The Worry-Free Mind summary

If you’re familiar with cats, you know that they’re often volatile; they can be gently resting one second and bouncing off the walls the next. Well, our thoughts are rather catlike. The shift from peaceful to stressful can occur in the blink of an eye.

The brain is made up of billions of nerve cells called neurons that use electric pulses to communicate with each other. Depending on what you’re thinking, feeling or doing, these pulses create brainwaves of different frequencies.

The key to cultivating a worry-free mind is to redirect your focus away from the things that trigger worry and stress.

Once you learn how to deliberately shift your focus, and get into the habit of doing so, you’ll be changing your brain wave activity. Change that and you can change your feelings, thoughts and perspective. That’s why knowing how to shift your frequency from beta to alpha is the best way to burst your worry bubble once and for all.

We often place people in one of two categories. There are the pessimists, who see a glass as being half empty, and the optimists, who see the same glass as being half full.

But a better personality test is to ask someone how they feel about the future. Are they excited and eager to see what happens in the next five years, or are they filled with dread?

If you think about it, you can probably come up with at least one decision that you regret. But, for some, regretful choices and actions can be so overwhelming that they trigger a deep depression.

Unfortunately, past events often have far more power over us than we’d like. All of our memories have an emotion that goes with them – usually whatever emotion we were feeling at the time. But if we keep thinking about a certain memory, we can get stuck in that emotion, which is particularly bad if it was a traumatic or sad event.

When life gets you stuck in a bad pattern, what you need is neuro-repatterning. This technique first makes you aware of what triggers your negative emotional responses, and then empowers you to regain control over your reactions.

In other words, it allows you to change your thoughts, feelings and behaviors when certain situations or memories present themselves.

When you’re overcome with worry, you want to be ready with the steps you can take to start calming yourself down and feeling better.

The best way to do this is to synchronize at least part of your brain down to the alpha frequency. Ideally, with enough practice, you can reach a whole brain state. When this is achieved, a clear mind will be your new normal, and worries will be an infrequent and controllable part of life.