Has your life been touched by depression? Depression doesn’t always play out in prescription pills and crying jags. It’s different for everyone. But basically being depressed makes you think you’re helpless to change the circumstances you’re facing because you keep on telling yourself the same story over and over again. The more you think about all the reasons you’re sad and miserable, you get more depressed, and you end up feeling worse than ever before.
Your Brain on Stress
Truth. Your brain can’t tell the difference between imagination and reality. There’s an almond-shaped part of your brain called the amygdala which functions like a warning system. It lets you know whenever your body senses it is under attack. Hard-wired to your fight or flight response/survival instinct, the job of your amygdala is to warn you of danger.
As a Certified Master Practitioner of Neuro Linguistic Programming, I learned that we create meaning out of our life experiences. Just think of all those times when you associate danger or risk to your memory of a specific event or person, that anxiety or emotion you feel is your amygdala on a hair trigger.
When your amygdala senses danger, your brain’s knee jerk reaction is to flood your body with stress chemicals. The ultimate purpose of this chemical cascade is to give you a blast of energy and motivation to escape the danger.
If you had to rescue a trapped child from beneath a heavy object, your surging stress hormones would work in your favor giving you the temporary strength to lift the object. The way nature organizes it all is that after that herculean effort your body is intended to return back to a resting state, the toxins get released and processed and all is well.
But nowadays we’re living in radical times and just watching the news or having an argument with someone is enough to make you feel worried and anxious. Bombarded by so much negativity, our brains are receiving false warning signals 50-100 x a day. If you’re an emotional eater, it shouldn’t surprise you to notice that stress and anxiety can often make you feel the need to eat when you’re not hungry.
Many clients hire me because they want circumstances to change in their lives. They are overweight, miserable and worried about their future. They see the people and relationships in their lives as a huge source of frustration. They mistakenly believe that in order for them to be happy, everybody and everything in their life has to change. That’s not true.
This is victim thinking which puts the burden of your happiness in other people’s hands. Whining, complaining and nagging people in hopes of making them change is only sending your cortisol levels soaring sky high. Nobody is going to change until they are ready to do it for themselves. And no amount of effort from you is enough to change anyone else. That’s just the way it is. Unless someone is ripe and ready for a reboot, your interference and well-intentioned ways will only alienate them, make them avoid, reject and snub you. Ouch!
Do you know of someone who’s always getting into one bad situation after another? Have you ever thought it was evidence of just some really bad luck? What about situations surrounding money, health, finding a job, or your family?
Feeling so helpless and upset, many times we complain about our rotten circumstances, and hope that things could be different. But that’s not really going to change anything. Is it?
If you’re finding yourself in a place where you don’t want to be, know that you’re not cursed. You’re not a bad person and God isn’t punishing you. The law of attraction is busy working in your life.
The Law of Attraction: What is it and how’s it work?
The law of attraction is best described by the concept of like attracts like. Did you know that every second of the day your thoughts are actually attracting people, places, situations and things into your life? That’s some kind of amazing power. It doesn’t matter if your focus is negative or positive, you get what you think about. No strings.
In the same way that you may think about a long-lost friend and they call you ‘out of the blue’, or you suddenly bump into someone on the street that you’ve been thinking about, the law of attraction is working in your life always showing you what you’re thinking about; your point of attraction.
The law of attraction is working when you finally get that loaded bill in the mail you’ve been worrying yourself to a frazzle and losing sleep over. It’s doing its manifestation thing when the guy you’ve been suspecting of playing you dirty, cheats on you. And it’s cranking out a new reality for you when it responds to your repeated paranoid thoughts fearing that breast lump you found in the shower would become cancer. And to add insult to injury, just when you feared that things couldn’t get any worse and you’re feeling the pain of all the scarcity around you, consumed with anxiety and worried it’s your turn to get that next pink slip. Bam! That’s when you get laid-off. Sucks. Right?
But don’t make the mistake of calling it a coincidence or a curse. Why?
It’s all about energy and energy in motion which is called vibration. Let me explain. Scientists have proven that everything that we can see, feel, hear, taste, touch and even those things that we can’t get a physical handle on, like our thoughts, these are all actually moving particles of light. Atomic bits of energy vibrating and in constant motion. Everything is about vibration.
Vibration: The what that really makes the world go ’round
You know that saying, “Money makes the world go ’round.” Well that’s actually not true. It’s vibration that makes the world go ’round. Money has a vibration as everything else does. Everything has its own vibration. Colors, words, things, people, places, blood, your body, foods, your thoughts. It’s all vibrating and resonating with things of the same vibration. And when you can learn to change your vibration to get more of what you want, you will stop manifesting what you don’t.
So to get out of the rut you’re in, you have to know how to change your vibration.
We live in a universe in which there are laws. If you walk off the edge of a building, the force of gravity will cause you to fall. It doesn’t matter if you’re Mother Teresa or Hitler, the magnetic force of gravity will take you down.
According to the universal law of attraction, you are a magnet and you are attracting everything into your life that you currently have. Your body, your job, your relationships, your finances. Everything you’re complaining about, and everything you fear and everything that you appreciate and love. The good, the bad and ugly is all a result of things you have thought and believed to be true for you. It’s what you’re vibrating.
To find out what kind of frequency or resonance you’re vibrating on, to determine what kinds of things you’re attracting, you have to pay attention to your thoughts and feelings. What are you saying to yourself?
Most of us have never been taught that our thoughts are powerful and that they are the building blocks of our life. So we slog through our day without paying any mind to what we are thinking about, getting dragged down by our emotions and letting our fears run our lives. Our inner critic is our worst enemy. Aren’t you finding that you stand in your own way sometimes?
Don’t beat up on yourself. It’s not your fault. Everybody does it. It’s natural.
Just like Pavlov’s dogs who learned to anticipate food and began salivating in response to hearing a ringing bell, we live in a stimulus-response world. Something happens. We react because our brain quickly makes connections about the meaning of what happened.
Every situation you experience in life is a learning opportunity. You may not like it, and it may be painful, but whether you know it or not, you always have a choice about how you respond to your circumstances.
But most of us keep on doing the same thing over and over again and complaining it’s not working. When something reminds us of feeling threatened, we just want to feel safe again. So we reach for the food, the bottle of wine, the cigarette, the joint, the credit card or do whatever we can to make the hurt stop hurting and provide some sanctuary in the moment. We get caught up in cycles of relying on substances and experiences to make us feel good, relieve pain and numb us out.
It’s a perpetual cycle that keeps on repeating itself. Without being aware of how to focus your thoughts and tame your inner critic, it’s so easy to get pulled off course, and caught up in your emotions. With so many feelings of overwhelm and frustration hitting you all at once, it’s tough to follow through and keep on moving forward toward your goals, despite all the anxiety you’re experiencing. Nobody can think clearly at a time like that.
Your subconscious mind: Your faithful servant
Your subconscious mind is responsible for all of your physical functions like breathing, digesting your food and making sure that you get just the right amount of blood pumping into your heart. But it doesn’t stop there. It’s also busy regulating your thoughts. It’s like this huge computer capable of holding every memory you’ve ever experienced.
Did you know that the beliefs that you hold consciously or in your subconscious mind are compulsive? That means that they have to come true no matter what. If you believe you aren’t good enough, or that you don’t deserve to make more money, you will stand in your way every time and sabotage your success every step of the way and there’s not a damned thing that you can do to stop it as long as your subconscious mind is stuck in it’s default mode.
In fact if you don’t believe yourself deserving of money, even if you get a huge windfall, like winning a lottery or an inheritance, you’ll either lose it or spend it all and eventually end up back at square one, facing poverty. Same with your relationships and everything else. We attract what and who we believe we deserve. To get out of the rut, here’s what you have to do:
Pay Attention: Know Where You Are
So all the rules you’ve come to believe about yourself and your life are stored there in your subconscious mind, which is actually in every cell of your body. Your body has a memory. And because your body and mind are connected, they are always communicating with one another. Did you know that we have over 60,000 thoughts a day. So the question is what do you think about all day? By getting clear about what you’re thinking about, you’ll get a preview of what you are attracting. Now don’t worry about trying to monitor every thought you have and making sure that it’s all good. Your emotions are like a GPS and they’ll tell you immediately what you’re vibrating out there to the world. Whether you feel good or bad, it’s an automatic feedback loop telling you what you’re thinking about most of the time.
- When you think about money, what’s your vibe on that?
- When you think of your relationship with your partner, what feelings come up for you?
- When you think about your body, what are you saying to yourself?
Clear Blocks to Abundance By Questioning Your Beliefs
The answers to these questions and more are determined by what programmed beliefs you have in your subconscious mind that have been keeping you stuck. It doesn’t matter how hard you work or how much you try to succeed, if a part of you doesn’t believe that you can have success, you’ll find yourself stuck in old bad habits that keep you down. That only makes you feel disempowered and helpless, so you’re not very resourceful when you’re in that place. When you’re feeling that way, your vibe is low, and you’re attracting more junk into your life.
No amount of conscious will power effort, is going to overturn your powerful subconscious mind to change your point of attraction. You have to make the switch by changing your energy; the way you feel. To make the flip and get back in the drivers’ seat of your life, you have to question all the doubts and limiting beliefs that pop up automatically.
So in order to calm the storm of the doubts and fears that you’ve got in your head so that you can get what you want, you have to learn how to control your vibration to your own advantage. It works on the basis of unblocking the energy in your body that keeps you stuck in thoughts and habits that don’t serve you. It helps you think clearly and it makes you realize that you have choices.
The path to making the law of attraction work is deceptively simple:
Choose what you want.
Believe that you can have it
Let go of the intensity of your desire and be open to receiving it.
Oh so simple but definitely not that easy. Because if you’re constantly struggling with doubts, your vibe is low and your point of attraction will be weak. The universe will give you more reasons to have doubts, more feelings of lack and plenty of reasons to fear.
If however, you want to change your body, or any part of your life that isn’t working for you, you have to feel more relaxed and neutral about it. You can’t continue to hate your circumstances and talk like a victim, because it will only make you feel worse, and you’ll get more of that bad feeling by thinking about it. To get out of the rut and raise your vibe, you have to do things that will make you feel better about your situation.
EFT: How I deal with my fears and limiting beliefs
I’ve found that the best way to control my thoughts and overcome my fears is by using Emotional Freedom Technique, a simple DIY stress-relief process that is considered to be the emotional version of acupuncture. Without EFT, I would never have been able to see my abuse experiences for what they really were; my gem; proof of how strong a woman I am.
EFT made it possible for me to leap over every fear, doubt and limiting belief and anxiety that kept me fearful and small. Without the gift of tapping, I could never have finished writing my book or found a way of getting off of welfare, regained my faith, saved my crumbling marriage, rescued my home from foreclosure and found the courage to face my creditors and begin to take steps to pay down $100,000.00 worth of debt.
In fact, without being able to tap on all my doubts and tame my inner critic, I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for this silly little tapping technique called EFT. What can I say? It rocks!
From the time that I learned EFT to now, nearly 15 years later, it has changed my life. Not only do I use it on myself often and always, but because it’s so effective, I share it with my clients and workshop participants all the time.
So if you’ve been getting sick and tired of feeling depressed, and you want real hands-on support to learn how to love your body through every age and stage, feel good about yourself every step of the way, and control your emotional eating, I invite you to join my new Facebook group: 30 Days to Lovin’ the Skin You’re in. It’s Empowerment from the inside-out. Plus insider access and great discounts for many of Andrea’s goodies. Here’s the link to check it out: