Driving to Wales earlier this week, on the way to meet up with some friends and go kayaking for the first time in ages, I stuck on a Podcast from a series to tend to go to – Feel Better, Live More by Dr Rangan Chatterjee, where there is a wealth of information about diet, mental health and generally living better! This one was episode 281, Five Simple Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress and Toxic Thinking, with Dr Caroline Leaf. Without going into details, the title was one that resonated, especially with events in the last week.
My head tends to replay and replay and replay again, a viscous loop sometimes of conversations and events, wondering if there was a way to play it better, to protect my precious boys, if only…, I should have….. to be a better person. Conversations with different versions of myself or other people, that they never hear, that tend to take up a lot of headspace and lead to exhaustion.
From the start, Dr Caroline started talking about the brain and thoughts being trees. And actually, our thought patterns create trees in our brain! Thoughts are electrical impulses – every time we have a thought, it creates chemical, sent through your entire body – affecting your emotions and attitude, which in turn affect our physical health. Anxious, fearful thoughts result in feelings of fear, stress and anxiety.
Our thoughts are real and actually take up space in our brains – these tree shapes. They can really be seen and look like little trees with branches and roots. They can grow and shrink, as real trees, depending on what we feed them. If you dwell on a thought all day long, rehearsing it in your head, that thought-tree will create more branches and grow bigger in your brain. Give it long enough and the roots dig deep and it becomes part of who you are. The problem occurs when these are negative and let’s face it, we all have negative and toxic thoughts and conversations in our brain. So one thought, dwelled upon can quickly grow and link into your thought patterns and instead of a garden of healthy trees, the neuronal path will look like a dark withered tree, that spreads its branches around the good trees.
Dr Caroline Leaf (great name for this!) has found through years of research though, that we can detox our brains and build new neuronal structures by systematically tearing down unhealthy thought patterns. (I automatically thought of this as burning the branches of these withered trees, reducing their size and ability to take up that space.) I knew that thoughts could be controlled to a certain extent, but the images of trees, healthy and withered, linked together, by branches and a root system, really hit home. And the fact we had control over it ….
A thought enters our conscious minds and we can choose to, at that moment, accept or reject it. We have the power, to throw it out or keep it and give it space in our minds. This takes practice, to be aware of them starting, to not ruminate on the thoughts. It takes a conscious effort and you need to catch yourself, to purposefully say (literally out loud sometimes!) “I will not think about this anymore.” I’ve tried this before and have had varying levels of success, but then something usually happens that is really difficult to deal with and those withered trees that I have been trying so hard to burn down, start to grow rapidly all over the branches of the healthy trees. Their roots have not been dug out and it is oh so easy to drop back into that way of thinking. The ingrained thoughts become part of who I am and the positive remarks from friends, of clients about photos, the skills I have and experiences I do, the fact I have two gorgeous, precious boys who are doing so well, the amazing partner with whom I feel so safe and loved – all get squashed away into a box, while the negative comment, that, when I can step back and take perspective, I know isn’t true, still has the power to take me down, back down into that thinking that destroys all the positive things and allows it to take over my whole thought process. I hate that this happens, I know I am not the comments or the message, that I dealt with things the best I could and still do – but I have been taking on the guilt, the shame of someone else and totally losing who I am in the process.
As I was driving through the countryside, the sun was rising and the trees the beautiful colours of Autumn all around, Dr Caroline Leaf continued talking and spoke about deeply ingrained beliefs and thoughts – those which we have fed numerous times, so much so that we believe they are true. Of the 70,000 thoughts we have a day, only about 3-5% come from our conscious mind. So if you try to change these with only positive thinking, it is unlikely you will experience real change, you are only tending (burning!) the branches and it is that root system that needs digging out for any change to be worthwhile.
So, while in the car, I couldn’t complete the process properly, but started imagining it and as soon as I got home, did a written mind map. She suggests a blank piece of paper and just write, mind mapping out random thoughts – it can be quite eye-opening, seeing them written down, not just floating around in my head and was a step in itself. It brings the subconscious thoughts and conversations to the conscious mind – noting down all the thoughts, feelings, memories, convictions attached to the one initial thought. Then reflecting on the thoughts and writing down what you think – Why do you feel overwhelmed? What are you fearing will happen if ..? How can you …? Her third step is to take a step backwards and re-check what you have written down so far, is this the advice you would give someone else if they came to you with this issue ? What assumptions are you making – are they based in facts and evidence or not?
Dr Leaf calls the last step Active Reach – reaching out to re-conceptualise your thinking. There is more to it and it sounds ‘too easy’ in some respects – but I think it’s a habit that needs to form and then to re-think about those positive things that happen and grow healthy trees – from real life evidence, hard facts, not listening to that voice that intrudes. We’re all going to have messy minds and make mistakes and have things in life that happen to us, events and circumstances cannot be controlled, but the way we deal with them can be. Not by imagining a different reality, but by finding the truth in the situation and focusing on that, not on those roots of lies and memories that take up so much time and weave their intrusive way as thoughts through our minds.
After a great session on the water, with all this filtering through my head, I saw a lovely friend the next day who has been a rock during the last few years and so valued, not just because she will support me but also tell me truths, even if I don’t want to hear them – and we chatted this through. The image of the tree was really powerful, that untangling of the roots that have been there for so long, the taking on of the shame and responsibility of someone else’s decisions – she had me speak it out loud – something I am really not comfortable about, but there was such power in doing that – in breaking those ties and walking away, taking back my self esteem and peace. Even writing this is a way of reflecting and another point of burning those branches, if not loosening the soil over those roots that will be breaking. (Again, I’m not usually one for the woo-woo, the out-of-there spiritual thinking – but the imagery Dr Leaf spoke about, backed up by facts stuck.) I’m going to be looking back at the mindmap everyday for a while, opposing the lies with the truth each time. The negative thought patterns should then start to break down and those roots should be a lot easier to dig out. At the same point, I am going to try building those gratitude trees – not made-up, self absorbed comments, but listening and actually taking on board moments of peace, of comments that things I’ve done well, of positive moments during the day – giving them the same weight as those negative comments have done in the past.
It maybe wasn’t new information, but the imagery associated with it really clicked. Maybe it’ll be helpful for someone else too?
Her website is https://drleaf.com/ and the podcast is https://open.spotify.com/show/6NyPQfcSR9nj0DPDr2ixrK
