Creating Order Out of a Chaotic Mind

Today, I’m going to put forward for your consideration, the topic of overwhelm. In today’s frantic world, I increasingly get people visiting my NLP coaching practice or booking on our fabulous NLP trainings because they are feeling weighed down and offer the presenting the problem that things, specific events and life in general, have just got too much for them to cope with. The most common result of life’s pressures pilling up on an individual is complete shut-down.  An overwhelmed person finds it impossible to get out of bed in the morning and even simple tasks like getting the children to school or even feeding themselves seem Everest like proportions of impossibility. Negative emotions abound and they often describe their condition as depressed, anxious or highly stressed. So has their entire world actually collapsed in on them or is something else happening within their neurology?

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In his book ‘Mega Brain’, Michael Hutchison writes:

‘even the smallest, subtlest thought can enter the brain and there, through a process of self-reinforcement grow stronger and even stronger in a self-perpetuating cycle, as when a hope, a fantasy or a fear insinuates itself into our brain and then, feeding upon itself, grows greater and more powerful, until it has seized control of our brain and become a ruling obsession.’

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As I read this, the resonance of Hutchinson’s words was quite powerful for me. We’ve all done it at some time in our lives haven’t we, made a mountain out of a molehill to quote the popular metaphor. Most times we realise our ridiculousness and move on in our thinking, so what happens if we don’t move on and the small problem grows and grows and other problems are added to it until the problem is so large it seems totally insurmountable? It’s a choice point. We shut down or we change.

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The Russian born Belgian theoretical chemist, Ilya Prigogine produced some insightful thoughts on this question during his studies of entropy. We spend time thinking about Prigogine’s postulations during our NLP Master Practitioner Programme as it is important to understand the concept of chaos in order to assist someone out of it.

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‘At a certain level of intensity, external events or stimuli become too intense, the brain’s fluctuations become too great to be dampened and the brain will escape from its old pattern into a new organisation of higher order and coherence. First, things no longer make sense, then with a sock of recognition, they make a new type of sense, sense of a sort we had never before imagined.’

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Prigogine defined entropy as a measure of randomness in a system. When a system reaches ultimate randomness, then we have chaos. The random mind shuts down and a person can no longer function. This is a critical point of choice, the point Prigogine refers to as the ‘bifurcation point’. At this point a person either enters into further chaos and shuts down into a depressed state, or they move into a new order of thinking and organisation, creating new patterns at a higher level of thought, the evolution of consciousness.

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How can you ensure that you select a new order of thinking? Stroebel stated that, “The power of the brain to re-programme itself is enormous, particularly when you set up a motivational structure for people to do it.” Utilising the powerful linguistic tools within the discipline of NLP, you will set up your motivational structure using the seemingly magical process of the conscious use of language. Using highly structured language, you will rapidly create new pathways of thinking, the ultimate in re-framing technique. Once you are out of entropy and into a new order of thinking, your mental wounds can be healed with Time Line Therapy™ Techniques and gentle, yet powerful hypnosis.

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Remember, be mindful that if you elevate your thinking to a new order born out of chaos, then your personal values will probably be impacted too. New powerful patterns of thinking will serve to awaken new values thinking and begin progress towards completing your current level of thinking which created the problems in the first place and moving up, like a spiral, to a new level of thinking where the solutions are easily accessible. This awakening can have some pretty powerful and interestingly positive effects on your capability, motivation and your capacity to cope with life in a resilient manner. Values are studied in-depth during our Master Practitioner Programme.

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Using language to generate order out of chaos is simply a process of linguistically breaking down the boundaries that you have built up around your problem. As you get visibility of what ‘not problem’ looks like, you break through the neurological boundaries that hold the problem in place and therefore find it impossible to recreate your problem, you find solutions instead. Order is restored to the system and you can once again develop and grow, with new coping strategies to avoid overwhelm and the right thinking in place to thrive in your world, however changeable that world might be.

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