Telling your inner critic to chill
Affirmations do not work.<p>Mental health is mechanical. Most anxiety and suffering within mental health are second order effects from unconscious fears that we have about behaviours we feel are risky to take. For example, if you grow up in a household where your personal distress causes distress in others, you will hide your own personal distress and attempt to appear good all of the time. You will have high levels of anxiety in situations in which you might have to admit distress&#x2F;dissatisfaction&#x2F;not be a happy person that makes everyone else happy.<p>To improve mental health, more behaviours on the spectrum of all possible behaviours need to become calmly accessible. This allows the brain to be calmer in a wider range of situations; previously a situation that might cause distress might have been avoided&#x2F;cause a spike in anxiety, now the situation can be faced calmly and the newly integrated behaviour allows the individual to say &quot;sorry, I&#x27;m finding this too stressful, I need to stop&quot;.<p>Everyone typically has their own unique combination of behaviours which are not easily accessible. In my personal therapy I found that my dreams were a useful way of diagnosing what behaviours I was not comfortable with. I got very interested in this and ultimately completed a Masters in Psychology to write a paper on the topic based on the underlying neurology that occurs during REM sleep.<p>The paper can be read here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;psyarxiv.com&#x2F;k6trz" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;psyarxiv.com&#x2F;k6trz</a><p>It was discussed on HN here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19143590" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19143590</a>