{"id":60591,"date":"2023-10-02T11:06:46","date_gmt":"2023-10-02T11:06:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/train-of-thought-speech\/"},"modified":"2023-10-02T11:06:49","modified_gmt":"2023-10-02T11:06:49","slug":"train-of-thought-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/train-of-thought-speech\/","title":{"rendered":"Train of thought \u2013 Speech"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When something feels important, or even difficult, we want to fix it. “Why do I feel the way I do?” we ask, because we want to try to make it better. Or we think about everything we have to succeed at: “I just have to get this done!” Unfortunately, these thoughts are what make things worse. By changing your mindset, you can perform more easily, without pressure and stress. A survey recently came out which showed that one in three students may have a mental disorder. That’s a high number, but perhaps not so surprising. As a student, there is a lot to master at once. You would like to move, find new friends and familiarize yourself with new subjects. Many also work on the side. There will be many arenas to perform at. But it is not only the students who feel the pressure. In working life, Norway has a world record for sickness absence. Anxiety and depression top the list of causes. On TikTok and other platforms, influencers are overflowing with their expertise. Self-help advice often refers to focusing on one’s own needs. The path to happiness is through discipline and self-improvement, so that you can perform optimally. Or as one student so aptly put it: The best version of ourselves is the only acceptable version. But it is precisely this paradox that we often see in treatment: The more you focus on yourself, your thoughts and feelings, the harder it becomes to feel good. And if you don’t feel well, it becomes difficult to perform well as well. We see this both in studies and working life. Many people try to increase their own motivation by reminding themselves how important what they are working on is. But this is a bad strategy because it can increase performance anxiety. Like all emotions, anxiety is also linked to an intuitive impulse to act. In anxiety, the impulse to act is typically to get away from the source of the anxiety. This may be a good idea if, for example, you meet a viper, but when the anxiety is due to the fear of not performing at work or in studies, avoidance is not so good. Then it leads to procrastination instead. It is then easy to lose engagement and feel that you have to push yourself through tasks, when you really want to do everything else. Many people have experienced that the sock drawer has never been so organised, or the Netflix account so active, as when you have an important task to do. A vicious circle can arise here: The more important the task is perceived, the more the anxiety increases, and the more difficult it becomes to get out of the avoidance. Several have told of attempts to scare themselves into performing, by focusing on the consequences of failure. A far better strategy is probably not to think so much about what others think, or what the consequences will be if you don’t succeed. Rather, see if there is something in the task that catches your interest. Most people have experienced how easy it is to learn or work when something is interesting. Like anxiety, the feeling of interest also has an impulse to action. But this impulse to act is not avoidance, but on the contrary to get closer to the source of the interest and to give it attention. At best, we can get into a state of flow. This means that what we are doing is so engaging that time disappears while we read, work or discuss. So, we forget ourselves. This is also the case with the social. It is difficult to enjoy being with others if you focus a lot on yourself. “How do I appear? What do others think about what I said? Do they think I’m stupid because..?”. The self-focus gets in the way and creates bad experiences. This can lead to people being reluctant to meet up, and ending up in a vicious circle of withdrawal and anxiety. In the same way as in the work and study situation, the social flows best when we are interested and committed, rather than when we are concerned with ourselves and performing. The solution is to direct the focus outwards: Fix your gaze on the person you are talking to, listen to what they say, try to be present in the situation. This may be easier said than done. Usually we are not so used to thinking about how we think. But it can be practiced. Try to notice where your attention is. Is it filled with worry about everything you are going to accomplish, or brooding over everything you should have done? If the answer is yes, it might be good to stop. See if it is possible to postpone these thoughts until later in the day so that it does not interfere with what you are doing now. Everyone has sad thoughts and feelings from time to time. There is still a lot of good mental health to be gained from being aware of when the thoughts come. Then you can choose whether to enter them or not. If we dare to give one piece of advice for good mental health: Breathe with your stomach, let go of your thoughts. Try your best not to worry too much about consequences, or dwell on all the things you should have done. Neither performance nor relationships will improve as a result. Direct the focus back to who you are talking to, where you are, what you are doing. Absolutely concrete. Here and now.
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When something feels important, or even difficult, we want to fix it. “Why do I feel the way I do?” we ask, because we want to try to make it better. Or we think about everything we have to succeed at: “I just have to get this done!” Unfortunately, these thoughts are what make things […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":60592,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[271,1813,1812],"class_list":["post-60591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-speech","tag-thought","tag-train"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}