My life is based on one simple philos...

My life is based on one simple philosophy

It is called 'The transparency'



Everyday which I start in the morning I start with genuine devotion of being transparent. I set my goals realistically, rpagmatically without any sort of illusions. I set my goals transparently.



I am a transparent person. I believe people can see me through. I believe I am open. I believe I am trustworthy.  I believe i am a reliable person. I am transparent. If you liked me at the very first acquaintance with me you will always like me. Always. If you did not like me at the first acquaintance, you will never like me. Trust me. I am who I am. And I am not going to change because of someone's viewpoint.

Everything I started in this life was and is based on that 'transparency' philosophy. I have nothing to hide from others, beause I have nothign to lose. I have nothing to lose, beacuse I\m not hiding anything from anyone. Everything, every single game which I was supposed to lose, I have already lost.



So I am who I am. I am transparent.

- Do you want to be an interesting pe...

 - Do you want to be an interesting person?



 - If you want ot be an interesting person, be interested in others!

Algorythm for future

Algorythm for solutions

AKA '5 step algorythm'
(in future when you face certain situation, problem, issue sor whatever, you may apply it)

1. Sort out what is the core issue (which need s to be explained), problem (which needs to be solved), a question (which need to be answered). Ask: What is the problem here? What is the problem which causes discomfort in your mind?

After you have sorted out the issue

2. Collect information about the issue, problem, question. The more information about the issue you have the better for you. Sufficient information (knowledge) will let you clarify the situation from uncertainities. It will let you have a clear fiew of the situation. This will allow you to control the situation. 

After you have collected information

3. Use that information to build different view of the situation. The collected information wil help you to build various interpretations of the situations, the predict and forsee various consequences. This will let you alternative interpretation which you have not known before. The collected information will let you to look at the issue (situation) from different angle and have a different interpretation of the problem.

After you have been able to look at the problem from different angle

4. Sort out what is the result, what will look like, how it will feel like for you. how do you se the solution of the problem, issue, question. In what form, shape will it come to your hands, when, where will it be able etc. Imagine everything vividly. You must have a clear view of the result.

After you have sorted out how its gonne be like

5. Ask yourself 'What can I do today to make the event to develop on my way?'    

Some extracts from what I read and re...

Some extracts from what I read and remembered in Dale Carnegie's How to win friends and influence people

1. Knowledge plus ability equals achevement in career

2. 15% of ur success comes from our professioanl knowledge and 85% comes from our personal and interpersonal skills

3. Adults care about two main things in their life: the first one is HEALTH, the second one is INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION SKILLS

4. Carnegie wrote: 'Comparing who we ought to be we are only half awake'

An individual can be better

5. People's thoughts create actions
    People's actions create habits
    People's habits create behaviour
    People's behaviour create their personality

6. Another psychologist said 'We become what we practice'

7. Carnegie wrote: 'Any fool can critisize and condemn - and most fools do'. 'A great man appreciates and evaluates others. He sees the best characteristics of the person regardless if the person is good or not'

8. Insted of critisizing people lets try to understand them

9. People crave for attention

10. All people has a feeling of importance

11. Carnegie also said: 'If you tell me how you get your feeling of importance, I will tell you who you are'

12. A lack of appreciation, attention and approval drives people crazy

13. Say compliments

14. 'Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that I learn of him'

paul mckenna

Leave the dark clouds behind: Paul McKenna shows you how to increase your levels of happiness

By Paul Mckenna
Last updated at 7:52 AM on 08th September 2009

Over the past few days, I've shown you techniques to help you control stress and make it work for you in a positive way. Today, in the final part of this series, I'm going to show you how to increase your levels of happiness and joy by looking at your life in a fresh, new way...

Trying to find time and space for everything we feel we must do is a matter of prioritising what matters.

One of my friends had to change his mobile phone. Before giving out the new number, he decided to try a little experiment called the 80/20 rule, which he had used to restructure his business. He made the assumption that 80 per cent of his stress was coming from 20 per cent of the people he knew, so he made a list of everyone in his life who increased his energy and all the people who brought it down.

Then he didn't give the new number to the ones he no longer wanted to spend time with! The 80/20 rule was put forward by Wilfred Pareto, a 19th-century economist, who was surprised to discover 80 per cent of the world's wealth was concentrated in the hands of 20 per cent of the population.

What was even more remarkable to him was that this 80/20 divide seemed to hold true in nearly every area of life. Check to see how many of these 80/20 patterns are true for you:

• 80 per cent of your time is spent on 20 per cent of your problems.

• 80 per cent of your successes come from 20 per cent of your efforts.

• 80 per cent of the wear on your carpets takes place in 20 per cent of your home.

• 80 per cent of the time you wear 20 per cent of your clothes.

THE ENERGY AUDIT

Here's a version of the 80/20 rule you can use for yourself: 

1. Do an 80/20 audit on the people, activities and situations in your life. Ask yourself these questions:

• What are the 20 per cent of your activities that bring you 80 per cent of your results?

• What are the 20 per cent of your activities and areas of your life in which you experience 80 per cent of your stress?

• What are the 20 per cent of your activities and areas of your life in which you experience 80 per cent of your happiness?

• Who are the 20 per cent of the people in your life with whom you share 80 per cent of your best experiences?

• Who or what increases your energy when you think about them? Who or what reduces your energy? 

2. Based on what you've learned, what should you be doing less of? What would be worth doing more of? 

3. With whom would it be worth spending more time? With whom would it be worth spending less time?

4. If you had only one month to live, what would you let go of from your life? Which of those things can you let go of anyway? 

BACKGROUND HAPPINESS

If you feel you are drowning in a sea of stress, every little thing that happens tends to seem worse than it really is.

But when you are floating on a sea of good feelings, any little waves in the ocean won't affect you.

You will still notice them, of course, and take any appropriate action to handle them, but your world won't be rocked every time there's a wave.

Background happiness is a subtle, but all-pervading awareness that regardless of what is going on around you, all is well. It is characterised by a state of relaxed alertness with good feelings in your body and positive thoughts in your mind.

Many people create this sense of optimism in their lives simply by focusing on the many things we all have to feel good about. In one fascinating study, happiness psychologist Dr Robert Holden showed that if a group of depressed people regularly think about things that make them feel good, their brain chemistry changes so much that they can no longer stay depressed.

He asked them to laugh (or simulate laughter) for 20 minutes a day and take some daily physical exercise. They were also taught to think positive thoughts throughout the day in order to refocus their attention on the positive.

In less than a month, they had reprogrammed their brains to produce powerful positive feelings regardless of what was going on in their lives. A scientific study into the group showed they had moved from one end of the scale to the other - from being clinical depressives to happy optimists.

Further studies showed that six months afterwards, the structure of their brains had been changed through the process. In a sense, happiness had become hardwired into their system.

 

 

THE ENDORPHIN BUTTON

Here's a technique I've developed for creating good feelings on demand: 

1. Remember a time you had a release of endorphins (feel-good hormones): making love, laughing or another moment of euphoria when your body tingled with pleasure.

2. Vividly return to that time as if you back there again - see what you saw, hear what you heard and feel how good you felt.

3. As you recall this memory, make the colours in the memory brighter, the sounds louder. 

4.Squeeze thumb and index finger together on your right hand as you recall the memory five times in a row. 

5. When you have only to squeeze your thumb and index finger and recall the memory for the feeling to flood back, you have created an endorphin switch. Each time you do this, you find it easier to relax, let go and laugh at many of the things in your life that used to bother you. 

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

Far too many people, particularly when they are stressed, spend all of their time thinking about everything that is wrong or could go wrong in their lives. One of the most basic facts of human psychology is this: What we practise, we get good at.

When people have been stressed for a long time, they've trained themselves to focus on problems in an attempt to prevent them from happening. They've become specialists in disaster awareness.

We all know that the more you use a muscle, the stronger it gets. In the same way, every time you think about something in a certain way, your brain fires electrical impulses down specific neural pathways.

The more times those electrical impulses are fired down the same pathways, the stronger and more developed those pathways become.

When people are thinking constantly about everything that could go wrong, it is as though they are practising being in a state of high alert. Each one of these practice sessions reinforces the neural networks in their brain associated with fear and stress, so it becomes easier for them to go into the stress response than to experience feelings of happiness and joy.

So you need to shift the primary orientation of your thinking from 'what's wrong' to 'what's right'.

Remember: What you focus on consistently, you get more of. 

 

 

I FEEL GOOD

This exercise is designed to build a complementary set of neural pathways, so your brain will begin to default to feelings of natural joy and relaxation.

As you instruct your brain continually to pay attention to good feelings, it will notice them more often.

The more you notice when you already feel good, the more your brain will seek out additional good feelings - what you set up your brain to look for, it will begin to find. 

1 From this moment on, any time you notice a particularly good feeling, put your hand on your heart and take a moment to acknowledge how it feels. 

2 Give your mind the instruction to seek out more of this good feeling in the future or simply say out loud 'I feel good' or 'I feel happy'.

Doing this throughout the day for as little as a week will make a dramatic difference. 

ATTITUDE OF GRATITUDE

The most powerful tool in our attempt to reboot our natural joy system is also the simplest - making a daily list of all the things for which we are grateful. For example:

• Thinking about my family.

• The first coffee of the day.

• Hitting a fantastic golf shot.

• Hearing my favourite song.

The benefits of this simple exercise are dramatic, including feeling greater optimism, higher goal achievement and increased levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, attentiveness and energy.

1 Get a notebook or open a computer file to begin keeping track of the many experiences of joy and gratitude you experience in the day.

2 Each day, add at least five things.  Any time you are in need of a boost, take the time to read back through what you've written.

 

paul mckenna 123

Don't worry, I'll make you happy: Paul McKenna reveals how to stop your anxiety holding you back

By Paul Mckenna
Last updated at 8:42 AM on 07th September 2009

We all worry about things at some point - it's quite normal. But the secret is to harness that energy and turn it into a positive and creative force rather than something that holds you back from achieving your dreams and ambitions.

In our second extract from his new book, Paul McKenna shows how to take control of your worry and use it to solve problems.

Paul McKenna

The term 'worry' comes from a Greek word which can be translated as 'divided mind'. And that is exactly what worry feels like so much of the time - a stream of thoughts pulling you in many different directions at once.

Worrying is not only one of the least productive uses we can make of our minds, it is one of the least pleasant - as you probably know! So why do we keep on worrying?

When I ask this question of people in my seminars, they invariably answer in one of two ways. Either they believe that in some way worrying keeps them safe or they believe that they don't know how to stop. Fortunately, both these beliefs are based on inaccurate and incomplete information. Does worrying always keep you safe? Have you never been able to let go of a worrying thought?

As human beings, we are designed to keep things familiar and stay in control as best we can. But there is a tremendous difference between taking care of what is within your control and worrying about what is not.

When I interviewed a number of the wealthiest people on the planet including Sir Richard Branson, Sir Philip Green and Dame Anita Roddick, one of the things which struck me about them was their sense of calm, even in the face of decisions which could make or cost their companies millions of pounds.

They each shared with me their own version of a process they used that is known as 'downside planning':

1. Think about an upcoming event or transaction.

2. Imagine all the things that could possibly go wrong with that thing.

3. Come up with a solution for each eventuality.

What is fascinating is that what most people call 'worrying' is simply interrupting the process of downside planning after the second step. That is, people imagine all the things that could possibly go wrong but never get around to creating solutions.

The trick to stopping worry in its tracks is to solve whatever problem it is you are worrying about to the best of your ability. If that makes the worry go away, then you know it was just a message from your emotional intelligence to better prepare you for the task at hand.

If the worry continues even after you've come up with a viable solution, then chances are it's just an overactive protection mechanism with a faulty reset button.

Using my Worry Buster technique below will reset the mechanism and allow you to sort out what's worth worrying about.

You'll quickly find that not much is.

TAP INTO YOUR CREATIVITY

When I was a child at school, they told us that the world's oil would run out by the year 2000. However, what hadn't been taken into consideration was the ingenuity of the human mind.

Within a few years, new developments in production methods meant that not only was there more oil available, we were able to get more than twice as much use out of every barrel. Now, creative innovations have led to the development of more renewable and sustainable energy sources.

The human mind is like a problem-solving machine, and its seemingly infinite creative ability has led to continual development in the fields of art, science, architecture, medicine and more. In fact, some people say that the only limit to the creativity of the human mind lies in people's beliefs about what's possible.

One of my favourite examples of the ability of the mind to solve problems when unfettered by a limiting belief is the story of George Bernard Dantzig, a student who arrived late for a maths class and saw two problems written on the blackboard.

Assuming they were the day's homework, he jotted them down but found it took him longer than expected to actually solve them.

When he handed in his homework a few days late, his teacher seemed taken aback, and Dantzig quickly apologised, explaining that 'they were a bit more difficult than usual'.

 The equations that he had solved had not been meant as homework at all - they were two famously 'unsolvable' problems of statistics.

Because Dantzig didn't know he wasn't supposed to be able to solve them, he was able to bring the full power of his creative mind to the problem. His work was later published in academic papers and his story became legend.

The point is this: When you tap into the genius and creativity of your mind, solving even the most difficult problems becomes possible.

THE ULTIMATE PROBLEM-SOLVING QUESTIONS

A good question is worth its weight in gold, not only for the answers it draws forth but also for the positive frame of mind it can help you to tap into.

These six simple questions can help you solve any problem. Simply choose a problem or worry and answer each question as honestly as you can.

1. What are three positive things about this problem?

2. What's not yet the way you want it?

3. What are you willing to do to get the result you want?

4. What are you willing to stop doing to get the result you want?

5. How can you motivate yourself and even take pleasure in doing what needs to be done to get the result you want?

6. What can you do today to get things moving in the right direction?

Each time you ask and answer these questions, you will gain new insights into how to better handle the particular situation.

BORROW FROM OTHERS

Sometimes, what makes the difference in solving problems is not looking at the situation in a different way, but rather looking at it with different eyes.

We have all had the experience of getting stuck with a problem and asking someone else for their opinion. They point something out that up until that moment we had not seen, but then it becomes obvious.

So to give yourself a whole new insight into your problems and begin generating positive solutions, think like someone else:

1. Think of somebody who is good at solving problems and sorting things out. The person can be real or a character from a story. I have seen people choose everyone from Einstein to their Auntie Doris. All that matters is that you have a strong enough sense of what they are like that you can imagine them vividly in your mind.

2. Take a few moments to imagine yourself seeing the world through your problem-solver's eyes. See what they would see and hear what they would hear.

3. While still looking through their eyes, think about a particular problem and consider it from this point of view. How would they handle it if it was their problem? What advice would they give to you about it? What would they think is the best course of action?

4. Act on any insights you may have.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

One  of the most unusual therapy sessions I ever did was with a woman who seemed completely unresponsive to every technique I used with her. I had no idea what to do, so I asked her to imagine going out into a time in the future when her problem had already been solved.

I then asked her future self to tell me what I had done to solve it. To my surprise, she was able to answer my question in great detail. When she reoriented herself in the present, I applied the strategy she had explained to me. Less than an hour later, her problem was gone!

Here's a simple way for you to use this same process for yourself:

1. Imagine yourself some time in the future when this problem has already been solved.

2. Look back towards the present and ask yourself, 'What happened? How did this problem get solved? What did I do to contribute to the solution?'

3. Allow yourself to act on any insights you may have.

Remember, it is not important that you get a clear answer. Simply by viewing the problem from the perspective of the future, it will begin to change.

WHAT'S THE USE OF WORRYING

Although we have already seen how most worry is simply a halfway house on the way to a creative solution, sometimes knowing what can be done still isn't enough to stop the train of worry thoughts in its tracks.

For example, I worked with a lady who was constantly worried about her young children getting out onto the street and being hit by a car. She was being tortured by her own mind, living through 30 road accidents a day in her head and constantly obsessing over whether the front gate was locked.

Because I know that all behaviour has a positive intention, I asked her in what way she believed that her worry was serving her. She told me: 'I worry to keep my children safe.'

After making sure that she was already taking every reasonable precaution to keep her children safe, I pointed out to her that although the intention of her mind was positive, it was overdoing its job.

One simple way to get a better understanding of the function of worry is to look at where it sits on the following scale: At one end of the scale is apathy and indifference; at the other are panic attacks and generalised anxiety disorder.

1. APATHY

2. INTEREST

3. CONCERN

4. WORRY

5. PANIC

In an ideal world, we want to stay towards the middle of the scale, between two and three, maintaining enough healthy interest and concern to make sure that everything which needs to get done gets done, but not allowing ourselves to get caught up in worry or panic about those things which are outside of our control.

However, this particular woman's thermostat of concern was set so high that she lived in a constant state of fear.

RESOLVING INTERNAL CONFLICT

Have you ever had the experience of wanting two seemingly conflicting things to happen simultaneously? Our personality is made up of different 'parts' and by identifying them we can make them work for us.

Perhaps one part of you wanted to go down the pub while another part wanted to stay in and prepare for the next day's work meeting. In most cases, whichever part has the strongest intention will determine which choices get made.

With the mother, the 'worrying' part of her thought that continual and excessive worrying was the best way to keep her children safe; it wanted the best outcome but was ultimately self-destructive.

So I asked that part of her responsible for the worry to find ways of making sure her children were safe without having to continually evoke the stress response.

After a few moments, she was able to imagine a number of simple ways she could care for her children's wellbeing without all the hyper-vigilance and obsessive behaviour she had been demonstrating.

I could see her body relax as she was able to let go of the worry while continuing to do her best for her children.

Here is a version of that exercise that you can use for yourself to eliminate worry without losing out on any of the positive benefits that the worry was designed to create...

THE WORRY BUSTER

Read the instructions all the way through once - then go back through each step in order...

1. Think about something you have been worrying about.

2. Ask yourself: 'What is the positive intention of this worry? What does it do for me, get me or give me?' Very often, the answer will simply be some variation on 'to keep me safe'.

3. When you've got an answer that feels right to you, ask your mind to come up with at least three new ways that you could get all the positive benefit of the worry without having to take on the stress and uncomfortable feelings.

4. Check to make sure that you are completely comfortable with taking on these new alternatives to worrying. If there is any hesitation, go back to your mind and ask it to sort out any internal conflicts. You will know you're ready to move on when you are feeling completely at peace with your new alternatives.

Imagine what it will be like doing those new things instead of worrying in the future until it seems as if that's what you've always done.

paul mckenna 11

I can stop stress wrecking your life: Paul McKenna reveals how to manage your anxieties

By Paul Mckenna
Last updated at 10:02 AM on 05th September 2009

Ground-breaking: Paul McKenna is set to reveal how mastering your anxieties can make you happier

As a therapist for more than 20 years, I've worked with all kinds of people with all kinds of problems.

And if I could help people make only one change, it would be to give them the ability to control stress - this would be the most significant long-term improvement in their lives.

So I've developed a unique stress-control system to help manage it more effectively.

If you follow it over the coming days, you'll learn to change your response to stress and worry, you'll have more energy, become more efficient, more effective, your levels of happiness will go through the roof - and you'll even look younger.

Stress is an over-used word, but a misunderstood condition.

It's supposed to be the body's natural response to threat, but actually it's an increasing cause of illness in modern life.

It's the reason behind half of the visits to the doctor. We all experience it, but hardly anyone has the skills to deal with it.

WHY DO WE FEEL STRESSED?

Our body's stress response works like a car alarm. It is designed to keep us safe by alerting us to the presence of danger in our immediate environment.

Instead of using a noise, our internal alarm system lets us know that something is wrong by creating changes in our neurochemistry.

The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) pumps extra cortisol and adrenaline into our heart, and extra blood and oxygen to our arms and legs, for the 'fight or flight' reaction that allows us to challenge or escape danger.

We can't live without it because it would be impractical and dangerous - like walking through the jungle without any fear signal in the presence of predatory animals.

However, if the alarm goes off too often or too easily, not only do we stop paying attention to it, but it begins to drive us and everyone around us a little bit crazy.

It should be balanced by the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), which helps you to 'rest and digest' - your blood pressure drops and the food in your system begins to digest.

This 'natural relaxation' is the sweet, soft feeling you get in your muscles when you have finished heavy work or vigorous movement. You feel a natural high caused by the release of endorphins, the body's natural opiates.

It would be virtually impossible to function if that's how you felt all the time, so both systems work together.

Modern phenomenon: 'Being stressed' is the result of one body system overworking

'Being stressed' is simply the result of one system (the stress response) doing too much and the other system (natural relaxation) not being used enough.

Over the coming days, I'm going to show you how to reset your internal stress mechanism to a healthy, useful and appropriate level of sensitivity.

We will be doing this in two main ways: Learning to reinterpret the causes of your stress; and learning to reactivate your body's natural stress-reduction system.

HOW TO CONTROL THE STRESS RESPONSE

Any average day has its stresses - a traffic jam or an argument may not seem like 'threats', but your nervous system does not differentiate between a physical threat to your body and a mental or emotional threat to your ego.

Your mind responds by producing adrenaline and cortisol in your bloodstream - the same stress chemicals that would be produced if you were under physical attack.

The father of modern stress research, Dr Hans Selye, summed this up in one simple sentence: 'It is not the event, but rather our interpretation of it that causes our emotional reaction.'

Health problems: Stress is supposed to be a natural response to threat but is an increasing cause of illness

This is why you don't need to change external circumstances, such as your relationship or job, in order to control your stress.

As you learn to change your perception and interpretation of a stressful event, the intensity and duration of the response will change with it. Then you can change outside circumstances from being in a place of relaxed alertness on the inside.

These days, the attacks our nervous system is protecting us from are largely imaginary: there is rarely real physical danger involved - no sabre-toothed tigers to fight or flee.

We are continually preparing ourselves to deal with physical emergencies that never happen.

What's interesting is that the human nervous system can't tell the difference between a real and a vividly imagined event.

This means that even when you just imagine looking bad or suffering an emotional threat, you are producing the same stress chemicals your body needs to fight or flee.

But when those chemicals are released into your system in response to thoughts that you can neither fight nor run away from, your body has no way to get rid of them.

Over time, the build-up of those stress chemicals can cause illness and disease.

Remember: The major threat to our health in modern life is no longer outside us. It is the threat of being attacked by our own stress response.

ADDICTED TO STRESS

Are you working yourself to death? In Japan, stress-related deaths from over-work have become so commonplace they have their own name - karoshi.

Unfortunately, this is becoming more and more commonplace in the West, as people find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer amount they feel they have to do just to keep up, let alone get ahead.

About ten years ago, I was one of these people.

I was working as hard as I could and was constantly getting burned out on stress.

A book by Maria Nemeth called The Energy Of Money used a phrase that described my lifestyle: 'Busyholism.'

Sometimes people who feel the need to work all the time because they 'need the money' or 'can't bear to be bored' are hooked on busy-ness.

They are addicted to the buzz they get from the chemicals their brain produces as a stress response.

They leave no time for all-important renewal.

A SPRINT, NOT A MARATHON

Top sports psychologist Jim Loehr says that to be a peak performer in any area, you have to find ways to renew your energy - physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

Our body's energy systems work best when we turn them on - and then turn them off again.

The metaphor Loehr used was this: Life is not a marathon - it is a series of sprints.

This is the principle of oscillation - intense energy expenditure followed by gentle energy recovery.

Once I understood the importance of incorporating recovery time into my schedule, I began to spend more of my time just relaxing.

On holiday, I would lie on the beach and feel the warmth of the sun, imagining each muscle relaxing from the top of my head all the way down to the tips of my toes.

Then, when I had returned home, I would imagine myself sunbathing on that beach.

As the nervous system does not differentiate between a real and a vividly imagined event, each time I took myself through that experience, my nervous system felt as though I was still on holiday.

THE 90-MINUTE REST CYCLE

To build quality recovery time into a busy schedule, you can take advantage of a naturally occurring phenomenon known as the 'ultradian rest phase', a cycle that occurs approximately every 90 minutes.

This is when the body stops externally oriented behaviour and takes about 15 minutes to relax and replenish its energy.

These are those moments in the day when your mind starts to wander and a feeling of relaxation begins to fill your body.

Unfortunately, many people override this message by knocking back a double espresso and trying harder to concentrate on what they're doing.

They establish a pattern of overriding their body's natural rhythm and the natural feeling of relaxation comes less often.

So for the next week, here is what I want you to do: At least twice a day, when you find yourself daydreaming and a feeling of comfort starting in your body, go with it and allow yourself to relax deeply for no fewer than five and no more than 20 minutes.

The more you practise this, the better you get. It simply involves thinking about a particular area of your body and then telling yourself to relax in a soothing tone of voice.

Take time to go through each part of your body slowly, giving yourself time to really feel the tension releasing from that part of your body.

SYSTEMATIC RELAXATION

Please read through this exercise before you do it and do not attempt it while driving or operating machinery. Only do it when you can safely relax completely.

Using your most comfortable, tired, drowsy voice, simply say each of the following to yourself as you follow these instructions:

 

Now I relax my eyes.
Now I relax my jaw.
Now I relax my tongue.
Now I relax my shoulders.
Now I relax my arms.
Now I relax my hands.
Now I relax my chest.
Now I relax my stomach.
Now I relax my thighs.
Now I relax my calves.
Now I relax my feet.
Now I relax my mind.

Pause to notice the feelings and then, if you wish, repeat it. Stay with this feeling as long as you wish.

You will be able to return to full waking consciousness, refreshed and alert, as soon as you are ready.

You can do it anywhere that you can relax safely - if you practise it on the bus or train, everyone will just think you're dozing.

THE CALM ANCHOR

In the same way that the anchor of a boat helps keep it steady in stormy seas, an emotional anchor helps you to stay calm in the midst of your daily life.

But unlike the boat anchor, an emotional anchor gets stronger the more you use it.

Just as the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov famously conditioned his dogs to salivate each time he rang a bell - by associating the bell with food - the two exercises you are about to do will build an association that helps you develop an inner calm.

Before you do this technique, read through each step so you know exactly what to do.

1. Remember a time when you felt really, really calm - at peace and in control. Fully return to that time now, seeing what you saw, hearing what you heard and feeling how good you felt.

2. As you keep running through this experience in your mind, make the colours brighter and richer, the sounds crisper and the feelings stronger.

When you are feeling these good feelings, squeeze the thumb and middle finger of your right hand together.

By doing this, you are associating this particular pressure in this particular place with this particular emotion. Run through this memory several times, until you feel a lovely sense of inner peace and calm.

3. Now go through this relaxing memory at least five more times while continuing to squeeze your thumb and middle finger together to really lock in these good feelings.

You will know you have done it enough when all you need to do is squeeze your fingers together and you can easily remember the feelings of calm and relaxation spreading through your body.

4. Next, think about a situation that in the past you would have found mildly stressful.

Once again, squeeze your thumb and middle finger together. Feel that calm feeling spreading through your body and imagine taking it with you into that stressful situation.

5. Now, still squeezing, remember that calm feeling and once again imagine being in that situation that used to seem stressful.

This time, imagine a few challenges and notice yourself handling all of them perfectly.

6. Think about that situation now. Notice the difference from only a few minutes ago.

Do you feel less stressed and more in control? If not, just repeat the exercise until you do.

When you feel comfortable with this exercise, you are ready to reprogramme yourself to be more relaxed for life.

Remember, your nervous system is unable to tell the difference between a real and a vividly imagined experience.

CONTROL YOUR STRESS FOR LIFE

Before you do this technique, read through each step so that you know exactly what to do.

1. Write down the five most significant stresses currently in your life.

We are going to lower the stress levels systematically on each one, which will create a new 'generalisation' in your unconscious mind and a lower overall stress level in your life.

2. Choose one of the five. Using the calm anchor you created in the previous exercise, think about this particular situation you normally find stressful and squeeze your thumb and finger together.

Feel that calm spreading through your body and imagine taking it with you into that stressful situation. Imagine everything going perfectly, exactly the way that you want.

3. Now, still squeezing your thumb and finger together, remember that calm feeling of being in control and once again imagine being in that situation. This time, imagine a few challenges occurring and notice yourself handling them all perfectly.

4. Think about that situation now. Notice the difference from only a few minutes ago. Do you feel less stressed and more in control? If not, just repeat the exercise until you do.

5. Repeat this process with each one of the five situations you find stressful until you feel significantly more relaxed and in control.

The process of lifetime stress control has begun - on Monday, I'll show you how to turn your worry into a positive force.

 

giuardian on fear

Welcome to the bright new world of positive living

At one time, 'self-help' books were considered a little odd. Now they have moved into the mainstream and the new 'science of happiness' has become a cultural orthodoxy. But is this vogue for positive psychology really helping anyone?

Seventy-three years after it came out, and 54 years after its author died, How to Win Friends and Influence People , a motivational guide written by an unemployed salesman-turned-actor called Dale Carnegie, is back in the bestseller charts: astonishingly, and for reasons that are not immediately clear, it is, this week, the eighth bestselling self-help book in Britain.

There's no movie tie-in, it's not even a new edition, and although other books written in 1936, are still read today, people don't tend to turn to Young Men in Spats by PG Wodehouse for tips on how to negotiate contemporary society, or Gone With The Wind for guidance on race relations. And yet, a book that opens with details of a recent news story (a 1931 police stand-off with a robber called "Two Gun Crowley"), written by a man born in rural Missouri when Queen Victoria was still on the throne, is still regarded as containing the sort of universal truths that, even in these difficult times, is worth a cover price of £8.99.

But then, of course, it's the difficult times that provide the link. Carnegie was writing during the Great Depression, as was his immediate successor Napoleon Hill, whose 1937 book, Think and Grow Rich! , is considered another early classic of the self-help genre. These were days in which men needed to learn to help themselves because there was no other type of help available.

And here we are once again. The recession has ripped through publishing as it has all aspects of British life. Philip Stone, an editor at The Bookseller, says that book sales are down by one per cent so far this year - "which, all things considered, is not too bad" - but that mind-body-spirit, of which self-help makes up by far the greatest part, is up by 25%. This week's top 10 contains not just Dale Carnegie's work but Susan Jeffers's Feel The Fear and Do It Anyway , first published 20 years ago, and the decade-old Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, a book that companies tend to give employees when they're "letting them go". Fiction dates, non-fiction dates, but self-help books are more like sacred religious texts, discovered afresh by each new generation.

And it's not just the books that are booming. "Salons" are cropping up all over the country. In Bloomsbury there's the new "School of Life" - set up by a group including Alain de Botton to "offer good ideas for everyday living". And when Malcolm Gladwell, the highly regarded New Yorker writer, turns up in Britain to lecture on success, hundreds come to listen in respectful silence. We live in self-improving times.

Michael Neill, a "success coach" who has worked for years with Paul McKenna, far and away the number one bestselling self-help author in Britain today, says that, 10 years ago, "self-help books just weren't considered quite 'normal'. You couldn't read them in public. It wasn't quite that you had to hide them inside a copy of a porn mag, but almost."

Now it's not just "normal", it's mainstream. Positive thinking is everywhere. Where you expect it, where you don't expect it. Last Wednesday Harriet Harman told the Labour conference to forget the Sun 's disavowal of the party. "Don't get bitter," she said. "Get better." It's a self-help staple, but then this is a language which has entered the corporate and business world, and the corporate and business world has returned the favour. It's become the dominant discourse of much of public life, so ordinary and everyday we barely even notice it.

Positive psychology, the so-called new "science of happiness", has, in just 10 years, become a cultural orthodoxy and a burgeoning field of academic study. It's the single most popular course for undergraduates at Harvard, and in Britain it has been instrumental in persuading the government to back large-scale funding of CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy). The application of science has given self- help a rigour and respect that for years it could only dream about.

But on the other hand there is still what Maureen Rice, the editor of the glossy mag Psychologies , calls "an awful lot of crap out there". There is. It's true. Not just a rash of recent books about angels ( Angels in My Hair , Angels in Your Pocket, How to Hear Your Angels ), which are the new misery memoirs flying off the supermarket shelves, but also a bizarre and insanely popular concept called the "law of attraction" in which, basically, if you ask the universe for a new car or a new boyfriend, the universe will provide.

Psychologies was launched four years ago and competes on the news-stands against Marie Claire and Elle , and Rice is an enthusiastic proponent of positive psychology. But the main part of her job is, she says, "reading rubbish so you don't have to". But then it's the broadest of churches, self-help, as I find when I turn up for a two-and-a-half day event in central London called "I Can Do It!", organised by Hay House, a specialist publisher in the field. Last weekend's session was the first of what is to be an annual event in the UK (America, Canada and Australia already have their own versions).

I assume I've got the wrong queue when I arrive. It seems more like the kind of crowd you'd find outside a designer sale: diverse, with a scattering of men, but a preponderance of glamour blondes in expensive heels and haircuts. Inside the lecture hall - it seats 900 people but it's been sold out for months, and Jessica Crockett, the director of marketing, tells me "we could have filled it at least three or four times over" - there's a low hum of expectation. At £299 for the weekend, not counting hotels or travel, it's a significant sum to invest in simply hearing a few people speak.

Except it's more than that. Or, at least, the audience are hoping it will be. Among the first people I talk to are South African sisters Candice and Karyn Velleman, 27 and 36, who both work in investment banking. "This is our outlet," says Candice. "This is how we survive in the corporate world. It's just recognising that everything is in your head and that your thoughts create everything in your life."

Which is more or less what Napoleon Hill had to say back in 1937. "What the mind of man can conceive and believe," he wrote. "It can achieve." And, in his case, this is how it seemed. He was a presidential adviser to FD Roosevelt from 1933-6, and it's not impossible to trace a path between Hill's beliefs and the high-minded ideals that underpinned the New Deal: the politics of optimism and self-reliance.

A few minutes later, Louise Hay, the founder of Hay House, bounces up on stage and says almost exactly the same thing (although she gets the biggest cheer when she announces, simply, "I'm 83 years old!"). And, immediately after her, it's what Wayne Dyer says too, although he takes three hours, and throws in lots of jokes and stories about his childhood in an orphanage, and his six daughters and two sons, and how this summer he married the chat show host Ellen DeGeneres to her actress girlfriend, Portia de Rossi. Finally we learn that he has recently been diagnosed with leukemia. A sympathetic murmur ripples through the crowd.

"Don't go 'Ah!'" he says. "It's not sad. I'm not sad. All you have to do is change your imagination of yourself. You can assume yourself to be wealthy. You can assume yourself to be healed. You can assume everything in your imagination. You have to Assume The Feeling of The Wish Fulfilled. If you are writing anything down tonight, write that down." So we do. I'm not the only one with a notepad - all around me women are jotting down key words and phrases in pretty floral notebooks.

Louise Hay wrote and self-published her first book, You Can Heal Your Life , 25 years ago, and it's sold a staggering 35m copies around the world since. And Dyer is another celebrated name in the field: he wrote his first bestseller Your Erroneous Zones in the 1970s and has gone on to publish more than 30 others. This isn't just big business, it's huge business. But then self-help and capitalism are the most intimate of bedfellows.

Tim Harford, the Financial Times 's "Undercover Economist", says there's a huge amount of speculation about how people's behaviour changes during a recession but that certain things are known, one of which is that we start to believe that success in life is more dependent on luck. "Which is where the angels and the cosmic ordering stuff comes in." It makes people wonder about how much is down to them "and how much is down to the universe".

Over the course of the weekend I meet life coaches, therapists, health professionals and charity workers, and a whole rich seam of ex-City professionals like Jacqui Cowing, 42, from Northants. She was earning "a six-figure salary" as a director in a corporate recruitment company. "And then in January I just gave my notice in. I felt there was a lack of integrity in the corporate world. I was being asked to do things that just didn't fit my moral code."

The fall-out from the financial crisis and its ongoing uncertainties has rippled out in all directions, raising questions about what it is to be successful. To be happy. Even what it is to be human. When I speak to Alain de Botton, whose books address similar questions, albeit in a very different way, he says: "I think what the financial crisis has done is to show that there's a vacuum of ideas at the top of society about how society should be run. These people were enormously confident about how things should be. Gordon Brown and Alan Greenspan were lecturing us endlessly about it, and basically they've been shown to have very little clue. And this has opened up a huge amount of imaginative space. People are actively looking for new ideas."

In the past, people turned to philosophy. "The interesting thing is that if you read Seneca or Cicero or Epicurus, what they're doing is not a million miles away from the modern self-help book. They're trying to fill practical goals in life, to help you survive worries of death and the vicissitudes of life."

But what de Botton calls "elite culture" has, he says, "abandoned a project on which it was engaged for most of human history. English literature, philosophy, history, they used to understand their role as basically being about the nourishment of the soul. But they've abandoned that field, leaving the area open to what are largely second-rate minds."

It's almost impossible not to be seduced by the positivity that is all around, all weekend. It's not just the speakers, who range from Doreen Virtue, a leading light in angel circles (she speaks to the archangel Michael, who tells Bridget in the audience that she has a wheat allergy; he's a very specific sort of archangel), to Robert Holden, a respected psychologist who used to work in the NHS.

Holden is typical of the new breed of positive psychologist. "I studied psychology for six years," he tells us. "And we studied paranoia, suicide, depression, eating disorders, psychoses, neuroses. The thing we didn't study was happiness. We had only a one-hour lecture in six years."

Happiness, he says, is what helps you to lead "an authentic life", it's what can help you live "in the now" rather than deferring to a future that never comes. And to prove the utility of joy he plays the Stavros Flatley clip from last year's Britain's Got Talent . "Sometimes in order to be happy in the present moment," he says, "you have to give up all hope of a better past."

In fact, almost all the speakers say this. It's one of the key messages of both self-help and psychotherapy, and in this case it's allied to other techniques: counting your blessings and looking on the bright side being two of them. And for the audience, it seems to work, at least momentarily. They leave Robert Holden's lecture looking, well, happy.

But it doesn't necessarily work for all people in all circumstances. When Barbara Ehrenreich, the left-wing American journalist and essayist, was diagnosed with breast cancer she found herself entering a world not just of painful medical procedures and agonising decisions but also of what she calls "bright-siding". She was exhorted to think positively, an orthodoxy so powerfully unremitting that "it remains almost axiomatic in breast cancer culture that survival hinges on 'attitude'".

It's not just that those diagnosed with cancer are encouraged to maintain an upbeat attitude towards treatment - Ehrenreich found she was asked to believe that her cancer was, in some way, good for her. That it would deepen her personal relationships and transform her attitude to life. Nancy Brinker, the founder of one of the US's largest breast cancer foundations, was typical, she found, in claiming that she "had come out stronger. With a new sense of priorities". Cancer had made her "happier than I had ever been in my life".

It didn't make Ehrenreich happy. It made her angry. And the result is a new book, Bright-sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America , published next month in the US and in January in the UK by Granta as Smile or Die . In it, she traces the history of "optimism bias" and its outcomes, not just on individuals but on nations. The refusal to recognise the warning signs before 9/11. The "reckless optimism" that characterised the invasion of Iraq. And, most damningly of all, the wild, free-spending, it-can-never-happen-here corporatism that directly led to the global financial crisis.

In an economy overseen by optimists, house prices would always go up, stock markets would never crash. Positive thinking became not just the language of the mainstream but, on both sides of the Atlantic, political dogma and economic principle too. An ideology that originated in America has fanned out across the English-speaking world, and from there to everywhere else, hand-in-hand with the doctrine of free-market economics. Wayne Dyer's 30-year-old bestseller, Y our Erroneous Zones , is currently No 1 in South Korea ("and we have no idea why," Reid Tracy, Hay House's CEO tells me). Louise Hay is a household name in Russia.

It's globalisation by any other name, according to Eric Wilson, a professor of English, who wrote a book called Against Happiness . "The self-help movement has attempted to commodify experience," he tells me. "It's intimately tied into capitalism. Buy this package and, almost like a technology, it will move you forward with the goal of a trouble-free life."

In fact, critics of self-help are as thick on the ground as self-help authors are, sometimes managing to be both simultaneously. When I call Oliver James, the psychologist and broadcaster, he's damning about the genre, despite having written various books that sit within the Mind-Body-Spirit section including "They F*** You Up" and "Affluenza".

"It's snake oil," he says, "and I explicitly reject it. Positive psychology and cognitive behavioural therapy and the idea that anybody can be anyone are American ideas involving what's basically a sort of magical thinking. The purest example is The Secret, which is a disgraceful book. It's just wicked really. It doesn't have any kind of basis whatsoever. It says: if you want something you just have to wish for it, like my four-year-old does. It's a kind of psychology for toddlers."

The Secret , written by an Australian television producer, Rhonda Byrne, is a leading proponent of the "law of attraction". It was endorsed by Oprah, became a massive global bestseller and has spawned a host of imitators. I go to a talk by a German author called Bärbel Mohr who advocates a similar philosophy of "cosmic ordering", and whom Noel Edmonds credits for his recent success. It works like this: if you need something, a washer-dryer, for example, as Mohr describes in a clip on YouTube, the universe will send you a washer-dryer.

Ehrenreich cites an article in the Los Angeles Times in which the reporter told how her sister, after having seen the film about The Secret , came to visit and "plopped a hand-tooled leather satchel on my piano bench and said, 'See the beautiful bag I manifested for myself?'" And the secret to this mystical provisioning? She had put it on her Amex card.

But, then, there's plenty of daft self-help out there, not to mention pseudo-scientific dangerous self-help too. I finally get around to picking up a copy of Louise Hay's You Can Heal Your Life , the book that has sold 35m copies, that I've seen people fawning over all weekend, and I flick through the pages. There's all the stuff I was expecting, What We Give Out, We Get Back, and The Only Thing We Are Ever Dealing With Is A Thought, And a Thought Can Be Changed. But then I find We Create Every So-Called Illness In Our Body. What? I flick to the back, where there's a whole list of these so-called illnesses with their so-called causes: acne is a result of "not accepting the self", arthritis stems from "feeling unloved", and the "probable cause" of Aids is "feeling defenceless and hopeless".

When I talk to Ben Goldacre, the NHS doctor who writes the Guardian 's Bad Science column and bestseller of the same name, he says there is evidence that beliefs and expectations can impact on your health, but that self-help is a "pretty seedy world" where writers often overdramatise these findings, and cherry-pick the evidence. He couldn't comment on the individual authors because "I would literally rather slam my cock in the door than read any more of these books".

But back to the people I meet. The ones who aren't into fairies or unicorns, who are simply trying to lead better, more productive, more thoughtful lives. Whom self-help has genuinely helped. Like Stephen Titterington, a 28-year-old chartered accountant from County Antrim, as nice and normal a young man as you could hope to meet. He credits the books for helping him pass his exams. "I'm not the most confident of people, and I had an overwhelming amount of work. In my firm, people are being sacked left, right and centre, we've been really badly hit. If I hadn't found this, I'd have let the fear take over."

Or, the woman who, when I ask how she got interested in the subject, hesitates and then launches into a sudden, heart-felt testimonial. "My husband ran off with a woman 20 years younger than me and left me with twin girls aged two-and-a-half, a seven-year-old, a 14-year-old and a 19-year-old. And you know what? If I hadn't picked up those books, I don't know what would have happened to me. It absolutely inspired me. You can get bitter or you can get better. And I've got better. He has my absolute blessing. I forgave him. I used to believe that I was a dumped woman. But I honestly believe now that he set me free."

Where's the harm in that? I ask Oliver James. It's just about taking responsibility, and changing how you look at things, and improving your life. "In my opinion it's extremely harmful. This is the story that selfish capitalism wants us to believe. That it's our fault as individuals that this fantastically big fuck-up in society happened, which Reagan and Thatcher caused, and which did not happen in mainland continental Europe. We have twice the level of mental illness as mainland Europe and yet this garbage encourages people to blame themselves and take responsibility, which is just a fucking joke. It makes me furious. It's very convenient to neo-liberals - meanwhile people like Philip Green have got massively richer while his employees read this crap and he nips off to Monaco in his £1.2bn corporate jet."

In Ehrenreich's eyes, it's self-help that has caused the mess we're in. And in James's eyes it's what will keep us there. It's just another opiate for the people. An Elastoplast, a form of textual Prozac, a device that masks symptoms but doesn't deal with our fundamental problems, either at a personal level or a societal one. It depoliticises us and reinforces a status quo in which we worker drones are kept just fit enough to do capitalism's bidding.

Maybe they're right. But it seems to deny, or underplay, the appetite that exists for some sort of help or guidance in dealing with the difficult business that can be life. Who couldn't do with a little extra help sometimes? But where are you supposed to get it from?

De Botton is at pains to point out that he doesn't support or condone the self-help genre, "because it's so disappointing and it could be done so much better", but he admits to the human need it shows up. "When people deny that we humans need such simple food, it's rather like somebody saying they don't need a cuddle."

Books should change your life. It's what writers have believed for centuries. Read Tolstoy. Read George Eliot. Read How to Win Friends and Influence People, if you must . Don't, and please just take my word on this, read The Secret .

Extreme fear: could you handle it?

When disaster strikes, whether you live or die depends on how you react to the crisis…

If you suddenly found yourself in a life-or-death crisis and had to make a decision that would either save your life or end it, are you confident you'd make the right one? People in the state of Victoria, Australia, faced just such a decision in February and March this year. For five weeks, catastrophic brush fires swept across the state. Government policy held that when fire threatened a neighbourhood, homeowners were to make a choice: stay and fight to save their houses, or evacuate early. They were explicitly instructed not to wait until the flames were close. Trying to run from an advancing wildfire is the surest way to die in it.

The choice made sense in strictly rational terms. But in the wake of the devastation, a vociferous debate arose over the wisdom of the policy: can people be expected to make rational decisions, critics asked, when they're surrounded by 1,200C flames raging four storeys high?

Most people have never faced imminent, lethal danger, and so couldn't possibly know how they would react to the experience of extreme fear. But, as thousands of Australians found out, danger can overtake us with surprising speed.

Everyone in Melbourne knew that Saturday 7 February 2009 was going to be brutal. The southern summer had been a scorcher, with temperatures the previous week climbing above 43C (110F) three days in a row. That day the mercury was forecast to climb even higher. Winds were strong and a long drought had left the vegetation brittle and dry.

In Glenburn, a farming community outside the city, Victoria University professor Ian Thomas spent the day listening for weather updates on the radio. An engineer, Thomas specialised in calculating the risk of fire in buildings. His house and lawn were surrounded by trees on all sides and abutted the eucalyptus forest of Kinglake national park: "We didn't need the forecast to tell us that it was dangerous," he says.

At about 11am, high winds knocked down a power line that ran through pasture 25 miles to the north-west. Within hours, a roaring wall of flames was burning eastward. Then, at about 4pm, the temperature suddenly dropped. "We started to relax," Thomas says. "Nothing big had happened." Soon after, the power went out. Fifteen minutes later it came back on, then died again.

What the radio broadcasts had failed to report was that the wildfire had spread all the way to the town of Kinglake, less than 10 miles from Thomas's home. The cooler breeze had fanned the flames to new intensity, and was driving them towards Glenburn at freight-train speeds. The first inkling of trouble came when a couple who lived nearby, Lou and Cheryl Newstead, pulled into the Thomases' driveway. They brought news that their son had just called to tell them the fire was heading their way. As they talked, the wind that was blowing in from the south darkened with smoke. Ash and glowing embers started dropping out of the air.

"We went from not having any particular worries to having fire in our immediate vicinity very quickly," Thomas says. The decision point – stay or go – had arrived faster than anyone had anticipated. The neighbours decided to evacuate; the Thomases, to stay and defend. "My thinking was that they were foolish in driving off in that situation," Thomas says. "They didn't know what they were driving into." But his own situation was scarcely better. With the power out and the fire on their doorstep, the Thomases were entirely on their own. What they would not find out until much later was that the fire that was racing towards them had already become the deadliest single blaze in Australian history.

The fire exploded up the ridge at 80mph. Hardest hit was a tidy neighbourhood of homes along Pine Ridge Road, Kinglake, where a triangle of land was flanked on two sides by steep hillside. Topography that once provided fine views over the southern plain now exposed them to fire from two directions at once. The entire community was caught unawares. There was no time to contemplate the options.

Rob Richings, a service technician, decided to make a run for it once the windows of his house started to explode from the heat. "It's against the rules, but this wasn't a normal bush fire," he later said. As it was, he managed to drive through the flames and reach safety. Many others did not. Disoriented in the smoke, cars crashed into each other on the jammed road. Flames melted tyres and exploded fuel tanks. In one car, six people died together when their vehicle was consumed by fire.

Staying put was just as much of a gamble. Another neighbour, Tina Wilson, planned to take her three children to the nearby home of Paul and Karen Roland, who were holed up with their two daughters. "The house has got sprinklers on the roof and we'll be fine," Wilson told her partner over the telephone. "I'll call you soon." Soon after, Karen Roland phoned her sister. "It's too late!" she yelled over the roar of the fire. "We're trapped!" They all perished.

By the time the fire was burning its way through to the Thomases' tree line, 70 people were dead. Thomas had counted on his sprinkler system to protect his house and garden from the fire, but the pump was electric and the power lines were down. If he and his wife were going to fight the fire, they'd have to do it by hand, with buckets. The smoke grew so thick that it was impossible to see more than a few feet. "It was like a steam train coming at you," he says.

Soon the fire had surrounded the house. Thomas and his wife had committed themselves to their decision. Whether or not it was the right one, they had no way of knowing. All they could do was handle themselves as best they could.

The first step to dealing with a crisis is acceptance. Studies of disasters have found that many people remain in denial in the face of evident danger. Nightclub patrons continue to dance and order drinks as smoke fills a burning hall; passengers on a sinking ferry sit and smoke cigarettes as it lists ever more ominously to one side. This denial is driven by a mental phenomenon called "normalcy bias". Psychologists say that people who have never experienced a fatal catastrophe have difficulty recognising that one could be unfolding.

For those who do accept what's happening, the most terrifying part of a crisis is likely to occur at the very beginning, while the full scope of the danger remains unclear. Anticipatory fear is often worse than the experience itself. Performers who throw up before every performance never throw up on the stage itself. The scariest part of jumping out of a plane is the instant before you leave the door. Psychologist Seymour Epstein conducted a study in which novice jumpers were fitted with heart-rate monitors that measured their pulse as their plane climbed upward toward its release point. He found that their heart rates got faster and faster until just before they jumped, declining precipitously once they were actually out of the plane. The most stressful part of the experience was the anticipation.

Uncertainty in the face of danger magnifies stress by forcing a person to think about a wide range of possible outcomes and weigh the strategies for dealing with those outcomes. It also allows worst-case scenario thinking. A key early step to combating fear is to find out as much information as possible about the threat at hand.

When we're facing a life-threatening situation for the first time, one of the biggest uncertainties we face is what will happen inside our own minds. Having been in danger before can help. When Dave Boon's car was struck by an avalanche on a road near Denver, US, he benefited from having been in another, very different, life-threatening situation two years earlier. He'd been white-water rafting when his boat was swept by the force of a rapid below an overhanging rock. Boon didn't panic, and the force of the water eventually pulled him free. Two years later, as he found himself tumbling end-over-end inside the avalanche, he knew he wouldn't panic then, either. And that was a powerful piece of information.

The more control a person has over a threatening situation, the less anxiety it provokes. Numerous experiments have shown that being out of control of a negative situation leads to the release of the stress hormone cortisol. Engaged in useful activity, it's easier to stop thinking about your internal experience of fear and instead focus usefully on external things, such as improving your situation.

Some people, such as optimists and extroverts, are generally more prone to take an active approach in a crisis. So are people who see themselves as capable of shaping the outcome of whatever situation they find themselves in. A related concept is self-efficacy, a person's belief that he or she is capable of accomplishing a given task. People with these character traits tend to perceive and take advantage of opportunities to change the situations they find themselves in.

These are the sorts of people you want with you when the going gets hairy. In 1967, a raging winter storm trapped mountain climber Art Davidson and two friends in an ice cave near the summit of Denali, Alaska. Days went by as they slowly succumbed to hypothermia and starvation, nearly immobile in their tiny hole. They kept themselves going by making careful plans about the only thing over which they had any control, their meagre rations. When the food ran out, they managed to find another problem to grapple with: how to locate a cache of fuel that one of them remembered was hidden nearby. By stringing together a series of meagre hopes, they managed to survive six days, at which point the weather broke and they escaped down the mountain.

Reframe

An alligator can't make you scared. A skidding car can't make you scared. The only thing that can make you scared is your mind's interpretation of those things. Fear is a phenomenon that resides entirely within your brain. That's why the most powerful method of all for controlling fear is reappraisal. But some people are better at reappraisal than others. Studies have found that people who are able to think of events as challenging rather than threatening are able to cope better with their emotions, have more positive feelings, and are more confident.

Marc Taylor, in a study of military personnel undergoing hyper-realistic combat training, found that subjects who relied on positive reappraisal to cope with their situation had lower levels of stress hormone in their bloodstream. Contrast that useful kind of positive thinking with the negative appraisal that's common to people in the throes of social anxiety.

Sir Laurence Olivier was among the most gifted actors of the 20th century. But in 1964, when Olivier was 57 and had been performing for more than four decades, he was gripped by stage fright. On the opening night of Ibsen's The Master Builder, in which he had a starring role, he froze. It was the moment that actors dread.

For those of us who have not experienced stage fright, it's difficult to grasp the impact of such a moment. But the terror is equivalent to that aroused by actual, mortal danger. The sympathetic nervous system launches into full overdrive, generating a physiological response appropriate to a life-or-death crisis. Actors say the sensation is a good deal like plummeting from a great height.

Like a panic attack, stage fright often occurs in the wake of other stress in a person's life. And as with most forms of anxiety, once unleashed, it's a demon that continues to lurk in the margins of awareness, always threatening to reappear.

Cognitive behavioural therapy is a powerful tool in overcoming anxiety disorders. Patients are taught to recognise when they're thinking unrealistically negative thoughts, and then deliberately to reassess the situation in a more positive light. But one doesn't need to go to a professional therapist. Anyone who's trying to get a grip on their emotions in the heat of a crisis can simply find someone to share their feelings with – or even say them aloud to themselves – in order to regain some control over their mental systems.

As the fire raced toward the Thomases' home, they had no time to express their fear. They were too busy taking action. The fire swept through the trees surrounding their house until it was blazing around them in all four directions. With a crack, a huge gum tree shuddered and crashed on to their driveway, blocking them in. The fire kept creeping forward and the Thomases kept patrolling, checking their most vulnerable points, hurriedly lugging buckets of water to counter each new thrust. Keeping continuously active helped to keep fear at bay.

As time went on, their growing store of information about the fire also reduced the stressfulness of the crisis. "The longer it went on, in a sense the more comfortable we got with it," Ian Thomas says, "because we started to feel that we'd already been to some degree successful, and we stood a chance of continuing to be successful."

Finally, at around 2.30am, the situation appeared to stabilise. The fire had crept to within 15ft of the house, but the flames in the immediate vicinity were now out and the carpet of burned-out grass formed a protective barrier. Together, the weary couple collapsed and slept fitfully for three hours, keeping the blinds open so they could check for flare-ups.

But the fight was not over. With the coming of the dawn, the wind began to build, whipping smouldering embers back into flame. Pockets of unburned vegetation erupted like roman candles. Thomas staggered outside to douse the most threatening flare-ups, but he was weak from the night's fight and suffering from heat stroke. He could not take even a sip of water without throwing up. Gradually, the flare-ups became less menacing and the Thomases began to relax. Except for their house, their property had been incinerated. But they were alive.

The catastrophe of 7 February 2009 dwarfed any of Victoria's past wildfires. But it was just the beginning. The fire season in Victoria would ultimately claim 210 lives, destroy more than 2,000 homes and lay waste to a million acres of countryside. In the aftermath, the people of Victoria were left wondering whether the "stay or go" policy was to blame for unnecessary deaths. Some argued that the policy should be scrapped in favour of mandatory evacuation. Thomas disagrees – in his case, his and his wife's action had saved their house. "Being afraid puts you under stress, and that makes it much more difficult to make completely rational decisions," he concedes. "But in the end most people have a very strong survival instinct. They find ways to deal with the situation."

• This is an edited extract from Extreme Fear: The Science Of Your Mind In Danger, by Jeff Wise, published by Palgrave Macmillan on 19 January at £16.99. To order a copy for £15.99, with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.

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