.

My goal is to encourage you to trust me enough to sign up for my course. In this course, I will teach you how to transform yourself into a calmer, more confident person who knows your true self and what you want from life.

The course comprehensively details my journey of overcoming anxiety, OCD, and depression and my experience of working as an anxiety therapist for two decades.

It also teaches you new ways to see and interact with our stressful and ever-changing world so that you can experience more inner calmness despite any chaos happening around you in your outer world.

My target audience are intelligent thinkers with complex personalities – who seemingly have had their dominance, creativity and extroverted nature suppressed during childhood and wish to retrain their brains from pessimism, doubt and fear – into optimism, trust and courage – and, perhaps, need to reconnect with the confidence and playfulness they lost (or never learned) during childhood.

Though I am a great therapist – I don’t like being in front of a camera and I don’t know how to make videos or edit them – so please bear with me as I learn how to capture and present all my knowledge, experience and wisdom.

Creating this course will be my own form of (ERP) exposure therapy and will force me to (further) let go of my old OCD tendencies towards perfectionism, fearing failing, being judged or rejected

I’m just going to create content, by myself, from my office – and whatever happens, will be whatever happens – I’m just going to keep on making videos to see what will happen, regardless of the fact that my brain is telling me not to do this and my body is feeling very uncomfortable – but I don’t care about that, as this is what I desire to do – and what kind of a therapist would I be if I weren’t doing that which I advise others to do.

OK, so let’s get started.

Throughout my younger life, I struggled hugely with shyness, anxiety, painful self-consciousness, (restrictive) OCD and numbing depression, which often took the confusing bipolar format of toggling between feeling suicidal one week, then productive and manic a few weeks later.

Despite this, after my teens, I learned how to function reasonably well. I had good jobs, and people often saw me as calm, confident and competent.

Mostly, I could function well despite how my emotions either overwhelmed or underwhelmed me – and I learned how to cover up how I felt (on the inside) or found strategies to control situations so that my intrusive thoughts or anxious feelings were kept in check.

During those years – between the ages of twelve and thirty-five my mental health issues really dominated my life – and though I achieved many good things – it was exhausting being me, and not much in life felt truly enjoyable…

Ultimately, this led to a complete mental breakdown, followed by a dedicated period of self-reflection and research on how to change myself.

At that time, I was an engineer, and though I could design, troubleshoot and improve production systems – I had never considered that my brain and body were a set of internal systems where inputs and outputs needed to be balanced, configured (and optimised) for the environment I lived in and my physical and emotional needs in each particular situation.

Strangely – it had never occurred to me that I could consciously reprogram myself or adapt my behaviours, thoughts and internal chemistry to optimise myself – somehow, I had the mindset of poor me; that’s just how I am – but I was wrong, there is much you can change if somebody shows you what to do.

So, for the next few years, I dedicated myself to researching and testing on myself every concept I could find on how thoughts and emotions functioned.

This way – I could honestly say, “I tried that and it worked!” rather than listening to the guesses of my old brain, which would often say, “There’s no point trying that as obviously it won’t work!”

Therefore, I gained an empirical database of knowledge on myself – about myself.

And what I learned blew me away because it was not what I had been taught in school nor did it reflect what I was reading in medical journals.

I’m happy to share that I no longer experience mental health problems, my anger is gone, my anxiety and OCD are gone, my depression is gone, and (for the most part) I feel calm, peaceful, and happy.

Of course, I still have good and bad days, and I may do silly things, but overall, I feel content with who I am, and I like myself.

However, who I am now is so modified and different from who I was back then!

So, I know that change is possible; was it easy? No. Was it worth it? Absolutely.

I suppose what I am trying to say is – the first lesson I learned (which none of my doctors) ever told me, was that you can’t recover from anxiety or depression and remain the same person.

And this is because – it’s usually, the (original) act of being you which caused them in the first place!

Worried people get very worried and tired, negative people become pessimistic and doubtful, and lonely people end up feeling detached and alone – it’s kind of obvious, really, but nobody talks in these simplistic terms.

So, I am going to teach you everything I learned as I renewed all aspects of myself.

I retrained myself to become the type of person whose negative, exhausting, fearful, doubtful, and self-sabotaging thoughts and behaviours would struggle to get any attention, energy, or traction within this new me.

What I discovered was both simple and complex at the same time: the fact that you can reprogram your thoughts, change your beliefs, and adjust your story of your own identity – and it is possible to re-engineer your inner chemistry to release chemicals that make you feel good rather than the ones which stress (and exhaust) your body.

As you change, you keep the aspects of yourself that serve you well, let go of the stories that don’t, and then add new elements that enhance your own ‘experience’ of being your new self.

I’ll teach you, how you can learn to be kind to yourself, stand up for yourself, and take more responsibility for the outcomes in your life – despite what your brain is thinking and your body is feeling.

Please trust the knowledge I have acquired from 25 years of study and 20,000 hours of delivering therapy to anxious professionals -and my unique brain, which can see patterns in information and connects dots, revealing new perspectives that many other researchers and therapists miss.

My objective for this course is for you to be able to answer the question – “Over and above what the medical world is currently doing for me with medicine and therapy – and despite whatever genetic card nature dealt me with – am I doing everything I possibly can, for myself, to improve myself towards a calmer, productive and happy life?

Now, the biggest surprise I had (as I moved from being an engineer to a therapist) was just how many regular and high-functioning people experience anxiety and depression.

They were usually intelligent, had complex personalities, were overthinkers, were creative, cared what people thought of them – and often were quite dominant and controlling (even if they weren’t directly aware of it).

It was almost as if anxiety was the natural condition that emerged within this type of individual after becoming exhausted from thinking and worrying too much.

You will hear me say this again and again – It’s not possible to think your way out of anxiety or depression because they are the biological symptoms of thinking and worrying too much.

Therefore, I will be teaching you many ways to quieten your mind or at least change your old, out-of-date stories!

My style of working is very metaphorical; everything I teach you is not necessarily the truth, but it points to the truth.

I will use metaphors or stories whereby your mind can say, “Argh yes, I can see what he’s trying to say.”

For example, it’s true that I can drive my car, but the truth is I don’t really know how I actually drive my car; my feet and hands just do it; I automatically respond to events as they unfold, and mostly, I’m just looking out of the window.

Please allow me to exaggerate, embellish and contradict myself to show you how the mind works and to prove to you how simplistic and flawed it actually is – also to demonstrate to you that who we “are” is not very logical at all.

Life does contradict itself; you can both love and hate a person at the same time, your body can be hot while your hands are cold, and you may be angry with a person, yet agree they did the right thing.

You may have many different perspectives on the same issue. For example, a lawyer may be asked to represent an organisation whose values they disagree with. Despite their disagreement, they may continue to do it to keep their job. At the same time, they may be retraining because they dislike their job but need the money the position provides until their retraining is finished.

So many other things in life don’t make sense either. Love is not rational or logical, music, poetry, art – these are things we just enjoy – and on different days we may enjoy them differently!

Just think about depression, OCD or anxiety – they are all completely contradictory…

I feel low, so I can’t be bothered to exercise – even though I know exercise will chemically lift my mood…

I know it is stupid to not trust that the door is locked when I have already checked it 5 times – yet, I will check it another 5 times….

I know my mind can’t really predict the future, yet, my brain tells me that if I don’t act a certain way, xyz might happen…

So, the key to gaining emotional control – is to understand how your brain and body REALLY work – so you can retrain or ignore your thoughts and feelings.

There are distinct stages to the course, firstly, I will teach you what you are dealing with – what anxiety, depression and OCD are – and how our emotions and thoughts work.

Then, I will teach you how to interrupt unwanted thoughts and feelings, how to manage fear, find more calmness and begin to start making decisions.

Thirdly, and probably most importantly, I’ll show you how to engage with life in new ways, how to see yourself differently, and how to recognise and update any values and beliefs that may not be serving you well.

We then look at removing any childhood trauma from your body and explore what you might need to do to adjust your life, your work and your relationships to be the best they can be.

Finally, we explore the fundamental questions: “Who do I wish to become?” and “What do I wish to do with my life?” These questions, although difficult to contemplate, are crucial for anyone looking to expand their life in the right direction.

To begin this process and to make sure we are aligned, let’s classify a few terms;

By anxiety, I mean; unwanted fearful emotions (and thoughts) that overwhelm and stress you.

I will be arguing that, in fact, what you are having may be the right emotion, but at the wrong time and the wrong intensity.

For example, if you were standing on the edge of a cliff, those emotions might be OK, but if you have them while standing in the grocery store, they are not.

By OCD, I mean; habits that you feel compelled to perform, thoughts or mental routines that need to be carried out in your mind (and for some) horrible intrusive thoughts that cause you to really fear what you may do, or may have done.

By depression, I mean a lack of energy, motivation and desire to engage with life. A lack of intentions and desires, a numbness that makes you feel stuck, lost and alone.

By conscious I mean thoughts or ideas that you ‘seemingly’ can control and by subconscious, I am referring to thoughts, ideas and behaviours that are involuntary or just happen to you.

Some people relate to the subconscious as the unconscious – allow me to jump between either label.

Remember, this whole process is about letting go of perceived control, pedantic behaviours and feeling that you have to be right.

Do you want to be right, or do you wish to be happy?

Well, this process is all about being happy – therefore, from this perspective – being right – takes on a whole new meaning!

“What thoughts or actions, at this moment, are the right ones for my happiness in this moment?”

I would recommend that you watch each video a few times because even though you may understand intellectually what I am describing – your unconscious brain may need to be exposed to the information a few times before it registers that information.

After this free introduction, I am aiming for my videos to be between 30 and 50 minutes long, as I am going to delve deeply into the details to show you how to change yourself on many levels.

I know these longer videos fly in the face of our rapid YouTube consumption world where people’s attention span is only 3 minutes or so.

However, I believe this is one of the reasons anxiety is so prevalent amongst younger people – they are looking for quick solutions through partial information rather than spending the time to gain a deep understanding of how we really function and taking more responsibility for their self-wellness.

Also, by making time to watch a longer video, you are essentially setting aside time from your busy life or the various distractions you may have, and this process will become an essential part of recharging your biology and regaining your emotional energy.

I have cleverly constructed each video in such a way that all you need to do is sit back and watch it a few times, and it will sink (safely) into your subconscious brain.

Remember, just because you consciously understand a concept DOES NOT mean your unconscious understands or has even seen the idea – as they are on two completely separate systems!

All of our anxiety, phobias, addictions and bad behaviours are hardwired subconsciously – they just happen, they just fire off – regardless of what we are consciously thinking or knowing.

You consciously know sugar is bad for you, you knowingly accept you are on a diet, and yet, there you are (subconsciously) with your nose in the fridge.

Therefore, to consciously know something is almost irrelevant, but to rewire the unconscious brain is everything.

This is why intelligent individuals experience anxiety and OCD; they become so engrossed in the intricacies of the software (which you might say are their thoughts) that they neglect to update the underlying operating system.

So, the way we rewire the subconscious mind is to disregard the conscious mind and its logical gatekeepers, who say things like “you already know this” or “this is boring” or “what has this got to do with anxiety” or “This video is too long…”

We need to get behind that trap and retrain our subconscious through repetition, multi-sense activation, deceptive imagery and a raft of sneaky psychological tools that get the job done. I

It’s what marketing people have been doing to you with TV commercials for years.

Repetition, imagery and emotional anchoring are vital in reprogramming your subconscious mind, even if your conscious mind thinks it already knows everything.

Now, for some people who have done a lot of self-reflection, many of my concepts may be familiar, however, I would earnestly ask you to still pay attention because I will be bringing in many subtle twists and perspectives which may surprise you.

Apply yourself, keep an open mind and allow me to show you a new way through.