If I only had a brain: the Tin Man and other brainy myths

When you're twenty-one, you obviously want to please everyone. You want people to like you, to think you're intelligent, smart, and beautiful, especially if you're the newly-crowned Miss Universe. The pressure can be overwhelming. I remember three months after I won, I walked into the office of the president of the Miss Universe articleant, placed my crown on her desk and told her, Take it back, I don't want to do this anymore. LARA DUTTA, MISS UNIVERSE 2000, ACTRESS AND 3 AM FRIEND And yet, although our lives have gone on fast forward, we aren't equipping our bodies to deal with the new situation. The simple life that our parents or grandparents once enjoyed, when people ate fresh food grown in their kitchen gardens and slept at a reasonable hour is now all fiction. Look at Maya's day--irregular and unhealthy meals, little sleep, no time to exercise. As we defuse from our thoughts, we can connect and engage with the world, take more in and appreciate the present moment. Similarly, as we become `present' and engage in the here-and-now, we spontaneously defuse from our thoughts. But what has all this to do with confidence? THE POWER OF ENGAGEMENT If you want to have great sex, or a great conversation, or a great game of golf; You need to be engaged in what is happening. Suppose you're playing tennis, and instead of keeping your attention on the ball, you focus on all the thoughts inside your head: `Am I holding the racket correctly? Chances are, not very good. If you want to play well, you need to keep your attention on the ball. Suppose you're making love, but instead of focusing on your partner, you're giving all your attention to thoughts in your head: `How am I doing? Does the client believe that cognitions are ideas and not necessarily truths, and that evaluating and responding to these kinds of ideas helps them feel better and/or act in a more functional way? Will the client be able to cope with the distress she is likely to feel when the core belief is exposed?

Will the client be able to evaluate the belief with at least some objectivity? Is the therapeutic relationship strong enough? Does the client trust me and perceive me as understanding who he really is? Do I have credibility with the client? Will we have enough time in the session today to make at least a little progress in evaluating the belief? EDUCATING CLIENTS ABOUT DYSFUNCTIONAL BELIEFS You've identified an intermediate or core negative belief, determined that it is significantly distressing to the client and is associated with significant impairment, and collaboratively decided that the time is right for you to start working on it. Next, you may decide to educate the client about the nature of beliefs in general, using a specific belief as an example. Most of us know adults who say they were adored or even spoiled as children, yet still feel that their parents didn't really know or interact with them. Recent studies in child development suggest that the infant who doesn't have someone who laughs and plays with him or her, and whose caretaker cannot handle stress, rapidly resolve differences, or be emotionally available at least a third of the time, is at risk of becoming an emotionally inadequate adult. This largely unrecognized group comprises far more people than the group of those who experience obvious neglect and abuse. If you don't know much about your childhood or how you were raised--or the childhood or parenting of other people in your life--how can you tell if this description applies? Deficient early relationships impact the infant brain in ways that can be seen in later behavior. As adolescents and adults, you may have noticed, or had others point out, such behaviors as the following: Failing to pick up on or respond appropriately to social cues Having less empathy and moral judgment than others seem to display Being anxious or edgy, or being withdrawn, spaced out, or shut down Being unable to repair rifts and surmount differences Or look at my client, 28-year-old TV executive, Sheetal Bhatt. Because of the erratic nature of her job, there would be days when her work started at 8 pm and would go on till 5 am, during which she ate plenty of trash in a fruitless attempt to calm her sleepy, tired nerves.

It didn't help that she was a smoker and a foodie. The friction from her job, her unhealthy lifestyle, and her total lack of personal time was fast burning her out. After her weight increased and her stamina dipped, she realized she needed to do something, which is how we met. Now look at your life. If you had to make a list of your top ten priorities, what would they be? A house, a bigger car, a new waistline, a fancy holiday and a fat salary to pay for it all. For how many people is health a priority? Do you ever give yourself time to wind down? If you want to enjoy the experience, you need to be engaged in what you're doing: appreciating the pleasurable sensations, tuning in to your partner's responses, noticing the warmth and friction of your bodies, and letting your thoughts float past like clouds in the sky. When you're in the heat of that important interview, sitting in front of the panel, you need to be engaged with the interviewers. You need to be `tuned in' to what they are saying and how they're reacting. So the more attention you give to that commentary inside your head - `D'oh! I shouldn't have said that', `Oops, that didn't come out the way I wanted', `Is this what they really want to hear? In article 1, I mentioned Cleo, a shy 28-year-old scientist, who said that if she had more confidence, she would make more friends, socialise more and behave in a more genuine, warm and engaging way in social situations. Cleo told me that she found socialising quite stressful, and often closed down or clammed up. There were several contributing factors but the largest one was this: instead of paying attention to the person she was talking to, she would get caught up in thoughts like, `I'm so boring', `I don't know anything about this topic', `I hope this person likes me' or `I've got nothing to say. Cleo had lost touch with the fact that if we want to socialise well, we need to pay attention to the other person: to notice what they are saying, their facial expressions and body language; When we say that someone looks confident, we have no idea what they are thinking or feeling. Important Concepts about Beliefs It is important for clients to understand the following:

Beliefs, like automatic thoughts, are ideas, not necessarily truths, and can be tested and changed. Beliefs are learned, not innate, and can be revised. There is a range of beliefs that the client could adopt. Beliefs can be quite rigid and feel as if they're true--but be mostly or entirely untrue. Beliefs originated through the meaning clients put to their experiences as youth and/or later in life. These meanings may or may not have been accurate at the time. When relevant schemas are activated, clients readily recognize data that seem to support their core beliefs, while discounting data to the contrary or failing to process the data as relevant to the belief in the first place. Posing a Hypothesis about the Problem Being unable to calm and soothe yourself when you are feeling anxious or depressed Failing to be playful or to easily experience joy If you didn't have the experience of adequate early relationships, here are some of the ways your adult relationships are probably affected. Take a deep breath and read these slowly. How many of them seem to reflect your experiences? You simply don't know what it means to be truly appreciated and understood. You don't know how to accept praise, caring, or goodwill when it is offered. You don't know how to be genuinely interested in or emotionally moved by other people. You don't know how to resolve differences without getting mad, tuning out, or splitting up. You don't know how to influence people. As Dr Bijoy Sharad Apte puts it, `Stress is something the world throws at you, but if you don't have your own ways of tackling it, then you are breeding, sowing, and reaping the after effects or bad fruits'. My mind is all over the place: I've got to do this, this, this, and I've got to do that!

And instead of getting up and dealing with it, I just sit and think non-stop. SURLY GOEL, FASHION DESIGNER The different kinds of stress There are two kinds of stress. ACUTE STRESS is what you experience on a daily basis, such as dealing with traffic, annoying neighbours, a vicious co-worker, a cruel boss, absentee maids, weather woes, lack of privacy, too many things to do, too little time for it. If you're edgy because the mountain of papers on your intray doesn't seem to be getting any smaller, or you're worried because you've got bills to pay, that's acute stress. It's the reaction to an immediate threat or problem. It's like having your mother-in-law over around the same time as the IPL matches. But we can observe what they are doing; And one thing you'll always notice about confident people: they are very engaged in whatever they are doing. When they're socialising, they're thoroughly absorbed in the conversation. When they're playing sport, they're totally involved in the game. When they're writing a report, they're completely focused on the task. So whether we're talking about confidence the feeling or confidence the action, engagement always plays a major role. Notice that in all the above scenarios, having negative thoughts is not the problem. The problem is that we are disengaged from our experiences. When we keep our attention on what we are doing and remain fully engaged in the task, then it doesn't matter what our minds say. Our thoughts only create problems if they hook us. When I educated LENNY about his core belief, I suggested two possibilities about the problem. PAULINE: [summarizing] It sounds as if this idea, that you're incompetent, could get in the way of your applying for jobs.