From Anxiety to Serenity in one simple shift

Author: Ann Grandchamp, Mental Health Editor

Do you find yourself wondering what is the worst thing that could happen? Do you worry about the future a lot? Do you get stressed and anxious about future events? Do you tend to catastrophise? This is all unconscious of course – you’re not doing it on purpose. But you may have noticed that you do this. If so, read on!

Our brain is there to protect us. In order to do that, your bad memories, the ones your unconscious mind wants to avoid repeating, will stick like velcro. Your good memories however, will tend to stick like teflon. That’s just the way we’re wired. So we have to make a conscious effort to direct our thoughts towards the good memories, right? I mean, you don’t come back from your holidays and erase all the good photos and keep all the bad ones, do you? And yet we tend to do that in our lives.

The same can be said about thinking about the future. In order to avoid making mistakes, to avoid pain or arguments, we’ll start making predictions. Often, these will be negative and exagerated. Does that sound familiar? You’re not alone. Most people do this because our brain’s role is to protect us. But here’s the thing:

Our thoughts trigger emotions. Those emotions lead to actions or reactions. Which in turn define our reality and our identity. This reality and our identity then define our thoughts. And around and around we go.

What’s also important to know is that your unhelpful or negative emotions release certain hormones (adrenaline, cortisol, noradrenaline, to name just a few) in your body and activate your sympathetic nervous system (your SNS directs the body’s rapid involuntary response to dangerous or stressful situations). This means that you switch to flight, fight or freeze mode. Remember, the triggers to these emotions are your thoughts. Being in survival mode for a short period of time is great when your life actually is in danger. But it becomes problematic when you activate it daily, or many times daily. Long term activation of the stress response can often lead to chronic dis-eases.

Here is the great news however: our brain is a beautiful and wonderful thing. We can (re)train it, change our biochemistry and therefore transform our physical and mental health. When you change your thoughts, you will experience different emotions, you will (re)act differently and your reality and identity will be transformed. Yes. It’s THAT easy. When you change your thoughts and therefore your biochemistry, the information around your DNA changes and so does your life. This is epigenetics. Epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change your DNA sequence, but they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence. This is wonderful news – there is hope for change for everyone. Change the behaviors and the environment to change your life.

When I was pregnant with my second child and in the throws of post natal depression was a time of my life that would be easy to paint all black and grey. It would be easy to remember the heaviness and the despair, the yells and the cries, the hours of TV my first child watched because I just couldn’t cope… As I said before, that’s what we tend to do as human beings: we remember what went wrong, what wasn’t quite right. But WHAT IF we remembered what was good, what we did well, what we succeeded at? In my case, I can remember that I loved and fed my children every single day. I encouraged them, praised them, guided them, coached them. Even at my worst, my love for them never wavered. WHAT IF we did that? My past changes from grey, black and heavy to pink, yellow and bright. Good hormones start flowing through my body and my memories are filled with the happy moments, the precious times. I start producing different hormones, my parasympathetic nervous system is switched on, and I feel better, I look better, I am better. The parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for the body’s rest and digestion response when the body is relaxed, resting, or feeding. It basically undoes the work of sympathetic division after a stressful situation.

I’d like to encourage you to start noticing that internal voice saying “what’s the worse that could happen?” (or similar) and replacing it instead with “WHAT IF THE BEST HAPPENED?”. The more you do that, the more the way you view life will change, the more YOUR STRESS AND ANXIETY LEVELS WILL GO DOWN.

I’d like to share a poem with you. I wrote it a couple years ago. It’s based on Erin Hanson’s quote: “What if I fall? oh but my darling, what if you fly?”:

What if I fall?

Oh but my darling,

What if you fly?

What if I can’t?

Oh but my darling,

What if you CAN?

What if I cry?

Oh but my darling,

What if you LAUGH?

What if I get it wrong?

Oh but my darling,

What if you get it RIGHT?

What if I stumble?

Oh but my darling,

What if you WALK TALL?

What if they don’t like me?

Oh but my darling,

What if you are LOVED?

What if it hurts?

Oh but my darling,

What if you GROW from it?

What if I’m not enough?

Oh but my darling,

You are ALREADY ENOUGH.

What if…

Oh my very DEAREST,

YOU ARE ENOUGH.

– original poem by Ann Grandchamp

Here’s the simple shift that will take you from anxiety to serenity. Start replacing the negative “what ifs” with positive “what ifs” in your day to day life. Ask yourself,

what if the best happened?

what’s the best case scenario?

what if this goes well?

Give it a go. See what difference it makes in your life. I guarantee it will change your biochemistry for the better.

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