Self-healing copywriting

Self-healing is never a deceptive chicken soup for the soul, nor does it require you to cut off love and become a saint. It is a psychological adjustment technology that ordinary people can operate independently and has clear empirical support from psychology and neuroscience. Most people find it useless because they are just using it in the wrong context.

Last week, I met a little girl who works in operations and complained to me. She said that she had stayed up until 3 o'clock on the 618 plan a while ago and came across a healing article that said "accept all bad emotions and don't fight against them." She sat on the floor for half an hour and thought about the grievances of working overtime and the past experiences of being excluded in school. She cried until her eyes were swollen to walnuts. She was late the next day and was docked for attendance. Then she deleted all the healing posts she had saved, saying they were all for fools.

In fact, she is not the only one who has this confusion. There are currently two mainstream practice directions for self-help healing for ordinary people in the academic community, and no one claims that they are the only standard answer. One school is the more familiar "acceptance school", which is rooted in Kabat-Zinn's mindfulness-based stress reduction therapy. The core is not to judge emotions and allow negative feelings to flow. A large number of brain nerve studies have proven that insisting on 8 weeks of regular mindfulness practice can indeed reduce the volume of the amygdala that controls fear reactions and reduce long-term anxiety levels. ； The other school is the "action school" that has become more popular among young people in recent years. Based on the framework of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), it is believed that ordinary people without professional training can easily become trapped in rumination and exhaust themselves by "deeply aware of emotions". Instead, they first do a small thing that can get positive feedback in 5 minutes - such as washing the dishes that have been piled up for three days, going downstairs to buy an iced Americano, which is much more effective than sitting there and struggling with emotions. The clinical data of this school are no less than mindfulness.

I also encountered pitfalls when I was working on a book manuscript two years ago. When I was insomnia, I did a body scan along with the audio. The more I scanned my mind, the clearer it became. My mind was filled with logical loopholes in the next chapter. Later, I simply gave up on the "acceptance" approach. I got up and wrote the three revision points I thought of on a sticky note and posted it on the refrigerator. I fell asleep within 10 minutes after lying down. To put it bluntly, there is no optimal solution. It all depends on which one is suitable for your current situation: If your hands are shaking after an argument with someone, don’t force yourself to sit and meditate to “accept your anger”. First, go to the corridor to blow in the wind for two minutes, hold a mint in your mouth, and use sensory stimulation to pull yourself out of the emotional whirlpool. This is actually a “grounding technique” in somatic therapy. It’s nothing mysterious, just useful.

Oh, by the way, don’t regard self-healing as a KPI that must be completed. I once met a boy who set an alarm clock every day and forced himself to meditate for 15 minutes. One day when he worked overtime, he forgot to do it. He would lie in bed and scold himself for his lack of willpower for half an hour. It was originally a way to relieve anxiety, but instead became a new source of anxiety. This completely defeated the original intention.

It’s no wonder that many people think that self-healing is an IQ tax. Nowadays, there are many leek-cutting courses on the Internet. Good psychological techniques are packaged as magic tools to “get rid of the original family in 3 days” and “attract the ideal partner in 7 days”. They charge thousands of tuition fees. If you encounter this kind of thing, you can just cancel it. They are definitely scammers. Real healing sometimes doesn’t even feel satisfying. For example, if you finally dare to say to a colleague who always leaves work for you, “I can’t take on this outside of my duties,” you may still feel anxious for half an hour after saying it, fearing that others will have opinions about you. But this is real healing, and it is much more useful than saying “I deserve to be respected” a hundred times at home.

A few days ago, I was packing up old things and found a note I wrote when I had an anxiety attack in 2019. The paper was crumpled, and it read crookedly, "I drank hot taro paste and milk green today, and spent 10 minutes in the sun. I won today." I feel good about it now. There is no standard healing template. You don’t need to force yourself to get better immediately, and you don’t need to compare your progress with others. If you feel that today is just a little bit better than yesterday, you have already earned money.