Rapid state-of-mind improvement (RSMI) – a pathway to improved mood and behavior

A simple, effective, and powerful procedure for improving your state of mind when you need it most

by Tom Cloyd, MS, MA – Counselor / Psychotherapist – Cedar City and St. George, Utah (435)-272-3332 – email: tc (AT) tomcloyd (DOT) com (please read about content licensing)

SUMMARY

Psychotherapy clients experiencing emotional discomfort or behavioral ineffectiveness can often quickly improve their function, even while their psychotherapy is still in process. What will produce this improvement is simple: better access to supportive and functional parts of one’s awareness and memory. The process which can bring this about is simple to learn and to use¹.

Introduction

You will learn here about the best parts of your mind and how quickly to make better use of them to improve your mood, feelings, and behavior in specific situations.

I have also provided some examples of applications of this RSMI procedure to various problems, as well as some actual stories of its successful use.

This document, while somewhat lengthy, addresses only these three topics:

• The nature of “personal resources”, and why they can be very useful to us.
• The purpose of the RSMI procedure, and how best to learn and use it.
• The procedure itself – how to do it.

Read what follows carefully, apply it to your own situation, and I strongly expect that you will like the results you get, as others have².

Personal Resources

“Personal Resources” – defined

A “personal resource”, as I use the term here, means only this: something we have in our mind that is useful in dealing with a challenge. Some examples of this might be:

• knowing you have ten dollars in your pocket, when you’re hungry;
• knowing a friend’s phone number, if your car breaks down; or
• the belief that it is acceptable for you to ask for what you want, if you need help from someone.

When the concern is improving one’s mental function and health, the resources of greatest interest are usually mental ones. Anything in our mind that can be used to solve a mental health problem might be considered a “Personal Resource” of potential interest.

When our mind is working at its best, and a mental challenge arises, we will have personal mental resources that will allow us to respond adequately. But if we do not respond well, that could indicate either (a) that we do not have the needed resource, or (b) that we cannot access it. More often than one might expect, our problem is simply one of access to resources. In certain types of psychotherapy, this can become a concern of great interest.

Another example of resource usefulness

Suppose I get invited to speak before a group of parents at a local school, and I’m nervous about this, with the result that I stall at getting started drafting my remarks. After a few moments, I recall that six months ago I spoke before a group of teachers at another school, and the experience was a good one. Rather quickly, I’m lose my nervousness. I CAN do this, I now tell myself. Problem solved.

In this example, I did have a relevant Personal Resource (a memory of myself as competent in a similar situation), and I accessed it when it was needed. I was then able to get on with preparing for my talk. This all happened rather automatically and without overt effort on my part.

Personal Resources – many possibilities

A number of things can function as Personal Resources – skills, feelings, thoughts, memories, or persistent desires, for example. Having a good awareness of your resources tends to increase their usefulness to you. A very good way to to make an actual resource useful is to put it into words. Then, these words can become an easy way for you to recall your possession of the resource. So, we may say that, put most practically, a Personal Resource is simply a truth about yourself that you can express in words.

Obviously, you can’t tell yourself these truths if you can think of nothing positive about yourself, or if you cannot tolerate it when you DO see something positive in yourself. For some people these problems are very real, and require special attention from a mental health professional, but fortunately this is not usually the case. For most people, useful “Self-truths” can be found, although often one may need help with the task. You will find such help here.

Why Personal Resources matter

Adequate Personal Resources in our mind allow us to respond adaptively – successfully – to challenges. This is no small thing. Life throws a curve ball at us and we get a base hit! Since getting more “base hits” is one of the major objectives of psychotherapy, an interest in the adequacy of our Personal Resources makes sense. “Adaptive” responses to challenges allow us to make good use of difficult situations—to keep ourselves healthy, and even thriving.

Someone who is in psychotherapy to resolve and finish with memories of past traumatic events has particular reason to be interested in Personal Resources. Access to such resources makes the difference between success or failure in psychotherapy. Almost immediately, use of the RSMI procedure can show someone in psychotherapy that they can change what their mind feels like to them, thus helping them to feel more in control and more hopeful. For some individuals, this may be the most hopeful thing that’s happened to them in quite a while.

This can happen because RSMI “balances the seesaw”. It creates, from simple truths, strong positive vision and feelings, and this counterbalances the negative feelings and restricted vision that so often bothers and limits someone seriously affected by their life history, as well as the anxiety and depression that so often follow. In turn, this “balancing” helps psychotherapy to go significantly faster. This is rather good payoff for only a little effort.

Introduction to the RSMI

The purpose of this procedure

Put plainly, the purpose of this procedure is to help you make better use of the contents and potential of your mind. Often, this will involve simply improving your ability to remember something that you already know – an important truth about yourself. But you may sometimes have to discover or construct that truth, using materials already in your mind.

What to expect when you do this procedure

Many people discover one or more of the following to be true about this procedure:

The procedure is easy to do. Like anything new, this procedure may be a little awkward for you at first, but this feeling probably won’t last long. Most often, if you do the procedure correctly from the first time you try it, you’ll learn it quickly and easily. It’s not difficult at all.

The procedure produces good feelings. When you do the procedure, you may expect to experience an increase in positive feelings. Your mood will probably become better, more “bright”, and more responsive. Many people also experience a quieting in mind, and a distinct degree of relaxation. Used correctly, this procedure can help you get to sleep very quickly, if you want to sleep. (And some people report that after doing this procedure they have more dreams and more of them are positive.)

The procedure tends to improve self-esteem and personal effectiveness. Just doing the procedure is an act of self-support, of course, as is true of any self-improvement activity. Being conscious that you’re doing it will help improve your self-image. Beyond this, increasing the supply of positive, adaptive mental resources available to you can be fundamentally helpful, so that you may expect the confidence you experience in your daily life to increase. This will be most noticeable if you do the procedure while addressing a particular challenge in your life (this last consideration is described below).

Some benefits of the procedure will be immediate, and some may not appear for a while. This is common with “strength-building” procedures, as anyone who does weight lifting knows. Furthermore, the procedure may initially feel and appear artificial or odd, but the effects will not! Professionals of all sorts use focused practice and special procedures to improve their function. You can too, if you want to be serious about making your life better as quickly as possible.

How to Learn the Procedure

The next few sentences are very important, so read them slowing, then give yourself the benefit of a little thought about them.

First of all, go slowly. The fastest way to learn something is to do it right the first time. So, be patient. Don’t rush. Set aside some uninterrupted time in which to study the procedure. Focus on each step individually. Make sure you understand what you are to do before trying to do it.

Carefully practice each step, until you know you are doing it as instructed. Then move on to the next step, until you have learned all the steps. Then you are ready to practice the entire procedure.

Once you learn the sequence, you can use these instructions to prompt you through the steps. Or you might summarize these instructions on a small card that could go in your wallet or purse. (Such a summary is offered at the end of these instructions.)

Practice often. I recommend doing this procedure at least at bedtime, every night, for about a week, as it may well prepare your mind for especially productive REM sleep. Alternatively, an excellent time to use this procedure would in the morning, upon arising, as this will surely well prepare your mind for a productive start of your day.

By the end of the week you’ll be familiar with it, and you should be seeing real benefit every time you do it. Practicing right before bedtime can also put your mind in an excellent state for falling asleep, if you focus on the right “personal truth”-something reassuring, comforting, or calming.

Two Ways to Use the RSMI Procedure

Use the RSMI procedure to respond to challenges.

This procedure works well in relationship to many specific challenges in your life. Some examples of this:

• You have a phone call to make, and you keep putting it off;
• You have something to do that you very much want to do, but you still feel somehow a bit nervous about it;
• You get asked to help someone, and you want to respond, but you don’t think you can really be helpful.

These examples could go on forever, of course, and in real life they do. Challenges are common in our lives. Competent, successful, adaptive responses to these challenges are less common, however. Changing that for the better is the problem addressed by the RSMI procedure.

It is worth noting that life challenges are of roughly two types: those which are threats and those which are opportunities. (Note, though, that many threatening situations are also opportunities in disguise.) If you use RSMI to respond as well as you can to an opportunity – such as the challenge of doing a speech, or a presentation, or some other kind of “performance”, then you are using it for “performance enhancement”, and this is a growing and significant area in contemporary psychology.

It is a virtual certainty, for example, that many Olympic athletes use something very like RSMI to gain access their full mental resources during this important athletic competition. They do this because it has been shown to work. There IS a “power of positive thinking”, and that power is improvement of our life.

Use the RSMI procedure simply to strengthen your mind.

You can use it without a specific challenge in mind, simply to change your state of mind, to build fundamental strength of mind. This procedure improves access to your best mental resources, and that definitely increases your mind’s capacity to thrive in challenging situations.

So, let’s learn how to do the procedure.

Rapid state-of-mind improvement

1. List some POSITIVE truths about yourself

An easy way to get started with this is simply to write down a list of some of the things you have done or accomplished today or this week. Simple things are just fine (for example: “I fixed myself breakfast this morning”). Starting with such obvious positive truths will get you moving in the right direction. After writing down a few things of this nature, try to write down some truths about yourself that are more general, that relate to multiple situations, and possibly to more challenging situations.

Here’s one such initial list that a person might write down:

— I got the kids off to school on time every day in the past two weeks.

— I balanced the checkbook last night.

— I regularly keep my yard in order.

— I usually pay my bills on time.

— I sometimes get asked to do tough jobs.

— Some people seem to like me.

— I can be a good friend.

— In time of crisis, I can be caring and helpful.

2. Refine and focus your list of “truths”

What will be most valuable, by far, is a set of statements that are about you, in the most personal way possible. Those truths speak of your character, which is why they will have great power. So, with each statement you’ve written, ask yourself “What does this mean? What does this say about me?” Your first draft list may contain items that don’t need this refining work, but SOME of the items probably will.

As you rewrite your initial list, your goal is a set of simple statements about your character, nature, abilities, skills, values, or goals. Use language appropriate for an 8 year old, because you want it to be very easy to grasp, when you actually begin to use it. When you have refined a statement so that it is short, plain, and speaks of these sorts of things, write it down and put a mark of some kind next to it so you can easily distinguish from your first-version statements. “Refined” versions of the list of statements given above might read as follows:

— I am helpful to other people I care about.

— I can take care of myself.

— I can be reliable and orderly.

— I can keep promises.

— I can work hard and get a job done.

— I’m a decent person.

— I value people.

— I can stay calm and patient when it counts most.

When you compare these versions with the initial ones, can you see how much more powerful they are? It is that power to which we want access.

It is certainly true that an initial version of self-truth statement might be refined and simplified to produce a number of different final statements. That’s no problem at all. Just check your statements to see that all seem obviously true, easy to understand, and are as personal as you can make them. Do not rush this step, for it’s quite important.

These refined self-statements are your working List of Personal Resources. They contain great power to correct your view of yourself in specific challenging situations. They can help you act, when you’re unsure what to do. They are, above all, truths about you that you easily recognize. You don’t want to lose these truths, because of what they make it possible for you to do. To the contrary, you want them to be as accessible to you as possible. Creating this kind of good mental function is the central goal of the RSMI procedure.

3. Optional step: Pick a current challenge in your life, and use it to focus your use of the RSMI procedure

There is a good reason NOT to skip this step: the RSMI procedure really shines when you’re facing a well-defined challenge. Working out your first application of the procedure in this context likely will teach you how to do most quickly and convincingly, as well.

You might begin by writing down a brief list of current major life-challenges. Or, you may already well know which of your challenges currently worries you the most. As with your positive self-truths, your challenge descriptions may need refinement. Seek to write descriptions of specific challenges. You can’t respond as well to general challenges as you can to specific ones, so work out specific descriptions of your challenges.

Initially, you may wish to pick an easy challenge in your life. For maximum value from this exercise, however, pick one of your major challenges.

4. Pick a Personal Resource from your list

If you skipped the previous, optional step, just pick a Personal Resource that particularly interests you at this moment. If you did come up with a particular life challenge, however, pick one of your listed Personal Resources that suggests something about you that will help you with your challenge. If you find such a statement, go on to the next step. If you do not, you can usually quickly come up with what you need by answering either of the following questions:

1. QUESTION ONE: “If I were to be successful with this challenge, what would I have to do, or what skill or ability would I have to have?” It might help considerably if you simply imagine yourself handling the challenge successfully. Look carefully at specific behaviors and states of mind that contribute to the imagined success. Then, describe what you see yourself doing in this little success story that allows you to succeed. For example, you might write this truth about yourself: “In a situation with multiple demands, I can stay focused on a goal.”
2. QUESTION TWO: “If I saw someone other person mastering this challenge (you could imagine a famous person from history, or a powerful person you know, have heard of, or can imagine), what skill or ability would they use to accomplish this?” Now, do you have this skill or ability? Have you EVER shown that you have this skill or ability? If you recognize it in another person, even an imagined person, you probably have it yourself. If so, a statement about your having it should go on your list.

If neither of the questions above help you, because you cannot imagine yourself or someone else being successful with your chosen challenge, but you CAN imagine success in other situations, consider picking another challenge. The challenge you have chosen may simply be too difficult, or even impossible. But if abandoning a challenge is not an option in your life, consult an expert to help you with your problem. If you cannot imagine success in ANY challenge you look at, be sure to take this important discovery to your psychotherapist. This problem actually does happen to a large number of people at one time or another in their life, and getting a little help with it can usually get you moving forward quite nicely – so go get that help.

5. Activate your Personal Resource.

You now need to activate this critical Self-Truth, to “wake up” your awareness of its truth. This is easily done, if you rephrase the truth in the form of a question. For example, suppose your Self-truth is “I can ask for help when I feel overwhelmed at work.” To create an active realization of this truth, rephrase this so that it says “Can I ask for help when I feel overwhelmed at work?” You’ll naturally reply YES to this question, because it refers to a obvious TRUTH—something you already agree with. Your affirmation of this truth will be automatic, clear, and quick, which is exactly what we need. This automatic self-affirmative response to a well-phrased question is the heart of RSMI.

6. Enhance access to your Personal Resource

Having brought to your mind the relevant Personal Resource question, simply notice your spontaneous response to it. Pause for a few seconds and just continue to notice the feeling associated with the positive response. Then, if your mind is calm and quiet, you can just quit. If your mind is still lively and interesting to you, however, you can simply continue to watch what’s happening, shifting your focus to something else only when you feel ready to.

What generally happens is that your mind will become progressively more quiet, until it is as if you’re paying attention to a blank piece of paper. At that point, take a deep breath, and slowly exhale while releasing any tension you feel anywhere in your body.

By slowly moving through these steps, you are allowing your awareness of this truth about yourself to become more securely encoded in your memory. What this accomplishes is simply a strengthening of this personal resource, AND thus an increase in its availability to you for at least the next several days³.

While it is unlikely that this will happen with most people, should something uncomfortable come up during this time of focusing, just stop. Immediately shift your attention to something you like to think about – anything at all will do. Look at this object or memory for 10 to 30 seconds, letting it fill your consciousness as completely as possible. If you have any problem with this, be sure to discuss this unusual event with your psychotherapist.

Summary of procedure

This might be an excellent summary to put on a card that you can place in your wallet or purse:

LRC/PAE (LIST self-truths > REFINE and focus > CHOOSE challenge (optional) > PICK Personal Resource > ACTIVATE Personal Resource > ENHANCE access

Final reminder: practice

Physical health requires appropriate effort, at appropriate intervals. Mental health is no different. What you practice will be a part of you, and if you don’t practice correctly, or often enough, little will happen. It’s just true.

Application Examples

Following are my suggestions for application of the RSMI to some problems sent to me readers of this document. In many ways, the first problem addressed will be a model for the others.

Overview of successful RSIM application

What you will aiming to achieve is these sequence:

• You enter into a challenging situation.
• You recognise that you’re facing the challenge (this is crucial!).
• You bring forward the personal-resource-activating question you have prepared,
• You notice the change in your state of mind.
• You then act from the this new state of mind, instead of the usual one which leads you into difficulty.

Getting to sleep

Getting to sleep is an easier problem than staying asleep (because we are conscious for the one condition, but not for the other). Usually there are either of two problems associated with getting to sleep (and they BOTH may be present): (a) poor sleep procedure-you are simply not doing what needs to be done to allow sleep to occur; or (b) a mind that is distracted, by worries that derive from your imagined future, from your present life, or from troublesome memories. As always, correctly understanding the nature of your challenge is crucial to success. Trying to solve the wrong problem never helps!

Poor sleep habits

Curiously enough, some adults, and many children, have poor sleep preparation procedure. To sleep, your body needs to be relaxed, and your mind quiet. Then, if you are tired, and it is time to sleep, sleep will come.

So, if fatigue level and time of day are not a contributing problem, the relevant question relative to RSMI is this: do you know how to relax your body and to quiet your mind? Do you actually have such resources to access? If not, then you need to learn these skills, and a visit to your local bookstore or a consultation with your therapist will probably put you in contact with them. Alternatively, you might first read and use my Step-Down Tension-Release (SDTR) Breathing procedure, which has produced excellent results for virtually everyone who’s tried it. Then, having the needed skills, you must access them when needed.

Since the challenge here is clear, use it to focus your work, as you start with step one of RSMI. List positive self-truths relative to your getting to sleep. Then work through the RSMI steps, refining what you have written and then picking a statement that seems most useful to you in your situation.

Having an unrelaxed body at bedtime

As I imagine solving this problem, I see someone producing a truth somewhat like this one: “I can deliberately prepare for sleep, then calm my body to allow sleep to come.” Good access to this truth will deal with anticipatory anxiety. You must also act on the truth, of course, which is beyond the scope of what RSMI addresses. I recommend setting up some simple visible reminders, where you go to sleep, to induce use of the skills you have. At a minimum, place there some visible reminder to invoke your prepared RSIM question.

A mind that is distracted at bedtime

This can be a very serious problem when it is time to sleep – and other times as well. A significant percentage of people are troubled by bad memories when bedtime approaches. When busy during the day, this is no problem for them. When the day’s activities disappear however, the ever-present bad memories “step forward” in the mind, and sleep will not easily come. At its worst, this problem requires serious effort from you and your therapist to manage and to resolve. But you can try to manage it yourself, first, of course, as many people have successfully managed this problem. Ultimately, however, the permanent solution is completing your psychotherapy.

With memories, be aware that those from early childhood can be particularly disturbing, and at the same time all but impossible to detect in your mind, as normal methods of “remembering” simply do not work for such memories. If you feel a general anxiety, without any idea where it’s coming from, suspect these kinds of memories as the cause. Helping you with these kinds of memories is a skill that not all psychotherapists possess, but properly trained psychotherapists can be quite good at it.

Part of the problem may just be poor sleep habits. For example, if you find yourself worrying about tomorrow, make a list of your concerns, and write beside each the first step you will take tomorrow to manage the problem. Or you might write your goal beside each of your concerns. That thinking done, most people will then forget about tomorrow, because they have their reminders all prepared.

In general, however, the solution is to refocus your mind at bedtime. You must strongly redirect your attention to something that will not produce general anxiety. This is a skill, and outside the scope of RSMI. Because of the seriousness of the problem, and the consequent necessity that you develop this skill well, it is recommended that you consult your therapist for aid with this problem if you have any real difficulty with it. (A couple of brief examples of how you might refocus your mind: use a “Safe Place” exercise⁴, or use a simple relaxation exercise, such as Step-Down Stress-Release Breathing (previously mentioned), which most of my clients are taught.)

THEN, having learned a skill or skills, you will need to acknowledge that you have something powerful you can do at bedtime, and then to remember to do it. If you do this you will have accessed the needed skill.

RSMI is ideal for the first problem – creating a state of acknowledgment of your ability. You can deal with this in exactly the same way as is done with the problem of having an unrelaxed body at bedtime, discussed above. The second can also be solve as previously discussed, by using some simple visual cue to DO what you know. Virtually anything that will get your attention and serve to remind you will do this trick.

Upon remembering to do your skill at bedtime, you might want to use steps five and six of RSMI (“activate your personal resource”, and “enhance access”) briefly to enhance your access to the truth that your skill works for you. This will increase the positiveness of your expectations about what will happen when you use your skill. There is excellent research to support the idea that enhanced expectations will significantly increase the likelihood of a successful outcome, in a wide range of activities.

Making healthy choices (food, exercise, etc.)

As with the problem with getting to sleep, first make sure you really have some choices to make. This may take some time for you to develop, as you may need to try a number of approaches until you find what works for you.

Let’s assume you do have some simple good choices, however. How can RSMI help you follow through on what you know would be good for you?

The resource (the fact of your choices), as always, is accessed by acknowledging and then remembering – at the critical point in time. As with sleep, I suggest first focusing on truths having to do with your actually having choices. This will build general confidence and expectation of a good outcome – always helpful to have. You might also wish to focus on the truth of your desire for the positive outcomes of making good food choices. Goals can have a powerful effect on behavior if you increase your awareness of them.

Then, set up your memory aids (as in the sleep problem, above). When you get to a critical point (equivalent to bedtime, with the sleep problem, above), you can simply make your healthy choice. However, I do recommend that, as suggested with the sleep problem, you pause for a moment before acting, and use steps five and six of RSMI to improve access to your relevant self-truth. For example, your truth might be “I can chose the momentary initial discomfort of exercise, and gain the pleasure of relaxation and health.” Or, more simply, “I can chose vigor and health.”

Dealing with a problem you’re having with another person

This might be a spouse (with whom you might too easily fall into resentment, or silence, or some other dysfunctional reaction), or a child (with whom you might too easily become frustrated or discouraged).

By now, you’re probably catching on to how to do this. First you need some real choices. This just may require you to obtain some education, or to assemble the choices from “parts” you already have in your mind. For example, perhaps you already do notice your anger when it occurs, and you do know how to pause, but you haven’t learned the skill of putting the two together. So, learn the skill. Your therapist can help you with this, if needed.

Then, since you now have a choice, use RSMI to change your expectations about the situation. For example, your personal truth might be “I can now chose to pause and take another path when I feel anger rising.”

Then, you need to make good use of that pause! It could be a wonderful time (like the moment before bedtime) for you to use RSMI to enhance access to some other self-truth, such as “I can ask the person frustrating me for help.” Or “I can use what I’m learning in my parenting class.” A very brief pass through steps five and six of RSMI ought to do the trick.

You simply want to stay in touch with the best parts of your mind, especially at critical choice points in your life, and RSMI can greatly help you do this. You can usually trust that good things will result with you do maintain such access to powerful personal truths.

Success Stories

Feeling overwhelmed

The weekend I wrote the first draft of this document, I was keenly aware of having major challenges coming from multiple sources. I simply had a lot to pay attention to that weekend. When I arose Saturday morning, I began to feel overwhelmed and a bit defeated. This was not something I was willing to tolerate. I saw the challenge clearly, then asked myself what truth about myself could help. Almost immediately the thought came: “I can make a list of my concerns, set priorities, then focus on one thing at a time.” It seems pretty obvious now, but certainly was not, at the time – not initially.

This simple proposal has the virtue of being completely true, and I know it, as I’ve done it many times. I’d just gotten distracted and lost touch with this truth, which addresses one of my skills. I went immediately to steps five and six of RSMI, activated my awareness of this truth, then enhanced my access to it. Within five seconds, I felt my mind clear, and I felt eager to get to work. The rest of the day was very productive for me, and I never returned to my earlier sense of being overwhelmed.

In the time that has passed since this experience, I have on other occasions felt the same sense of being overwhelmed with demands, but find that it is easy simply to ask myself this simple personal-resource-activating question: Do I know what to do with this feeling of being overwhelmed? The answer, being obvious, rise into my mind, and my problem is solve. I like the ease with which this happened very much.

Scared by a writing task

A colleague told me of feeling intimidated by a grant proposal she was committed to write. She’s just received a copy of RSMI, and put it to work immediately. The personal truth she developed was “I can ask for help to keep me focused as I do the actual writing!” She then used the activating question that can easily be derived from this truth, as she worked through her writing task. As she puts it tersely, “It worked!”

Notes

¹ Empirical support for the RSMI procedure is from informal clinical observation only.

Note that an earlier version of this procedure contained the following paragraph:

It is presumed that anyone using this procedure will be in psychotherapy with an EMDR-trained psychotherapist, as use is made at a critical point of something called self-administered “bi-lateral stimulation”. If you do NOT know what this is, or its use by you has not been approved of by your therapist, just omit that part of the procedure. It should still work, but it will be effective a little more slowly.

This paragraph, along with any use of or reference to “bi-lateral stimulation”, has been removed, due to the fact that review of over a decade of research on EMDR has failed to find validation that such brain stimulation has any clinically meaningful effect. All things being equal, simpler is better, I think.

In addition, it should be noted that the assertion in the paragraph that without the bi-lateral stimulation (BLS) the procedure is slower to take effect was a logical conclusion based on an apparently false premise – that BLS has a clinical effect. Research has validated that BLS can enhance recall, in a pure recall paradigm situation, but has not, to my best knowledge, validated its effectiveness as part of a psychotherapy procedure.

² I would invite mental health professionals to consider that while this document has been written for professional use with psychotherapy clients, professionals themselves may well find it useful in other contexts, such as performance enhancement work.

³ This strengthening of “availability” (a term used by Cognitive Psychologists to refer to how quickly we can access something in our mind) is a widely known and validated effect. It is, to be sure, why students review material for exams – so that they can respond more quickly once they are taking the exam. A quicker response gives them more time to work on the quality of the response, as well. So it is for us, in real life, when we improve the availability of our relevant cognitive resources.

⁴ Many psychotherapy clients with anxiety problems are taught this. It involves learning to focus clearly on some place you have been where you feel safe, calm, and secure. I have described the exercise well in my Symptom management skills document, where I write of the Safe Place procedure.