How to Stop Letting Anxiety and Negative Thoughts Ruin Your Life Pt. 10

This is the tenth in a series about how to stop letting anxiety and negative thoughts ruin your life.
Sometimes our anxiety and negative thoughts are a result of our non-verbal behaviors sending messages for us that we can’t hear ourselves!

00:00 Intro
00:33 Topic Intro
01:46 TL/DW: Here’s the solution
02:14 How Non-Verbals are a tattletale
03:22 How Non-Verbals are a tool
04:00 How to stop your non-verbals from telling on you
5:55 How to use your non-verbals as a tool
7:55 Why and how it works
10:23 If you want to learn more

Today, I want to talk about Non-Verbal communication. If you don’t know what non-verbal communication is, I encourage you to go google it and learn more.
I’ll drop some resources below as well.
Verbal communication refers to the words we use and everything else is our non-verbal communication.
Things like tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, and more are part of our non-verbal communication.
Our non-verbal communication is always talking for us and it doesn’t always back up the words that are coming out of our mouth.
The thing about non-verbal communication is that it comes directly from our brain and doesn’t always check in with our conscious mind before it speaks for us.
It pulls directly from our Reticular Activating System and our actual (even subconscious) thoughts to decide how to act in a given situation.
So, our words could be coming out well as we choose them carefully, but our non-verbal behaviors could send a very different message because our thoughts are actually different.
If you haven’t experienced that then maybe this post isn’t for you and you’ll find more value in another video, but, if you find it true that sometimes people are picking up messages you didn’t feel you sent, it could be your non-verbals are telling on you.

TL/DW: Here’s the solution

It’s Hart Habit number six, Non-Verbals, and the Mantra is: I keep myself cool physically when faced with a tough situation It gives me time to process before I respond.

How Non-Verbals are a tattletale

When we’re thinking about our Non-Verbal communication and how it can be a tattletale, I already explained how that’s true, but let’s dive deeper.

Our non-verbal communication are things that our body does because our RAS (reticular activating system) tells it to.

They are based on the conscious and subconscious thoughts we’re having or feeling in the situation or moment. Even deeper than that, they come from a whole lifetime of things our Amygdala has learned to keep us safe from, the values and social norms we grew up with and a host of other layered details that make us exactly ourselves.

So, it can be complicated and difficult to just control our non-verbal communication.

This is not a simple fix or a simple thing to do.

In fact, if you find that this is very difficult for you, therapy with the right therapist can be a great tool to help you discover why it’s hard to manage your non-verbal communication more consciously.

How Non-Verbals are a Tool

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Viktor Frankl

This simple tool will help you become more conscious of your non-verbal communication and give you more time to create that growth and freedom for yourself.

It’s so simple you’re not gonna know what to do with yourself, all right?

So, are you ready for this? Here it is:

Next time someone comes to you with information big enough to elicit your immediate response, take a moment and count to ten before you allow yourself to have any physical or verbal response to their news.

How to stop your non-verbals from telling on you

Take a moment, if you need to close your eyes… take a breath…count to ten… and then proceed to do whatever you feel you need to do next.

I’m not going to tell you how to deal with every situation but, if you need to because it’s very difficult information, I recommend you give yourself a calm down method after that 10 second count.

You could walk away for a moment or say something like “pause this for a minute, I hear you and I need a second to process it, and then I’ll be right back to you, thank you for telling me.”

Use whatever you need to get yourself into a mindset where you can respond to that individual from a very grounded and thought-out place.

When you do this, not only does it give you an opportunity to keep your non-verbals from telling on you and telling what you think before you’re ready to express that to someone, it also gives space for the other person to exist, just as they are.

I grew up in a very Christian lifestyle and society where one of the big “No-Nos” was Homosexuality.

It was talked about as the most horrible, terrible thing in the world at the time.

I totally disagree with that point-of-view for the official record, but that’s how it was when I was growing up.

In the early days of thinking about this particular word, this mantra and how it might look in implementation, I thought about the people I knew in the LGBTQIA community, whose parents were pastors or leaders in Christian churches.

It was very common for pastors or leaders to publicly denounce LGBTQIA lifestyles and people from the pulpit.

I would hear stories all the time of what friends went through when they came out of the closet with their families. It was nerve-wracking for them to talk about this very personal information with people almost guaranteed to reject them when they did.

I imagined that if those pastors, preachers, leaders, and parents were reading the Bible, and read the love chapter in first Corinthians and saw the part that says love does not act unbecomingly, it might apply here.

I imagined that when they got news like this like – their son comes to them and let them know, “I’m gay”, maybe they could take a moment to breathe and walk away if they needed to.

Then think and consider how much they love their child, how much they adore their child and how much they want their child to be happy & healthy and to live a fulfilling life.

Then they could have an opportunity to come back into that scenario, embrace their child and do something different.

I’m not saying that this one habit would change the course of these young people’s lives but, I imagined and dreamed that it could help.

Taking that moment allows us to think through some important questions we should always be asking like:

What’s the truth of this situation?
What are my boundaries and how does this involve me?
How is my shadow self and spirit affecting how I’m viewing this situation?

Once you know how they work, you realize all of the Hart Habits come into play and non-verbals become a tool because you can use them to intentionally communicate the message you want to in one more way.

Imagine if that pastor, leader, father, or person who would have responded negatively instead takes that moment, breathes, and responds only with a hug?

They don’t have to decide immediately what is their moral stance, what the Bible says, or what their responsibility is in changing the truth.

In that moment, instead they could simply express love by giving a hug to their child.

Imagine what a difference that small act could make in the progression of the relationship and discussion as it goes forward.

How to use your non-verbals as a tool

Think about how non-verbals in your day-to-day life are tools.

For example, if you’re feeling down and you choose to smile anyways, it can help you feel a little bit better, right?

If you choose to dance, it wakes your body up and helps you feel better top to bottom.

How does it make your life, heart, and mind feel when you allow it to let loose and move freely?

What does it do for your emotions and your energy?

It has the power to shift and change it, right?

So, now that you’re becoming conscious of how your body communicates for you you can recognize how it communicates both outwardly from you and inwardly into you as well.

That’s how you can use your non-verbals as a tool.

If you find that people are often misinterpreting what you think you’ve said and it’s causing you anxiety and negative thinking or negative thoughts, it might be time to take a step back.

You don’t have to understand anything yet, just that your non-verbals are speaking.

If you don’t want to say anything, all you have to do is be quiet, take a step back, take a moment to breathe and don’t let them talk for you until you’re ready to use them as a tool.

One of the great examples of how this works is illustrated in a Ted Talk by Amy Cuddy about how to use our body language or non-verbal communication to communicate power and confidence, even if we feel we’re faking it at first. Science shows our emotions will follow our bodies lead if we let them.

I dropped a link to that TED talk below so you can watch that if this is an area you want to improve in.

In the meantime, I love you.

I’m so glad to be here every week and I’ll see you next week.

Disclaimer –

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