“How about not equating death with stopping?” – A Morissette
by Phillip Day
Everyone endures stress, it goes with the experience of life. One of the great discoveries is that stress affects the body with its complex array of reactions. Temporary stress can be beneficial. Long-term stress is harmful. If you are about to go into combat, the shot of adrenalin and cortisol you get from the flight or fight response sharpens the senses and prepares the whole body with a cascade of reactions for explosive action. This type of stress is strictly a short-term commitment which does no harm to immunity and may even build it. But what about long-term corrosive stress or a one-off major emotional shock or trauma? Let’s learn a thing or two about how emotions affect us physically. These are insights that will literally save lives.
In two minds
The two centres of action in your brain are loosely termed the conscious and subconscious minds:
THE CONSCIOUS MIND, located in the pre-frontal cortex, evaluates information, forms conclusions and is the ‘human’ part of the mind which separates us from the animal kingdom. With it we’re able to appraise, reason and form complex conclusions from sensory input and information.
THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND, located hind brain, is the stimulus-response master computer with the flashing lights that runs everything in our body. I’m glad my subconscious mind runs my pancreas and liver, for instance, not my conscious mind! Some areas of the subconscious can be programmed or amended through repetition and/or pleasure or pain (aversion therapy).1
The conscious mind is slow, deliberate and evaluating. The subconscious mind reacts blindingly fast in flight-or-flight situations and deals with behavioural patterning and the running of life-systems in the body. Depressed people get sick. Dr Bruce Lipton, one of the foremost authorities on how belief affects behaviour, contends that the subconscious mind forms our end of a quantum link into the unknown.2 We not only transmit but receive. This communication is greatly enhanced in the lower states of consciousness experienced in prayer, meditation, trance-states, drug-states and hypnosis. The obvious questions are: What is the nature of what we transmit? What/who is doing the receiving? What is our relationship with what’s doing the receiving? How can we know?3
In my book, Origins I, I cover the extraordinary research carried out on the nature of consciousness, the brain and the definition of mind. The conclusions are astonishing. For the purposes of our study here, it’s enough to know that stress and ill-health – cancer especially – are linked all the way down. The more stressed you are, the poorer your immunity becomes and the more vulnerable you are to illness. What’s more, while you may have been stressed before you got cancer, now you have the condition, your stress levels are cranked further.
A majority of breast cancers (especially hormone-receptor-positive cancers), as well as prostate, ovarian and endometrial cancers have a major stress component which needs to be addressed. Most folks with cancers in general have a stress causation and you don’t need to reach very far to find it. So you want to recover from cancer? It’s vital to know that all the good diets and vitamin drips in the world won’t amount to a hill of beans if you don’t do something about stress suppressing your immune system.
I come in to contact with many people suffering long-term, corrosive stress brought on by failing relationships, rotten jobs, family woes, money problems or other slow-burning physical or mental threats, including illness. Nothing suppresses your immune system like long-term stress. Dr Lipton gives the example of you running in the Olympics. Everyone around the world is looking at your coming performance on satellite TV so the pressure is on. Your body is tuned like a Stradivarius. Then it’s time. “On your marks! Get set…!” But what if the ‘go’ never comes? The body has prepared for explosive action but there is no release. The result is nervous collapse within a short time.
Lipton wonders how many of us are living in a ‘get-set’ world where the go never comes.4 Remember also, Pavlov-patterning in the subconscious is all about routine, and there is the danger. The brain hates to be jerked out of comfort zones once they are established. The whole idea of taking time off to de-stress by visiting the pyramids is met with horror by the subconscious mind because actions like this jerk the patient out of their geographical and psychosomatic comfort zones and overwrite their patterning. Which is precisely what we want to happen!
Taking action
Two of the great blocks to recovery are the inability to take command of a situation and the inability to take action. The scale of the action does not matter. Taking action is simply the ability to do something. Once you start doing something, the stress and worry lessen because you’re taking action. Notice how pain motivates and so does pleasure – the carrot and the stick. We can tolerate a certain discomfort but when it is pain, we take action to do something about it. And when it’s real pain, we take immediate action to do something about it. Notice we change our emotional state.
World-famous life coach Anthony Robbins describes survival as the single-most dominant human dynamic. The brain is constantly seeking to avoid pain and gain pleasure, by which we survive. We do those things which bring pleasure, we avoid those things which cause pain – we survive. Both stimuli create action depending on their intensity. Humans have the unique ability to reassign what we link pain or pleasure to.5
Pain
Pain for most people hurts, which is why Nike’s ‘Just Do It!’ for most people didn’t. ‘No pain, no gain’ discovered instead a world full of fat people paying £50 a month for a gym membership they never showed up for. We avoid activities or people we think will cause us pain. We aggregate and are drawn towards pleasure. Linked with pain is the need to do something about it.
Pleasure
…too can provoke action if we let it. Multi-billion-dollar industries have grown up around the need to stop pain or ease it with pleasure. Advertising doyens play pain and pleasure games like the pros that they are. Five hours a night of TV entrainment, infomercials, ads and soaps plug us into the pain matrix. Pleasure, the billboards snarl, You’re Not Getting Any. Cooking gurus make food we can’t get at. Exotic travel shows contrast dream locations with our own crummy neighbourhoods. Adverts show people in pain gaining pleasure from the advertiser’s product. We want those things we are told will bring us pleasure: cars, sofas, quad bikes, fashion clothes, Crazy Frog ring-tones and, if there’s some cash left over, a card for the spouse.
Placebo/Nocebo
Faith changes your biochemistry
Pain and pleasure affect us at such a fundamental level, our thoughts change our biochemistry. Witness someone angry at being caught in a traffic jam when they have to be somewhere in a hurry. Someone in love. The fight or flight response when danger threatens. There are four interesting effects that spin off from these emotional state-changes:
Threat=mental pain=emotional response=depressed immunity
No-threat = mental pleasure = raised immunity
Placebo = raised immunity
Nocebo = depressed immunity
Someone given a fake pill or placebo,6 who holds to be true that the pill will heal them, stands a good chance of recovering by boosting their immunity. If they know the pill is a fake, any benefit is lost and the effect does not work. There’s faith for you. Faith is projecting your confidence, trust and certainty onto something or someone. Faith is not believing in spite of the evidence, it’s believing in spite of the consequences!
For centuries, doctors used placebo to assist in their work. Drugs are tested today in double-blind, placebo-controlled studies to see whether the drug can outperform the placebo effect.7 Witness two doctor’s declarations almost 100 years apart:
“I was brought up, as I suppose every physician is, to use placebo, bread pills, water injections and other devices –. I used to give them by the bushels –”
Professor Richard Cabot, Harvard Medical School, 1903
“Whatever the rights and wrongs, placebo prescribing is widely practised and, if we admit it to ourselves, so is the habit of prescribing for largely social reasons.” [emphasis moi]
Dr K Palmer, British general practitioner, 1998
Nocebos have the opposite effect to placebos and depress immunity. Nocebos don’t have to be ‘bad’ pills at all. They can be anything we process in a negative fashion. Consider the following:
A son is told repeatedly, ‘You’re no bloody good.’ – Nocebo
‘Good news, Mrs H, the cancer is gone.’ – Placebo
A patient is told, ‘You have three months to live.’ – Nocebo
Bad news – Nocebo
Good news – Placebo
Love – Placebo
Hate – Nocebo
Changing state
When we avoid pain and move towards pleasure, we ‘change our state’. Media teaches us how to handle the spasms of life variously with beer, football, cigarettes, sex, drugs, violence and lots of chocolate – all state-changers. For the young, bad news nocebos, financial woes, stressed relationships and late nights at the office are countered with perceived placebic effects such as shopping, food, clubbing, sex, alcohol and controlled substances which change mental focus to ban pain and gain pleasure. We like how pleasure feels. It’s feral. ‘Just Do It!’ cries Nike. So we bloody did, mate.
The older relieve stress with more sedate placebic actions: reading a book, going to the pub, watching a good film, having friends around. There is nothing wrong with changing state so long as the effects do not harm us or others. Sometimes, though, we banish symptoms instead of the cause: the headache treated with painkillers; money problems with shopping; a gnarly husband with Valium. In the meantime, the underlying problem continues unabated.
Pavlov’s dog – neuro-associative programming
Take a Jack Russell to a park and throw it a stick. The dog charges after the stick and brings it back. You reward the dog with a biscuit. Now the dog’s brain is thinking, ‘Stick. Biscuit, Biscuit. Stick. Stick. Biscuit’ and links pleasure to the activity. Stick-getting is thus to the dog a placebic event. Next time you throw the stick, the dog is thinking ‘biscuit’. You now have Pavlov’s Dog.
Notice the dog’s brain also records everything else in the three dimensional arena around the park: children shrieking, church bells, horn toots, ice-cream van jingle. Since these effects are all part of the stick-getting experience, the dog links pleasure to them too. If the stick-throwing is repeated often enough (usually over 15 – 30 days, the ‘Pavlov Period’), all these extraneous experiences – children shrieking, horn toots, ice-cream van jingle, etc. – are grouped together in the animal’s mind under ‘Stick-Getting’ and can trigger each other. Both pain and pleasure can result from this type of associative brain-patterning. The habit is formed:
- Eagles songs remind of California = sun, sea and sex = pleasure
- Relaxation reminds of cigarettes = changing state = pleasure
- A woman’s perfume reminds of Mother = pleasure
- Spiders = the movie, Arachnophobia = spiders killing humans = survival threat = pain
- Public speaking = failing in public = pain
- Exercise = pain
- Play = pleasure
Advertisers rely on Pavlov’s Dog to link beer with football, aftershave with the FA Cup, make-up with Miss World, seduction with Ibiza, to create associative pleasure in the recipient. The technique is known as neuro-associative conditioning. Ad time sells big time during major sporting events due to the power of its association. Millions watching Wimbledon, the World Cup or America’s Superbowl are in a receptive state of pleasure so they are ripe for a linking. Consider how advertising shapes our behaviour with associative conditioning, resulting in the lure of a positive state-change:
- Money problems (pain) = Re-mortgaging advert = removal of the survival threat (pain) = Loan = pleasure. State-change
- Lack of love life (pain) = Aftershave/perfume advert = gained attention = Girlfriend/boyfriend = pleasure. State-change
- Dirty kitchen (pain) = cleaning product advert = squeaky clean kitchen = pleasure. State-change
The advertising industry highlights problems and offers solutions, usually the ad client’s product or service. Notice the perceived state-change to pleasure in the recipient. Neuro-associative conditioning is so potent that it underwrites the holiday, auto, housing, insurance, advertising, marketing and public relations industries, to name but a few. Aye, big business.
The Hegelian Dialectic
Politicians are at it too, linking pain to events to gain power to change things. The Hegelian Dialectic involves a three-step process that justifies solutions which result in an expansion of government and the tax-load on the population. Citizens can be educated into accepting laws and restrictions they normally wouldn’t if it means the removal of a perceived survival threat (pain).
- Real or imagined problems in society are raised and pain is linked to them (the thesis). Iraq, Afghanistan, global warming, immigration, crime, etc.
- The media provokes a widespread emotional response to the problem, which it reports and agonises over in excruciating detail (more pain – the reaction or antithesis)
- Finally, after everyone has exhausted the gin-bottle and Prozac worrying about the survival threat, the public begs politicians to spend more of its money to take action to remove the threat (the synthesis)
- Guess who pays for it all?
H L Mencken was famous for saying:
”The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the population alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Got it in one, son.
Learn more about yourself
Did stress cause your cancer? Think about:
- What causes you pain?
- What causes you pleasure?
- What placebic events are operating in your life?
- Which nocebos?
- How do you change your state to relax?
- Are any of these state-changes harming you, like, for instance, smoking or drinking?
- Are you solving your problems or just masking the symptoms?
What you can do
- If I am unhappy with my life, I can do something about it
- I can take action
- I will only take action if I am uncomfortable enough
- When I am uncomfortable or motivated enough, I gain leverage
- Gaining leverage is when I am compelled to act immediately and irresistibly
- To take action I must decide where I want to go
- Setting goals gives me a course of action
- Now I can plan the steps to carry out my mission
- Each step must impress me enough to move on to the next
- My goals must be irresistible, impress the heck out of me
- I must take action if I want a result
- To achieve my goals, I must really want them
- I can improve my well-being by increasing placebic effects in my life and decreasing nocebos
- I can steer my own destiny
- I can really do this
Facing your mountains – worry
“Worry is a trick of fear in the mind that soon carves a crevice so deep, all other thoughts drain away.” – Anon.
Worriers perfect the art of imagining how things will turn out for the worst. If they work at honing this worry, the subconscious will create a pattern called ‘Worry’ and install it as a frontline behavioural pattern. This makes the worrier very vulnerable to illness, and cancer in particular.
Do not dwell on impromptu evil imaginings. You can’t stop the birds flying over your head, but you can stop them nesting in your hair. The best way over mountains is one rock at a time. The best advice about mountains is to face them. Mountains cause worry. But not if you overcome them. Be an overcomer.
There was a time when we fell off our bike, picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves down and carried on as if nothing had happened. Today when we fall off our bike, we’re dusted off by a social worker, referred into a victim support group, and if that fails, we can sue the government on legal aid. Alternatively, if we’re slam-dunked by some appalling stroke of ‘fate’ such as wanton debt, an illicit affair or a Prozac or Valium dependency, we can slip into the ‘victim’ jacket and seek out the nearest agony aunt, astrologer or Feng Shui advisor. These are only too happy to oblige with the latest scoop, pocketing our money and reassuring us it’s nothing WE did, it’s just society’s a dog, the new moon’s in the 11th house and the furniture’s all in the wrong place.
If something about me needs changing, I need to change it
I stopped overcoming
Time for me to overcome
Learn more about yourself
Divide a sheet of paper vertically down the middle with a line. On the left, write down all the things that worry you which you CAN do something about. On the right, list all the things that worry you which you CANNOT do anything about.
Rank the left-hand column in descending order of bother, i.e. the most worrisome problem at the top. Do the same with the right-hand column of worries you can do nothing about.
- You are now staring at your mountains
- You have an order of worries to tackle, commencing with the most worrying
- Worry caused by the problems you can do something about will diminish ONCE YOU TAKE ACTION
- Imagine each problem resolved and how you will feel about that
- Imagine the relief/pleasure you will gain by overcoming
- Dwell on the peace of mind gained by overcoming
- Imagine the continued pain/anxiety of not overcoming
- List out the steps required to overcome the problem
- How badly do you want to conquer the problem?
- Now take action, focusing repeatedly on the pleasure/relief you gain at every step
- Be consistent and repetitive. If you falter, link big pain to having to tolerate the worry further
Things you cannot do anything about
Problems beyond our control cause unnecessary worry. There can be no action, since the problem is beyond our capacity to influence, so why worry?
I am going to die one day (perhaps today)
A super-quake will snap California off into the Pacific
An asteroid will strike the Earth
The sun will flame out, plunging the earth into darkness
A tsunami will re-engulf Indonesia
My family will perish in a freak accident
I will become a victim of terrorists
Do this
- Link big pain to unnecessary worrying
- Link big pleasure to not unnecessarily worrying
- Imagine the relief of not having to burden yourself with matters beyond your control. While you cannot fix the whole world, sometimes you can fix your little corner of it. Is your worry caused by junk input such as newspapers? You can, of course, take action on a smaller scale, i.e:
- Stop reading newspapers
- Move out of California
- Don’t take your holidays in Jakarta
- Then again, why worry?
- Overcoming unnecessary worry is about confronting the worry itself, examining it dispassionately, then deleting it in a state of positive emotion with a change in focus. How about:
- A coward dies a thousand deaths, a brave man dies but one
- I can be brave. Why worry?
- Terrorism fails when I fail to be terrorised. Why worry?
- Have I actually experienced terrorism?
- Are my worries disproportionate to what actually happens to me?
- Am I reacting reasonably?
- Why don’t I restrict input which fosters unnecessary worry?
- Why not give my life meaning and context to explain why I am here?
- If I live my life well, my journey’s end will be expected, even welcomed
Understanding worldview
Perhaps the single biggest problem underpinning stress is worldview. Worldview is the lens through which you view your life, the world around you and how you process what happens to you. I receive many emails on depression and the fear of death, which are classic worldview issues. Let’s take a look.
The death-rate is still one per person with a 100% hit ratio, so we’re all going to make it. No-one gets off Planet Earth alive. Each of us has a future day with our name on it. Every person at some stage will die, that should not be a surprise, but the context of why we are living this life – the ultimate, overall plan – compels each of us to ask the four big questions at some stage in our lives:
- Who am I?
- Where did I come from?
- What am I doing here?
- Where am I going when this life is over?
Note that these questions describe a journey with a beginning, a middle and an end. If I add context and purpose to my life, goals can be met and the journey’s end, like the close of a day, is expected, even welcomed. If I have no belief system to explain why I am here, I can find myself with no clue to the outcome, no context or value to my life, becoming more desperate as I grow older, not really knowing what it’s all been for – indeed being told that life itself is meaningless.
Teaching despair
I might start a Campaign for Truth in Science. For the past one hundred years, schools have gone to great effort NOT to teach Life Management (the skills required to overcome problems in life) but the hopeless theory of evolution. Evolution teaches that you are here by blind, random chance and that although life and the world can be wonderful, it’s ultimately all for nothing. That’s right, you’re nothing but the chance product of a huge cosmic burp. The universe banged into existence completely by chance one day from matter the size of a full-stop (really?). Then a speck of dust somehow developed life and consciousness via billions of ‘beneficial mutations’ (no such thing), evolving from simple to complex (in spite of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) into insects, fish, reptiles, birds and finally Eddie Izzard. That Eddie was then able to consider said speck of dust and marvel at his own ancestry (even though no-one saw any of it happen) is another truth-busting paradox that passes us by with nary a blink.
Evolution is sold to the public as science. What science?
In my book, Origins I, I examine the science behind where we came from and reveal the incredible information being deliberately withheld from the public and the shameful scam used instead. Evolution is taught in classrooms and universities as fact. It is a laughable cry from fact. If evolution were fact we’d have to accept it. Religious arguments aside (which always hound the debate), the theory of evolution is scientific and social fraud on a Lady Gaga scale, and just that, a theory:
- BILLIONS of years ago, the Big Bang banged
- MILLIONS of years ago dinosaurs roamed the Earth
- HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of years ago, cave men were thumping each other with mallets
- Frogs turned into princes
- Whales into cows
- Dinosaurs into birds
- No-one saw any of it
- No transitional forms have ever been found
- Some think evolution’s what happened
- It’s a theory, a belief system, a religion impersonating science
- Evolution teaches survival of the fittest
- If you don’t get given, you learn to take
- No right or wrong (pesky God concepts)
- No morality inherited (fun-stalling religious rubbish)
- Life, in the long run, is pointless
- You are nothing but a pollywog that crawled out of a mud-swamp MILLIONS of years ago to begin your slow scrape up to Wall Street
- You’re just a ‘human resource’
- You die and go back to stardust. None of it meant anything
- Have a nice day ?
I don’t think you’re human
Like most religions, evolution turned deadly. Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler and Serb extremists all used evolution to justify their mass slaughters of ‘inferior’ populations. Today there’s abortion (it’s not human yet); black people, Aborigines, native Indians, etc., not as evolved from apes as whites. GM foods (nature needs improving upon); euthanasia (life unworthy of living). Some doctors are being trained to decide whether you’re worth saving or not depending on your age. We have been teaching our kids for the past one hundred years that they are nothing but a monkey, so why are we surprised they behave like monkeys? (By the way, why do we still have monkeys if they evolved into humans?)
What’s the big deal?
Let me tell you why all this is important. What you think you’re doing here plays a major part in whether you give up or press on; whether you get a job or sponge off others; whether you kill or heal. Whether you help those less fortunate or let them go tumble in the great washtub of ‘natural selection’. There are only two choices. You’re either here on Earth by accident or you’re here for a reason.
In Origins I show you the unequivocal science that proves you live in a completely designed system right down to the tissues and organs of your body, the software which sustains you (DNA, RNA, etc.), the cells, molecules and atoms that comprise you, and that’s just the stuff we know about. In the beginning there was information. Today we have the information sciences which detect information everywhere, and where you find information, there’s an intelligence compiling it. We live in a world of natural order not chaos. Signal not cacophony. Language not gibberish.
You gaze upon the faces of the four presidents on Mount Rushmore and know that wind and erosion didn’t carve their features, someone got up there with a hammer, chisel and a blueprint and did it. For the first time in human history we have the tools to detect information and design across the natural world and beyond. The conclusion? We live in a world that is ordered and meant to be knowable.8 Einstein, Ehrenfest, Zeeman and Boltzmann, the bright stars who founded modern quantum physics, discovered that we’re actually living in a highly elaborate digital simulation wherein everything seems to be crafted precisely for the human condition. Sadly, due to their evolutionist worldviews, Boltzmann and Ehfrenfest went into deep depression and committed suicide. Today, we know better.
You need a belief system based on facts, not fluff. I’m not here to give you a belief system, I’m here to tell you you need one. Make your belief-system a cracking one. I am a great believer that life’s experiences help you develop one. Actually, reconciling your place in the Grand Plan is less about making a monkey out of you than finding out if there is a Grand Plan, a personal mission, one you were born for. Investigate this awesome subject, especially if you’re going through serious challenges. Be careful. Be interested. Be amazed.
Above all, respice finem: know your final outcome
Thomas à Kempis writes:
“Very soon it will be over with you here; then, see how things stand. Today we are, and tomorrow we are gone. And when we are taken out of sight, we soon pass out of mind. Oh, the dullness and hardness of our hearts that only think of the present and do not look forward more to the future. This being the case, you ought to master yourself in every act and thought as if you were to die today. If you had a good conscience you would not fear death so much…. If you are not prepared today, how will you be ready tomorrow? …When that final hour does come, you will begin to think quite differently about all your past life, and you will be exceedingly sorry that you were so careless and remiss.”
Well said. Live life with no regrets. Drag any skeletons out of the closet and bury them under the patio. Forgive those who have wronged you. Ask forgiveness from those you have wronged, even if you do not receive it. Own a good conscience. Always be aware of the context of your life and where you are on the journey. Do you lack purpose? Dream goals that get you excited, then reinforce them repeatedly in a state of positive emotion.
Living life to the full
…need not mean parachuting from the Eiffel Tower, swimming with sharks or bungy-jumping from the Clifton Suspension Bridge. It’s about enjoying what you do. Goal-setting daily (What do I want to accomplish by bed-time tonight?) is my personal favourite, for each day lived has been thought about in advance. Achieving on whatever scale bestows satisfaction. Relaxation and play provide pleasure. A life lived to the full is one where goals have been met and pleasure and play abound with a clear conscience.
- Travel
- See the world
- Ask questions
- What does my photo album have in it?
- Am I smiling or scowling?
- Who knocked the Sphinx’s nose off anyway?
- What happens when I press this at Cape Canaveral?
There are people near you who will die never having ever really lived. Fear holds them back. Fear to explore what they were told was a dangerous world. Fear they might fail. Fear they might get cancer and they did. One died a moment ago, a life of lost opportunities they probably wished they had taken.
Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!
Most disease, attitude problems, ‘mental illness’, anger, stress, road rage, toilet-seat rage, etc. derive from the hamster wheel of life spinning too fast. Some try to hang on for grim death (Whee!!) while others cause the onlookers to duck as they fly off into the water dish. Usually a psychiatrist fishes them out.
Learn more about yourself
- Are you stressed?
- Are you doing too much?
- Do you have road rage? Hotel rage? Parking rage?
- Do you have free time when you can do nothing?
- What comes out of your mouth?
- Do you surround yourself with noise at every opportunity (TV, radio, parties, computer games, Graham Norton?)
- Try driving around in the car with nothing on (the radio)
- Try switching off the TV
- Exercise 60 – 90 mins a day outside (play)
- Allocate at least an hour each day/evening simply to relax
- Re-acquaint yourself with the names of your children
- Discover your spouse
- Rule your domain
- Be
Thinks
The body and mind are one. Medicine does not teach this.
How healthy are your thoughts?
What you believe and what is important to you guide your actions
Love and caring affect you at a deep, physical level
Pain in, pain out. Pleasure in, pleasure out
Surviving stress is knowing when to walk away
When was the last time you took a consecutive, four-week holiday?
Summary
- Obtain control over your sense of certainty. Know why you do what you do, and why things are the way they are
- Live one day at a time
- Own a good conscience
Be an overcomer
- Create a positive outlook and optimism for the future. Set goals. Know where you are going every day
- Create enjoyable wholesome, optimistic experiences every day
- Guard input. Switch off the TV/radio, especially the news, and see how you feel. None of it usually affects you directly and the rest is the weather (which they always lie about)
- Think good thoughts. Do not entertain impromptu, evil imaginings. You can’t stop the birds flying over your head, but you can stop ‘em nesting in your hair
- Make good choices. Put Post-It notes with these three words on all your food cabinets for the first thirty days to force conscious decisions on what to eat until your new patterns are formed
- Relationships: Restructure the friendship arena. Do you have friends who drag you down?
- Take frequent holidays to erase Pavlov patterning. Four weeks in the absence of those who cause you stress and worry. Different geographical location
- Worry/stress situations: how are you processing them?
- Reconcile your fear of death. Get a belief system which gives you a context for your life and explains why you’re here
- You are what you eat: Change to the Food for Thought Lifestyle Regimen. If you are sick, learn about your illness and decide on an appropriate action. The ABC’s of Disease covers most ailments. Let your treatment be your decision
- Be wise but keep your exposure to doctors and psychiatrists to a minimum
- Embark on a basic supplement program of vitamins, minerals and essential fats
- Detoxify body, mind and environment
- Simplify! Simplify! Simplify! Create empty time
- Lose the mobile phone
- Get out of debt
- Live in the present
- Listen to what comes out of your mouth. It’s a good indication of when to take that four-week holiday
- Forgive
- Create
- Serve
- And keep doing all of the above until your need for oxygen ceases