anxiety

Overcoming Anxiety, Stress & Burnout with Emotional Intelligence

One of my most helpful mentors when it comes to learning to manage anxiety is a guy named Nicholas de Castella. I did his brilliant breakthrough workshop Passionately Alive, and I always remember a private session with Nicholas where towards the end he said to me:

“The reason you’re anxious is because you don’t know who you are”

Nicholas is an extremely compassionate and genuine guy who gave up his previous career as an architect to teach emotional intelligence to other people for a living. Since then he has helped thousands of people go from feeling stuck, blocked and frustrated to creating a wonderful life, relationship, and career of their dreams.

If you happen to be feeling anxious, burnt out or overwhelmed and would like to ignite some energy and move forward in your life, then Nicholas has an exciting opportunity for you.

Nicholas is holding a complimentary emotional intelligence webinar called:

IGNITE: Energy for Life! (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Help Your Adult Child With A Mental Illness

I often meet parents whose adult children who are suffering from a mental illness such as anxiety, depression or anorexia, or who are suicidal. When I hear these parents talk about how they’re dealing with this situation, they often appear very stoic. They say things like “I need to be strong in order to support my son”, or remark that “I’ve told them that they are very strong”.

At the same time, I often notice my own feelings of emotional disconnection around these same parents during our interactions. They often talk a lot about themselves in great analytical detail but without much real emotional engagement, and rarely ask me about my own life or how I feel.

Empathy is the key to helping your adult child with a mental illness

I sense that they’re avoiding something in our conversations: a sense of emotional connection.

Unfortunately these behaviors are exactly the opposite of what a person with a mental illness needs in order to feel the sense of emotional safety, love and support that could potentially heal their brain and help them through a time of deep crisis.

While all parents instinctively love their adult children, mentally ill people need to be surrounded by love and support that they can actually feel.

This means being empathic rather than being stoic.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Stop People Pleasing And Start Facing Conflict

I recently got this email about the problem of people-pleasing and avoiding conflict:

Yo!

I read ur article about fear of conflict and laughed hysterically. Ure fkn brave man! I like ur eastern take on things too where ure aware and u breathe n things. I recognize me being a people-pleaser too and I’m shitless afraid confronting people and coming into conflict. How do i go about it? Do I just do it? How do i do it if the other part is childish and runs from u like a scared little bitch? I want to please everyone but inside i know i HAVE to come into conflict cus i cant escape it. I have to let others know when they’re being retarded. I focus too much about making others happy n i cant see em sad. Is this wrong? I think its good to be this compassionate and nice but the more i read up on it somethings telling me this kind of people pleasing is bad for u and ur future. and others?”!?!?! But isn’t that another layer I’m adding to it? Stopping people pleasing to please others even further?!?! SO FUCKED UP. WHATS THE POINT OF LIVING WITHOUT VALIDATION and ATTENTION OUTSIDE YOU. FUUUCK. SEEELF IMAGE WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT. WHATS THE PURPOSE of FKN LIFE?!?!

I hear your anger and frustration. This sounds like a classic example of how obsessive people-pleasing and avoidance of conflict undermines your sense of self to the point where your life seems meaningless without external validation. Here’s how to stop people pleasing and restore your true, confident sense of self: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Heal Your Mother Issues

Many men have mother issues that undermine our self-confidence by stopping us from really growing up and fulfilling our true potential. Unresolved mother issues cause us to remain emotionally and developmentally immature; a boy in a man’s body. If we had a critical or controlling mother we’re particularly prone to having mother issues. Add in a passive father and a lack of tribal structure with initiation rituals in modern society to force us from the cozy comfort of our mother’s breast, and it’s easy to slip from childhood into adulthood without ever actually growing up.

Unresolved mother issues can leave you stuck in a permanent state of adolescence.

Unresolved mother issues can leave you stuck in a permanent state of adolescence.

This leaves us forever unconsciously seeking comfort and reassurance from our mother, and our neediness ends up projected onto any woman we come across; which is a disaster for our relationships with women.

In normal human development, we individuate from our mothers during adolescence as we grow into being our own man with our own set of values different from hers. This is a time of rapid brain rewiring and emotional upheaval as we alternate between feeling emotionally connected with our mother, and separating from her to explore the world and our place in it.

If our mother wasn’t emotionally available to connect to, or tried to control our excursions into the world in order to prevent her feeling upset in case we got hurt, then everything can go horribly wrong. Nice Guy Syndrome and the associated approval seeking are classic symptoms of mother issues. Insecurity resulting from unresolved mother issues ends up being unconsciously projected onto everyone and everything around us, having a serious negative impact on our whole life.

Here’s how to heal your mother issues: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Overcome The Fear Of Going To Hell

I recently got a question via email from someone who was starting to question her religion, related to my story about How (and Why) I Went From Christian to Atheist, and wanted to know how to overcome her fear of going to hell.

Are you afraid of going to hell?

Are you afraid of going to hell?

One of the most frightening aspects for me in deciding to abandon my childhood religion was the potential eternal consequences. After a lengthy examination of what I really believed and what I actually thought was true in the Bible, I concluded that the resurrection accounts weren’t as compelling as they had been portrayed to me in church. Most likely Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. A lot of Christian teaching is predicated on the idea that this miracle is proof that Jesus was the son of God, so that belief promptly went out the window.

Modern science has reasonable explanations for the origin of the universe and the emergence of life without the need for a creator God. Although there are holes in our scientific knowledge I could see that being more comfortable with not knowing all the answers to life, the universe and everything could actually be more liberating than religiously answering “God did it” to every question I couldn’t answer. While there are many modern-day Christians who believe that Darwinian evolution isn’t incompatible with Christian teaching, for me the sheer barbarism of the natural selection process rules out an omnipotent compassionate God from coming up with it.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Is My Therapy Going Right?

I got a question via email last week about how to tell when therapy is working. Here it is, along with my answer:

I have been in psychoanalysis to treat emotional abuse for 4 years now, and am still in a really bad place. I exploded in anger and stopped talking to my mother, father, family and friends only writing to them to wish them dead in horrible ways. Then I burst into tears a few times realizing my friends do care and love me. But I am still feeling bad despite having been crying a lot in the past year and having a much better relationship with friends and family. I feel confused and lost. I wonder whether I should change therapists as after 4 years I still feel “like shit” and cannot work properly. Many thanks.

Thanks for your question; I’ll do my best to give you an answer based just on the little bit that you’ve told me. I get that at the moment you feel “like shit” as you’ve had 4 years of psychoanalysis and still cannot work properly, so you’re wondering if your therapy is going right or whether you should change therapists.

How do you know if therapy is really working?

How do you know if therapy is really working?

The first thing I’d say is it sounds as if you’ve made a lot of progress over those 4 years: You got in touch with your inner rage when you exploded in anger; then you set a no-contact boundary when you stopped talking to your mother, father and family; then you communicated to them honestly how you felt as best you could; then you released some grief when you burst into tears a few times realizing that your friends do care and love you. You healed more grief about your family too, so you have been crying a lot in the past year. After all of that you have a much better relationship with your friends and family.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Overcome The Fear Of Conflict

I developed an intense fear of conflict when I was young, and it has hung around with me for a long time. The fear evolved as a series of things led to each other: I used to find the fights between my parents very frightening as a kid, and never experienced any of their conflicts actually being resolved. Conflict was scary, and never seemed to have a positive outcome. My parent’s anger during conflict always felt out of control and destructive to me, so I decided that anger was a bad emotion to be suppressed at all costs. Plus my religion taught me to “turn the other cheek” rather than to stand up for myself when I was being treated in ways that I didn’t like. As an awkward, sensitive boy I was bullied mercilessly at my sport-oriented all-boys high school.

When we are afraid of conflict, other people can treat us like this.

When we are afraid of conflict, other people can treat us like this.

So the message I internalised was that conflict was scary and often led to me getting hurt. I developed an intense fear of conflict: Any time I was under threat or being criticised, I would collapse into sadness or be overwhelmed with fear. I didn’t know how to utilise my anger to stand up for myself in times of conflict, nor had I been taught the communication skills to resolve conflict in a win/win manner that left me feeling empowered.

Once we’ve internalised negative experiences of conflict in our nervous systems, our default programming around conflict can be to run away from it, and it can be a challenge to reprogram our brain and nervous system to step up in the face of conflict, instead of fleeing from it.

Standing up for ourselves in the face of conflict is how we overcome the fear of it.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Learning To Swim

Eight weeks ago I finally got around to taking swimming lessons. It’s something that I had been planning to do ever since moving to live near the beach 18 months ago. There are a number of reasons for this: firstly, I don’t feel safe in the ocean when I’m out of my depth. Deep down I know that I’m not a confident swimmer and whenever I’m in deep water my body responds with a lot of anxiety. I figured that if I knew I could swim confidently I wouldn’t get so anxious about not being able to touch the bottom.I go body boarding a lot and I feel relatively safe with the board strapped to my arm. But I get caught in rips all the time and I know that if the strap was to break or I lost the board somehow, I’d be in real trouble.

Plus I think swimming is a great exercise for overcoming deep-seated anxiety. The full immersion in the water gives gentle stimulation to our nervous system, and it’s also a relatively low impact exercise. So long as you don’t drown, that is.

Swimming: How hard can it be?

Swimming: How hard can it be?

The arm movement involved in swimming could also be particularly beneficial. We generally use our arms to move things in our environment: to take action; and I believe that taking action is the antidote to the anxiety that we feel when we think was are powerless.

I also suspect that the migraine headaches I sometimes get are related to muscle tension in the back of my neck and shoulders. Getting some motion on my shoulders and neck should help release that tension and give me the feeling that I’m moving forward under my own power.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Everyone Else Is Afraid Of You

Here is an idea that’s a little bit zen, a bit out there. It’s the concept that:

Everyone else is afraid of you.

Now, you know that feeling that you get when you go to approach a group of strangers or a stranger and you want to start talking to them and you immediately feel this reaction of uncomfortable, anxious, approach anxiety, whatever you want to call it? It doesn’t feel good. Well, here’s the funny thing: the funny thing is that everybody else in the world feels exactly the same thing about you.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Overcome Approach Anxiety

Here is yet another confidence building tip for you. And today you’re going to learn about how to overcome some of that approach anxiety that you may have about talking to women who you haven’t met before.

And the key to overcoming this is to break things down into manageable steps, and the step that I want to talk to you about today is simply giving compliments to women that you see without having any kind of expectation of getting anything back from them or any kind of payback or any they’re going to like you or you’re going to end up talking to them or in bed with them. Just dropping all that stuff.

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By Graham Stoney, ago