NLP Training video: NLP Technique to Stop Worrying
Video transcript:
Okay, so this video is about worrying, and I’m on Venice Beach right now. I don’t know what’s happening here. The cops are there. So I train here in Los Angeles, January, April, and September. The sun is setting so I have to hurry up.
Worrying. Cognitive behavioral therapists have a really cool tool that I think is amazing but a little incomplete. I was actually taught this exercise when I was in therapy myself. Long time ago, kind of lost my way, mental illness, stuff like that.
Anyway, I would be worrying all day long, all night long, couldn’t sleep, all that stuff. And so my therapist said you’re going to institute a worry… I forgot if it was 10 or 15 minutes, but you’re going to institute a worry 10 or 15 minutes.
So I would pick a specific time in the day where I would like sit down and do nothing else, not doing the dishes, not doing anything, and I would be worrying my ass off like a champion, total winner at worrying for 10-15 minutes straight. Right? Then the rule was the rest of the day I wasn’t allowed to keep worrying. So if I would start worrying I’d be like no, tomorrow is my worry 10-15 minutes.
And it was a little tedious I have to say, but I did do it and I found it really working because I was like yeah, I’m not going to worry about this right now. I’ll be worrying about this tomorrow, you know. Let’s shelve this. And distraction is really great for me, like so I would start worrying, this is for my worry 10 to 15 minutes tomorrow morning, I’m going to distract myself by doing something… whatever, read, watch TV, whatever it is. Okay?
So to NLP it up, it needs a little bit more. To actually have it light up the neural pathways, to actually come up with better solutions is that you can do your worry 10 to 15 minutes. You can also make it… I personally do two minutes now, but worry for two minutes, then I’d go, well how realistic is this? Is this really reality-tested really going to happen? Yes or no? Do I really have something to worry about? That’s the first question that I ask myself. What specifically is it that I’m worrying about, and is this likely to happen. Yes? No?And then I watch a movie of an action, with me doing an action. So I see myself from a non-emotional point of view as an observer and I see myself solving this problem. Now sometimes it’s letting go. Sometimes it is breathe through it. But to take an action to prevent this from happening, to go into another direction… And I only have to do this if it’s really not going to happen, because I already did my reality testing here too.
And so I’m actually seeing myself do an action, and at the end of it when I’ve resolved it, this thing that I was worrying about, I float my awareness into myself, so I can see what I would see, hear what I would hear, and feel what I would feel. And I find that emotion in my body and I light that up, I augment it, I make the image larger, the sound larger, so it’s kind of… I’m sort of like surrounded by the positive impact of solving this.
And that positive emotion propels you out of the stress and the anxiety and the fear that worry brings. So it’s another opposite emotion. And the watching the movie to come with the solution is really about if this were to happen then what you will do.
And so the whole technique that I do myself I designed to work for me to not start endlessly worrying, if that makes sense at all. So steal that technique for yourself, for your clients. It’s truly yours. See you around.
