A Growth Mindset: How to help your mind change & grow
You will often hear people say your mindset is everything, your mindset is important, and your mind is the key to success. Whilst this can seem like a bold statement to some, especially when the media portrays, money, qualifications, and materialistic goods to be the key to happiness, those statements could not be further from the truth. Your mindset is the key to health and wellness.
Everything in life starts with a thought. The way we think about things and perceives things influences us a lot. Our thoughts influence our emotions, behaviour, perception of ourselves, the world, and others, our understanding of our capabilities, and shape who we are. It is therefore pivotal, to support our minds to change and grow, we understand how our mindset functions.
I am a great believer that to take control, and effectively utilise something, we need to know how it works. Knowledge is power. Let's face it if someone didn’t know how your car works you wouldn’t let them fix it. Unfortunately, a lot of us do not perceive our most powerful tool, our mind, in the same way. Most of us when facing challenges with our mindset, whether that be; our mental health, learning a new skill or habit, developing a growth mindset, or trying to bring about change, will try endless techniques and tools. These tools are commonly mentioned by others, or from what we may call the shelf of self-help, to try to help and nurture our mindset, without actually knowing the purpose or how they support our mind to learn and grow.
In hypnotherapy, when working with clients, I support them to; have the knowledge and personalised understanding of how their mind works, how they can create problems, how they can help their mindset to overcome problems, create new habits, and make changes to nurture their minds. Most importantly, empowering them with lifelong knowledge and skills so they can always be in control of their mind and know how to help their mind continually grow and evolve. So what better thing to do than to share some of this knowledge with you.
How Your Mind Works
Our brain has multiple regions and facets, but to help our mind there are two main parts of our brain we need to know about.
First, we have our conscious mind. Our conscious mind is often the part you know as you. Your conscious mind is the part of your mind you will be aware of and use every day. The conscious mind is the part that absorbs all the information from what is going on around you, and what you use in your interaction with others. Your conscious mind is attached to a pivotal and vast resource known as your intellectual mind, which is essential for our happiness, wellness, and growth. Your intellectual mind is the part of your mind which helps you to think objectively, rationalise your thoughts, think clearly, analyse problems, but importantly, identify the solutions to perceived problems and help your mind stay positive. For example, if you started to get anxious before an exam, your intellectual mind will help you to reflect on the facts such as; that you have revised, attended classes, done well in mock exams, in turn building your confidence, and helping you to stay focused to overcome the anxiety. This is why having a strong intellectual mind is so important. When faced with problems or barriers, which can often quickly and easily throw us into a vicious cycle of negativity, the intellectual mind can fight back, take control, and guide you toward the solution and positivity.
Sounds great, doesn’t it! Just like anything in life, we have to work at maintaining access to and strengthening our intellectual mind because we also have another part of our mind, our primitive mind, but for easier reference, the emotional mind. Clients will often ask me, "well if our intellectual mind is what keeps us happy, why do we have our emotional mind?". Whilst our emotional mind is negative, it serves a purpose. Our emotional/primitive mind carries three very important components. It controls our fight/flight/freeze response, which helps us to run away or defend ourselves in very dangerous situations, such as if you were to see a tiger roaming the street, it would help your body build adrenaline so you have the resource of energy to run away. It also stores the library of our emotional memories, so if needed, our mind can cross reference to these to help protect ourselves in dangerous situations in the future, and it also controls the production of hormones and neurotransmitters for our body and mind. In a nutshell, it serves to defend and protect us. Unfortunately, what we know about our emotional mind is it cannot tell the difference between imagination and reality. What this means is, our mind can not tell the difference between the information it is taking on board from our surroundings, what is actually happening and thoughts or situations we are creating or visualising in our imagination. For example, whether you were to physically see a tiger running at you, or imagine this in your mind, your mind will still create the same anxious response. What this tells us is, if we think about something negatively or perceive it to be dangerous, it will cause our emotional mind to get to work, take control, and protect ourselves.
As you can probably tell, this is how we start to create problems with our mindset, health, and wellness. For example, if we perceive an exam situation to have a negative ramification we will create anxiety, even if we have no factual information to base this on. If we believe others think negatively about us, this will cause us to feel low in mood or even paranoid or anxious to the point where we avoid social settings. As you can see, creating the formula for creating challenges with our mental health is as follows; the more we think negatively, the more we live in our emotional mind, and create the vicious cycle of negative thinking and feeling negative emotions. Thankfully there are some signs we can look out for in our thinking or behaviour which show we are drifting into our emotional mind.
Obsessive and negative thinking is common, this explains why our thoughts are everything. You will often find when you think negatively, you will start with one initial thought, and before you know it you have created 50 different possible outcomes. These negative thoughts are often characterised by "the what ifs" and worries, often known as negatively forecasting the future. Alternatively, you will start to reflect and overanalyse past situations, also known as negative introspection. As soon as you recognise that vicious cycle, you know it is time to do something about it.
You will also be highly hyper-vigilant and your senses will be fire. What I mean by this is, if we think back to the example of the tiger, if you had a tiger in your back garden you would constantly be looking for it, listening out for it, and be startled by any touch sensation. Furthermore, if you struggle with social anxiety, you may find yourself being vigilant to the body language of others, and their tone of voice as a way of anticipating whether their response is negative.
Our emotional mind is our opt-out clause. It serves to protect us in times of danger by producing hormones to either help us fight and defend ourselves, freeze, or run away. As a result, it will always operate on the emotional response of anxiety and stress, anger and irritability, or low mood and depression.
The emotional mind is also very impulsive. Our mind craves to be happy. When we get trapped in our emotional mind, our mind will guide us to do anything possible to claw its way back up to our intellectual mind. Here is how we often create repetitive and negative habits such as biting our nails, comfort eating, smoking, or consuming too much alcohol. If we get a positive or calming response from a behaviour that helps us to transition from our emotional mind to our intellectual mind, our emotional mind will store this as a habit. A method it can use in future. You're probably thinking, why does my mind do this to me when it does not support my mindset long-term? Unfortunately, your emotional mind does not have conscious awareness. What I mean by this is it can not take on board information from what is factually going on in a situation, or analyse behaviour concerning your goals. Its purpose is to protect you. Just like if you were faced with a tiger you would do anything possible to defend and protect yourself without much thought, your emotional mind will do the same in any perceived dangerous or negative situation.
How You Can Help Your Mind?
As you can see from the understanding of our emotional and intellectual mind, how we think influences which part of the mind we function from. The more negatively we think, the more we operate on negative emotions and impulse, and the more positively we think, the more rational we are. Of course, I know it isn’t as simple as that, so before we talk about what you can do, it’s also important to be aware of another concept, the stress bucket.
In our mind, we all have a stress bucket, and all of us will have a different-sized stress bucket and capacity, ultimately meaning we all have different tolerances to stress. During the day, each time we think negatively or perceive a situation to be negative, the thought will go into the stress bucket. At this point, I like to use the analogy of a water bottle. The more negative thoughts you have, the more water you pour into your stress bucket, and like a bottle of water, our stress bucket also has a limited capacity before it bursts. Therefore the first way to help and nourish your mind is to manage the flow in your stress bucket. Thankfully, there are two ways we can do this.
The first is promoting good sleep hygiene. When we sleep, we go into cycles known as REM sleep (rapid eye movement). What most don’t know is the function of REM sleep is to empty our stress bucket. REM processes all of those negative thoughts and situations out of our stress bucket and pushes them up to our intellectual mind. Once there, the intellectual mind will use all of its amazing skills to problem solve, rationalise, and defuse the negative emotional attachment so we can gain clarity with our thinking and identify the solution to help us move forwards. In addition, REM sleep also supports us process new learning so we can embed these as habits to help guide us every day and towards our goals, such as how to perfect a sporting technique.
Whilst REM helps to process what we put into our stress bucket, we also need to monitor and control what goes into our stress bucket. The simplest way to do this is to minimise negativity and focus on the positives. This is, what we as hypnotherapists like to call, the 5 Ps. Ensuring we engage in positive thoughts, activities, and interactions and having pleasure and purpose in our lives. Whilst it sounds too simple to be true, what we know is that when we engage in these areas and strike balance it helps our mind to create a chemical response. This produces the most well-known neurotransmitter serotonin, which is our happy and motivated hormone. Serotonin helps us to maintain access to our intellectual mind so we can; cope better with the challenges and stressors of modern living and identify the solutions to promote mindset health and wellness, feel braver and stronger so we can manage stress and anxiety, but also even help manage the pain gateway in our mind to aid rest and recovery in the face of ill health and longer-term management of chronic pain and health conditions.
When we incorporate a good sleep routine and engage in positive thinking, activities, and interactions, have a purpose, and experience pleasure, we help our mind to create serotonin which strengthens access to our intellectual mind so we can continually win the fight with our emotional mind and take control to identify the solutions, work towards our goals, teach our mind what is important, and allow our mind to live in harmony.
Now you may be thinking, if it’s as simple as that, why do people need therapy? In relation to hypnotherapy, one of the main advantages I have as a hypnotherapist is that I use hypnosis. Now in addition to our intellectual and primitive mind, we have our subconscious mind. Our subconscious mind is like the engine of our mind it stores all of our patterns of thinking and behaviour. The subconscious mind utilises this information to help you respond automatically. For instance, when you drive, you don’t think about what you do once you’ve driven for a long time you go into automatic patterns of thinking and behaviour. This is your subconscious mind guiding you. Your subconscious mind is receptive to and stores all the information you expose yourself too. Whether that be who you interact with, how you speak to yourself, what you read on social media, who you follow, or what you watch on TV or listen to on the radio. The more you think or behave a certain way, due to this exposure, the more you teach your subconscious mind this is how you want to think and behave. Therefore if you talk negatively towards yourself or criticise your self-image, your subconscious mind will internalise this as your norm. Your subconscious mind then automatically sends up this information to support you to automatically think and act and guide you in the way you teach it. In turn, creating habits of thinking and behaviour, such as being self-critical or positive, or creating habits such as smoking or comfort eating.
Thankfully hypnotherapy targets the intellectual mind by helping you to identify the tools and techniques you can use to strengthen control and access to the intellectual mind through the 5 Ps. It supports you to understand how your mind works so you know how you are functioning and how you can take back control of negative thinking or habits of behaviour. Finally, hypnotherapy works with your subconscious by helping you to retrain your mind on how you want to think and behave in a positive way so your mind can more effectively guide you.
In a nutshell, if you want to help your mind grow and change:
- Learn about your mind, find out more about how it functions, your triggers, and what supports you.
- Prioritise time to work on your mind, such as strategies promoting focus and growth.
- Prioritise good sleep hygiene.
- Strike a balance in your routine. Ensure you are incorporating a healthy balance of positive thoughts, interactions, activities, pleasure and purpose each day. Do what makes you happy.
- Monitor what and who you expose yourself to. Take time to have a deeper awareness of your thoughts, and monitor who and what you interact with. Ask yourself do these people support or hinder me?
- Ask yourself each day what one small thing can I do today to help me take a step towards the growth and change I desire.
- Have some 'you time' to work with your subconscious, whether through hypnosis, meditation, sitting down with a cup of tea, or going for a walk. Disconnect from what’s going on around you to reconnect with your subconscious.
This is how your mind will grow and change, your mind can either be your best friend or your worst enemy. Remember, change starts with you. Ask yourself today, how am I going to nurture my mind for the better?
Feel free to follow my social media pages at live harmony hypnotherapy for more tools and techniques or to find out more about how I can support you to learn about your mind and develop the skills to support mindset growth.
21st October 2022