The 5 Questions to Ask to Get Control of a Ruminative Mind

Today, we're going to discuss the five questions to ask about negative emotions – a method to gain a handle on your monkey brain, a way to safeguard your thoughts and gain control of your mind.

I hesitate to use the term 'control of your mind' because it's more about feeling the need to control it, given that our minds sometimes race and feel out of control due to automatic or ruminative thoughts.

But, really, we are facing a serious - I would call it an epidemic - here, where we have got to start paying attention to emotions and teaching people how to learn from their emotions. I'm not going to say how to learn to handle your emotions, and I'm not going to say how to learn how to manage your emotions.

I think we are at a huge deficit in learning what to do with emotions, what we're supposed to learn from them, how they're working in our favor, and what we're supposed to do with them once we have them.

So we really need a better way to understand our emotions as they happen.

I'm going to give you the five of them and explain why that matters, especially from a physical perspective.

So, five questions to ask when you feel negative emotions. I say 'negative feeling emotions' because there is no such thing as a negative emotion. They are all positive; they just may not feel as good from one to the next. But they all are there to serve a purpose.

Number one: What is it I'm feeling?

Number two: What thought is this stemming from?

Number three: Where am I feeling it in my body?

Number four: What can I learn from it?

Number Five: What will I take with me moving forward?

A, we don't teach people how to learn from feelings. We do teach people how to react or avoid. Now, let's discuss each one of those questions a little bit, and then talk about what's happening in the mind and the physical body.

I know there's a lot of emotional management processes out there that are all talking about questions like “where would I be without this emotion?” and “Is it true?” I agree, these are not bad questions to ask. We even ask the same questions at times. But, I like to ask more. When it comes to feelings, and you’re asking “Is it true?”, a feeling ALWAYS feels true. It’s true for you. I tend to ask “if it’s true” towards concepts, thoughts, beliefs, because we can consciously decide the beliefs we want, and can always re-challenge them from time to time.

Thus, I don’t tend to follow the same questions as other systems where the first questions are “Is it true?” Again, it’s feelings. They are always true. I think we can dive deeper and learn WHY we feel it is currently true.

But first, we have to understand what exactly it is we're feeling.

Have you ever been in that feeling state where you're feeling all kinds of things, and maybe you've never even stopped to try to pinpoint what it is you're feeling? You might feel angry and sad and upset and fearful all at the same time. And so the first question, before you can know what monster it is that you have to tame, you're going to have to identify it.

So we have to look at what it is that I'm feeling exactly while I'm feeling a little bit of fear, a little bit of anger, and a little bit of worry. Let's see, which is the overriding emotion in all of that and get it down to okay, what I'm feeling is fear. I really am feeling fear. Where is this stemming from?

So question number two, where is this stemming from?

Generally, there was a thought, an event, or an occurrence that happened that brought this feeling on, but we bustle through our day so quickly, and we don't pay attention to how our mind is operating. And pretty soon, we have this bundle of emotions, and we can't even really pinpoint what it is that we're feeling or where it came from.

So if we get really good at learning how to use our emotions for the tools that they're meant to be, we will start paying attention more frequently throughout the day, and then it's easier to step back and see where, what is the thought that this feeling is stemming from?

Third, where am I feeling it?

It's really important when we start connecting it to the physical body, to be aware of where we are feeling the feeling. I feel it in my belly, as tightness in my belly, my shoulders rising, and my muscles tensing, my jaw clenching. It's important to start naming where we are feeling the feeling, especially when we are doing the new cog process with our clients in the office. That's neural cognizance training – we start to connect the feelings to the body.

The reason why this is important is that when you're out and about in your day and you start noticing a sensation of clenched shoulder muscles, you're going to remember, 'Oh, that's right. How many times have I noticed this when I am feeling fear? This is how my body responds.' And then you're able to process, 'Why am I feeling fear? What's happening in the world around me? What's happening in my space before you?' That's how you get ahead of the feeling. So we really want to start paying attention to where you're feeling this feeling in the body. Okay, it is what it is; you are feeling a feeling. Feelings are there to help indicate that something is off.

So next is, what can I learn from it?

Okay, I'm feeling fear. I'm feeling it in my belly and my tight muscles, so I can work to relax that right now. Just instantly, I can work to relax that. But what can I learn from this feeling that I'm feeling? Okay, I'm feeling fear. What is the thought that this fear feeling came from? Now I can start asking, 'Is it true? What I'm thinking? Is it really true? Should this thing be causing me a state of fear? Why is it causing me a state of fear? Where have I felt fear like this before?' Oh, I remember feeling this before; it was when such and such did something. Now we can process that emotion. It is trying to teach you something once you learn from it.

Now you can ask the final question, what will I take with me moving forward?

Okay, I remember this feeling of fear. I recall this happened when such and such did something. It's triggering that right now I'm feeling similar emotions. What I'm going to take with me is the feeling of calm as I move forward in my day, and the remembrance that I felt fear because maybe I let my guard down too much with a person that I perhaps shouldn't have trusted, or something.

So identify what it is that you learned and what you will take with you. Remember, a lesson doesn't serve any purpose if we don't learn from it. And feelings are huge lessons. If nothing else, the greater the emotion attached, the greater the lesson. The reason why is because your nervous system does that on purpose so that you pay attention.

When your emotions get very involved, more neurons in the brain are created. The more neurons in the brain created, the more you will remember the experience. So the nervous system must have decided that this was a pretty important experience to get your emotions all worked up. I would think you would want to process that and not let the nervous system retain something so out of bounds, so big when it didn't need to be so big.

So let's talk about that nervous system, and how it affects the physical body.

Now remember, your nervous system is there to protect you, to keep you safe, for your survival. Remember when you touch that hot pan or that hot burner, it's going to create an imprint on your nervous system timeline. Your body is going to scan for the awareness of that always. Now, you don't consciously keep thinking about this if it happened when you were five, or by the time you know, 20, 30, 40, and 50. It moves into a place in your brain, the subconscious mind, so that your nervous system is aware and automatically working for you without you having to take up precious conscious brainwaves.

So, it is the physical things that you are feeling, that fear or pain that you're feeling. It really is physical. It's not just in your mind. It really is physical; it exists in the part of the brain where you can't rationalize it, but the nervous system responds to it.

So the farther away from the occurrence that the nervous system recorded, the farther length of time you get away from it, the more receded into the deeper parts of the mind it becomes, and the less and less you are consciously aware of it. If you haven't dealt with the occurrence as it happened and the emotions that imprinted with it, it's going to keep coming up but in the subconscious mind. So it's harder and harder for you to remember why you felt the way that you felt. It's going to be harder and harder for you to understand why your physical body is responding the way that it's responding because a long time has been added on to that.

Remember that the nervous system responds automatically. Okay, we're talking about the autonomic nervous system, with sympathetic and parasympathetic dominance. It happens in the autonomic nervous system. There are multiple nervous systems, but this one, autonomic, means that it happens automatically. Everything that happens and is considered necessary information by the nervous system is recorded in the brain, in the structures of the brain, and utilized along the pathways of the nervous system. This includes emotions and the biochemistry that is made from these emotions.

So now it starts making sense, why we need to understand what the emotions are because the emotions are going to produce different brain chemistry. The cells, then the immune system, is there going to receive these messages and act accordingly. So they're going to act very differently. If the biochemistry that is created is fear based hormones, for example, your body is going to look and act differently, your digestion is going to look and act differently.

Now, we teach the process of neural cognizance training so that you can process it on a conscious level. It also helps to start pulling it up from the subconscious mind. I would also suggest using subconscious communication. You can do this through brainwave state or intuitive training, all things that we can help you with at our clinic at ANMC. Some people have tried hypnosis to great effect. But basically, we have to get into an altered brainwave state, like the theta state, where the conscious mind is not the dominant mind. I do have an exercise that I teach people, and you can start with it to see how far you get. It isn't enough to just band-aid the physical.

When something has been recorded on the nervous system, that's a nervous system imprint. We're going to have to go in, especially if it was a long time ago; we're going to have to go into an altered communication pattern in the brainwaves. So this exercise that I teach people is to write down the questions you have before you go to bed, and leave the paper and the pen right there. If you wake up at night or right when you wake up in the morning, grab that notebook and read the questions, and write whatever comes to mind. Don't judge it. Don't minimize it. Don't critique it. Just write whatever comes to mind.

Alternatively, if you know that you're a person who will critique and stop yourself from writing, have someone else ask you the questions. As you start falling asleep, have someone ask you these questions and write down your answers. Or as you wake up in the morning, have them ask the questions and write down what you say. I like to put it in the mindset of thinking you're moving beyond all the time and space limits. Take me to the answers I seek. Then just relax and let yourself start falling asleep. When you are kind of in that halfway state, you're in the theta state. That's the best time to try to access the deeper recesses of your mind. So whether you need to ask the questions yourself or have someone ask the questions for you.

That is one way that you can have a subconscious communication through altered brainwave state. I hope this made sense to you because this is a core key component to what makes up so many of the programs that we conduct at ANMC and I think it is one of the biggest keys for how we need to start changing how we approach health care.

I teach all of this and more in our 90 Day Hidden Health Clues Intensive. Find out more here.