Coloured circles and chemicals - Mindfulness Monday Episode Two

One of the ideas I wanted to talk about in my blogs was a model which came from a guy called Professor Paul Gilbert.

I picked this up as part of my studies last summer when I did a Mindfulness For Stress course, something I wish I'd come across a long, long time ago.

I did this Mindfulness for Stress course for a couple of reasons.

One is that I was interested in it and it was something which I was using and I wanted to deepen my own practice.

Two I wanted to look at using it more in the coaching and more in the work I do with other people.

I even had a conversation about teaching it which is interesting then because instead of going back to the organisation I did it with, I then sign up to do an MSC which as part of the whole process actually has a teaching component to it and we're going through a mindfulness based course at the moment.

The three circles model hadn’t been covered at this point, but I was keen to talk about it in this video.

This is a relatively simple three circle model and what it depicts overall is that each of these circles has a different function or a different focus. With that function and focus, comes different feelings, different desires, different wants and different chemicals. That for me is the really interesting thing.

Now as a practitioner of mindfulness, as somebody who's studying mindfulness in more detail and still early in my studies, but still focusing on it, I'm really interested in this kind of stuff and I get very, very geeked out.

In the top right corner, the circle which is green on the screen, we have contentment. Isn't that where we all want to be all the time?

Contented, non-wanting, connection-focused.

That just sounds beautiful, doesn't it?

Safeness, kindness, soothing, who wouldn't want to be there all the time?

Who wouldn't want to spend time there all the time?

Contentment is just a lovely place to be.

If we look at the left hand side - drive, the blue circle, resource-focused, wanting, pursuing, achieving, consuming, kind of makes sense,

I think a lot of us are that way inclined.

And then the interesting one for me as well is the bottom one, the red circle, the one right in the middle on the bottom, self-protection, flight, fight, freeze, threat focused, safety seeking.

I'm sure if you take a moment you can identify with each of those circles. You can look at those circles and you can go, yeah I know what contentment feels like for me, I know what drive feels like for me, I know what self-protection feels like to me.

If we spend a moment just thinking when did I last feel contentment? When did I last feel that non-wanting, that connection, that safeness, that kindness, that soothing?

When did you feel that chilled? When did you feel that drive? When did you feel that wanting, pursuing, achieving and consuming? When did you feel that need to kind of have that going on?

If we go to the contentment one quickly, the contentment one for me is spending time in nature, with people I love, meditating, mindful, on a bike, in the gym. Those are the things that give me that kind of connection.

Hugging my kids, that's where I get my green circle stuff from.

The drive, where do you feel drive?

How many of you have a mobile phone with the notifications on? How many of you post on social media and go, "Does anyone like my post yet? Has anyone kind of engaged with my stuff? Has anyone got interested in what I'm talking about?"

What about that self protection at the bottom? What about that red circle? We've all been through the most interesting two years, and I use the word interesting with intent.

How many of you have felt that fear, that threat, that need to find safety, that need to escape, that need to be somewhere else?

Messages coming from the media, messages coming from the government, messages coming from the health service, messages coming from friends and colleagues, people crossing the road from each other because well, you might catch something if you're even within two spaces.

I'm sure you can identify with these circles at different points.

Each one of them has a chemical or a set of chemicals associated with it as well.

Self-protection, flight, fight, freeze, adrenaline, cortisol. Cortisol gets a lot of press at the moment about cortisol being the stress hormone and things to try and reduce your cortisol and how cortisol affects you and the effects it has on other body systems.

Drive, dopamine. Oh, I've got a notification, check my phone. Two minutes later, have I got a notification? Two minutes later. We go back because when we get people liking our stuff, we get that hit of dopamine. The ping of your phone, the ping of your email, the knock at the door, the doorbell going, it's that feeling of being loved and being wanted and we seek out that dopamine on a regular basis.

The green, oxytocin, endorphins, the chemicals which come out when we're content and when we're happy. And all those chemicals have their own kind of addictive nature to themselves.

If you read any of the stuff out there, you know that lots of cortisol is bad for you. Dopamine is something which drives us to do more things and to want people to love us more. And oxytocin, I mean oxytocin who doesn't want more of oxytocin? I certainly want more oxytocin.

When I first looked at this, I kind of went, where do I want to spend my time?

I want to spend my time in the green circle. I want to be there all the time because that just seems absolutely fantastic but that's a dangerous place to be.

If you spend all of your time in that contentment phase, you kind of get lost. And a friend of mine, Steve, who's an amazing an amazing mind-fixer, asked me ages ago when I was talking about meditation, he said, "What about the dark side of meditation?"

And there are dark sides of meditation. There's really interesting literature which I've been looking at. And of course, I don't want to believe that there's any dark sides to meditation or mindfulness or any of this stuff because that kind of goes against that feeling that I think it's brilliant. But there is a dark side to it.

Dark side of staying in that contentment zone, no drive, no desire to get up and do anything, you just want to withdraw from the world. So spending all your time there is not good. Spending all the time in that drive section going, "Has anyone messaged me? Has anyone liked my stuff? Has anyone engaged with me? Does everyone love me?" It's great to be there for a bit but it's not good to be there all the time.

That self protection place, you know that cortisol and adrenaline, if you're running on cortisol and adrenaline all the time, if you've ever been in that situation where you're scared and you're fearful and your adrenaline goes up, you really burn through your adrenaline, what do you get at the end? You get this dip at the end and you feel tired and you feel exhausted.

So for me, I looked at this and thought I wasn’t to spend all my time in contentment, but actually that isn't good.

I need to go into drive at certain points, I need to be in a place of stress at certain points and I need to be in a place of contentment.

The key thing for me is understanding when I need to be in those states and I need to be in those places and when I'm either too much or too little in each of them. It's recognising when my stress levels are up, when I'm too much in the red and it's pulling myself back out of it. It's recognising when I'm, it's recognising when I'm too much in that space of looking for the love and the dopamine hit from the outside world and then it's knowing when I'm too withdrawn from the world and I'm not engaging with it.

And I'd love to tell you that there's a really easy way to do that, but I don't think there is.

I think it comes with practice and it comes with time and quite often it comes when you've made the mistake. We change our ways when we've been burnt out. We change our ways with access to mobile phones and dopamine when we're getting notifications all the time and we find that it's not doing us any good. It comes with practice and experience.

My invitation is have a look at this model and spend some time being aware of these different states and how they affect you. Be aware of when you're in that red zone, when you're feeling your cortisol and your adrenaline. Be aware when you're in the dopamine zone and you're looking outwardly for much of that dopamine hit and be aware when you're in the green zone and whether that's good for you to be in there a lot or not.

Just make note of that and see how you feel. Spend some time just almost acknowledging that place and acknowledging how you feel.