As we saw in the previous post, to stop intrusive thoughts there are other ways than drugs, including making mental adjustments. For example, some people give great credit to Transcendental Meditation, saying it “quiets the racket.” Or someone might seriously study the deleterious effects of everyday media and advertising, and gain enough momentum from that to shut down negative self-talk and the insistent promptings to seek food.
Dr. Pretlow and eHealth International have another solution, called BrainWeighve, and the most efficient way to learn about it is to take a look at the app’s User Manual. Meanwhile, here are some highlights:
The app helps you identify the situations in your life that you cannot face or are frustrated with, and then it helps you create Action Plans to deal with each one.
The treacherous thing about those unfaceable life situations is the avoidance mechanism that a person unconsciously sets up. “Nervous energy builds up in your brain to either deal with or avoid the situation…” and one thing that nervous energy does is talk a lot of trash. It warms up its ghostly vocal cords and starts producing what some call “food noise,” the distracting chatter about when, how, and what you will be eating next.
The constant bla-bla-bla is like the legendary water torture, where a person’s head is confined and then subjected to continuous attack by single drops of water. It doesn’t sound like much, but please don’t volunteer to try it, because it can cause hallucinations, misery, and maybe even insanity.
No happy ending
A water torture victim will eventually betray friends and family, king and country, and spill all the secrets, just to make that unrelenting assault cease. It’s no wonder that someone trying to shed weight finds it hard to resist the self-generated “food noise.” Such a person will do anything to make the food noise stop, even scarf down an entire pizza.
With the help of Action Plans tailored to different life situations, a person can put a stop to aggravation. “Also, you will learn to rechannel the overflow brain energy to non-harmful displacement behaviors…”
To start things off, the BrainWeighve app asks the user to fill in certain baseline information, and then provide more subjective answers that are relevant to one’s own personal circumstances. Even if you have trouble pinpointing exactly what bugs you, the app can suggest specific situations, some of which you might not have even realized were problems. Then, BrainWeighve guides you to make specific plans.
(To be continued…)
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “BrainWeighve User Manual,” BrainWeighve.com, undated
Image by emiliokuffer/CC BY-SA 2.0
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