Everyone has one, even though who say they don't. The old chestnut of 'what side of the front door is your lock on and what colour is your front door?' you know because because you can automatically see a mental picture of of your door when you think about it. that'll be your imagination conjuring up the mental images.
Imagination can be a great thing, it can also be a pain, literally. Your nervous system doesn't know the difference between whats really happening and whats happening only in your head. Your can make you mouth salivate at the thought of yummy food and you can become aroused at the thought of your partner etc. The other side of the imaginary coin is that you can trigger all sorts of unpleasant chemical and hormone releases just by thinking of something stressful or of something you fear.
To make it even more interesting you may not even be consciously thinking of it. It could well be all going on in your subconscious, and before you know it your body is releasing chemicals and hormones left right and centre, causing major upsets to your nervous system and to your conscious mind.
So whats the answer to stopping your subconscious going AWOL and freaking you out? Well it seems that as thinking of certain food causes salivation is a learned behavior, we know what food we like and the thought of it causes our yummy reaction. So, at some point in our lives we 'learned' things that made our body react negatively. This may have at one point been the result of a real event or a perceived real event. Whichever it is the result is the same, we have 'programmed' our subconscious to react in a certain way in certain conditions.
Getting back to imagination, those certain conditions in which cause a negative reaction in our body no longer has to have any basis in reality. Our amazing imagination can create beautiful scenarios to trigger very real physical reactions, and it can even do it automatically within our subconscious so that we are not even aware of what is about to be unleashed until it happens!
So what can we do? well it would appear that we need to relearn, to overwrite the existing 'software' in our brain that causes us hassle with new software that does not. As with any learning it takes some time, you don't just get on a bike and ride off into the sunset if you have never ridden a bike before. You get on it and fall off, lots, then you ride around for a bit like your about to fall off and eventually you get the hang of it and you do it without thinking, your subconscious has full control, leaving your conscious to chat ot eat an ice cream or whatever as you ride along merrily.
To replace subconscious negative thoughts you have to recognize when it is happening, such as the onset of the physical reaction, tell yourself the reaction is due to subconscious reactions to an event either real or imaginary, control your breathing, count slowly 2 in through the nose and 4 out through the mouth for example, tell yourself that it is ok to feel like this and it is nothing to fear, this will, after practice stop the chemicals from being released that are causing the physical reactions.
The trick is not to run away from your fears but to confront them in a prepared way and push through the initial freak out that your body will have.
With time and some 'falling off the bike' your subconscious will learn that it doesn't have to freak out at real or imagined events, then you can eat your ice cream and have fun!
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