Reprogram Your Brain with Positive ERP: Overcome Anxiety by Rewriting Unconscious Stories

By John Glanvill, Author of The Calmness in Mind Process for Overcoming Anxiety, OCD, and Depression

Welcome – this is Video fifty, part three of five – in my Calmness in Mind ERP Series – where we explore common-sense solutions for your calmer life.

Releasing Your Greatness Through Conscious Reprogramming

I’ve called this video – Releasing your greatness by consciously hacking into your unconscious brain, to test the integrity of the data it uses to make decisions.

Because if your anxiety stops you from driving your car, or makes you repeatedly check things, or if you have to please everybody, if you are averse to risk, or if you can’t touch anything red, or if you can’t use a public toilet – or if you think you’ll harm or abuse another person.

Then perhaps the unconscious data your brain currently uses to analyse your situation and formulate your automatic responses might have become corrupted.

Therefore, by repeatedly avoiding that which scares you and running the same fearful stories, you’ll be using (negative ERP), which reinforces those fears over the top of the corrupted (or incorrect) data.

This is why (without a sensible intervention program) people usually get stuck, worry more, get worse, and sadly squander the (potentially) best years of their lives, going around in circles (and pretending it is OK) when it obviously isn’t.

A Strategy for Reprogramming Your Brain

So, our new plan is to develop a strategy whereby we can isolate certain brain parts, reformat them, scrub the data, and then reintroduce new data more aligned with the automatic responses we’d prefer our brain to use in the future.

And that’s the goal of this video: to show you the what and why of reprogramming yourself so you can then take this information and modify it to suit your specific issues, then do the work (and the repetition) to code these new responses back into the brain, of the head, of the body. – Which is not you, as you are (conscious awareness) the observer of what the brain and body do!

As ever, I can’t give you any proof this is true, but it seems to be common sense true, and it’s certainly what I found to be true for me – and you must find what is true for you, as we are all different, but there are many patterns and similarities.

Acknowledging the Unconscious Brain and Body

So, for this new form of positive ERP to work, the first step is to deeply acknowledge (if you can) that 99% of all the things that happen to you are automatically done by the body and the brain – they are unconscious, they are automatic, and they are incredible, they are not intellectual, but they are very functional.

They keep you alive, cell reproduction, digestion, breathing, waste removal, temperature control, reproduction, and natural immunity, all automatically, silently working together, keeping you safe as best they can if you would only get out of their way and stop interfering.

The brain/body just does what it was programmed to do, with a bias to keeping you alive and reproducing, but its logic is simplistic, like an eight-year-old.

All this happens unconsciously to you, not driven by conscious you! Even walking, talking, eating, typing, having sex, running, wiggling your fingers – you are not doing it.

You may initialise it with a conscious thought – “I’ll wiggle my fingers”, but, thereafter, it just happens; like me talking, it just comes out by itself.

If you accidentally slip, then recover your balance or if you roll over while sleeping – though it feels like you are consciously doing these things, you are not – they happen unconsciously.

You get cleverly awoken from your slumber by your unconscious, which makes you move because the blood has stopped flowing to your left leg, so you need to roll over onto your right-hand side to stop tissue damage.

But as you wake, you get all grumpy and say, “Why can’t I sleep?” Rather than saying, “Thank you, little body, for keeping me safe, and I’m sorry that my fat legs cause you these circulation problems.

Let me set myself some conscious intentions to lose weight, do more exercise, and get some cold shower exposures to increase flexibility in my circulatory system – as I wish to help you as much as you are non-judgementally helping me!”

Can you see what a different story this is?

The Role of Unconscious Belief Systems

Our unconscious brain/body is elegantly simple – it keeps us alive, urges us to reproduce, tries to second guess what will happen next so we are prepared, and then it attempts to offer up proposals (ideas, concepts, thoughts) for what it thinks might be an appropriate response, for our best well-being (in that moment) based upon all the information that was included in the programs that were programmed into us as we grew up.

Your body will never judge you – it’s here to serve you unconditionally; it operates automatically by the programs programmed into it from others and from how you have trained it via how you consciously talk to it each day.

What it hears the most (regardless of its truth) – forms its unconscious belief systems, which, once automated, stop any evidence not in line with that belief from ever entering into the memory of the brain.

This is why there is no point reassuring an anxious person because their belief system will just unconsciously reject (and forget) whatever you tell them – and then it will still run the same belief system because it has no evidence to support it changing – as it already rejected that information – it is an elegant OCD loop, trap.

This is why you can tell a person you love them ten times or check the door is locked ten times, but they still don’t believe you because that data is not actually getting past the brain’s belief system firewall and into the core of the brain to be registered.

Therefore, it is only by breaking the belief system – and gaining new real-life experiences that those old beliefs might be changed.

The Brain as a Feedback System

Do you remember when we were children and played that game where you had to find something hidden, and the other children would say ‘warmer’ or ‘colder’ depending on whether you were getting closer or going the wrong way?

Well, our auto-meat-suit communicates by making us feel pain (biologically, mentally, and emotionally) when we are going the wrong way in life or if we misunderstand the basics of what it needs – it is screaming colder, colder, but it does it biologically and unconsciously by scaring us with our worst fears to get our attention.

Then, when we get it right, it rewards us with deep pleasure – so we know we are on the right path for both what it needs (as our service provider) and what we need to do as we grow to become of more use to nature by becoming wiser, more creative, and more loving.

It’s absolutely incredible!

It’s here for you – program it and tell it what you consciously want it to do – because if you don’t, society, corporations, culture, religion, or the media will – then you are just a passenger dragged along behind your programmed horse, rather than the fearless immortal rider of that wonderful multi-function-tool (at whatever stage of its reconditioning you happen to find it in today!)

When seen from this perspective – it always makes me smile when pet owners treat their cats better than they treat their own meat-suit – imagine how their bodies might feel witnessing that disparity.

Reconnecting with Natural Intelligence

We are a very programmed species, and waking up to this shocking fact seems to be the prevailing zeitgeist for those brave enough to question everything rather than blindly accepting what they are told.

I think we often overlook the natural, energetic intelligence within us that connects us to the macro-environment of nature due to the overdeveloped attachment we have to the conscious thinking and intellectual mind.

When I was young, I used to do a lot of cross-country running, and my favourite part was running through forests or down steep and rugged hill paths.

I soon realised that my body, my legs, and my feet could automatically jump, hop, twist, and rapidly find all the right places to land, and if I stumbled, they could recover in impressive ways faster than I could actually consciously keep up with.

And if I did consciously think too much, it would either get in the way of this incredible unconscious (and innate) ability – or it would use its sensible logic and reason to talk me out of trusting these impressive abilities with fearful stories.

I remember getting to the bottom of some dangerous hills really quickly and overtaking many other more cautious runners, and at the bottom – I would think, ‘Wow, how cool am I?’

Obviously, I can see now that was my ego, trying to take credit for something that it wasn’t even doing!

And if I did fall (because something out of my brain/body’s control changed the computable variables of the situation), like a rock being loose or another person’s foot tripping me, it was still amazing that the brain/body still did its best (in real-time) to analyse how I might fall and automatically put me in physical positions to minimise any harm or shut down my memory to hide the trauma of some impact.

Plus, if there was damage, it would automatically repair itself (if it could).

It’s bloody amazing, but few people go around saying – “How lucky am I to have one of these most incredible meat suits!”

Seemingly, we humans are mesmerised by the concept of identifying with our logical and reasoning-conscious brains and using them to decide what is best for our self-regulating meat suit, which will tell you what it needs if you know how to listen.

Instead, we say things like – I will only eat this because I am a that, or this supplement will help with XYZ, or this crystal will help me align with that whatsit, and I can’t buy that thing because it comes from that specific country – all of which are conscious programs of which our multi-function meat-suit couldn’t care less about and is often negatively impacted by!

Trusting Your Body’s Natural Wisdom

But my point is simple. Our body already knows what is good or bad for it unconsciously – just sniff some old milk or walk near stinging nettles, and you’ll unconsciously intuit something might be wrong – without the need for your over-conditioned and programmed intelligent pre-frontal cortex telling you what it thinks will keep you safe!

That part of our brain was the last part to develop (evolutionarily speaking), and we worked just fine before it arrived. Yes, it’s good for doing calculations, but it is rubbish at knowing what the body truly needs!

No other creature on the planet washes their food, disinfects their nests, or can look up on the internet which plants are poisonous; they just intrinsically know from some nature-based energetic database that they intuit or they expand their experiential knowledge by sampling many different things and finding out what is true for them.

They are just at one with nature – not in a saving-the-planet kind of way, just in an energetically connected and sampling every moment with experiential data (rather than thinking) kind of way.

Sure, your conscious brain may have influenced an idea, a concept, or a thought that the brain/body then actioned (or rejected), but you are not doing it; it just happens once instructed – and it’s very cool, and it is very easily tricked, adapted, and reprogrammed if you know what you are doing.

Even thinking, the brain just thinks – all the time, it is pulling data from all of the body’s senses to be aware of the environment around you and to unconsciously formulate its best guess as to what you might need at that moment.

And if you are not telling the brain/body what YOU need (which is called a conscious intention), it will default to what it thinks is best for you based on its old unconscious programming from somebody else!

The brain/body analyses your problems, then proposes solutions and emotionally (or even physically) guides you towards what it guesses is safe for you or away from what it guesses is dangerous.

I say guesses because your brain sits in the darkness of your skull – so how can it know for sure?

The Illusion of Visual Perception

Consider this, as you watch this video, streams of photons enter your eyes after traversing the energy space between your device and your face.

They zoom down your optical nerve into the brain, which automatically decodes those signals in real-time, then it constructs an image of me, which is then projected onto your mind screen at the back of your brain.

It seems like you are looking out of your eyes, but you’re not because light goes into your eyes, and what you see is on the mind-screen at the back of your brain, which sits in the darkness of your skull.

Only then do you consciously do anything with that information – but (in reality) most decisions have already been unconsciously made for you!

The truth that nobody ever discusses is that we humans are virtually blind; not only are we not looking out of our eyes – of all the light and information that does enter us is only a tiny slither of the actual light spectrum of everything else that might be all around us that our primary five senses don’t have the right physical ability to detect and decode.

And behind those overly conditioned five senses, we have furthermore delicate senses that are tuned for energy and other dimensions.

Upgrading Your Unconscious Brain

Another truth that is so rarely discussed is… Though most of your brain/body is unconscious and automatic – you can consciously upgrade it – and I hope you’ll want to upgrade it once you…

A – know this information – and…

B – You recognise that it can only be the conscious part of your brain that takes responsibility for testing the quality of the data that was input unconsciously during your childhood and to test to see if it is true by pitching it against new real-world situations!

And it gets even more complicated because – not only do you have your unconscious (inner reality), your inner interpretation of life, which is uniquely real to you and which we might call your subjective experience.

But there is also another reality – a completely different outer reality, the outer objective world outside of us.

There are two realities – an inner one and an outer one – both are true, and both are real, but both operate in differing fashions.

And, though there may be many players in that external objective game of life whom we might blame for our troubles, it will, of course, only be by taking full responsibility for our own actions that will ultimately determine our experience of growth, inclusion, and integration within that external objective world.

We need a separate plan for each reality, though ultimately, your inner reality will be the truth of how YOU will experience life; therefore, it’s probably where the greatest change is possible.

Questioning Programmed Beliefs

But we weren’t taught any of this in school; we were just programmed to fit in, follow rules, respect authority, and be of use to the system.

Plus, are you starting to consider that we are not separate from nature? We are part of nature – we are made from the same atoms as all of the trees and animals around us, and we all swim in the same invisible electromagnetic field of energy that holds all our atoms together into a clump called our body – and all the invisible energy between us stops us from all squishing into one great big blob.

And is your perspective on life widening enough to see that energy contains information? Thoughts are energy forms and may be low energy and life-negating or high energy and life-enhancing; saying (or hearing) I hate you is a very different energy from – I love you.

Things like WIFI, radio waves, cell phones, and TV signals all carry information (invisibly) through this field of energy all around us, looking for a receiver which can tune into that frequency, decode that message, and utilise that energy (and knowledge).

Can you see how (potentially) everything changes as you climb out of the content of an issue and into a new, higher context?

Testing the Integrity of Brain Data

If we go back to the brain’s corrupt data, I think it is useful to explore (both) where much of that data came from and its accuracy.

When I reflect on questions like this, I can’t help but feel that most of the data our brain is using to base all its calculations upon is largely untested by us; it might be true, but it might not be true (even if it feels true.)

Think about it – the vast majority of the data in your brain came from very structured rules, regulations, and beliefs ranging from your parents, schools, culture, religion, friends, universities, radio, television, music, comics, social media, books, science, and films…

Now, all that data your brain absorbed may have been true, but, it may also have been a distortion of the truth, or that input data may have been a downright lie.

And then, as we grew up, I think it is interesting to ponder what internal organic algorithm – did the brain – inside of your head (in the darkness of your inner reality) develop to use, to be able to discern what was true and what might be false without actually physically testing it?

Was what you were taught to be true, somebody else’s truth or a lie that somebody else might wish you to believe was true as you thinking that way may benefit them in some manner?

Conversely, some lesser volume of your brain’s data was constructed from your real-world interactions. Where you did something real and got a measurable result, so you had a subjective experience of that objective happening – therefore, it was true to you experientially, so you could have more faith in the quality of that knowledge.

Data which we have learned (but never tested) and which came from sources the brain was initially conditioned to trust – like universities, governments, doctors, and scientists tend to form the brain’s belief systems, which it will then use to make unconscious decisions on our behalf.

And once the brain adopts a belief, it often automatically fights to defend or uphold that belief (even in the face of opposing information that feels true) – especially if it comes from a source currently less respected (or trusted) by the brain.

I hope this is making sense – especially after all we have been through in the last few years.

So, if any organisation is trying to get money from you or wants you to behave in certain ways – by default, it may be prudent to question (or test) that data before accepting it. I think this is just common sense advice to protect against the less favourable aspects of human nature.

So, it seems common sense (to me) to spend time testing our existing beliefs to see if they’re trustworthy, and then through continuous real-world exposure, can we gain additional experiential data to have more faith in our knowledge as we change?

A Personal Example of Testing Beliefs

When I made my first animation video (about anxiety) in 2016 – I only did it for fun to see if I could do it.

It took me three weeks to make a seventeen-minute animation about complex anxiety, and when it was finished, I showed it to one of my friends by simply saying, “What do you think of this?”

I was expecting them to say how crappy my animation was and how wacky was my description of anxiety because it was so radically different from how conventional doctors described it.

My friend watched it all the way through, and then he said, “OMG, how much did that cost you to get made by a professional marketing company? It’s brilliant; I love the animations. It’s so understandable; your voice is great, and your message makes complete sense. I’ve never heard anything like that before. What response have you had on YouTube?”

I said – it was me who made it and that it was only for fun so I could learn how to do it, and that I thought it was rubbish.

He said it’s brilliant. You HAVE TO upload it to YouTube today!

And I said something like the quality is too bad; I don’t want my work being scrutinised by the world as I am not a doctor, so I shouldn’t be giving advice outside my role as an engineer masquerading as a therapist – and my ego gave him five other reasons why I shouldn’t post it based on my fears of being judged, rejected, or ridiculed in some way.

And he said, “Those are all stories in your head, John – you won’t know the real truth until you take a real-world action to see what really happens – so let’s upload it!”

So I did (I felt vulnerable yet still took action), and it was received unbelievably well; it’s now had over a million views with a 98.2 thumbs-up rating and hundreds of people telling me how that information changed their lives and asking me to make more videos.

My brain was wrong with the subjective data it used to form its prior beliefs, and because those beliefs had never been real-world tested I had been assuming they were true.

But after they were tested and I had real-world facts to work with – my brain could update those old beliefs with new objective truths – people did like my work, I was talented, and I could make myself vulnerable without the world ending!

In fact, it was that video which convinced me to start making this course in 2019 – and creating it has changed me (and my life) in so many ways my brain could ever have imagined.

Writing, editing, and publishing what I believe to be true (even if others didn’t believe me) and continually testing and challenging my old brain stories rather than accepting them became my new game of life.

I decided what I wanted from life and began walking towards it; if I needed something, I would ask for it; if I didn’t want to do something, I would say no. I became belligerently honest with myself and everybody around me, and I started living my life – not the life others wanted for me.

Shifting Focus from Inner Fears to Outer Intentions

So, though what I am saying is kind of complex, it’s also quite simple, especially if you can reorientate your Observer/Awareness from focusing on the micro-details of your inner fears and what makes you anxious towards the outer world macro-view of who do you wish to become and what do you wish to do with your life?

As I said in video 44, people who act, then think, then adjust and act again – always outperform those who think (but don’t act) or think that only once they understand something fully – can they move forward.

This is just another of those common-sense facts of life anxious people struggle to grasp as they are so identified with (and addicted to) their thoughts rather than their potential greatness, which will never be revealed unless they are doing real-life actions with real-life people – rather than distracting themselves, with drama, YouTube, or other people’s issues rather than finding their own solutions!

Applying Positive ERP to Life

OK, so let’s regroup and get back to a sensible, positive life ERP perspective.

So, we look for ways where we become forced to find – real-world experiential data feedback by Exposing ourselves to what the brain and body fear and then Preventing ourselves from taking our current avoidant (or distraction) Responses – to see what will truly happen – over and above us just having a noisy brain, a scared body, and remaining stuck.

Did you actually catch that disease? Did you actually harm that person? Did that bin actually infect you? Did that family member actually get ill? Did you enjoy kissing that person? Were you actually arrested? Are you gay? Was the date more fun than you expected? Did you actually get fired? Did that animal bite you? Did you get offered that job?

When you test these stories out – did your worst fears happen? Or, what truly did happen when you Exposed yourself to those fears and Prevented your old Responses from stopping you from taking action regardless of the brain’s thoughts and the body’s feelings?

This is what normal people have to do each day, every day! And what I discovered was life became a lot more engaging (and exciting) as I became part of it rather than trying to control or avoid it!

Plus, there is very little sense in doing Exposure Therapy on your presenting anxious symptoms unless they are in the context of expanding your life because complex anxiety will just morph from one symptom to another, trying to keep you away from life.

On the other hand, applying ERP to your life forces you to face those symptoms in the real world. Therefore, you are learning new skills, meeting more people, and expanding your life.

You could be scared by doing ERP on your symptoms – or scared by doing ERP on your life; however, this second way is faster, as you get to develop more skills, and you stir life up a bit, thus giving you more opportunities.

Unleashing Your Suppressed Potential

I recommend that you rip the sticking plaster off as fast as possible. Stop using your dominance, creativity, and anger to harm yourself. Instead, learn to channel them and use them as a source of energy, leading to a more authentic life that aligns with what you do want rather than focusing on what you don’t want.

Now, as you rip off that old plaster by engaging with life, exposing your old cover stories, and looking beneath your brain’s conditioned beliefs to finally face your fears – there is one more thing you need to know.

It’s my experience that fifteen to twenty per cent of the Western World’s population have some form of complex anxiety, and one of their biggest (yet silent) frustrations are – how slowly (and robotically) the other eighty per cent of people function.

Why do other people think so slowly? Why aren’t they spontaneous? Why can’t they see the obvious? Why does it take them so long to make decisions? Why do they crumble in a true emergency? And why do they deviate from sensible plans and guidelines that were put in place to improve efficiency?

Now, this is a big problem because (if this sounds like you) it would be hard for you to delegate work to others (or be told what to do) as you’d probably be able to do those tasks faster and better than most people around you.

Or, perhaps – you do have those superpowers, but because they were suppressed (or manipulated) during your childhood, you unknowingly repressed all your dominance and creativity and now rigidly followed rules to the last letter – so nobody can judge or criticise you?

You cut your own nose off to spite your face, but that anger and frustration has to go somewhere, and they often get pushed down and energetically trapped within your body.

Or, to use my metaphor, repressed down into the atomic battery of condensed potential energy (just waiting to be released), but until that happens, it causes inflammation, pain, and a background feeling of fear you can’t quite put your finger on.

Whilst at the same time depleting your biological battery by holding all that energy down and analysing your thoughts all day long trying to figure out why you feel like you do – you know the story, and it’s exhausting!

But so often, what people with complex anxiety fail to grasp is (that beneath all their childhood conditioning) they themselves are the gifted ones, the potential leaders, the rebels, the fabric of society, and imaginative creators who had that innate aspect of their personality squashed down so they could ‘fit in’ to the slow (and boring) victim life, that the other eighty per cent of the population are sheepishly happy with.

Ask yourself, are you using your gift of having an advanced complex personality, with a fast brain and obsessive tendencies, to define and live your life or to trap yourself?

The Calmness of High Performers

Most complexly anxious people are actually very useful in an emergency; they respond quickly and logically while others flap around. In those moments, they don’t have time to think, so they just respond automatically (or with common sense), and usually, they do a great job.

Think about that: in an emergency, when there wasn’t time to think, they did well – but when there is no emergency, they do all the ‘if only’ worrying about the past and ‘what if’ worrying about the future and exhaust themselves with fear, doubt, and worry.

There is a sense of calmness that can be found within us, even when our bodies are feeling nervous. This is something that soldiers, bomb disposal specialists, surgeons, athletes, nurses, mountain climbers, racing drivers, and motorbike riders know for sure.

Although their bodies may be experiencing fear (or excitement), they can still (to a certain degree) maintain a sense of stillness, composure, self-trust, and intense focus (on what they wish to do), which allows them to proceed with their intentions and ignore the brain’s fearful thoughts or the bodies’ corresponding emotions.

Very often, they have an anxiety attack after the emergency – because, during the event, they were so laser-focused on doing their ‘task in hand’ – that they didn’t have the time to scare themselves with all the things that could go wrong – so they do it afterwards!

I find this both ironic and sadly distressing because it is so unnecessary. That behaviour is only the result of their conditioned brain and body doing what it was programmed to do in early life.

We are (simply) and unconsciously being run by the programs that we were programmed with.

Reprogramming Through Positive ERP

So, to reprogram those programs, you have to be willing to put in the effort to endure temporary discomfort and tolerate the repetition of new, more positive, optimistic, and intentions-based iStories and behaviours.

But most importantly, you will have to learn how to willingly suspend many of your brain’s existing beliefs (which you think are yours) long enough to explore new knowledge, values, beliefs, and perspectives that your conditioned brain was trained to reject in childhood because they were not scientific or provable – yet may work really effectively – which of course is what most of this course is teaching you.

The most obvious example I can think of is for a person with type two diabetes, unconsciously having a ‘we must eat five-a-day fruit and veg’ belief system running in their brain – when eating carbs and sugars are at the very core of their largely reversible metabolic dysfunction.

As I keep saying, common sense is now so uncommon that when it is seen, it’s almost so unbelievable that our belief system dismisses it – even though our intuition is screaming at us to listen as it senses something is wrong.

So many of our great teachers say the same thing they say… Actually, life is really funny and just a big game, and the world needs to be all messed up; otherwise, how would we learn anything?

Once you wake up, and can see how things really work in the outer world – as opposed to how you were taught they worked.

And once you acknowledge that though your animal body and its brain will die, you can’t die because you are the energy of conscious awareness, and energy can’t be destroyed; it lives forever, and that energy holds information.

The great teachers say once you see all this (or program it into your unconscious brain), life becomes reasonably easy, and it is sadly very funny to watch those who haven’t figured it out yet – as they exhaust themselves clinging to stories, which are the very things that are stopping them from living a calmer, healthier, and richer life!

And there’s nothing you can do to get them to listen as they deeply believe they are right – and they rigidly cling to those old values and beliefs which are not even theirs as they were programmed into them from parents, school, culture, religion, TV, social media, corporations, and our governments.

Questioning Societal Conditioning

Think about it; Why do you have to be a good?

Why do you have to save the planet? Why do you have to follow the rules? Why should you do as you are told? Why should you stay safe?

Why should you work hard? Why should you pay taxes?

Surely, as an adult, you can now choose who you wish to become and what you desire to do – and then program that into your brain that wasn’t able to do it for itself when it was young, so you had to accept somebody else’s dream until you could dream the right one for you now!

Embracing Detachment and Trust

And it gets even easier if you can see things differently.

Sometimes, if people experience disassociation, depersonalisation, or derealisation, they might feel scared and out of control, like if they took some drugs or were drunk – and they may hate that feeling of being out of control of the body.

A huge lesson I learned – is actually, you never were in control! The Observer is not controlling the body; the body runs itself! But anxious people think they are doing it, and they should be able to control everything when they can’t! But it is possible to learn to let go and trust it.

Like those soldiers, surgeons, and motorbike riders I mentioned earlier, they are trusting their bodies to do what is needed as they keep their conscious awareness on what intention they have for that moment – then ignore everything else.

Practising how to detach from the body and brain and to just trust them is a powerful process to learn as you accept you can never control, but you can influence.

And, after a certain period of time and once we have retrained our body and removed any trapped trauma, we might choose to reorient ourselves back into the reconditioned body (or not).

Personally, I try to dance with all aspects of my (whole) Self, jumping from moment to moment to whatever aspect of me is appropriate for the situation I find myself in, the outcomes I am looking for, and the resources I have available to me.

I have used ERP to physically desensitise my body and iStory ERP to condition my brain to operate differently from that with which it was wired up when I was a child.

Emotional Mastery Through ERP

In each moment, I separate the emotions of the body from the stories of the brain, then I ignore those brain stories (because I didn’t ask for them), and I do that by placing my conscious awareness on what is happening externally in the environment around me and what my intention for that particular moment is.

Will I bring out my warrior and take control, my settler and fit in, or my nomad to be playful? Will I act introverted or extroverted? Will my actions be for my own benefit or to benefit someone else? Should I focus on the content, context, or perspective of the situation at hand?

Are the people around me getting triggered? Can I not take that personally? Might I need to apply a different strategy? Do I want to listen to people’s problems or help solve them? Do I have enough energy to help others, or should I keep it for myself?

Which character is chatting in my brain – the victim, the pleaser, the rebel – and is that a character I desire to listen to, or shall I ignore it?

Is my body getting emotionally triggered with anger, frustration, fear, passion, or desire?

Do I wish to increase that feeling because it’s pleasurable, or if it’s uncomfortable, will I ignore it or trick my central nervous system back to a reset position?

Might I just allow that uncomfortable emotion to flow through me (and out of me) without allowing my brain to attach a story to it?

Or might I listen to that emotion (or intuition) and remove myself from that situation, change it, or accept it?

This is the kind of emotional mastery I’m inviting you to learn how to develop within yourself – and I know it’s possible because I’ve done it! But we don’t get taught this at school, and usually, our parents didn’t learn it either.

I can’t always do it – because I am only the rider of my horse, not the horse itself, but I have become very accomplished at influencing the body and the brain – towards my intentions.

Plus, I really look after my brain and body; I really love them – but I’m not too interested in their silly animal thoughts, feelings, or cravings – you might say I am lovingly unattached.

I’m going to lose them one day, as I will everything and everybody – but I’ll never lose me, the formless energy of my conscious awareness.

Detaching from Fearful Stories

So, this step is learning to detach from focusing on what is happening inside you and orientate your detached formless awareness to the external world with a new optimistic story and trusting your body to do its best.

And remember, those unconscious and unrequested thoughts scare you because your unconscious anxiety knows what you consciously fear the most and just uses it against you to get your attention – think about it – unless you are a good parent – thoughts of harming your child wouldn’t grab your attention!

As I mentioned in my last video, health anxiety tends to hit those with a repressed warrior, and contamination anxiety tends to hit those with a repressed nomad – the person is hit with the opposite problem of who they truly are deep down beneath all the early life conditioning.

The warrior should be making decisions rather than asking for reassurance – and the nomad should be off travelling and having adventures rather than worrying about becoming contaminated – anxiety is so predictable.

This is why it is so essential to define the intentions you wish for your life. These come from the work you applied by completing the video 32 part 2 workbook – and moving towards those intentions should become your decision-making framework at any moment, not your thoughts or feelings!

And, remember, how can you reprogram your Reticular Activating System (RAS) if you haven’t yet decided what you want from life or who you wish to be? It will remain conditioned by all your current fears thus looking for them and presenting evidence of them to you all day!

Addressing High-Performing Individuals

And finally (in this section) – I would like to briefly discuss high-performing people who, though they have complex anxiety, still manage to get on with life, though they are constantly being emotionally triggered.

These people do real-world ERP, but their anxiety still remains; I would suggest that these individuals have intensely repressed trauma or deeply trapped energy, which needs to be released from their atomic battery, as I discussed in video 9.

In part 5 of this ERP section of the course, I will teach you what I know about understanding, finding, and releasing these (known or hidden) trapped traumas and emotional blockages, so please sit tight until then.

Avoiding Common ERP Mistakes

OK, the next step is to ensure you are not falling into one of the biggest ERP error traps that conventional CBT erroneously teaches.

And that is… Please DO NOT use stories in your mind or scripts that you read to yourself to try to make Not Normal Thoughts – Normal!

Let me give you some examples: If you have intrusive thoughts about harming a person or sexually abusing that person – Do Not Imagine yourself doing those things and pretending that you are OK with the corresponding emotions.

If you are scared of dogs, yes, imagine yourself stroking a dog because that is natural and appropriate.

If you feel contaminated, yes, imagine trusting your natural immunity, as I talked about in video 49.

If you fear conflict, yes, imagine yourself talking calmly to another person – this is the right way to reprogram your brain.

But, with violent, abusive, harmful, suicidal, or sexual thoughts, you must run the thoughts that would be the appropriate solution in your future – NOT ingraining and doing Negative ERP on those ugly behaviours.

You must run new positive and reality-based iStories.

Positive iStory Examples

For example – if you can’t go near knives as you think you might hurt a person, you imagine using a knife to lovingly cook them a meal and eat it together, then do the washing up together and put the knives away together. Then, after imagining those things, begin to do them in real life.

Anxiety uses what you won’t do to scare you! Once you see this, it becomes funny; because you never did those things, and you never will!

If your unrequested thoughts are about sexually abusing another – you run thoughts about dancing with them, playing sports with them, or whatever positive interaction would be appropriate.

If your thoughts have a suicidal tendency, you run new stories about all the positive events you could wish for your life – regardless of their truth at that moment.

Can you see what I am pointing to – as this is really important? You have never done those things, and you never will do them – because they are the opposite of who you truly are – which is why your exhausted unconscious brain is using them – purely to get your conscious attention!

Realise that you have become consciously addicted to analysing the unconscious and unrequested thoughts of the brain.

ERP is to detach from engaging with that thought by consciously focusing on what you should be doing at that moment to live a richer life – and begin to run three or four new conscious positive, trusting, and optimistic stories to begin the repetitive process of bombarding your unconscious brain with the new narrative you might wish for.

“I am a kind and loving person.” “I love the fact I’ve never harmed anybody.”

“I respect the fact that though I have animal urges (as everybody does), I’ve never acted on them.”

“I can see my brain is using ‘who I am not’ to scare me with – but that’s not who I am, so I can ignore it!”

“I love the fact I have a creative brain (a creative thought proposal device) in my head – however, from this point onwards, I choose to only consciously accept the positive and optimistic thoughts it proposes to me from its old conditioning.”

Can you see what a different conscious internal dialogue this is? Your unconscious automated stories will only change by YOU overwriting them consciously with a better story (in line with your intentions) over and over again, even if you currently don’t believe them.

It pains me to keep repeating this – but it’s just how it works! It’s ridiculously simple but nobody ever taught you this!

Some people (unknowingly) turn their lives into a never-ending soap opera (inside their heads), which distracts them from real-life opportunities. The door to their perceived cage is wide open, but they can’t see it.

Emotions 101: Relabeling and Managing Agitation

Now, in the final part of this video, because I am asking you to ignore your emotions (for a while) let me remind you of the basics.

We start by relabeling emotions from anxiety to agitation; remember, if you were doing something exciting, you’d want to feel some agitation.

Anxiety is just excitement with a bad story and excitement is just anxiety with a good story.

And calmness is either having no story and no feelings – or learning to consciously ignore both the thoughts of the brain and the responses from the body – the rider can still be calm even if the horse isn’t!

So, let’s jump back to Emotions 101! An emotion is the physical result of the biological agitation of your body from the release of stress hormones, as I detailed in video 11.

The more chemicals released, the more they will agitate the body until it reaches a level where the prefrontal cortex is turned off – at that moment, logic and reason are disengaged, and the person simply fights, runs off, or freezes as the more animal limbic brain takes control.

Once the person calms down, meaning the chemicals have worn off, the intelligent thinking brain comes back online, and the person either smiles at that natural sequence of events or freaks themselves and back into anxiety because they erroneously believe they should be able to control their thoughts and feelings!

We are emotional creatures who learned how to think – not thinking creatures who try to control their emotions!

Applying ERP to Emotions

So, when we apply ERP to emotions, we have to remember we are Exposing ourselves to life and Preventing our Responses From Stopping Us – we are not necessarily trying to stop the responses (the thoughts or feelings) – we are learning to inhibit our responses – from stopping us from taking action towards our intentions for a richer life.

Therefore, if we apply some common sense perspectives on how you might intelligently desensitise your body (your automatic meat suit), there are my top tips.

The absolute fastest way to overcome anxious sensations in your body is to take the very action that will better your life…

You drive, you date, you apply for a job, you leave home, you fly, you stop cleaning, you start saying no, you start saying yes, you make friends – all the positive actions for a richer life that I have been talking about.

You then ignore those fearful emotions (as they arise) as they are just fear chemicals being released into your bloodstream that agitate your body – and so what!!!! If you can learn to not care about that feeling – it’s no longer a problem.

Accept them and give them no meaning, or immediately use tricks to desensitise the body from releasing those fear chemicals or tricks to quickly recover from their release and stop the release of any more – and I will be detailing these in my next video.

Lessons from Personal Experience

Do you remember back in video 41 where I mentioned the first time I took the recreational drug ecstasy?

The amphetamine (the speed) in that drug – gave me what I would have classified as a panic attack: my heart raced, my palms got sweaty, I was shaking, my vision became blurry, my mouth was dry, and I felt out of control.

Yes, of course, my body was doing those things because I had ingested that amphetamine into my blood system, which had agitated my body. My body was having the appropriate response to what I had done to it!

Then, twenty minutes later, my body accessed its own serotonin, and I felt so wonderful that those old bodily agitations could be ignored.

Then, the second time I took it – when the initial amphetamine agitation came on, as much as I didn’t like it – I could just accept it and say, “Oh yeah, this is just the agitation phase; I can ignore it and sit with it, (even do other stuff) until the next phase kicks in.

It’s the same with our natural fear (or anxiety) responses – adrenaline and cortisol have been appropriately (or inappropriately) released within you by your old programs (which are not you); they are just the old erroneous programs running within you.

And the body will intrinsically become agitated by those natural chemicals, and YOU CAN accept and ignore those sensations – until such a time that you have desensitised yourself and got around to reprogramming your amygdala to remove those erroneous fearful associations to life/people/events/germs (or whatever) from its unsafe database to its safe database.

Just like I taught you way back in video 8 but which you probably haven’t been doing. It’s more likely you’ve been unknowingly reinforcing those errors via negative ERP meaning (running the same old fearful stories!)

The Observer and the Meat Suit

You (the Observer, immortal, timeless conscious awareness) are riding the body, which has a brain – and that brain, though incredible, is also fallible and trickable and wasn’t designed for the modern (though absurd and artificial) environment in which we find ourselves.

However, it is possible to make some aftermarket adjustments which might favour this more modern environment.

That brain constantly (and automatically) and at the speed of light is processing ALL sensory data inputs: light, sound, touch, taste, smell, energy, vibration, frequency, balance, distance, time, rules, reproduction, digestion, breathing, cell division, and ten million other things – it then makes (speed of light) decisions, applies them to the body which automatically responds to those directions.

This is why we respond so well in emergency situations – the brain evaluates all options that are real to that moment, then fires off what it thinks is the best response (after doing millions of unconscious calculations in real-time) to what it thinks is happening from within its blind and dark inner cave – guessing about what is out there, what it is that you wish to achieve, and trying to keep you alive – based on all its prior programming.

That is why I could run down the hill without thinking; the motorbike racer could race without thinking; the bomb disposal guy could follow that process without thinking – because we are not doing it, the brain and body just do it automatically – if we learn how to trust them and get out of their way.

But, for some people, this may mean they have to undo the erroneous programming they received growing up – and install a new operating system, then run it in through repetition, trying new things, seeing what happens, then making adjustments in line with their intentions – then once again seeing what happens…

And this is the process of living an active (and self-responsible) life that nobody told you was the right thing to do – or how to do it – until now.

ERP as a Life-Enhancing Process

So, in summary, don’t see ERP as a technique you apply to anxiety; it is the process of training your meat-suit to align with your intentions – regardless of how it childishly kicks, screams, and tries to sabotage you with virtual reality untested worst case scenarios!

That silly game needs to end – we are not children anymore. We are becoming responsible adults – and what we can truly handle and achieve is incredible.

So, the story I have programmed into my auto-meat-suit (my horsey) is – I’d rather die young pushing the boundaries of my capabilities, sampling everything, and living an experientially rich life, which will develop my purpose, courageousness, emotional dexterity, and will expand my skills.

And by doing so, will increase my value to nature (or divinity) so she will want to give me more energy, opportunities, and more access to higher conscious states of awareness.

And, I’d rather do that than live a very long life avoiding danger (yet still feeling scared) whilst feeling unfulfilled and without a purpose – and unable to handle the opportunities that nature potentially has for me.

And quite frankly, consciously, I don’t care if that story is true (though I do believe it) – all I needed to do was trick my unconscious brain into believing it – and when I did, everything changed for the better.

We don’t apply ERP to anxiety; we consciously apply it to our meat suit all day, every day, because it is a lovely, programmable little pet which will serve you well if you give it what it needs and program it with your intentions for this life of learning, discovery, and love.

Next Steps

OK, the next video will be totally dedicated to the words, tricks, and calming down techniques we can use to train our adorable little automaton into a happy, healthy, and useful mechanism that we can use to become our best selves.

And remember, it’s not what he looks like or what shape he is; it’s who is influencing him and loving him and guiding him to be his best self that matters – and that is your conscious awareness – nature learning how to be its best self.

Ok, so you get working on applying ERP to your life and I’ll make that next video.

Thanks a lot.