Hello Cara.
Sugar and caffeine. The brain uses the bi products of sugar to work but it needs very little. There is enough in food. Too little in your blood and your brain goes to sleep, too much and it can't function right and you make mistakes A very high blood sugar and these mistakes can put you into a coma. So diabetics have to balance their sugar. Most people get a sugar spike then a drop as the insulin tries to compensate. It shows itself as anxiety first as the brain is more active and then confusion as it slows down. It is worse with caffeine. There are guards on the nerves leading to and from the brain called neurotransmitters. They are chemical and they decide if information can travel to or from the brain. Caffeine affects the ones that allow information to travel. If you don't have a tendency to over think caffeine will increase your ability to problem solve and keep you awake. If you over think this is bad, Caffeine allows the guards to open and sugar feeds the over activity. Sugar in the form of glycogens formed in the liver feeds the muscles too so some people twitch or get restless leg syndrome. Most people think it is normal and ignore it.
Once you know the dragon is there he is impossible to ignore. So what you do is talk to him. (her) (it) Acknowledge the dragon. Say I see you are here again and walk away. It is like the apple. Pick it up and say "yep this is an apple" and put it back. If you know there is an apple in the basket you don't have to check for it, you know it is there. You can actually visualize this. You could carry it around in your hand and do other things with the other hand. It isn't really an apple but just a thought and it will go back to the basket on it's own if you treat it as being there but not as important as the other things you are doing. If you ignore it, it will try to get your attention. Exposure is basically this, putting your hand in the basket and taking out the apple, not just seeing if it is still there. You know it is there and always will be now. What you want to do is learn how to ignore it and you do this by wearing out it's presence. Sort of having the novelty wear off. It will still be there it just won't mean anything.
Positive thought is just keeping the hand without the apple so busy the one with the apple doesn't get used. Positive thought will bury negative but you have to accept the negative otherwise what are you burying.
One spoon of sugar in one tsp of tea would be very noticeable, but one spoon in a mug of tea would be acceptable.
Positive and negative thought is just like that. This is just a start but repetition reduces the negative tendency till it goes away. (it doesn't go away, it just isn't important any more)
I hope this makes sense. Feel free to ask if something doesn't make sense.
80% negative free is considered good, we want better than that.
Davit
