Stress and the ‘penny drop’ moment
We’ve all had the experience of a ‘lightbulb moment’ or had that feeling of when the ‘penny drops’.
The two terms both suggest a flash of insight or sudden inspiration - a new level of understanding that changes the way we look at things.
But did you know there’s also a crucial distinction between the two?
A lightbulb moment is a flash of illumination up in the head. It’s powerful and arresting and allows us a new vantage point from which to see our lives.
A penny-drop moment is different because it has a definite and direct knock-on effect in our innermost Being.
The notion of a penny dropping is an allusion to penny operated mechanisms of the early 20th century. The penny dropping from the slot down into the inner workings of the machine was the energetic spark necessary to bring the gears and mechanisms into life.
For us then, a penny drop moment is a new insight or understanding that gives rise to a direct physiological and emotional effect. It’s an insight that we are changed by right away.
We all have this capacity to develop fresh new thinking and perceptions that have a powerful transformative effect in our lives. And nowhere is this more clearly felt than in the context of stress and anxiety.
To understand this, I’d like to share a story from my own clinical practice.
I was working with a high performance athlete who, despite being world number one in their sport, was struggling with high levels of stress and anxiety in their social life.
Most of us would find the demands of elite level sport incredibly stressful, and I asked why they were able to sail through those particular professional challenges.
The response was really interesting: “It all goes well until you start thinking about it.”
The athlete could function optimally in their sport by keeping a clear and peaceful mind, but struggled socially as a consequence of over-analysis, preoccupation and projection.
We can extrapolate out from this into a useful observation about humanity in general: whenever we’re able to encounter a given situation without excessive layers of conceptual overlay, our performance will always be better.
In my experience, most of life’s problems - be they personal, interpersonal or organizational - develop out of a conceptual misunderstanding of where we believe our experiences are primarily coming from.
If we live from a place of excessive conceptual distortion and projection we experience ongoing tension in body and mind. And when that tension is prolonged it eventually impacts our physical and mental health.
However, the moment we get an embodied understanding or insight into this - the moment the penny drops - everything looks very different, tension is immediately relieved and our outlook becomes more aligned with reality.
The athlete was so accustomed to feeling high levels of anxiety in social situations that it was hard for them to imagine ever changing. But a further example held the key to understanding how change can actually come quickly whenever the penny drops.
I asked them whether they had ever mistaken a shadow for an intruder at night. In such moments it feels absolutely correct to experience a surge of adrenaline and fear, and to have neuro corticoids and other stress hormones running through the body, as we ready ourselves to fight or take flight.
But the moment we realize that it’s just a shadow, all that fear, tension and complex physiology falls away in an instant. The body’s stress response is switched off and we’re flooded with a sense of relief instead.
I pointed out that what we believe are real problems are often just shadows of an internally generated perception - projected figments of our own distorted thinking.
Often what we’re relating to is not the situation, but just our own feelings about something - which may in fact bear no resemblance to the reality at all.
For as long as we continue to believe our experiences are coming from the situation or outside of our perception, we’ll feel stressed, worried and anxious.
But the moment we realize we’re experiencing the shadow of our thinking, all that stress and tension drops away in an instant - in a way that requires no effort at all.
What I'd like to suggest is that the vast majority of our stress, anxiety and worry is primarily a response to a trick of the mind - and that the solution is always the penny drop moment of an embodied understanding.
We’ll explore this in more detail in the next article.
NEW! LIVE EVENT IN LONDON
Sovereign Tea Time Live
On Sunday 19th June, join me in creating a new narrative of health and healing in the resplendent setting of Mariage Freres Tea Emporium in London's iconic Covent. This in-person half day workshop includes powerful talks, insightful tips and tools, and Q&A - over fine tea and patisserie. For further information and to book your place, click on the link below: