How to Stamp Out Personal Fear and Anxiety in Ten-Minutes

How to Stamp Out Personal Fear And Anxiety in Ten-Minutes

Do you ever read articles or listen to experts who sound so slick
you discount their knowledge as just old common-sense?

What we are too nice to say is their great solution to your problem
is too good to be true. When the answer is too-easy, something a
ten-year old could come up with, we say, No thanks, I will do it myself.

U of Chi

The University of Chicago is a great school, it was started by
John D. Rockefeller in 1890 to make folks love him and do good works. It was a religious thing, pushed into reality by the American
Baptist Educational Society with the Rockefeller oil dinero.

Marshall Field the department store czar, donated the land for the
campus. The goal was to be different, more European than American
schools. How? The departments crossed educational boundaries.

I am getting there – their first President was William R. Harper, who demanded professors take the less traveled road and produce scholars, not job seekers. The money behind them delighted in controversy – imagine that.

Today

Professor Sian L. Beilock of the University of Chicago just wrote a book on Choking (up) by folks facing adversity playing golf or making financial decisions.

She came up with simple, but effective solutions for not choking up in the middle of life’s challenges. Stupid – but they work.

Simultaneously she wrote an article on how to avoid anxiety and stress in taking exams. Again, simple strategies that just plain work.
Get this – her scientific solution enable students to improve their test
performance one-full-grade. Example: B- to B+.

Solutions

1. Write out (keyboard is nice too) your worries and
fears for ten-minutes before testing, making a presentation or doing a job interview.

Five-minutes does not work, and glittering generalities fail – you need to express your deepest
emotional fears and anxiety in print. It shifts your
brain from Left Hemisphere (brain) to Right-brain
functioning.

Use words that produce mental imagery
(movies) and really get into it. You move forward a
winner. It never fails, works like a charm.

2. Instead of concentrating on your worries, anxiety
and stress - Sing. That is exactly what Dr. Beilock
discovered in her experiments. If you sing, you brain
cannot worry about failing the exam or blowing the
presentation or interview.

It causes your brain to shift hemispheric dominance. Your move your thinking from left-brain
dominant to accessing your powerful right-brain.
Righty specializes in pictures, emotions and holistic
thinking. You are empowered and win all the ---

3. Instead of being a perfectionist, and attempting to
control all the factors in your environment, literally
Stop! - let go of control over all the circumstances.

Avoid Paralysis Analysis by letting go of trying to
control each and everything going on. Let your right
brain take over accessing your Procedural Memory.

It owns all the rules and instructions for
implementation at a non-conscious level. Stop
putting your nose into the pot and just perform.

How?

Humming and smiling simultaneously.

Three smiling facial muscles kick in:

a) Risorius – angle of mouth is drawn outward.
b) Zygomatic Major – raises the corner of the mouth.
c) Orbicularis Oculi – closes the eyelids and forms
Crows feet on the sides of your eyes.

Can you remember Risorius is called the Laughing
or Smiling muscle? I knew you could.

Hint: Lady Risorius is just Glorious.

In psychology there is a concept called
Cognitive Dissonance. It says our brain gets agitated
when we have conflict between two sets of feelings or
ideas. The brain freezes up in the face of conflict.

If you put a dopey smile on your face or force
yourself to imitate laughing, your anxiety, fear and
stress are locked out of your brain as foreign
invaders.

You win, and move forward to fulfill your objectives.

Who Needs Speed Reading

Graduates of speed reading remain healthier and maybe even
live longer than the slow-pokes (snailing).

You accomplish one thing for a certainty, you avoid regressions.

What are Regressions?

The typical college graduate, including professionals, lose their
place on the page they are reading - a minimum of five (5) times.
Wait – five-time PER page. It slows you down to a crawl.

Your brain is disrupted and you lose your attention-span and
focus. S-L-O-W.

What is Subvocalization?

If you are a Homo sapiens, when you read you hear each word
in your mind (through your larynx – voice box). It is as if you
have a sportscaster reading to you. Slows you down to a snail.

What is Porous concentration?

You read the whole page and do not have even a vague idea
of what the writer meant. If you have porous concentration,
did you really read the text or are you merely faking it?

See ya,

If you interested, we have a free, no strings attached article
to explain speed reading. Just 13 copies left. Contact us.

copyright 2011, H. Bernard Wechsler www.speedlearning.org
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