Looking back, it just might have been relaxing…

Just when I thought I’d missed the boat, it turned out I was waiting for the bus. All those things that I had so carefully allowed my unconscious mind to deliver with poorly timed delays which built up and left me wondering if I would ever have that digit sufficiently extracted to get this thing off the ground, to continue the locomotive metaphorical referencing, several of those self-same things have all turned up and are hammering my door down.

Well to be fair, they’re not so much hammering as knocking politely to see if I’m ready to let them join the party which, with later hindsight will turn out to have been quite some bash if I’m not mistaken.

All of a sudden there are actual leaflets to deliver, ; there will shortly be a downloads page together with some bone-fide eponymice designed to alleviate and offer remedy and solace as appropriate. Sounds good so far to me but it gets better.

I have for some time now been pondering the merits of combining my careers of Cognitive Hypnotherapy (which I love by the way) and Chartered Financial Planning, (which, whilst the fire of love has long since died down, I am still very fond of). It seemed a long shot but in my Sky Bird kind of way I was certain that there was a path into the future which would bring the best of both into sharp communion and offer an offering which was not currently being, for want of a better word, offered.

It turns out that one of my key decisions in this Quest was, with that aforementioned hindsight, pretty much 20/20 although at the time I was very concerned it may drive a myopic wedge through my Financial Planning contract work. You see, there are a lot more of us pitching for work than there is work to be pitched for especially as I’m aiming at ad-hoc days rather than the chunkier multi-week affairs which are more prevalent (or at least were in the pre yet-another-regulation-changeover days).

I debated the merits of keeping my two careers separate. You know, two LinkedIn profiles, two set of CV, two Facebook pages, twinned Twitter accounts and so on. Instead, as is becoming mildly habitual, I took the risk of combining them. My LinkedIn profile , whilst majoring on my financial services credentials nonetheless declares to the world, at that part of it which decides to look, that I am not only Chartered but a Cognitive Hypnotherapist. My CV proudly declares that I offer the above and am also an NLP practitioner. Twitter, Facebook and this blog pay tribute to both sides of my split working personalities.

It seems that this is the week when the coming together begins.

I’m now in contact with two Financial Services groups specifically because I am qualified in Cognitive Hypnotherapy. This is not, I hasten to add at this juncture just in case any of the regulatory persuasion are amongst the blogging community who drop in for a read every now and then, to add a layer of hypnotic persuasion to the meticulously crafted advice being offered to members of the general public but rather because my unique perspective might deliver some sideways, upside-down and occasionally just plain unexpected views of how certain problems might get solved.

The horizon has opened up to reveal a potential, (a lovely word which loosely translates into ‘maybe/maybe not, we’ll just wait and see what you come up with, OK?’) for developing training modules to help candidates undertake their study, learning, course-work and the like to suit how they, as individuals, learn best rather than depending on the design of the various study materials and generic learning styles on offer.

There’s a move to understanding the hugely overlooked importance of the advisers themselves in the advice transaction leading to an inevitable misalignment with the client because our wonderful, (honestly?), UK regulator insists on communicating written detail to one and all which leaves no room for a client’s particular view of the world and how they make important decisions. The more astute are understanding that to some extent successful advice relies on an element of client-life-coaching as part of the advice process. So who shows them how to accomplish that one in a way that takes a leap ahead of most life-coaching models? I might just put my hand up and offer my services.

Now that the doors have opened, it is my firm intention to thrust a wedge in between them and ensure they don’t shut. I am fully aware that these particular seeds of hopefulness may not bear fruit. But there is at least some evidence of fertile ground on which to cast whatever further seeds float, drop or spiral their way past me. Regulars amongst you will also know that I am not one for touching wood or worrying about Fate being unduly tempted and all that Melarkey (a pleasant woman who, strangely, worked for me once upon a time). What will be, will only have been once the what-will-be has done its doings and I take a long hard look in the rearview mirror, (Fate and Lee Remick notwithstanding). Weirdly, the IMDb.com plot synopsis for Rearview Mirror reads; ‘The plot synopsis is empty’. They’ve obviously seen the film.

And now to business: I have a question.

When my download page is live, (hopefully within a couple of weeks), I’d like to offer a pretty chunky discount every now and then to you guys, (‘guys’ is of course a unisex term, referring to readers of this blog) and I’d really value your feedback.

Would this be something you’d like me to offer or should I just leave all that download stuff for my website only?

To help you decide, (just for you stressed-out, adrenaline-fuelled, sleep-deprived blog-reading fans), here is a taste of things to come…click on the link below to listen to (or download) my example Relaxation recording. This one is an exclusive and won’t be up for sale.

Gentle Relaxation

And to add to the sense of doing the right thing at the right time, I find that I’ve been nominated for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award (twice) in the last 7 days! Needless to say, I’m doubly flattered but more of that mid-week.

For now, have a relaxing time on me…

Not a care…
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013

 

Pain Procrastination and Broken Cycles

Here’s a thing. Whilst I’ve been attending to things other than blogging, for a variety of good and not-so good reasons, I’ve discovered something interesting. When I have a task that I don’t want to do, my unconscious mind does everything in its power to make it a difficult as possible to do undertake the task. Now, I used to think of this as procrastination, I’ve procrastinated all my life, putting things off until the last possible moment and then working away like someone who’s working hard to win the hard working competition by working harder than a hard worker would normal work when working hard. And so on. But perhaps there’s more to it than that.

You see, I’m just that little bit more self-aware than I used to be and I reckon that I actually run two types of procrastinatory algorithms in my library of mental sub-routines. You could call them the Good and the Bad. Which unfortunately leaves me as being the Ugly, but there you go. In previous musings I’ve let you into the secrets of how I use procrastination as a means of cramming more good things into the time when I ought to be, by the standards of those who subscribe to dainty elephant-eating etiquette, working consistently towards achieving the goals and sub-goals beloved of the aforementioned munchers of pachyderm micro-morsels.

My view? Basically, stuff the perceived wisdom of those elders and betters who achieve their goals a small sub-goal at a time spread out over a sensible time period to avoid stress. I belong to the relatively smaller world of folk who would rather not have elephant for every meal and are better suited to a sampling wide variety of fare secure in the knowledge that when the time comes, as surely it will, there is more fun and productivity to be gained by diving into elephant feasting for a week or so and eating my fill whilst achieving the same ultimate goal in a fraction of the time.

What I’ve discovered and what I think has up until now obscured the view and prevented me from identifying a propensity to working better under pressure by choice, is that I also self-sabotage when there’s a task ahead that I dread. I’ve always had tasks that I dread, it’s just that up until now  my reaction to these has had the same outward appearance as those tasks that I put off because simply because I subconsciously know that I’ll perform more efficiently if I do. It’s only really now that I can tell the difference.

So what constitutes dread. For a start, it is not the difficulty. I can do hard. I can do intricate. I can do complex. I’m particularly good at dealing with a task where I’ve no idea how it’s going to pan out or what I am actually going to do – it’s enough simply to know that there must be a way through it, even though I may have absolutely no idea what that way might be when I start. I just know I’ll get through it. A bit like realising that getting lost is always temporary. If it wasn’t, you’d be lost forever.

In essence, I’ve got a project on at the moment which has really made me look at why I have delayed it and deferred it beyond reason. It turns out that my particular flavour of dread is a task at which I think I might fail because I fear that I am less skilled or knowledgeable than my peers. Where I think I might finally get found out as the fraud that the back of my mind whispers to me that I really am in moments of self-doubt.

That was a bit of en eye-opener. Useful though. Now I know what is going on I can do something about it. So I have. I looked it full in the face, worked out where it was in the cycle of repetitive failure and broke it. The beast of a task is now two thirds done and under control, on time for the deadline.

And as is usual in these posts, there’s the twist and turning of the imagination and the concurrent dealings I’ve been dealing which have uncanny parallels. As you know, in my brave new world of Cognitive Hypnotherapy, my particular focus is on pain management, fertility issues and stress related difficulties.

By co-incidence, over the same three weeks in which I’ve been wrestling with beastly workloads, I’ve fallen across a host of information on chronic pain. Articles, blogs by sufferers, on-line communities, scientific papers and the like. Almost without trying, it seems that I’ve had three weeks of soaking up more and more fascinating information. It all just makes me more and more convinced that what I’ve set out do achieve is exactly right. It is really quite stunning just how many people there are out there who suffer with chronic pain that proves incredibly difficult to treat. Until you have a reason to look, you tend to believe that good old western medicine with its multi billion pound/dollar pharmaceutical industry has got it all under control.

Not so.

There however some hopeful signs. More and more is being researched and written about how pain, particularly chronic pain, manifests itself and the mechanisms which produce it and cause it to repeat and repeat and repeat, despite whatever medical interventions are thrown at it. This is where the parallels with my self-sabotaging procrastination struck me. Bear with me, I’ll explain.

There are situations where, neurons get so used to pain that they display similar attributes to muscle memory, you know, where neural pathways develop which allow ever faster replication of muscle co-ordination and movement with less and less conscious thought. It appears that the same can occur with pain. the neurons get so used to perceiving pain, that they do it with less and less stimulation. They get better and better at telling you you’re in pain.

In addition, there’s a type of gating system in the spine which helps to regulate the perceptions of the three types of nerves which transmit touch-related feeling, (high-level short-term pain & lower-level chronic-pain and then touch itself). It seems to operate in ‘centres’ in the spine where these three nerve types pass in close proximity to each other. Whichever is the stronger of these impulses tends to get priority and closes the ‘gate’ for the others, suppressing their perception. For example, if touch is the strongest, then any other pain related sensory information is over-ridden and doesn’t get through. Likewise if one of the pain sensations is strongest, then the touch related information is less important and becomes restricted.

Here’s an interesting thing. What you think about appears to have a major effect too. Well it must do, if you think about it. Consider this, if touch happened to be the strongest impulse, then that sensation would get through. However, if there wasn’t any way of down-regulating that information then we would spend all day at the office being fully aware of the feel of the fabric on our arms, the shoes on our feet, the pressure of the chair on our well rounded backside and so on. So there’s a mechanism which shuts this information down and allows us to concentrate on issues which are far more important to our lives.

In essence, if we are in an already-safe-so-it’s-OK-to-carry-on kind of a mode then we send a deregulating signal down our spines which also shuts the gate. It’s called descending inhibition. This is what means that we simply don’t notice the touch of the clothes we wear unless something draws it to our attention. We aren’t constantly aware of how hot or cold or just right the temperature of the room is and so on. It also means that people who are in pain but who are experiencing something more important at the time, ten not to notice the pain. Think battlefield wounds, think sports injuries, think children playing happily with grazed knees. Think Manteo Mitchell who ran the last 200m of his 4x400m Olympic relay with a broken leg. He knew he’d broken it too. He still ran it in in 46.1 seconds. Amazing.

The thing is, this system also works in reverse. If you are in protection mode, not feeling safe, then your brain is on the look out for anything that might be dangerous; anything that might indicate you are under attack. And what’s its primary warning system? Pain. So what do you think your body does if it’s in protection mode, feeling defensive? It puts it’s pain sensor system on alert and opens those pain gates up wide. Just in case. The difficulty is, if you’re already in pain, it becomes ever more difficult to down-regulate the ‘gate’. Descending inhibition becomes almost impossible

So here’s one possibility of how the cycle might run where there’s apparently no residual physical issue causing the very real levels of pain that can be experienced by a chronic sufferer. Long term experience of pain tends to send most individuals into a state of self-protection, whether physically, (holding yourself to restrict movement which exacerbates pain), or mentally, (from feeling just down and fed-up, those low levels of energy which tell you to give up and stay in bed, right through to serious levels of depression and anxiety).  And what does your brain do when you’re in a self-protective state? It triggers those self-preservation early warning systems and looks for evidence of attack. Open those gates, boys, we need to be ready. Here you go again. It can be a cycle which is extremely difficult to get out of.

The good news, (really, there is some), is that this cycle appears to be able to be interrupted at any point. And if it is successfully interrupted, the cycle breaks and the body has a chance to reset the pain gates. Western medicine is adept at interrupting this cycle at two main points. The site of the initial source of pain, (interventions which assist the healing process) and reducing the pain itself back to manageable levels with a variety of analgesics  Unfortunately, it seems that if these tactics fail, there isn’t much else that medics have up their sleeves.

So how does this sort of cycle work? In essence, we ‘do’ chronic pain in the following way:

• Something triggers the perception of pain.
• We react unconsciously to the pain and map it into what we expect the pain to mean for us. If we suffer chronic pain, the brain jumps into its routine reaction and without us even noticing.
• This triggers an emotional reaction and given that pain is an alarm stimulus, we are likely to react in a negative emotional way
• The emotion triggers a set of unconscious behaviours. This is often self-protective behaviour such as lethargy, muscle stiffness, depressions and anxiety. The purpose of this could be self-restrict movement and enforce rest, designed to encourage recovery and prevent further damage.
• It is only really at this point, once all these automatic responses have been triggered, that we realise the conscious perception of the pain.

Now, even though pain medication can be very effective, if it doesn’t work and there’s no apparent physical cause, the only recourse open to western medicine is to try again. Usually with more powerful pharmacology. As our Mr Maslow said, (he of the eponymous hierarchy-of-needs fame), ‘If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail’. In essence, if it didn’t work the first time, hit it harder.

Perhaps one way out of this maze is to find someone with tools designed for use at other points in the cycle as well.

You never know, it just might work.

What’s to lose?

Except maybe the pain.

here to stay or gone for good?
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013

Related articles

• Relieve Chronic Pain By De-Stressing, Study Says (huffingtonpost.com)
• Patients With Chronic Pain Benefit From Pain Training For Primary Care Providers (medicalnewstoday.com)

Why Intentions Don’t Matter That Much

In the end, right at the end, it’s what you did that counts. At least that’s the premise.

You set out to achieve. You plan. You intend to do. There is no try. There is only do or don’t do. If you keep track of where you’re headed, you might even arrive.

If you’re not careful, you are of course simply paving the way to the cliché of your choice.

I found a blog this week that not only wraps this concept up really neatly, it does so via a less well known and particularly favourite film of mine. It might also shed light on why those anti-globalisation protesters insist on wearing Guy Fawkes masks…

Why Intentions Don’t Matter That Much

Should I turn it down now?
© Tony Burkinshaw 2012

When the Future-Trap Snaps

So I’ve spent all week waiting for that mythical particle of inspiration to strike a spark in my imagination. It didn’t.

Thanks to Victoria, I have a back-up plan.

Module 7 of my training with Quest dealt with, amongst other issues, performance enhancement which you’ll know, of course, because you’ve read ‘You’ve Got The Power‘. On that particular weekend’s training course I worked with Victoria and the particular performance we worked on was my evolving writing skill. I’m still very new to this, having only really started any form of meaningful writing, (sales reports and technical bulletins don’t count), three months ago with this blog.

However in that short time, I’ve found that there are, on occasion, times when I just start writing with no real idea exactly what I’m going to write other than following that spark of inspiration that fired the post in the first place. I found a place of flow. On occasion.

To be fair, I also spent a lot of time not writing anything and wracking my brains to tease out the best next word for the sentence. There have also been more than enough sentences and, indeed, entire paragraphs that really should never have turned up on the screen in front of me at all.

So the performance enhancement became my Plan B, (yet another great musician – you should check him out but beware Strickland Banks is not representative of young Mr. Drew’s usual work, parental guidance most definitely applies). With Victoria’s help, I worked on being able to re-create that feeling of finding flow in my writing. Of not really knowing what will come next, just starting out and trusting to the knowledge that it’s worked before and will work again. This post will be the test of that. I haven’t a clue where I’m headed and to fair until 20 minutes ago, I didn’t even know that I’d get this far writing about the fact that I didn’t even know that I’d get this far. I’ve even managed to pull another musical reference in.

Moving on.

What is really taking up my attention this week is that HPD. Remember? That source of my mini rant about TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) back at the beginning of September. A major part of my being able to qualify and practice as a Cognitive Hypnotherapist is the Hypnotherapy Practitioner Diploma. I need to gain the qualification and if I want that qualification to be in place by the time I finish my course in January, the HPD must be completed by the 1st December.

I have twelve and a half days to write 12,000 words. I’ve already done about 9,000 but that’s taken me since the beginning of September. Extrapolate that one out and you’ll find that my target completion date is 2nd of March.

I’m on track to miss my deadline by three months.

Fortunately my engineering education, (yes, I qualified as a Chemical Engineer, spent three years as a Brewer of beer, twenty-seven years in Financial Services and am now becoming a Cognitive Hypnotherapist, don’t you just love consistency), allows me to be appropriately disdainful of statistical projection. I’ve also learnt to embrace my innate tendency to procrastinate. After years of trying to manage it, of being told from early school   days through my adolescent and adult life that procrastination is just another version of laziness, I’ve discovered it is actually a talent that allows me to embrace the here and now.

It doesn’t work for everyone and annoys the hell out those who can’t do it. I simply work at my best when something is both important and urgent. If it’s just important, like the HPD, it’s not enough. It needs to be urgent as well in order to get me working at maximum efficiency. The HPD is a classic case in point. I know that I have the skill, knowledge and capacity to pass. I’m not at all worried that I can’t do it. I qualified as a Chartered Financial Planner this year and that took me many years and many exams to complete so the HPD definitely lies within the realms of a do-able thing. It’s taken me 11 weeks to write 9,000 words. I’ve got 12 days left (and a half, don’t forget the half, it’s important). Plenty of time.

Which brings me to the title of this post.

For years, I’ve managed both my propensity to procrastinate and my talent for forgetting anything important, (my most active auto-trance-phenomena is Amnesia), by setting myself traps for the future, to ensure that I really did deal with those important things that are not yet urgent or that I would quite like to avoid but absolutely had to prepare for. I would set up tasks or meetings or presentations which would walk me towards whatever the goal in mind would be. It was the only way I’d ensure that anything actually happened. I’d break down my target event into to trip-over-the-next-important-section style sub-events. Now you might think this sounds quite familiar, good time management practice and project goal setting. You should never forget that I once turned up five hours late for a time management training course. Honestly.

For me, though, what I was doing was setting a trap in the future, a trip wire that’ I’d fall over and fire a shot of deadline adrenalin into my system. I knew that I wouldn’t work towards those goals, I’d forget them secure in the knowledge that at some point in the not too distant, I’d fall flat on my face, pick myself up and deal with it. Efficiently. And always to standard. I’d set the trip wire so that it would give me just and only just enough time to get the whatever it was that had to be done done by the whenever it was it had to done by to whatever the standard was that it needed to be done to and meet the deadline.

Somehow, it turns out, I was aware enough of my trance phenomena preferences to move effectively into the future at my most efficient, even if I did have to do it by repeatedly tripping myself up. In effect, I’d become my own game keeper, trapping my effectiveness at appropriate points to prevent my amnesiac consciousness from wandering off and populating my future with a total lack of achievement.

In a clear demonstration of serendipity, which the more astute among you will recognise as nothing more than negative hallucination allowing me to ignore anything that didn’t fit in with the serendipitous trend, I’ve come across three totally independent rationalisations of why it’s important to embrace procrastination. Two of these were people my alter-ego works with and another was a blog on Psychology Today way back from April 2011. Somehow it turned up on my Twitter feed a couple of weeks ago which is very much a phrase I never thought I’d be using in the middle of a blog that I’d no idea I was going to write.

It talks about active procrastination. I’m an active procrastinator. I have always worked best under pressure, with just enough time to get something done. And I’ve always felt I had to treat this as a negative trait and strive to build in more ongoing work to try to counter act it, to be more ‘in control’. As it happens it didn’t make me feel in control at all. I’m convinced that all I was actually doing was giving a sense of control to my erstwhile elders and betters. Now those are two words should never be used together automatically, only sparingly and when really deserved. I’ve met a few elders who are indeed better and have a wealth of knowledge and experience to share.

However, I’ve met many more who don’t. They wallow in their thirty years of experiencing the same thing and mistake it for being truly thirty year’s worth of experiences. They’re wrong. And usually so fixed in their ways and so ingrained in their own world that they cannot see, let alone comprehend, anyone else’s point of view. You’ve probably met them. They are only older. If you suspect you might be one of them, it’s never too late for new experience. Try it. I’m loving it.

As an active procrastinator, I get to spend more time dealing with and enjoying the here and now than if I try to meet a non-procrastinator’s ideal of ongoing, manageable bite sized chunks.

You know that well-worn phrase, (sorry Trevor), about how to eat an elephant? Apparently perceived wisdom is one bite at a time. I prefer a feast. Stuff your face until you’re fit to burst. Accept the burst and feast again. In my mind, if you try to eat an elephant one bite at a time, your future is full of, guess what, elephant flavoured food. Breakfast lunch and dinner. Hey guys, what’s for dinner? Elephant – again. For four months in total, I’ve been avoiding the elephant. I’ve had a taste every now and then but it wasn’t cooked right. Didn’t quite have the right texture.

In the meantime, I got to eat all manner of mental flavours and concoctions. All my meals were and are different. And every now and then… guess what.

Bring on the Elephant feast!

Are they all the same?
© Tony Burkinshaw 2012

Related articles

• Why We Procrastinate, And How To Stop It (lifehacker.com.au)
• Procrastination is a dirty word…or is it? (academicwonderings.wordpress.com)