photo credit: CJ (Siege)

Experiment with distancing yourself from your worries and let us know how this works for you.

Have you ever found yourself stewing over something that happened and didn’t go well for you?  Berating yourself because you blew it big time and you’re mortified remembering what you said or did?  Castigating yourself for your oh-so inappropriate reactions?

I know I have.  I used to (and sometimes still do) re-live my moments of embarrassment, my open-mouth-insert-foot moments, over and over and over.  Moments like when I took a seminar leader at her word and actually (against my better judgment) wore the “grubbies” she encouraged us to wear – and everyone else showed up in dress slacks & sweater vests.  Or the time I piped up in class with a totally inappropriate answer ’cuz I wasn’t listening to the question.

Or maybe you brood over some future event, anticipating in picayune detail all the ways you’ll be miserable?  Dreading all sorts of grim future faux pas? Like presenting a speech but flubbing your lines, being left out when people break into work teams… that sort of thing.

When thinking about something that really, really bothers you, especially when you don’t want to be up tight and bothered – what can you do?  Something very easy: change the way you think about it! Create an imaginary distance between you and the occasion that distresses you. I’m talking about “using your brain for a change” instead of perpetuating your anxious musings. Or to put it another way: you can, as they do in filming, reframe the experience.  (Yes, you’ve seen this term before – I explained it in Spin Into Control!)

Change Your Point of View

Scene One:

Very often when a person dwells on an upsetting situation they re-live the scene from the inside looking out, replaying the emotions intensely over and over and over, re-experiencing the agony, the frustration, the anger, the helplessness in vivid brain-Technicolor.

That’s way too UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL.  Here’s how to cut yourself some slack – establish distance between you and the event.

Scene Two:

Mentally step out of the picture – instead of being in your own body, imagine that you are sitting in a movie theatre watching the event unfold up on the screen.  Watch the actor (yourself) from afar; observe what s/he is doing, what emotions s/he is revealing with voice, body posture and facial expression.  Observe what is happening with the other players.  Then pretend that the film-maker was showing a close-up that is now fading farther and farther away.  Now get up and leave the theater while the scene fades.  Walk away.

Which Scene Was Easier to Live With, One or Two?

My guess is that Scene Two is far less bothersome to you than Scene One.  That’s because in Scene Two you used your brain to create mental and seemingly physical distance between you and the emotional event.  You created a space that allowed you to see the situation more calmly and dispassionately. And you gave yourself permission to let it fade out of your memory.

I’ve found doing this version of reframing reduces my discomfort with memories I used to agonize over.  If you want to learn more about this technique and many more, look in almost any book on NLP – Neuro-Linguistic Programming – but I recommend Change Your Mind-And Keep the Change by Connierae Andreas as a good place to start.  Also see Aligning Perceptual Positions: A New Distinction in NLP.

Experiment with distancing yourself from your worries by stepping out of the picture and viewing it on a make-believe screen.  Let us know how this works for you.