"Anxiety-Free" Paraliminal, Session B, with Dr. Paul Scheele

All right, it's time to get started. It is Wednesday in December, and that means that the focus of our paralyminal listening is on anxiety free session B. Yesterday we talked quite a bit about the idea, the importance of anxiety free. And today there are some essential distinctions that I would like to offer you. This particular paraliminal is very deep in many, many ways.

So let me break down a couple of the key ideas that may really help you understand why this is such a powerful idea. Let me first start by talking about the human mind and the principles by which it makes sense of the world. They're called universal modeling principles. The brain taking in information naturally deletes, distorts and generalizes. That means any information that's coming in, it's got to cut it up and make sense of it really, really fast. Now, one of the things that happens with fears and ultimately phobias is that the human mind uses the information of a particular experience.

Responds in a way in order to feel like it survived that experience, but then generalizes it into a lot of other contexts. I'll give you an illustration. There was a woman who had been kind of sick physically, a lot of headaches. She took an overdose of pain relievers, went out with her family to a situation, and started having a panic attack when they were out in an open space. And what she thought was, oh my goodness, what if this happens? What if when I'm in this situation and that situation here and there and all these other places, what if I had that level of panic attack in other places? And guess what? Of course, now that the mind has imagined it, it generalized, it prepared her for it, and then would have a tendency to trigger that anxiety response in anticipation of an event that she was headed to. Worked with another woman who had a phobia of being on airplanes. Now what, what appears to the mind is you see an airplane or you think of getting on an airplane to fly, and you have this triggered response of an anxiety attack.

So it must have been the airplane that caused this feeling. I better not go on the airplane, otherwise that feeling will take over. I won't be able to manage myself. That's the brain generalizing. Within a couple of minutes, I was able to remove that phobia and all the phobia. She had about same level of anxiety in a bus or a train or a car. Couldn't be in the backseat of a car because she'd be too anxiety. It all disappeared. It was really quite remarkable. So the basic protocol behind this is think of the threshold of your conscious awareness. Okay, kind of a wiggly line here. There's everything that's in your conscious mind and everything that's below the threshold of your conscious awareness make sense. So this you're conscious of, this you're not conscious of, but it's still playing. So, person sees an airplane.

Goes inside, remembers a situation in which they had anxiety around an airplane, gets on the airplane, has a terrible event, the whole thing spirals out of control. They're in the airplane as it blows up or whatever happens, and then they come back to conscious awareness with this total anxiety attack, this panic attack. Now, they weren't aware of any of those pictures, any of those feelings. They only associated the the airplane there with the anxiety here. No idea that all the other things were happening out of consciousness. So if you understand that as the basic mechanism for many of our phobic responses or our big anxiety responses about specific items or things or situation situations that we're heading into, then the idea is to change what we're doing out of consciousness. Now, the second thing you need to know about is something called association and disassociation. So right now you are in your body, you're seeing through your eyes, you're listening through your own ears. And you could become aware of the feeling of your feet and the chair that's behind you, under you, etc. That's associated present awareness. The other thing you could do is you could remember a time when maybe you were swimming.

And I don't know what the situation was, whether it was a pool or it was at the beach or in a lake, I at the ocean. Imagine yourself there and what it felt like to be in the water. And imagine the sounds, the water on your skin. Now what you just did is you disassociated from the here and now. You went to another place. You disassociated from here. You went to another place and and associated stepped into your body in that other place. Now, this skill of associating and disassociating is very helpful. And what we want to do is we want to make sure that you're using that skill for your benefit. So you could disassociate from an anxiety feeling, associate with a resourceful feeling, and generalize that resourceful feeling into all the other context situations and circumstances in which you want or need them make sense. So these are powers of mind and powers that you actually have control over. A lot of situations we don't have control over. I get onto an airplane, I don't have control of the airplane. Right. One of the things that really triggers people to have anxiety is when there's turbulence, all of a sudden there's a. And what happens to people? I asked someone who was sitting next to me who had an absolute terror attack. I knew I was going to help her get over that particular anxiety. I said, what do you imagine when we feel that bump? I think we just hit something. And what's the problem? Well, the wings are going to snap off. I'm a pilot, so to me that's hysterical. But the idea is there is the picture that she was playing in her mind until she quits playing that picture. That's going to be a problem. Right, okay. So getting in control, that's the key. Now there's a third component of this program. It's really, really helpful and that's to create a scale, a scale in which anxiety is tolerable.

So I ask you to think of a scale from 1 to 10 where 10 is completely out of control.

And 3 is you don't even feel anything. It's no more anxious than wondering where you're going to get your next drink of water. I mean, it's non issue. So what's a manageable range? Most people will say between 4 and 7. So now what we have to do is we have to be able to ask.

Where am I on that scale? At any moment in time when you're feeling anxiety, it's not, oh, I just had an anxiety response. Now I'm completely out of control. No, have a mild anxiety. I'm at a 4, 5 or 6. I don't like it, but I'm in charge. I'm okay. I can do some things. I can stand up, I can move around, I can shift.

That's like right on the borderline. Eight. I really need some help. Right. But four to seven is pretty manageable. So at any moment in time you need to be able to ask yourself, how are you feeling right now?

And take a situational awareness, monitor your state and say, yeah, I'm at a three right now. Well, I'm hearing Paul Shealy's voice. I barely have my eyes open. I'm at a one. This is Paul Shealy. Right. And immediately he almost fall asleep. Well, the idea is the wherever you are at that moment, that's a good measure. Then when you do something to make it different, check in again. So I have a client and he's owner of a big business and he was having anxiety attacks in the middle of the night, couldn't get to sleep. It was as if, you know, minute by minute, he was just trying to get through the next minute. I gave him that scale. Totally changed his life right on the spot. He said, I could tell I was at a six and I didn't have to make it worse by imagining all the terrible things of being at a 10, which he had felt he had been at in the past. See, the mind has the ability to generalize and distort as well as delete. Deletes that you're resourceful, it distorts how bad the situation is, and then it generalizes it to all kinds of other situations. So to reign in the mind, to bring the mind back to an awareness of what's true, that's really essential. Now, the final thing that I need to explain to you is we don't want to have zero fear, ever. We don't want to have an inability to sense situationally that something could be dangerous. But what we're making a distinction between here is real fear and mythical fears. You see, it's a mythical fear that every airplane is going to blow up when you get on it. The wings are going to snap off and it's going to spiral down and implode on the ground. Have heard statistics about how safe airplanes are. However, when the Boeing Max came out and they were going down at different places in the world, I said to myself, I'm going to check what equipment Delta Airlines is going to put me on, because if they're flying a Delta Max, I'm not interested until they work that bug out. That's a real fear, right? There's real fears and there's mythical fears. Now, the big challenge that we have is when we have a mythical fear because of some situation that happened in our life and we've generalized it into all kinds of other situations and circumstances we might fear.

Then we have a faulty conclusion because we did something to protect ourselves.

It protected us. And now we conclude that that dysfunctional behavior that I did has now caused me to be in control of my life. And so the mythical fear and the faulty conclusion work together to perpetuate this generalization. I know this is kind of deep stuff. I just want you to understand the reason that we're not eliminating all fears is because fears that are real, like.

Don'T crawl under that car with the jack on it unless there are some things to hold the car in case the jack lets loose. I mean.

These are some things that just make sense that you're going to take care of. I worked with a person who had a phobia of dentists because someone told him how terrible it was when he had dental surgery. So he just generalized it, made sure he never went to a dentist for 30 years. Imagine what a mess that was. Well, yeah, the idea is that there are real fears that you should be able to say, yeah, I'm going to run the scenarios of what might happen under these conditions. Am I safe enough to proceed? And you make the determine, yes, you're safe or no, you're not. I met a woman who was on a tower.

In Sydney, Australia. We were on the Sydney Bridge and my wife and I were looking around. This one woman was standing way back against the inside wall, unable to look over the top because she felt if she got to the edge, she'd be so out of control she, you know, would feel like she would fall over, fall over the edge. And I gave her a brief lesson. It was about a minute and a half and we came back around and there she was standing up, looking over. She said, that was amazing. It really works. So anyway, all of this wisdom, all of this background, all of this capability is built in to Anxiety Free Session B. So you learn to create a scale. You learn to have a situational awareness to determine what's true. You'll be able to disassociate from anxiety responses and associate step into highly resourceful states. Yesterday I talked about stacking resourceful anchors so that they're available to you. Have those ready to go. Keep building those throughout the month of December. Enjoy your listening to Anxiety Free Session B. If you have it, go ahead and listen to it as soon as you can. You're going to get additional value as a result of our playing together. Thanks very much for participating. We'll see you again tomorrow. Bye for now.