Mastering Your Senses and Inner Dialogue for Emotional Freedom

I’m John Glanvill, author of The Calmness in Mind Process for overcoming Anxiety, OCD, and Depression.

Understanding Anxiety and OCD Patterns

As you are well aware, anxiety and OCD tend to cause doubt within the mind of the person, meaning they often need reassurance, dislike feeling out of control, and get stuck in catastrophising loops about what might happen next.

They then fear the body’s natural physical response to the biological release of adrenaline and cortisol from all that prior worrying, thus sending them into spiralling worry and fear loops.

And I have been urging you to consider: what are you really in control of anyway?

I want you to get into the mindset that it is okay to feel out of control and it is okay to be out of control – that is what living life is all about. Making the most of what life throws at you – or stirring it up a bit to create new opportunities.

You know that if the body releases adrenaline, it will evoke a feeling of fear, and that is normal. And you know that your brain is currently erroneously wired to see danger where it is not.

So then, why would you be scared of the feeling of anxiety? The body’s natural response – just being released at the wrong time?

Can you see that how your body may feel could be irrelevant? “Oh yeah, my brain accidentally triggered the release of fear chemicals.

Therefore, I’d better start working on how I reprogramme my brain rather than trying to stop these feelings!”

In addition, why would you be worried about future events or outcomes that haven’t happened yet?

Why would you be running negative stories in your mind about the past that make you feel sad, rather than running happy stories that could make you feel good?

If how we feel is largely based on the chemicals in our blood, why are we not doing everything in our power to trick our bodies into releasing good peptides and hormones naturally, regardless of the truth of the story we use to do it?

Then, as we stop running negative, scary stories and start introducing new, positive ones, our cells will begin to think that the “world out there” is getting better and is less dangerous, so it allows for the deregulation of stress receptors and the increase of receptors for happier peptides – like we discussed in video seven.

Unless, as best we can, we try to influence the production and release of our own feel-good chemicals, we are just passengers to what our conditioning or life throws at us – and I think that is sad when there is so much we can do for ourselves.

Reframing Life’s Purpose

Remember too that this course is not about exploring the truth about anything; it is about exploring what you can actually do to change how you feel – to change how you think – and how to overcome fear – to expand the experience of your life.

Rather than fearing embarrassment or even death, how might we fear missing out on the richness of life, love, travel, connection, creation, and just being?

Can the heaviness of depression become a lighter emotion that drives you towards your intentions?

Do you even know what you want from life?

Can the fear of anxiety be swapped for a gentle calmness?

Can the rigidity and control of OCD be exchanged for the agility to respond to life in any way at any time?

Can the skill range of your personality be expanded or even extended to incorporate the behaviours of other characters, like your Settler becoming more Warrior – or the Nomad becoming more playful?

Can our bodies be made less dense by releasing trapped trauma, which will change the frequency we vibrate at and encourage our intrinsic health?

Rather than asking, “How do I make my anxiety or OCD go away?” can we ask, “What do I need to do to become a new person in whom anxiety and OCD would struggle to survive?”

Remember, anxiety (metaphorically) is a parasite that feeds off fear – so how do we change how we think, how we behave, our values, beliefs, perspectives on life, how we socialise, conduct relationships, how we work, and, importantly, find more peace within ourselves?

Exploring the Role of Senses

So, to really master some of these skills, we need to go back to basic principles – and in particular to our senses (because they are our primary tool for experiencing life) and explore how they function so we can really optimise them in our favour.

Do our senses tell us the truth, or do they just guide us? Can we trust our senses? Should we trust our senses? How accurate are our senses?

Because the truth is quite shocking – and if you want to get out of anxiety and OCD, I genuinely believe creating a new relationship with your senses is key to your recovery.

Vision and Perception

So, let’s explore our senses – beginning with our eyes, sight, and vision.

And, although what I am about to say is taught in school, most people seem to forget that we don’t look out of our eyes; in fact, nothing comes out of our eyes. It’s a one-way street, where light comes into our eyes.

Light emitted from a source reflects off an object and goes into our eyes. Those two separate streams of data from each eye are digitised and sent as an electrical pulse down each optic nerve to the back of the brain, where the occipital lobe resides.

Here, they are reconstructed, stitched back together – gaps where your nose was and blind spots from the optic nerve are then “filled in” with a guess of what would be there – and a 3D visual representation is made (in the back of your brain) of what is out there.

So, we do not truly see what is out there, just our brain’s best guess, best interpretation. What we see out there is actually the image made in our brain, not the reality of what is out there!

But it feels so authentic, even though the image is in our brain, in the darkness of our skull; it feels like we are looking at it out of our eyes! But we are not!

To make it even more incredible, the object we are observing (that which the light is bouncing off) doesn’t have any colour!

Colour is something that our eyes add as they decode the varied spectrum of light waves bouncing off the differing reflective or absorbent surfaces of the object (or person) we are looking at.

Really think about this – our brain is making its best interpretation of what is out there. However, we believe that interpretation is reality (when, of course, it’s not), and our response to that interpretation feeds our thoughts, and our thoughts feed our emotions, which feed our behaviours.

At worst, it is cherry-picking all the negative things. For example, an OCD person’s conditioned brain, upon walking into a kitchen, may present an image where a full waste bin, dirty plates, a splash of food on the tiles, and a grubby dishcloth may be the centre of attention.

Another person in the same kitchen may notice the pretty window blind, the quarry tiles on the floor, and the packet of chocolate biscuits.

What we see (or don’t see) is determined by how we were ‘conditioned’ throughout our life – we see what we are expecting to see.

You could say there is the objective reality of what is happening out there – then there is the virtual reality, a subjective story we make of it, plus the additional stories we add to that story based on our beliefs about ourselves, who we ought to be, or how we were trained to see life.

Can you see how error-prone this can be? But also, what a huge opportunity to rewire and reprogramme ourselves? Once we can see with new eyes, virtual eyes – we can condition our brain to see things differently.

Even when we look at ourselves in the mirror, we do not see the reality of what we look like; we see the representation our brain makes of us, along with our conditioned stories about how we look.

I found it totally liberating when this realisation sank in; firstly, it doesn’t matter what I see when I look in the mirror – because nobody else is seeing that same representation – all that matters is there is no spinach in my teeth.

Plus, I will never know what anybody else sees when they look at me – for all I know, to them, I am incredibly handsome!

And that’s the story I tell myself, lovingly and playfully – like I have been saying all along, it feels better to placebo your body for good feelings than bad ones because it really does affect your subsequent behaviours.

Can you see, too, how easy it is for our unconscious mind to trick us? We are looking for our car keys on the table, but our mind hides them – we can be looking directly at our keys – but, remember, we are not looking out of our eyes; we see what our mind lets us see – because our little eight-year-old may have a sabotage agenda in mind for us!

This is how hypnosis works – when the hypnotist says you won’t be able to see me, the person on the stage’s brain is just erasing the picture of the man in the image created in their brain.

They are not looking out of their eyes and not seeing him; they are looking at the image in their brain that has been easily modified, like the brain using its own copy of Photoshop.

The more the person believes the hypnotist, the more likely their mind can be tricked.

So, you can see how important the role our beliefs play in what we see about the world, other people, and ourselves.

What we think is reality is just our virtual reality created by our brain, manipulated by our beliefs and conditioned by our stories. Really think about this…

Can you see now how normal it is to have a hallucination? Everything we see is a hallucination. Our dreams are a hallucination. The world is our dream.

Are we making our internal dream of ourselves and the world horrible or lovely? Because either way, it is still a dream.

Perhaps, too, you can glimpse now how conditions such as schizophrenia, psychotic delusions, or recreational drug hallucinations can be far less scary?

When you realise all of our vision is just a rich visual interpretation, all happening within our brain, that can easily be influenced by ingested chemicals, beliefs, opinions, our personalities, and our emotions.

Our Settler will see a different virtual reality than our Nomad; one wants to fit in and follow rules, the other wants to stand out and bend rules!

In fact, rather than being scared by a hallucination, perhaps we should be thinking, “Wow, how cool is my brain, how creative am I? I wonder if I can make this scary hallucination safe? Or this safe image unsafe, just for fun!”

What about great horror book authors and filmmakers like Stephen King or Steven Spielberg – if their brains were proposing thoughts of harming, killing, or sexual abuse, they would be thinking, “Excellent, I can turn those daydreams into a book!”

Yet, a person with OCD who had similar thoughts might be afraid to spend time with their family because they fear the daydream is about themselves and that they may do those terrible things…

Thoughts are just thoughts; we don’t get to choose them, but we do get to decide how we interpret them or to ignore them.

Addressing OCD Intrusive Thoughts

A quick note here about OCD intrusive thoughts about harming or abusing other people (which, by the way, are very common). The chances of you doing these things are very slim.

Yes, there are people out there who do those sorts of things, and they are called psychopaths, which means they lack remorse or concern for others.

So, the very fact that you are concerned you might do it means you are not one of them!

It’s just a trick of your OCD to stop you from getting on with your life and reminding you to stop thinking – because negative thinking is exhausting your body and emptying your emotional energy battery.

Now then, the brains of people who are ‘glass half empty pessimists’ have become conditioned into unconsciously searching for all the things that could go wrong and presenting them to be the focus of what they see and where they place their attention.

That’s why so much of my work is teaching you how to change your story, adjust your inner dialogue, and placebo yourself with positivity and gentle love.

How can you become a ‘glass half full optimist’? Because the world their brain creates, through their virtual vision, leads to more pleasant thoughts and calmer, happier feelings.

Remember, too, that our sight is linked directly to our amygdala, which is why what we see can instantly kick off a fear response. This is why the vision exposure therapy taught in video eight is so powerful.

I would recommend you spend a lot of time moving your trigger images from the unsafe to the safe amygdala database via repetition of the visualisation and tapping technique taught in video eight.

As the mathematician and philosopher René Descartes approximately said, “There is the world as it is and the world as we see it.”

Another of his quotes I like is: “An optimist may see light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?”

It took me quite a while to master living in both worlds, the objective world out there and my subjective world in here.

They are both real (in their own ways); however, it is in my inner subjective manipulation of the world where I can make the biggest difference to my calmness.

It is far easier for me to change how I see the world than to change the world to be how I want to see it!

I truly hope you can begin to see how fluid, transient, creative, reprogrammable, malleable, and influenceable our own brains are?

But we have to consciously retrain our unconscious.

Just because we consciously know something doesn’t mean the unconscious knows it too!

No, we have to spend time consciously reprogramming our unconscious until that new programme becomes updated and takes over. Repetition, repetition, and more repetition of a positive message.

Hearing and Sound Perception

Let’s stay with our senses a little longer and explore our hearing, too, as I think it is often overlooked, especially by those who have experienced psychotic episodes or take a lot of medication.

Sounds cause vibration waves, which go into our ears, and then our brain compares those vibration patterns to a database of known sounds and words, thus decoding their meaning – “Ah, that’s the noise of a dog barking,” or, “He said, ‘Have you seen my car keys?’”

As with sight, sound also goes through our amygdala, and loud noises or a person shouting may set off an amygdala alarm to get you ready for some danger.

However, certain sounds may be stored erroneously in our amygdala’s unsafe database. For example, a scary teacher from school may have had a strong foreign accent, and when a person speaks with a similar accent or tonality, it might set you off.

Or a parent may have criticised you with a phrase like, “What are you doing that for?” and that phrase may trigger an amygdala response when spoken by somebody else.

Remember, too, that like memories, sounds can be moved from the unsafe to the safe amygdala database via most forms of exposure therapy.

Hypothesis on Psychosis and Medication

Another hypothesis of mine, which pertains to psychosis, is that many people who experience anxiety and OCD are heavily medicated, especially with sedatives, to calm their anxiety down.

These sedatives turn down the responsiveness of our senses; pain gets numbed, and our reactions are dimmed, too.

For some, this sedation may alter the frequency at which incoming noise is registered. This means when this modified frequency is forwarded to the brain for decoding via pattern matching, there is no match.

So, the brain either jumps to a fear response because it’s an unrecognised sound or latches onto the nearest match for the erroneous frequency.

Let me give you an example: I remember once being heavily sedated after outpatient surgery. I was standing in my kitchen, and all I could hear was a voice in my head whispering to me with a Scottish accent. A person was talking inside my head, and it wasn’t me!

This really startled me until I realised it was the noise from my dishwasher being incorrectly pattern-matched in my brain due to my hearing being sedated slightly.

Now, in that instance, I just smiled to myself – but I could clearly see how another person could have become quite psychotic about those “perceived” voices and turned them into further scary stories, starting a new anxiety loop.

Can you see how background noises from fans, air conditioners, traffic, and the general sounds of life being misunderstood by the brain, in some medicated individuals, may lead to continuous and fearful confusion and dissociation?

The Unreliability of Senses

So, what I am pointing to is that our senses are not reliable! Our brain is a wonderful interpretation tool, but it is very open to errors from its conditioning, its chemical balance, and its single-perspective myopia, which we might call our beliefs.

You could say our brain or mind is our sixth sense, which pulls all the data supplied by our senses together and tries to make an understanding of them, then unconsciously decides what our best plan of action may be and gives us that information in the form of thoughts and feelings.

And as true as those thoughts and feelings may seem, they are just our programming in action – and they are JUST AN INTERPRETATION!

And all this goes on automatically, unconsciously, within our little horse.

But the good news is that we, as the rider, can override what the brain suggests, what the thoughts propose, and what the mind predicts will happen.

We can observe it all unfolding, we can see how the body responds to those thoughts, how the triggered fear responses from our amygdala flood us with chemicals, and we can watch the stories our little horse tells itself about everything – it is all just a giant virtual reality!

So, my question to you is: “Which version of the virtual realities will be best for your happiness?”

And, as I keep saying, you are the observer; you can be calm regardless of the whole routine unfolding beneath you. It’s not your problem; it’s the horse’s, and as the rider, you can just (silently) move towards the outcomes you are looking for at that moment, regardless of how the horse feels or the stories she is telling you.

A Personal Anecdote

This reminds me of a Nomadic prank I performed on a playful friend of mine, which resulted in quite an unexpected consequence.

My friend had a massive fear of heights, and one day I engineered for us to emerge from a car park into a shopping centre at a place where we were four floors up, and where the down escalator had a glass sidewall, which exposed the drop all the way down to the ground floor.

I kept him distracted as we walked – and suddenly, he found himself on the escalator, and, of course, his fear exploded. I thought it would add to my fun to lean right over the handrail and say, “Wow, that’s a long way down!”

In his panic, he grabbed me by my belt, pulled me away from the edge, and restrained me until we reached the first landing – where he was both angry and (kind of) laughing at the same time.

He said, “John, if you knew how scary that is for me, you wouldn’t have done that!”

I said, “I do know how scary that is.” I grabbed his hand and placed it over my heart, which was pounding with fear because I had dangled over the edge of the escalator four floors up.

He said, “Why is your heart racing? You are not afraid of heights!” I said, “No, I am not afraid of heights – but my body is!”

He just looked at me blankly and said, “I thought people who were okay with heights didn’t get fearful responses?” I said, “No, they are just okay with what the body does; they might even call that feeling excitement?”

And with that one realisation, we went back up the escalator, then came down again, and he realised his mind could be calm, even though his body wasn’t!

So wonderful to see a whole internal dream changed for a new one in just a matter of minutes! And you can do the same.

How many fixed beliefs do you have that could be changed just by altering your perspective, your attitude, or your knowledge?

The Role of Frequency and Energy

In video nine, I introduced our atomic battery and explained that trapped trauma makes our body dense and lowers the natural frequency we vibrate at.

For some of you, this might sound a bit weird; however, you have come this far with me, so let’s keep an open mind!

I went on to teach you in video fifteen why it is so important to release this stuck energy so we can become less dense and raise our natural frequency – which we might call emotional and physical health.

To put this into a more graphical representation, let’s look at the effect of frequency oscillation and sound on matter.

If we hook up a speaker to a metal plate, then play sounds at various frequencies, watch what happens to the sand sitting on that plate.

As we adjust the tone, the frequency takes random particles and forces them into astonishing and beautiful patterns of nature.

Why? Because there is information in energy, and sound is energy.

And what we need to understand is that our voices and our thoughts have a frequency (often outside our hearing capabilities), and the frequencies we send out (through our thoughts) organise our matter into coherent patterns, which we might call health – or incoherent, messy patterns, which indicate disharmony in the body, which we might experience as illness or distress.

This is why I am pointing out that we need to discharge our trapped trauma, which enables our natural frequencies to be attained through raising our vibration.

Plus, if our internal and external dialogue becomes that of a soft, gentle, loving, and positive nature, this raises the frequency we resonate at. It also raises the frequency of those around us.

At specific frequencies, we can even see matter acting the way our universe does, forming into spiralling galaxies with arms that reach out and wrap around. Why? Because everything is energy; sound is energy, and our thoughts are energy, too.

And if we pass sound through iron filings, they take on form and act together – similar to how all the separate atoms in our body act together, stick together all the time we have a cohesive resonance – which we might call health.

So, making our bodies less dense through releasing trapped energy, by finding cohesive resonance through calmness – and then changing our thought patterns to be kind, open, loving, and permissive – a whole new era in biological health evolves, along with the recharged energy to get on with the life you really want.

So, thoughts have energy, words have energy, your perspective and actions in any moment have power and do affect matter and the resonance of those people around you.

Energy and Behaviour

We will explore this in more detail in later videos, but consider this:

How we think, talk, and behave does give off a frequency vibration, which may be high and in resonance, which is natural and life-affirming.

Or our thoughts and actions may emit a low vibration at a chaotic resonance, which is life-diminishing.

Let me give you some examples:

You could be impatient (low energy and tiring) or tolerant (high energy and encompassing).
You could forever be planning or start creating.
You could feel limited or unlimited.
Rigidly defend a belief or evolve a belief.
Blame a person or take responsibility.
Be careless or disciplined.
Reactive or detached.
Demanding or just having a preference.
Critical or accepting.
Fearful or brave.
Condemning or forgiving.

How you see the world, how you talk to yourself, and how you behave set up within you an energy frequency that, at a biological level, will fill you with energy or suck the life out of you (and others).

And, as you let go of trying to control life, more energy is available to you and through you – you just need to consciously stop resisting it and let it in!

Summary and Homework

So, a quick summary:

Our senses are not necessarily the truth.

What we see is the virtual reality our brain constructs for us in our head, not necessarily what is actually out there!

Our beliefs, opinions, and stories are added to that virtual reality model in our head, and our brain proposes thoughts and feelings that try to help us consciously choose what we do next.

There is the world out there and the world inside our head – we need to learn how to live in each of them.

And finally, what we say and what we think are energy fields, and I am urging you to consider: are your conscious thoughts negative and life-diminishing or positive and life-affirming?

To say “I love you” is a very different energy field to receive than hearing “I hate you” – be it to others or yourself!

And that is your homework.

How can you begin to consciously work on a new internal self-dialogue that is kind and positive, regardless of what your unconscious mind is proposing (and regardless of what you actually might believe yet)?

So, when the unconscious says, “You idiot,” you consciously talk over that old story with a new one: “I’m a lovely person.”

Be creative; imagine you are talking to your own child – what positive language would you be using with them so their self-esteem is emboldened?

Then, I would like you to consider your external dialogue with others; how can you jazz it up a bit, how can you add more energy?

If they say, “Where shall we go tonight?” rather than saying, “Oh, I don’t mind,” try saying, “You know what, I’d love to go to that pub down by the river for dinner; shall I see if I can book us a table by the window?”

I don’t care if you feel down; I don’t care that you feel anxious about going out – remember, you are changing yourself, and that change starts here.

In addition, consider how the other person will feel if they heard such a direct and enthusiastic response. That positive energy will lift them, which will also change how they begin to treat you.

Can you see life is a game, a dance, and if you are smart, you will start playing that game in new ways.

How can you make positive dialogue a game with your partner, where you are not allowed to moan or complain; you have to turn every interaction into a positive statement?

“That was lucky; it could have been much worse.”
“How lucky are we that we can go out for dinner?”
“How wonderful that we have running water.”

In the beginning, this will feel a bit false and hammy – but you will be surprised what happens when you stop complaining and start positively accepting that what is happening now is what’s happening now – and you put a positive spin on it.

That way, your story changes, your vibration increases, your partner sees you differently, your body responds differently, more positive peptides are released within you, your chemical soup changes, and your cells can begin to produce more receptors for those happy peptides!

It just makes sense!

In my next video, I am really going to go to town on how we change our beliefs and reprogramme our brains for more of the positivity I am talking about.