How To Stop Feeling Stressed and Unhappy By Re-Wiring Your Negative Beliefs

Guest post by Penny Mallinson and Sue Coyne, co-authors of The Zone of Connection (LID Publishing, 2019).

Are you guilty of sabotaging your success and happiness?

Do you ever find yourself reacting to situations rather than choosing how to respond?

Perhaps you feel held back at times by your ideas and beliefs and feel you have an inner critic controlling your life?

It could be that you sabotage your success by the stories that you tell yourself.

When we experience this way of living our lives, we feel closed, stuck, held back and frustrated. Many women struggle with the stress of juggling everything in their life.  What we need to create is a more supportive, positive approach to life that means that we are open to change, opportunity and our potential.

How To Feel Your Best At Any Time

We’re going to teach you some powerful exercises that allow you to shift and manage your state, to prepare for your day whatever that involves and feel at your best any time, anywhere.  We’ll also show you how to interrupt your habitual negative thoughts and patterns of behaviour enabling you to connect to your true power, to feel calm and centred yet vibrantly alive.

Let’s take a look first at why we have negative beliefs.

Why Do We Have Negative Beliefs?

There are four aspects that develop our negative or limiting beliefs:

• During our early years we have experiences that create our ideas about ‘self’, such as rejection, neglect or being the ‘odd one out’, which leads to…
• Our core belief. This is an assessment of our worth or value as a person, which may lead to other beliefs such as “I am worthless” or “I am not good enough”
• These develop our guidelines for copying or survival – “I must avoid this,” “I must always put others first,” “If I am myself, I will be rejected” – which lead to…
• Trigger situations. These are situations in which our guidelines are transgresses, resulting in defensiveness and feelings of rejection, failure or being out of control.

Your early experiences, and the limiting beliefs they create, not only remain unchallenged into adulthood, but also generate self-reinforcing and self-fulfilling mechanisms that are regularly triggered.

What then happens is that your brain filters the information it receives to find things that confirm your hardwired beliefs. These beliefs become your thoughts and your inner dialogue, which influence how you feel, what you do and the outcomes you get as a result. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is not easy to break out of.

Why You Need To Regularly Scan Your Beliefs

The reason is that your brain likes certainty; it likes to maintain the status quo and does not like change. So, you tend to hold onto your hardwired view of the world for fear that if you change it, your world may collapse. What this means is that, in a world that is constantly and rapidly changing, your view of the world very quickly becomes outdated and holds you back or keeps you stuck.

You are not taught about the need to regularly scan your beliefs and update those that are no longer in line with the outcomes that you want. You don’t realize that you need to update your software. But it is important to do so, and it can be achieved by using the process of neuroplasticity to rewire your brain and update your software. Learning how to let go of beliefs that hold you back is an important life skill.

Becoming Aware Of Your Beliefs

The first step is to bring these limiting beliefs to conscious awareness so that you become aware of them as they arise in the moment. Since these beliefs have been in place for so long, throughout your life, they are buried deep in your subconscious, and it takes patience and skill to bring them to the surface.

Notice What’s Going On Inside You

Using the Connection Practice heightens your awareness. It does this by helping you to slow down and be present in the moment so that you can notice what is going on inside you.

You might not initially be able to articulate the belief, but you are aware of how you are feeling and what sensations happen in your body as you start to react based on your subconscious beliefs. The Connection Practice facilitates the process of identifying the limiting beliefs that are holding you back.

Once you have identified your limiting beliefs, you can start to identify a more empowering set of new beliefs given the outcomes you want to bring about.

The Feel-Good Chemicals

Neuroscience shows that you can’t just overwrite these existing beliefs, which are hardwired into neural pathways in your subconscious brain. The only way is to create new neural pathways for the new beliefs that you identify, using the neuroplasticity of your brain. This means that you control your own reality, because you can change your thoughts, beliefs and mindset.

Essentially your brain plays a big part in determining your state of mind and your reactions. If you are consumed by negative beliefs and negative mindsets, you are likely to be less happy than people with a generally positive set of beliefs. When you have positive beliefs, you create more dopamine and serotonin, the feel-good chemicals in the brain.

These chemicals are electrical transmitters and allow your brain not only to process optimally but also to support the neuroplasticity you need to rewire your limiting beliefs. Essentially, your brain’s influence on whether you feel happy and positive goes well beyond beliefs.

Brainwave Frequencies – What You Need To Know

Your brain changes frequencies at different times during the day and these different frequencies heavily influence your state of mind, as each frequency puts you into a different state of consciousness. These are five main brainwave frequencies, beta, alpha, theta, delta and gamma.

When your hardwired beliefs were installed during the early years of your life, your brain was vibrating at a theta frequency. In order to hardwire a new behaviour, we need to access the subconscious mind and encourage it to create a new neural pathway.

There are a number of possible ways to do this, which involve thinking about it, speaking about it (possibly using positive statements and affirmations) and practising the new behaviour. With this method, it is best to think about the new belief that you want to hardwire when you are just about to go to sleep or when you are waking up, because your brain is in a receptive state at these times.

However, the Connection Practice switches you to a lower frequency, such as alpha or theta. By doing so, you will have more awareness of your limiting beliefs and also enter a state where your subconscious is receptive to the new beliefs that you create in this state.

How To Rewire Your Limiting Beliefs

Limiting beliefs are often deeply buried. The following exercise may help to bring them to the surface.

Step 1 – Relive The Situation:

• Think of a situation in the recent past when you felt uncomfortable, blocked or stuck, or you overreacted
• Close your eyes, picture the scene and relive it as fully as possible. What is happening around you? What are people saying? Imagine what are you doing? What are you saying/not saying? How do you feel?
• Write down verbatim everything that was running in your head at the time. Don’t censor it: just write what is there

Step 2 – Identify The Belief:

Limiting beliefs often start with ‘I must’, ‘I should’, or ‘I can’t’. Here are some examples:

• I must be perfect to be loved/worthwhile, etc.
• I must be right
• I’m not good enough
• I must work hard to prove I’m good enough
• If I make a mistake, others will ridicule me and think I am no good
• If I challenge others or express a different opinion, others won’t like me

Next you can start to tackle your own beliefs:

• Look at what you wrote down in Step 1, highlight any limiting beliefs and write them down in a list
• Take each limiting belief and say, “What would that mean to me?”
• Keep repeating this question until you get to the underlying limiting belief

Step 3 – Tune Into Feelings

• For the limiting beliefs that you have identified, take a note of the experiences in your body and your feelings as you recall the times when this limiting belief held you back
• You may re-experience feelings that you had at the time – this shows the strong connection between thinking and feeling

Step 4 – Check For Assumptions:

• Read through each limiting belief and ask yourself whether it is a fact or an assumption – anything that predicts an outcome in the future is an assumption
• Ask yourself what it is costing you to continue with this assumption
• Look critically at each belief. Is it really true?

Step 5 – Re-frame The Situation:

• Re-frame every assumption into a belief that will support you better or one that is more empowering
• Identify a positive re-frame for every negative belief, such as: If I speak out, I will get conflict.

Positive re-frame: Is I assert my view, they will listen. If I do get into conflict, I can both listen to them and stand my ground.

Step 6 – Visualize The Outcome:

Use the Connection Practice to get your mind into a relaxed, creative and receptive state:

• Set your intention to identify beliefs that will support ad empower you
• Feel your feet on the ground and your spine aligned
• Close your eyes
• Notice the sensations in your body and take a moment to relax
• Bring your attention to the energy surrounding your body and feel for balance
• Take a big breath and let go of anything you don’t need right here by sighing it out. This includes those limiting beliefs you have identified
• Breathe in from your head down through your hearty to your gut, connecting yourself up
• Take another of these long conscious breaths down into your belly as you slow down and become calmer

And…

• From the centre of your chest, start to imagine a line going up through your body and all the way to the centre of the radiant sun
• Enjoy the warmth of the sun’s energy for a few moments
• Now come back down the line into your body and down to the earth, all the way to the earth’s molten core
• Take a moment to feel your source energy and to feel grounded with the earth
• Feel aligned between the sun and the earth
• Sense the energy in your heart opening and expanding into your entire body
• Allow this energy to continue to expand way out to encompass the whole earth, out past the planets, and connect to the infinite universe
• Expand out as far as you can possibly imagine, to where you have no edges and are fully connected to everything in the entire universe
• From this expanded state, imagine a situation when you notice your limiting beliefs coming into play in the past. This time imagine a positive outcome happening based on your new positive belief.

With time, as you use the Connection Practice in this way, you will gradually see a positive outcome from similar situations. You will start to notice how you are dealing with such situations differently.

Step 7 – Embedding The New Beliefs:

Changing beliefs and habitual behaviours takes time, as you have to create a new neural pathway. This happens if the behaviour of thought is repeated/focused on often enough. Each time you notice the old limiting belief coming into play, pause and use the Connection Practice to connect up. You will create a six-to-ten-second gap in which you can consciously change it to your new positive belief.

This won’t happen immediately. It takes time and you might need to ask someone to encourage you when they see the new behaviour and remind you if they see you lapsing back into the old behaviour.

Affirmations

One way of embedding your new positive supportive belief is to use them as affirmations. The idea is to repeat these affirmations (you should not have too many, ideally) to yourself every night when you are half asleep or every morning when you are half awake – this is when your subconscious mind is most accessible. It takes sustained effort, but eventually you will realize that you are operating to the new set of beliefs.

Visualization

An important and effective addition is the use of visualization, a powerful technique used in sports. This works through our mirror neurons, which cause us to mimic things. We create pictures in our minds and mimic them, and we also mimic others.

If we visualize how we want to be and if, when doing our affirmation, we replay these images as if they are actually happening then we can consciously choose to make this our reality. As we go through this process, we take back control because we are choosing what is in our subconscious. We put it there, we wrote the program.

What To Do When You Lapse Back Into Old Behaviours

As these new beliefs start to influence your behaviours, there will be times when you lapse back into the old behaviours. It is important to realize that the thoughts in our minds are making our decisions six to ten seconds before we are aware of what we are going to do.

The Connection Practice will make you become more present in the moment and aware of your behaviours. You will notice these choices and take a pause to consciously select the new behaviour as opposed to allowing the old one to automatically happen. In this way you begin to gain the ability to make your own choices and stop the previously embedded automatic responses. This begins to change the programming in your subconscious.

The Zone Of Connection

This book share’s the latest thinking and simplest explanation as to how we function at our best in terms of our psychology, neuro science and quantum science. It guides you through a unique set of ‘Connection Practices’ that were developed and work consistently for most people to reach a fully connected ‘in the zone’ state. They are powerful beyond mindfulness exercises, but simple to use everyday giving you practical tools to transform your life.

In this fully connected state, you have shifted from your default operating system to a new operating system. This allows you to interrupt your habitual negative thoughts and patterns of behaviour.

Why not also read 17 ways to build your self-esteem or happy tips for self-care.

Bio

The authors, Sue and Penny are passionate about making this as accessible and understandable as possible for everyone to transform their daily lives with 17 powerful exercises in the book that you can practice and listen to through the free downloads at www.thezoneofconnection.com/downloads.

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