Talk to your brain right
STEP TWO in your journey from sweaty-palmed fear monster to angster with attitude — Get your brain talk right in order to write.
I was pretty sure I was communicating very clearly with my brain. I want to be a writer, I want to write. I told it what I wanted and yet, so often, my brain seemed determined to trip me up, undermine me, paralyse me with anxiety and procrastination. I suspected we weren’t on the same team at all. I was plagued with doubts, they gnawed away at my confidence. The more others experienced success, the worse I felt. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. I was a fraud, I was no writer, who did I think I was? I battled on, writing away despite the inner demons. Fuck them! I thought. I will write anyway. Sometimes this worked, and I managed to complete two 90,000 word novels. But I was still plagued with doubts and fears. I was too scared to send them anywhere. For weeks I stopped writing, worrying I was doing things all wrong. I had come to believe that my anxiety was just something I had been born with, that I had had as long as I could remember, that it was a physical imbalance, an unfortunate neurological glitch I would have to fight every day. It was exhausting.
Then I found this lady: Marisa Peer
She made me realise that my brain really is trying to do its best and keep me safe. The problem was I just wasn’t being clear with my communication. Could it be that simple? If I learned how to talk to my brain better, I could be free to write without that constant, exhausting fight with anxiety?
The first thing I watched her in was a talk she gave on destroying fear: https://youtu.be/pR9FsmZ_Wko
I began to see that I could reprogram my brain to think differently, by using better thoughts and pictures. I practised. I’m not going to say it’s easy, breaking the habits of a lifetime. But, I noticed that I began to get better at how I talked to my brain. I understood that my brain wanted to do whatever it thought I wanted; I just had to get better at communicating those wants.
I watched quite a few of her videos — any will do, and will reinforce the ideas forming in your minds that you can change for the better.
Here is another of her videos on how to overcome anxiety and fear:
In between, I began to do mindful meditations — I found some I liked (again on the YouTube). Some were a bit ‘airy fairy’ for me, and some were difficult to take seriously. I liked the more ‘self-hypnosis’, science based ones, but each to their own. Find the flavour that suits you, invest in good headphones and make a point of doing at least one mediation a day (some are just 10 or 15 minutes). Say to yourself, everyday, ‘I am enough’. Write it on your bathroom mirror. Write it big above your desk, put it on a post it on your laptop.
When you think about writing, tell your brain that you are good enough, you are a writer, that you embrace the fear, the vulnerability, that you are happy to take risks, and get on with it. Not still here are you? Good…
