After the last time when I chatted about the ways Self Esteem affects our lives, I happened past a video about another construction that we prefix with ‘Self’, the almost physical feeling of Self Control.

I recently overheard someone talk in a cafe about a friend’s inability to exercise any of this ethereal talent that we are all expected to be instant masters in applying. I am still wondering exactly how this person’s inability to exercise their ’self control’ affected them or their friend and I’ve got to admit to being strangely intrigued as to what form this ‘lack of self control’ took and exactly how it affected them.

Was it a food stuff that rendered them helpless to temptation or perhaps it surrounded a member (or members!) of the opposite sex, maybe it was alcohol or shopping or even it could have been violence, anger or even a crazy dance in the middle of a dance floor. I wonder!

So let’s think about it, what is ‘Self Control’? To me ‘Self Control’ is the ability to really want something and then deliberately not have it due to the perception that something negative will occur if you were to indulge. For instance, you see the chocolate cake, you really want the chocolate cake but you deny yourself the pleasure and exercise ’self control’ because you imagine that the cake will cause you to gain weight, inches or, god forbid, both!

This is great. For many of us we really do need this in certain places in our lives. That ‘just one for the road’ mentality or reaching the ‘point of no return’ have been the undoing of many an evening, relationship, diet, career or worse.

The problem about Self Control is that, in certain contexts, so many of us feel bad about what we’ve done whether we exercise ’self control’ or not!

What I mean is, we have the chocolate cake and we feel sh**ty because we will pile on those ounces or inches or we don’t have the chocolate cake and we feel sh**ty because it looked so bleeding delicious and we feel as if we missed out on the joy!!

Have you noticed the pattern? Self Control is only difficult because we focus on the pain that we have gained and the pleasure we have missed rather than the pleasure we will gain and the pain we have avoided.

So here’s something for you to start making Self Control easier;

1. Understand that the urge you are feeling has a positive intention and your mind believes it is helping and protecting you

yourself, “If I do this how will I feel about 30 seconds after it is done?”

3. Make a decision based on that

4. Focus your mind on the benefits of the choice you have made, accept the decision and move on

In practice; you see/smell/witness the chocolate cake and you are not even hungry. But, it looks goooood! Your mind quickly remembers all the pleasures it has had from cake in the past and therefore you begin to feel a motivation to have that pleasure again. It is understandable, isn’t it?

You ask yourself, “If I do this how will I feel about 30 seconds after it is done?”. You get the answer, ‘I will gain momentary pleasure from having the cake and after that I will feel sluggish, a come down off the sugar and I may even feel bagged up.’

You make the decision not to have it and feel good in the knowledge that you feel light, alert and you always have the opportunity to have the cake tomorrow.

Want to see this whole process in action and performed brilliantly (by most anyway!)? Click here to watch the most charming, incredible video and remember no marshmallows once it’s done!

I like the thought of having a TED Talk Corner, don’t you! I think this may become a regular feature!

This time I include one of my all time favourite TED talks and if you have seen it before I urge you to watch it again as i promise you will learn something new.

Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroscientist who had the amazing fortune (not a misprint) to have a stroke. While having this stroke she was able to ‘watch’ as her brain functions began to shut down one by one and in this talk she discusses the incredible 20 minutes that changed her life.

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A really incredible talk. Take the time out, watch, enjoy and feel free to discuss at Mastering Happiness - The HeadStrong Blog.

One thing the human mind is very good at is distorting reality.

We do it all the time; bending reality to match what we want to see rather than what is really there.  It’s impossible not to, it’s how we are made.

In many ways you could say that we get the life experience we expect to get.  If you think the world is out to get you, you’ll get to be right.  If you think the world is your oyster, you’ll get to be right.  

The question is how much of it is reality and how much is your distorted view of reality?

Just a thought.  And an example to prove that we will see things that, in the real world, aren’t really there…or are they?

So again I find cause to point my will to scribble my musings towards the mainstream science community and cheer as they begin prove the  goings on of the brain.  Albeit the goings on in the brain that many therapists have been working with since at least the early 1980’s if not long, long before that.

Here’s what I’m talking about.

The boffins at Oxford Uni have run a series of experiments on pain and pain response.  One of these experiments involved a group of people with chronic hand pain looking at their sore hand through a pair of inverted binoculars (binoculars round the wrong way).  Incredibly they found that the subjective pain response was greatly reduced and the amount of swelling was also reduced due to the fact that the sore hand now appeared to be much smaller.  (Source)

This is great research and for anyone out there with chronic pain - or any pain for that matter - as all you have to do now is get used to navigating your world through those darn binoculars and all your pain will begin to shrink and may eventually disapear!  Or is there an easier way than walking around with your binoculars every day?

I point to another piece of research that I recently came across and this I find truly innovative and a great way of merging cognitive and medical science.

Scientists (or should I call these guys uber-boffins) at Omneuron in California have turned pain control into what I can only describe as a game.

Here’s how it works; imagine someone with chronic pain.  When that pain fires an area of the brain connected to pain control, fires at exactly the same time.  The guys at Omneuron have designed a piece of software that measures that ‘fire’ in the brain and turns it into a virtual flame.  The more pain, the bigger the flame; less pain, smaller flame - you get the idea?

Our imaginary chronic pain sufferer gets put into a MRI scanner -the big coffin like scanning machines you’ll have seen on telly - wearing a pair of special virtual reality goggles.   These goggles then show the client their own unique, real-time ‘flame of pain’ as measured by the MRI scanner.

Here’s where it get’s even better, the patient is then talked through various visualisation techniques such as imagining the area being flooded with soothing chemicals or being fixed by armies of little helpers and watches as the flame gets smaller and smaller until, after some practice, the patient is easily controlling the flame and therefore their own pain. (Source)

How cool is that!

I must admit the man in charge, Dr Christopher deCharms (not kidding!), then loses it a bit by saying that ‘in time a patient could evoke the effect without the machine’.   Aaaahhh…

Of course a patient can invoke the effect without the bloody machine!!  It’s nothing to do with the machine.  It’s all our own doing.

Feelings, including pain, are just feelings.  Yet because all our senses are part of one large cognitive net we can use one sense to ‘talk’ to another sense, i.e. we can use visualisation to affect our sensory feelings.

Here’s a wee trick for you that will save you a lot of money on paracetamol.  Next time you have a headache ask yourself “If this headache was to have a colour what colour would it be?” and see what comes up for you.  Is it a blue headache, a fluorescent yellow headache, a boiling red headache, a deep black headache?  Whatever colour it is, imagine turning it white.  Imagine a flood of brilliant soothing white entering your head and taking away all the old colour.

Try it.  What have you go to lose?

If you suffer from any other type of pain you can use a similar technique:

1. Close your eyes and get ‘in touch’ with the pain

2. Ask yourself ‘If this pain was to have a shape what shape would it be?’ (accept whatever comes up e.g. circle, square, cloud, raindrops, spiders, snakes, pins, fire.  Always work with whatever your mind wants to imagine.)

3. Ask yourself ‘If this shape was to have a colour what colour would it be?’

4. Now if that pain was to be totally gone now, what shape would complete freedom from pain be?  And what colour would that shape be?

5. Use your imagination to completely change the old painful shape into the new freedom shape and notice what happens to the pain.

6. Do this for 5-10 minutes every single day for a week and notice the results.

This is only one way to do it and you can use the soothing medicine or the army of people example if that works better for you.

Before I go here’s a couple of resources or you if you are interested in finding out more about how your mind can affect your body.

Dr David Hamilton is a leading expert on the science of how the mind affects the body and his book
It’s the Thought That Counts: Why Mind Over Matter Really Works is a fantastic read packed full of scientific study and research into the affect your mind has over your healing ability.

David also has a new book out How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body which I’ve still to read.  I would say, having met David a couple of times and having read ‘It’s the thought that counts’, that it will be also packed full of the science of healing with the mind.

I would, of course, be failing miserably if I didn’t also recommend the classic Quantum Healing Exploring the Frontiers of Mind /Body Spirit by Deepak Chopra.  One of the most insightful and incredible books I have ever read and a must for anyone interested in the power of the mind.

Anyway, enough from me for today.  I’ll be back soon to give you some tips on how to forget the crappy New year’s resolutions that some of you (and you know who you are!) are already not keeping and help set some truly empowering goals for 2009.

‘Til then, happy thinking.

Brian