This episode I share with you three important parts of rewiring the habit of worry. I discuss the hypnogogic and hypnopompic states of entering and leaving sleep and how they are times when our subconscious is very suggestible. So in those times, it's very important to explore our internal coping strategies of what we are saying to ourselves, and I make suggestion on how to notice, change and repattern your habitual patterns around worry to help you feel more better more of the time.
2024 can be the year you put yourself in the driver's seat of your mindbody experience. Having an experienced and trained guide is so helpful. I have been trained by both Dr. Schubiner and Alan Gordon's Pain Psychology Center, a Master Certified Life Coach and Integrative Hypnotist.
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And fun.
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the curiosity cure podcast. I'm your host, Deb Malkin, master certified life coach, body worker, hypnotist trained in pain reprocessing by the pain psychology center, queer elder, fat human on planet earth here to help you evoke the power of simple neuroplasticity techniques rooted in shame free curiosity.
[00:00:29] So you can feel more better. more of the time in the body you have today and build the rich, full life that you want to live. A quick disclaimer, this podcast is not a replacement for medical care. I am here to provide insights and techniques that can compliment your healthcare journey, but always consult with your healthcare provider for personalized advice.
[00:00:58] All right. Hello and happy, happy New Year, friends. So one of the things that I have started, 2024 out with is reorganizing my bedroom and my bedding and starting to make it like a much more cozy nest for me so I can enjoy resting and relaxing and feeling safe in.
[00:01:25] And I know that bedtime and beds and waking up can be a place where we unconsciously perpetuate some of our least helpful habits. So I kind of want to talk a little bit about how we can use our mind. To affect both our, our body and our emotions using our subconscious.
[00:01:49] So first question is, is worry a part of your morning routine?
[00:01:55] Like do you wake up in a startle, rushing through all your thoughts about the day? Because in the morning and also when we're going to bed, we're in highly suggestible states. These are called Hypnagogic and hypnopompic and actually, I will just read to you a little bit about what they are.
[00:02:17] Hypnopompic also known as the hypnopompic state is the state of consciousness leading out of sleep. It is a term coined by the researcher Frederick Myers. It is the mirror of the hypnagogic state at sleep onset. So sometimes they're conflated and they have kind of different, um, but not identical phenomenological characters.
[00:02:44] I think the important thing about it is that this is a place where we're kind of shifting states. We have our conscious mind is either been asleep and is coming into wakefulness or we're inviting our conscious mind to like, rest and take a break as we go to sleep. So these are two different states that we're shifting out of. And our relationship between our conscious mind and our subconscious are different at those times. And I think that knowing that when we think about Bedtime and waking time. We can just start to think of those times as really important places for us to explore the habitual patterns that we've unconsciously created around them and often use that intentionally to shift, to shift both our physiological and our emotional experiences.
[00:03:43] So just as we are unraveling pain behaviors when we're doing pain reprocessing work, we're revealing our worry habits, revealing our worry habits will help us further continue to change our psychophysiological experience so that we can feel more better more of the time. And it doesn't have to be complicated.
[00:04:05] We just want to start with Noticing, right? With curiosity, as this is called the Curiosity Cure podcast. Um, so I like to think of curiosity as a friendly and directed type of awareness. So we notice things. You know, with a quality of self love and care. And even if we're noticing us being mean or reactive or fearful, we can develop that noticing habit with the self love.
[00:04:40] Maybe the love that we can't be feeling in that moment, but that self loving witness is the one that's kind of holding that quality and looking internally at our experience of like, what am I experiencing right now? What am I noticing? And as you'll see, it's the same conceptualization as somatic tracking.
[00:05:06] So we start with noticing like, What is happening in your body when you wake up? What's going on in the morning? Where is your mind? What's happening in your body?
[00:05:21] So just noticing your body. How's your breath? Is it relaxed? What feels relaxed and what feels not relaxed? And without trying to make any kind of change, just noticing what happens when you pay attention to the relaxed parts of you.
[00:05:43] Like noticing. Oh, yeah, maybe my calves feel relaxed. And usually we notice what feels relaxed by noticing nothing, right? We're noticing a not thing, a not tension, right? We're noticing what isn't there to be noticed. I would call that relaxation. I would call that ease. Right because physiologically, there is something there. Your leg is there and what's happening inside of your calf, the blood is flowing, all kinds of things are happening, but we're not perceiving it. And so maybe that is a state of relaxation, right? So we bring our awareness gently to this not there sensation and in directing our awareness there, just noticing what happens to everything else?
[00:06:40] I think the important part is in shifting our attention, we're not really trying to make anything happen. I think that it's.
[00:06:49] It's hard to say because it feels like something is happening, right? We're doing something with our attention, but it's like this subtle difference where we're not trying to make change. We're just trying to observe that there's more than one experience happening simultaneously. And then just kind of inviting our awareness to be with the one that we were not noticing before.
[00:07:14] And so that, notice how that's different. How many times can I say notice on this podcast? Probably a lot. Notice how that's different than trying to make something happen. And I think with mind body work, the harder that we're trying to make something happen, the more intensity that we bring to the experience, the kind of more difficult it becomes.
[00:07:41] And also we create this kind of condition for achieving change, which is, it's got to be hard. It has to be full of effort and it has to be very high stakes. And you may remember from an earlier podcast where I talked about Alan Gordon, my, a conversation I had with him when I was experiencing some nerve pain in the middle of the night.
[00:08:05] You know, he said, you're, you're being really high stakes about using these tools. And he was not wrong. And that moment, that piece of learning, that piece of, you know, he doesn't know me. We weren't working together, but he was able to reflect that back to me because he could see in my approach and the language that I used and how I talked about what I was doing and trying and, you know, all the efforting.
[00:08:31] He was able to reflect that back to me. And then I was able to change my approach based on that feedback. And then the pain went away and it never came back. Just not to say I haven't had other pain at other times that comes and goes. You know, our bodies feel things. I also just want to invite us to hold that as normal, that our bodies feel things.
[00:08:58] But in that experience, the approach that I had around that physiological experience changed between one night and the next night, getting that kind of feedback.
[00:09:12] So in using these hypnagogic and hypnopompic states where we are more suggestible, how can we use them for our highest benefit?
[00:09:27] So one of the things that I noticed is I've been on my phone at night, like I'll go to bed at a reasonable time, but then my conscious mind's like, you know, you really need to go look up this thing and then I'll be in bed on my phone, researching something.
[00:09:42] You know, one, because I can, I think this is the problem with phones, right? Back, back in my day, um, when I was young, to look something up, you had to go to a library or you had to own a collection of encyclopedias.
[00:09:58] The part of our mind that really derives satisfaction from knowing things and finding out things and researching and that can be a pleasurable experience like that part of us might never want to go to bed.
[00:10:11] That part of us may be remembering yourself as a child. I spent a lot of time reading under the covers in secret with a flashlight and you know, that was really enjoyable. And I needed the parent to put me to bed and tell me it was time to go to sleep. And so as an adult, we get to be both, right? Be both the one that enjoys being up and researching and finding out things, and then be the one that puts ourselves to sleep.
[00:10:43] And so the problem with phones is if we're holding them, our ability to research things is endless. We can find out anything at any time, day or night, immediately. And, okay, that's cool, but like, it's not really serving me, right? So I'm noticing that I go to bed, but I'm not going to sleep or I am going to sleep, but then I wake up because I know that the phone is there and I can go look something up.
[00:11:11] And so immediately in that moment, I am giving over my attention to this question in my mind. When really it, it does not need an answer at that time at all, nothing is happening.
[00:11:28] And that is right. Nothing is happening. I'm going to sleep. So one of the things that I'm trying to do, I both bought a watch and I bought an alarm clock. That's going to, There's a word for it and I can't remember it, lighten as the morning comes, right? And I'm going to put my phone in another room, but I'm not doing that yet, but I'm noticing that this is my habit and my pattern.
[00:11:54] There's this part of me that wants to know things, right. That's told me knowing stuff is really important and it feels good. It gives me a sense of security. I'm teaching my brain what's important and what we need to work on the next day. And before I've got these kind of structural things that I'm going to put in place of my phone, because of course my phone is how I know what time it is and it's got my alarm on it.
[00:12:21] So I'm replacing those, Elements, but I've also just started with a mantra, um, and a mantra is just a sentence that you practice and repeat. And anything that we practice and repeat, it becomes habituated. So my mantra is the bed is for snuggling, not for solving and, you know, and really just like the bed at sleeping time, but going to bed and waking up, that is my mantra.
[00:12:52] And I like it cause it's cute. And I snuggle with. Lionel, my stuffed animal or with a pillow or, and I bought these pillows that are like kind of soft and fuzzy. So those feel really good to snuggle with, but it's just that quality of like reminding my conscious mind, we don't do this here. The bed is for snuggling, not solving.
[00:13:16] The bed is for sinking into that really pleasurable experience of being asleep or being in that state where you're kind of not quite asleep and not quite awake, but boy, does it feel good when we're there.
[00:13:33] And so whenever I feel the impulse for my brain to jump into solving, I just tell my brain, of course, brain, of course you want to know all the answers, but now is not the time.
[00:13:49] And then I invite my subconscious mind to take over. And I say like, You know, subconscious mind, you're awake all the time. So as my conscious mind is asleep, like you go and make discoveries, like go and explore all the nooks and crannies of this issue that it is that I think I have to know and solve right away.
[00:14:12] And see what else there is to know more about, but give that duty over to my subconscious mind. And then I remind my conscious mind that the bed is for snuggling, not for solving. And it's just worked.
[00:14:27] And you can come up with your own version of that, but can you see how it's not punitive? How I'm not yelling at myself, how I'm not being mean, actually found a statement that I delight in saying. When I remember to say it, and usually I remember to say it in those moments where I'm have the urge to do the opposite. And when I feel that urge, I remember.
[00:14:53] And I remind myself, nope, the bed is for snuggling, not for solving. And tomorrow's another day, or I invite my subconscious to spend that time thinking about it. Cause our subconscious is amazing. It can actually multitask, right? It's running our whole body. It's running our body budget. It's pumping blood and like doing all the things of being alive, of keeping us alive. So it's doing more than one thing at a time.
[00:15:22] I really trust that my subconscious could use some of its, uh, neural real estate to just start to imagine different solutions to a problem.
[00:15:35] And I know that some people work in their bed, right? Depending on the state of your home and like people work from home or some people like to work in bed. Like I'm not a stickler. Some people who help people on sleep get really, really rigid. There are so many rules. Like don't ever work in your bed.
[00:15:55] The bed should only be for sleeping and bed things like adult bed things and I just think like anything that's strict can really just create more fear and tension. So if your bed is a place where you like to work, that's fine. And bedtime going to sleep is just different. We're not working. We have a different goal.
[00:16:22] We have a different ambition. And maybe it is something where you want to like change some things, move some pillows around, you know, have different lighting. Like obviously. Go into an experience where now I am inviting in this like hypnagogic state, this state of relaxation where my conscious mind takes a break because that is normal for human physiology.
[00:16:50] Prioritizing sleep and relaxation because it feels good. It's a foundation of our health and it's something that's really useful at getting better at, but you don't have to be perfect at it to do it. So don't let perfectionism and actually, I don't know, you can see my shirt. It says progress over perfection, right?
[00:17:15] You don't actually have to be a perfect sleeper to sleep well. Like the pursuit of perfectionism is not very helpful. It's not very relaxing. I'll tell you that. So we want good enough sleep, right? We want that place where we're feeling safe and cared for and well so that our conscious mind can just drop off and go into whatever that place is that it goes.
[00:17:40] When we get better at that, we can start to pull the thread of our worry patterns away. We're going to pull that thread so we can unravel any habituated pattern of worrying of obsessing, of that constant need of, of knowing, right, of, of having this like, like connected relationship between knowing and control and safety.
[00:18:06] So sleep is a great place for us to begin to create safety with this kind of mysterious unknown. When we have good sleep and we stop panicking about not having good sleep, we really support ourselves and build some incredible self trust. Sleep is a natural and necessary experience of being alive. And I was watching, um, Love Has Won, the documentary about the cult.
[00:18:37] And one of the things that stood out to me was that they were trying to overcome their need for sleep and food. And I thought, well, one, that's like a pretty standard cult practice other cults, like when they can control your sleep, and your food, like they have a much clearer way to influence your mind.
[00:19:04] If we actually want to decrease the external influence of our mind, like getting good sleep and eating food are really important.
[00:19:18] So don't do that, don't overcome your need for sleep. It doesn't make you a better, more efficient person. It doesn't make you a, a better worker.
[00:19:27] Those experiences, both food and sleep can be incredibly pleasurable. And I thought it was so interesting that they were doing all kinds of drugs when sleep has its own drug like experience, these hypnagogic and hypnopompic states where we can hallucinate and kind of have a dreamy quality.
[00:19:52] Here's another strategy I use, I invite my cognitive mind to imagine that I am sleeping on a beautiful bed of clouds and just sink into their amazing softness and feel how good that feels.
[00:20:09] And I just have this amazing relationship with clouds. Like when I look at big, soft, fluffy clouds, like I feel just this well of love and support. And that was a relationship that I built during the most difficult times during COVID. So at some moments, only the clouds were things that I felt positive about.
[00:20:35] And so now clouds are almost like this sense of home. Why not use it? Right? Like there's nobody that can tell me that that's not true. That's what it feels like in my body.
[00:20:48] In the morning there's that place between sleeping and waking. When I can tell that my worry brain wants to start running and sometimes morning brings with it a feeling of anxiety because of rising cortisol levels and we need cortisol right? That's a part of our wakefulness. We need kind of all of our neurotransmitters.
[00:21:12] I know some of them get a bad rap, right? So there's the natural rising of cortisol and then there's a perpetuation of a high cortisol state. Those are different and it can be really useful to just start to notice in the morning that feeling, that feeling of just noticing what is happening in our bodies, our conditioned relationship with the mornings.
[00:21:43] You know, we're thinking about waking up and all the mornings of the years past and how we've conditioned ourselves to start our day. You know, we have all kinds of systems and structures that have influenced us over the years. All of the times of getting up and going to school, or if you had to get up early and go to work, our thoughts and feelings about that, our relationship with our caregiver, all of those things. Go into this habituated experience of what morning is. And it doesn't really matter what's happened in the past because when we are talking about habitual patterns, those are happening now based on what's happened in the past and the fact that those states are not being interrupted and changed. So yes, it's like, Oh, I learned this stuff. But at any moment we can learn something new.
[00:22:38] What if you just got curious in the morning and instead of thinking about what is it that I have to get done today? Just starting out with noticing, noticing the sensations in your body, noticing that there's something that you call anxiety.
[00:22:57] But what if we didn't think of it as a fixed state, like my anxiety or I have anxiety, right? That part of us that we've now are so familiar with, it feels like an identity. But if we change the frame and start exploring this as becoming aware of sensations in your body, like if we're aware of a sensation in our body and we think of it as my anxiety, rather than thinking of it as, Hey, this is just cortisol waking me up.
[00:23:29] This is just the natural process of our bodies becoming into alertness and awakeness. Those things have different qualities, they might be experienced differently, right? So if you don't offer yourself a different frame, you can't change that experience. And so even noticing not anxiety. noticing the feeling in your chest or your limbs, getting to know also the thinking content that starts running on its own, that comes along with it.
[00:24:04] What happens in the morning when you wake up? Not because you have to fix it or change it or run away from it, but really we're just getting curious. Are you running through events in your day in the morning before you even get out of bed? Are you revivifying a worry that you had before you went to bed?
[00:24:25] I like to think of worry as a kind of jumpy importance, right? It is our brain putting center stage something that we believe is important to know and pay attention to and remember. We train our brain how to help us remember things and worry is really powerful because those sensations are loud and hard to ignore.
[00:24:54] And so it's a very effective strategy, right? So we want to say like, wow, okay, that's a really effective strategy, but what comes along with it are all the physical sensations and then the thoughts and thinking part of it. It's like, what is it that I need to remember? What is it that my mind wants me to know? Because I'm not going to say that worry is not important or it doesn't serve a purpose.
[00:25:20] It absolutely serves a purpose. It is our brains way of prioritizing, but, you know, after a while. So much of worry becomes a habit and then that habit becomes automatic patterns that drive us. And after a while, those automatic patterns start to look like an identity or a personality.
[00:25:43] But what if they're not? We're not saying what if it's not so we can gaslight ourselves by telling worry to shut up and you know, shut up and everything's okay. Like you don't have anything to worry about. Right? Like that is not what I'm saying at all, but just like with pain, we can begin to get curious and ask, Hey, worry, what is it that you want me to know?
[00:26:10] What are you concerned with? And then just start to listen.
[00:26:14] Worry is often a habituated driver of action, but it's like trying to ride and steer a rocket instead of putting the lightest touch of your foot on the gas pedal and steer the car. We need some fuel and we need a direction. Worry is often starting in panic and letting that energy motivate us to take action.
[00:26:40] And worry will never resolve itself because when worry works, works as a strategy of the mind and the nervous system, worry will always self perpetuate.
[00:26:52] I don't know exactly how you will resolve your worry, but I want to invite you into a new and different relationship with it. Just as I invite you into a new and different relationship with your physical sensations, or if you want to call them symptoms.
[00:27:10] How can you hold it all loosely? The messages from your body that are here to tell you what to pay attention to or what your ego thinks is important. This cycle often is one that feels like it has no end or beginning. It's self sustaining. And what's wonderful though, about this kind of mind body work is that we actually don't need to get to the root cause. We don't need to find out why to make change, even freeing us from the pressure of figuring out why can be a tremendous relief.
[00:27:51] We just start to observe with love and curiosity and see what it is that we notice about the construction of whatever it is that we're calling a problem. And I say this not because I think we don't have problems, but we have long habituated patterns of how we cope and none of them are wrong.
[00:28:09] But within those patterns are also the remedy, the not pattern, the neuroplastic ability to make change. And if I believe in anything, it's change, but to make embodied change, we need to have at least three things.
[00:28:27] Self compassion, self loving, or even playful curiosity, even just the intention of having it is a great start. So planting those seeds, planting the seeds of that kind of loving self witness or playful curiosity, that ability to turn around and have some part of us outside of our experience with love for us being able to reflect and look back in.
[00:28:57] This is the second one. The framework of self that gets us thinking about our physical sensations and our emotions in a new way, as a call and response between our mind, our body, and our self. It's nothing dangerous in and of itself. When we relate to our embodied experience differently, we feel different. So it's starting to unravel that fear response inside of us when we are experiencing something.
[00:29:30] And then repetition, repetition is what all neuro associations use. It's really how our brain works. We can do it unconsciously or consciously. And since most of our human mind operates subconsciously, right? So that's below our level of awareness. And they say 90 to 95 percent of our whole lived experience is driven subconsciously.
[00:30:00] So only like five to 10 percent of us is actually our conscious mind. If we want a new pattern to be automated and shift into the learned part of the brain, and the learned part of the brain is like anything that we've learned that we don't have to think about anymore, maybe walking, driving, typing, right?
[00:30:20] We need to gently Interrupt those old, unwanted, habitual patterns, and that can be cognitive patterns, right? Things that we're thinking about or somatic patterns, things that we're feeling or sensing, and it's useful to separate them when we're talking about practicing things on purpose because they're cognitive tools and they're somatic tools, but they're not really different, right?
[00:30:44] Cognitive and somatic is all woven in together. So we can interrupt those patterns through self directed neuroplasticity activities. So some of the ones that I teach are shifting into peripheral vision, tapping, bilateral stimulation, or just practicing new thoughts, doing the thought work model, spending time meditating, if meditating is something that you enjoy, or journaling, or starting with a gratitude practice in the day.
[00:31:15] It's not really about being good at them. Like I actually want to invite you that being good at something has actually nothing to do with whether or not it's effective in terms of creating change. I think that being good at something, why we like being good at something is because there's a pleasure that comes with feeling or believing that we are good at something.
[00:31:44] And usually it's because we don't like not being good at something, right? So that unliking quality of not being good at something actually interrupts the process of neuroplasticity. So I just kind of want to throw that in there. Like you don't have to be good at meditation to meditate. You don't have to be good at doing a journaling practice to do that.
[00:32:07] What we're trying to do is get ourselves evoking a state, into a different state than the one that we're habitually in. Anything that interrupts our habituated patterns with something that's kind of neutral or pleasant or even just weird, but like weird in a fun way.
[00:32:26] Even if you got up every morning and practiced juggling, but didn't care that you were terrible at it, that would change your brain in a positive and useful way. So it's not the specific activity. Never, ever get sidelined that the activity is the cure. The activity is not the cure. It's the precursor to change.
[00:32:49] It is the thing that changes the well worn neural pathway that your brain wanted to travel down and we're inviting it to take a different route. But it's a friendly invitation, not a demand, not a scary one, not a, if you don't do this, you'll die kind of thing.
[00:33:08] Although, that kind of messaging can be very motivating for sure. But that doesn't really address any workability with fear.
[00:33:17] But I will say that is a message that gets repeated over and over and over again. And if you're a fat person, how many articles have you read where people are like, I had to change or I was gonna die.
[00:33:31] That's again, that kind of high stakes motivation that yes, drives change, but also it presupposes this kind of emergency state.
[00:33:41] And I want to invite you that change does not need that kind of quality because that kind of fuel burns us out. It also keeps us in this perpetual heightened state of fear. If we're talking about trying to like lower our cortisol levels, we're trying to teach our brain that we're safe in this body and in this life, you're kind of sending mixed messages, right?
[00:34:09] So I guess I want to end, with this kind of curiosity. I love stumbling into a perfect example of how a hypnotic state and talking to ourselves can create change in the body.
[00:34:25] This is not a client. This was something I found in an article about facts about your subconscious and I'm just going to read it.
[00:34:33] So Rosalie says, I previously read a book on self hypnosis and how the subconscious mind works. About 25 years ago, had a pinched nerve in my neck that was excruciating and constant and it almost caused me to lose my mind.
[00:34:50] One very early morning I was in such pain. I went into the living room and sat in the rocking chair. The room was very dark and there was a mantle clock ticking a slow, mellow sound. I started rocking back and forth and repeating over and over to myself, "totally relaxed, no pain" to the slow, rhythmic sound of the clock. There was no other sound. I did this for an extended time and the pain stopped. I was shocked, but so at ease. It felt like a miracle, but I think I connected with my subconscious mind and it did the bidding.
[00:35:42] And then here's this part that I love. I tried to tell others about it and got that look, kook, liar. So I stopped telling it a long time ago. I know it is true and I know that it worked.
[00:35:59] So what might you take away from this example that our subconscious has a lot of ability to create our reality if we change our relationship to something like pain or worry?
[00:36:12] If you were to conjure a feeling of ease, what does ease feel like in your body? And if you don't know that's fine. Can you invite your subconscious to notice ease when you have it? Or even imagine what ease might feel like and then feel it. Even if it's imagined and then notice what happens. What if it's a cartoon or a memory? Feel that now. Now practice that. In the mornings, first thing when you get up, it doesn't have to take a long time.
[00:36:50] Just touch into the feeling of ease, first thing as you start your day, no matter what happens, then you've already experienced ease in your day.
[00:37:02] If this is helpful, I'd love to know your thoughts about this podcast. So pop over to the corresponding Instagram post and let me know. I really enjoy connecting with people about their mind, body experiences and journeys.
[00:37:16] And 2024 can be the year that you take this work deeper and help reinforce those neural pathways of ease and more good feelings and more physical possibilities and less overwhelm and distress.
[00:37:32] So book a curiosity call and let's talk about working together.
[00:37:37] Wishing you a very, very happy new year, full of ease, delight, and anything else that you want to experience. Thank you.