If you’ve ever wondered about something that might have caused anxiety concerning an event that may or may not happen, I recently found out something that might help. For example, let’s say you have a meeting with your boss that afternoon. Something important, like your annual review, or you are going to ask for a raise or something else that you’d deem something a little bit less than a walk in the park.
If you are like most normal people, you might start to imagine all kinds of things that will happen. And I’m sure if you take the time to think back, now, about those times before when you used to imagine things that might come to pass, you might realize that they never did. Like if you had a big golf game or something with your boss’s boss, you might have imagined accidental hooking the ball into his head or something. Ok, maybe not that bad, but you get the idea.
And I’m pretty sure that you’ve heard the old saying “Most of the bad stuff that you imagine never happens.” Well, even if you understand that basic principle about the human mind, it doesn’t really help when you are laying in bed and are unable to sleep due the horrific images your brain keeps delivering to you against your consent.
But I was listening to this internet radio show the other day, and there were these two guys talking about the human mind and how it works. Unfortunately I didn’t remember which internet radio station I was listening to, as I was aimlessly surfing like I sometimes do. Like when you are surfing around the web and find this really cool blog, and you think, wow you really need to read this everyday, but then you can’t remember where it is, so you can’t come back and read it everyday like you’d like to.
So anyway this guy was saying that when people imagine all those horrible things that might happen in the future, it’s really an evolutionary manifestation of a brain early warning system. It’s thinking about all the possible things that might happen, and just kind of giving you a heads up, so you can prepare for the worst. Then he said that if you pay attention to the messages that your brain is giving you, you can kind of imagine how you’d handle whatever situation that you were afraid might come up. As soon as you imagine handling it from a few different angles, it satisfies the brains warning system, and your brain will settle down.
And the other guy was commenting that is evidence of the other old saying: “If you can imagine it, you can create it.” Because why in the world would your brain imagine up something that wasn’t possible to come true? And that simply means, that you can use your anxiety as a starting point to create whatever future reality that you’d like. Just use your imagination to take care of whatever your brain is warning you about, and then just imagine the best possible outcome by preventing it from happening by doing the opposite.
For example, if you imagine your boss yelling at you for being late on a project or something, simply come up some really good reasons why the project is late, and then come up with a few benefits for the project being late, and then hit your boss with these benefits before he gets a chance to even remember that it’s late in the first place. He’ll not only see you as being proactive, which is highly valued in today’s economy, but he’ll think of you as somebody that he can depend on when things get rough.
And it all starts with having a solid respect for the images that your brain delivers to you, all the time. Once you can tap BOTH the positive and the negative images, which you will start to realize aren’t so negative after all when you use this technique, your world will really open up.