Anxiety, OCD & Depression Treatment Course – Video 2 Review

Welcome, I’m John Glanvill, and this is video two of my Calmness in Mind Process, where I teach you common-sense strategies that you can use (on yourself) to find more emotional well-being, in addition to any medical advice and medication you may already be receiving.

Now, because this is going to be a very comprehensive guide, we’ll start with first principles and work our way up to the really cool stuff.

Be patient if you’ve heard some of this before because, as I mentioned in my last video, just because you consciously think you know something, it doesn’t mean your unconscious brain does!

So, let’s dive straight in….

If it is safe to do so, please close your eyes, take a moment to focus your awareness on your breath (pause 15 seconds) —–

Now, place your attention on how you feel (pause 15 seconds)

And, now, can you evaluate how noisy or quiet the thoughts in your mind are (pause 10 seconds)……

OK, open your eyes.

Let’s consider what just happened.

Is breathing a conscious or sub-conscious activity – or is it both?

You placed your attention on your feelings – well, what exactly is your attention?

And what, indeed, are your feelings?

Who is the YOU that is checking how noisy your mind is?

And what is the mind that is making all that noise?

In just one simple exercise, there can be many different perspectives of who or what you are – and as we proceed, you will learn how they all work and how to use these various aspects of yourself more effectively.

I’ve read many times that loud noises and falling – are the only fears we were born with, and every other fear we have is learned.

Well, I don’t quite see that as the complete truth – I think falling and loud noises naturally invoke the inbuilt “startle response” within our central nervous system – and that makes us “jump” – so we pay attention to what is happening around us.

To call this response “fear”, I believe, is in error – perhaps we should call it a message of “pay attention” or “lookout“.

Our body may get alarmed or flooded with chemicals that stimulate us – ready for fight or flight – however, let’s not call that fear; let’s use a new language.

Perhaps we can say, “Argh, my unconscious mind and body have been ‘triggered’ by some event (or thoughts) and want to get my conscious attention.

If there is no “real” threat, we can say – “argh, my unconscious got it wrong, never mind, but it has still released those fear chemicals within me – so I can be “calm in my mind” even though my body will be agitated until those chemicals have run their course and burned off.”

So, when we were born, we had no real fears, no preferences, and no concepts about who we are (or who we should be) – we were just blank biological canvases – waiting to be programmed.

And programmed we were, by our parents, our culture, school, religion and a thousand other factors – into the person we are now, and that programming feels like “Me”.

And because it feels like “me” – the assumption is that I should be able to control myself, I should be able to manage my thoughts or change my feelings at a moment’s notice.

But the truth is, we are not in control – our breath just breathes us, our thoughts just materialise from nowhere, and our emotions can, in a moment, over or under-whelm us – we are not in control!

And this is where we really start our education of understanding ourselves at a deeper level – the absolute realisation that we are “not in control of anything” – and I really mean ANYTHING

Can you tell me one thing internally or externally that you can actually fully and repeatedly, consciously control?

We can’t control our feelings, thoughts, actions, or other people.

Sure, we can influence some things. I can choose to blink my eyes, but when I am not focusing on it consciously, they blink by themselves – we really can’t control outcomes, and definitely controlling our own emotions is very hard, if not impossible.

So then, who are we?

Because if we are going to learn how to overcome anxiety, OCD or depression, we need to approach it from two new perspectives.

Firstly, is there anything (at all) I can entirely control?….

Secondly, who (or what) is the specific aspect of “Me” that is trying to control those things anyway?

So, once again, if it is safe to do so, please close your eyes – and count how many thoughts or images arise in your mind (((( (pause 15 seconds)……

OK, open your eyes. How many thoughts did you count? 1 – 3 – 5 – none?

Well. the number doesn’t really matter; what’s important is this…

Who is the ‘YOU‘ that did the counting?

Are you the one observing and counting the thoughts – or are you the one creating and offering up the thoughts?

Think about it.

Of course, at some level, you are both. However, as we progress, I will be asking you to keep perspectives like this in mind: Is it the conscious part of you creating fearful, anxious thoughts, or are they just appearing subconsciously on the screen of your mind unasked for?

Later in this course, I will teach you how all these things work, but for now – I want you to imagine there is a part of you, which I am going to call the “observer“.

It’s the part of you that watched the thoughts as they arose, the perspective of yourself who just peers out of your eyes or witnesses your dreams, the aspect of yourself who watches, notices and observes everything that happens internally and externally – a kind of “silent watcher of all that happens”.

In fact, this part doesn’t really have any words or thoughts; they come “after” your observations – they come from other parts of your psyche, and I will introduce them to you in later videos, too.

This observer aspect doesn’t have any feelings; they come from your conditioned body – which is just responding to your thoughts.

So, although you may be the observer, you can still experience feelings or watch new thoughts or listen to judgements as they appear.

Now, if you already understand this, that’s good – and if you don’t, that’s fine too. It will become more evident in later videos; for now though, please just keep an open mind.

Consider this statement…..

“My body responds to ALL my thoughts as if they were true or actually happening.”

Perhaps you imagine meeting up with friends at the weekend, and you get a nice little feeling in your stomach.

You might think of meeting up with a colleague who annoys you and might get an uncomfortable feeling.

In both of those scenarios, nothing “real” actually happened. You created a “virtual story” in your mind about what you “thought” would happen in the future, and your body responded with a feeling that was interpreted as either favourable or unfavourable.

Your body really can’t tell the difference between a thought and reality – or even a dream!

You might suddenly wake up from a nightmare – and your heart is racing, and your body is all sweaty – well, your body just had a panic attack in your sleep – because your body thought the dream was real!

Really think about this…. a dream which you didn’t ask for, played out in your mind, out of your control – and your body thought it was real and gave you what it thought would be the correct emotional response.

Where were you during all of this?

Perhaps you awaken from another dream which had sexual content and find your body has become aroused as if the dream was real.

Your body just responds to thoughts as if they are true!

You may remember an incident from childhood and find your mood changes instantly – or watch a scary movie, and although you know the blood is only tomato ketchup – your body doesn’t, and it gets scared.

Your body, simply responds to, your sensory inputs as if they really were the truth of what is happening!

So, if we go back to our story about meeting up with some friends in a few days. We may run some thoughts in our mind, such as, “It’ll be good to see them again” – “I really love that restaurant” or “Bob is so funny”.

And from these good thoughts, memories and images – the body responds with a nice feeling – and because we have a nice feeling, we are looking forward to the event, and we are very likely to ensure that the meeting will take place because if it feels good thinking about it, it will certainly feel good to do it.

But, let’s just break that down and see what that really means…

A thought about something that has yet to happen – kicked off a chain of events that subconsciously resulted in the agitation of our organs (which, if gentle, we call ‘a feeling‘ and if strong, we call ‘an emotion‘) and the subsequent release of chemicals into the bloodstream produced a nice ‘mood’ – from which we make our decisions on what we will or won’t do.

All of this happens in seconds, mostly unconsciously and (usually) for people with anxiety or OCD – the emotional decision “feels” right – but may, in fact, be wrong.

You may think to yourself; I can’t stand up to my boss because I feel too nervous.

Rather than thinking; although my body is nervous, my self-worth will not accept being spoken to like that.

What happens is – anxiety, OCD and depression, over time – uncalibrate people’s emotional acuity, they lose the ability to trust themselves, they become worse at making decisions or fear their emotions overwhelming them.

Any person trained in how to sell knows that people buy emotionally and then justify the expenditure with logic and reason.

But, because an anxious person’s emotional system is out of whack, they can’t trust their feelings and hence struggle to make ‘gut’ decisions – then lose themselves in “what if” thinking, trying to find answers, which the unconscious responds to as they were true, which just tires the emotional system further – it a loop and it’s a trap.

Therefore we need to explore, emotions and thoughts a little deeper to see just what we are actually dealing with.

When we see a map of a human, it is easy to assume that we were always as we are now; however, in our distant past, we were very different indeed.

And I would like to give you a very simplistic model to use – to understand how we evolved and became who we are now.

Please allow me to be loose with my terminology and simplistic with my approach – because it is the concept that is important, not the tiny pedantic details.

So, let’s reverse evolution, take ourselves back through time, to understand how we really function.

The part of our brain that controls logic, reason, language, and complex thinking, I’m told, only really evolved in the last 30,000 years or so (of course, it might have been 100,000 years ago or only 12,000; it doesn’t matter)

What does matter is – It’s our prefrontal cortex, and I’d like to loosely refer to this as our consciousness or intelligent thinking mind.

Before this evolved, we were run by our “limbic brain” or emotional brain, which could be considered to be the unconscious, subconscious or the automatic animal part of us.

Our language was very simplistic back then (as speech is mainly located in the newer parts), and we made decisions subconsciously or automatically without language just by responding to our environment and our sensory inputs.

Our subconscious, nonverbal limbic brain would make decisions to keep us alive from the following perspectives…

We are animals, and all we want is food, water, shelter and reproduction; we are non-verbal and probably only as intelligent as (perhaps) an 8-year-old in the complexity of the strategies we use to remain alive and respond to life.

Our limbic brain told us what to do by sending messages through our autonomic nervous system to our organs, and via their agitation, we responded – gentle agitation, it’s OK, big agitation, it’s not OK, get out of there!

Now, at this point, I am, of course, beginning to explain the Fight or Flight response, of which I am not going to go into details about because you can read about it in a million places – and you should, in fact, that is your homework.

However, what I want to do, is entirely reframe fight or flight into what it really is – which is your old animal – yes / no system, the way your subconscious mind makes decisions for you and tells your body what IT wants you to do, much like within in a dog or cat.

We communicated our orders to the body via the central nervous system – which created feelings or emotions by agitating our internal organs, and we perceived those as instructions of what we should do – move towards good things or run away from bad things.

Another way of looking at it is that we unconsciously made non-verbal decisions that were interpreted emotionally via our bodies.

Should we go back even further, hundreds of thousands of years, before we had a limbic emotional brain – we only had a very simplistic reptilian brain.

This simple brain was also plugged into all of our organs – so impulses from our brain could tell us what to do via the agitation of our organs; however, the brain didn’t do much thinking – the brain was pretty much hardwired from birth with the primary animal “program” of “how to be.”

I am told the reptilian mind is much like that within a crocodile – apparently, all crocodiles always do the same thing; that’s why the crazy guys who work with them are relatively safe because they know how the crocodiles will always respond.

This system is still very active deep within us. We might call it our instinct or survival responses – and during times of real danger, this system takes control, turns off all the brain systems above it and just tries to instinctually protect us.

If I were to throw something at you – instinctively, you would respond by closing your eyes and raising your hands to cover your face. You can’t not do it, even if you try; that’s how deeply ingrained this system is.

So, personally, I just trust this part of me – I know that in times of danger, it will just kick in and do its best for me – even if the trigger is wrong, like a leaf hitting my car windscreen and making me “jump”.

I really would urge you to find time to research these three parts of the brain that have evolved over time – they are all still within you, each of them is a part of you, and each of them is still active within you, and they all have differing goals for you.

So, as we learn to handle anxiety I’ll be teaching you how to manage and reprogramme these parts of your brain in great detail as this is fundamental to finding more calmness and happiness.

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So let’s summarise what we have covered here.

Very simply stated, the way we evolved, was like this;

Originally, we were instinctive animals, we just habitually responded to life non-verbally via a pre-programmed reptilian mind.

We then evolved to generate the limbic emotional mind that had the logic of a 7 or 8-year-old child; however, we were still animals.

Our brain unconsciously makes decisions for us, then informs us of those decisions through agitating our organs – which we call feelings and emotions.

Then, more recently we developed our prefrontal cortex and neocortex, the part of our brain that adds language, logic, reason, rules, fairness, kindness, love etc. the aptitudes that make us human rather than an animal.

Put another way (evolutionarily speaking) we are emotional creatures who have recently learned how to think.

Conscious logical language-based thinking was the last capability that evolved within us – it was an add-on to an already very successful childlike emotional creature.

It was what moved us from animals to humans.

Now, here’s the takeaway that metaphorically I need you to recognise – The conscious part and the subconscious part of the brain are on two distinctly separate systems – one is who you feel you are, and the other is who you think you are.

The animal and the human, the feeler and the thinker,  instinctual and logical, selfish and kind.

Neither part truly knows what the other one is doing – yet we assume that they understand each other! But they don’t! They are two separate systems running within us, and we need to manage them both in new ways if finding calmness is our goal.

Now, a person experiencing anxiety is primarily operating like a thinking creature who is trying to control their emotions -but that is just not how we are wired up, and it makes things worse.

I’ll repeat this; We are emotional creatures who have learned to think.

Your unconscious mind hardly understands what you consciously think as it operates very simply and mostly by automated programs and responses.

Your unconscious mind (which controls your emotions) is hardly listening to what you say; it’s listening to how you say it, it’s responding to your tonality, speed of thought and what your body language is doing.

That’s why we talk softly and slowly to a crying baby – it soothes their subconscious mind – and we must learn to do the same to ourselves.

Your unconscious mind sits in the darkness of your skull – and what it would love to say to the conscious part of your brain is…

Listen, I am your unconscious mind, it is my job to keep you alive, it’s my job to give you the right emotion at the right time to take you towards that which is good for you and away from that which I perceive to be bad (or have been trained to believe is bad or dangerous).

As I live in darkness and don’t understand language well, I rely on the speed, tone, and volume of your thoughts and your bodily responses to guess what is happening in the external world and to hopefully provide the right responses.

Much like the way a dog doesn’t really know what our words mean, he is really responding to our tonality and our body language.

And for those experiencing anxiety or OCD – because your thinking and worrying are never-ending and panicky, the unconscious biologically gets overwhelmed from being triggered all the time.

It gets tired and drained – and this exhaustion is the source of all anxiety, OCD and depression – and I will prove this to you in the next video.

For now, please be aware that we are entering into a vast topic, we’ve only just scratched the surface; you don’t have any answers yet – because you still need to know more about what you are actually dealing with.

So, let’s recap what we covered today… Do we want to be right or happy?

There is nothing in life we can truly control.

What aspect of you is trying to control everything anyway?

Repetition reprogrammes the subconscious – and it’s OK to fib to your own subconscious mind to trick it into calming down and rewiring itself.

By finding the observer aspect of yourself it is possible to watch thoughts and feelings rather than getting caught up in them.

Your body responds to all thoughts as if they were true.

We are emotional creatures who learned to think – stop trying to be a thinking creature who tries to control their emotions.

Our subconscious mind does not process language very well, therefore, you can’t consciously think your way out of anxiety, it just makes things worse.

Both your subconscious mind and your conscious mind are on completely separate systems – they are not naturally working together and this is at the core of your problem.