Drop: Making Great Decisions

By Dr. Helen McKibben

Use neuroscience to retrain your brain and make better life choices.

"The first self-help book I've found based on neuroscience that describes these processes in simple terms that anyone can understand." -

• Language: English
• Publisher: Feelings Management Press
• Release date: May 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9798986388915

Dr. Helen McKibben

Dr. Helen McKibben's approach combines the study of the body, the brain, and the interaction between emotion and memory. She created the technique of dropping to the blank screen after noticing two significant recurring needs among her clients. First was the need to learn how to manage triggered emotions and second was understanding the root causes of their feelings. Dr. McKibben earned her doctorate in psychology from California Southern University. Her 35 years of clinical work include licensure in seven states and the District of Columbia, where she has her private practice.Before releasing her debut nonfiction, Drop: Making Great Decisions, Dr. McKibben published her study of therapeutic movement among Parkinson's patients, and an article on distraction in youth sports. For busy people on the go, Dr. McKibben's Feelings Management Podcast streams about emotions and how to effectively manage them.

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Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Helen McKibben

Published in the United States by Feelings Management Press, an imprint of Feelings Management LLC, Bethesda, Maryland. First edition 2024

Cover design by Emily Mahon.

Cover photo by Didssph on Unsplash.

Interior design by Rebecca Brown.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permission requests, please contact Dr. Helen McKibben at [e-mail].

ISBN: 979-8-9863889-0-8 (Paperback)

ISBN: 979-8-9863889-1-5 (eBook)

ISBN: 979-8-9863889-2-2 (Audiobook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023922080

Important Note: Limitation of Liability and Disclaimer of Warranty: This book is not intended as a substitute for the medical or clinical recommendation of healthcare providers; rather, it is intended to offer information to help the reader cooperate with health professionals in a mutual quest for optimum well-being. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional prior to using any of the information in this book.

While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of its contents and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, personal, or other damages.

The identities of the interview subjects and any references to people and places described in the interviews have been changed to protect their confidentiality. All interview subjects were volunteers who agreed to appear in the book. None of the interview subjects currently are or have ever been clients of the author as part of the author’s private counseling practice.

FEELINGS MANAGEMENT® is a registered trademark of Feelings Management LLC. Use of the trademark without express permission is prohibited.

www.HelenMcKibben.com

Contents

Preface

Introduction:

How to Drop to the Blank Screen

Chapter 1

Rewiring Your Brain

Chapter 2

Redefining Self-Esteem

Chapter 3

Overcoming the Critical Voice

Chapter 4

Substance Abuse and Managing the Addictive Voice

Chapter 5

Disordered Eating and How the Brain Guides What We Eat

Chapter 6

Getting Sleep and Using Your Dreams to Resolve Feelings

Chapter 7

External Disruptors: Dealing with Difficult People

Chapter 8

Parenting: Influencing Your Child’s Self-Esteem

Chapter 9

Dating in Neutral: How to Change Who You Attract

Chapter 10

Emotional Muscle: How Athletes and Performers Succeed

Chapter 11

Trusting Your Brain: It’s Scientific

Acknowledgements

Dedications

This book is dedicated to people in my past, present, and future. In the past, I dedicate this book to my father and Greg for supporting and promoting my self-esteem. In the present, I thank my colleagues for giving me the clinical setting to practice my methodology. In the future, the dedication goes to my sons, John and Jacob, who will transfer these acquired skills to their future interactions.

Preface

Our society is suffering from the effects of a feeling disease that results in procrastination, lack of follow-through, ineffective relationships, and costly disabilities such as anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. So far, the response of the self-help industry to this national crisis has largely been to teach us how to override our feelings. Book after book and podcast after podcast guide readers through methods of breathing, relaxation, or meditation to help them clear their minds of negative emotions. However, methods of relaxation are often temporary Band-Aids to addressing stress and emotional reactions. If people do not allow themselves to explore their triggered feelings, that relief will not be permanent. Tensions and stress will remain, continuing to build in the body and being retriggered over and over again, until the enormous volume of ignored or bottled-up emotions becomes overwhelming.

The problem with traditional self-help techniques is that they rob us of the very things we need to make good decisions for ourselves: the words that accompany our feelings. I believe that, in order to make healthy decisions, we must learn to stop running from our emotions. Instead, we must learn to feel first and think second, no longer running from our emotions. The brain just works better that way.

With this in mind, during my thirty-five years of experience as a clinical therapist, I have totally redefined the concept of self-esteem. Far from encouraging my clients to relax and clear their minds, I teach individuals to do the opposite: To feel through their emotions and listen to themselves long enough to hear what they need to do for themselves—then to take well-considered action based on their real needs. My revolutionary approach taps into the biomechanics of emotion, based on the premise that people and situations trigger emotions, and the first receptors for those emotions are physical, not cognitive. If people who struggle to make healthy decisions for themselves (physically, cognitively, and emotionally) focus only on their thoughts and don’t deal with this physiology (that is, with the changes in physical and chemical processes occurring in the body, which I will often refer to the physical aspects of), they will continue to overreact, sabotaging their progress through life. On the contrary, permanent, neuromuscular relief comes when people allow themselves to feel before they think, completing the entire sequence of working through their feelings and, only then, making decisions when the brain is functioning at optimum levels.

Permanent, neuromuscular relief comes when people allow themselves to feel before they think.

That is what Drop: Making Great Decisions is all about.

The method is called dropping to the blank screen (dropping or drop for short), and you’ll learn more about how it works in the Introduction. But first, let me take a moment to give you an overview of the book you hold in your hands.

This book is intended as a companion piece to the extended Drop: Making Great Decisions audiobook, and it is designed to be more than just a self-help book. While other self-help books suggest ways of being in order to live a better life, mine goes a step further, offering a tried-and-true method for attaining that optimum lifestyle through enhanced decision-making.

The instructions in this book will help people identify indicators of poor self-listening skills, enable them to make those indicators conscious, and teach them how to rewire their brains to change their responses to life’s stressors. Throughout, I’ve included transcripts of conversations with interview subjects (under pseudonyms) who consented to appear in this book. These conversations have been edited for length and clarity, with the purpose of illustrating how real people have applied the drop method to various aspects of their lives.

I encourage you to read this book—and listen to the expanded audiobook—from beginning to end. However, you may also jump around to individual topics, as the underlying methodology is the same for each, in order to find value in the material that’s most applicable to your life. Please note that, if you do decide to dip in and out based on the topics that call to you, you’ll need to read the Introduction and chapters 1 through 3 first to get the foundational material you need to follow the real-world advice provided in chapters 4 through 11 for applying my methodology to your life.

By practicing the drop method, you will learn a myriad of new skills. They include learning to stop second-guessing yourself, to stop worrying and predicting, and to stop reacting to others. You’ll stop being distracted, attracting difficult personalities and unprofessional relationships, procrastinating, and learn to follow through with your ideas. You’ll also gain the power to break any dependencies on drugs and alcohol, and even to enhance physical performance. This book teaches how to embody self-esteem in a deeper way than the clichéd I like myself. In summary, you will learn to identify and use untapped emotional instincts to make decisions in accordance with your specific concerns and needs.

You will learn to identify and use untapped emotional instincts to make decisions in accordance with your specific concerns and needs.

Introduction:

How to Drop to the Blank Screen

The cornerstone of my methodology is a technique I call dropping to the blank screen . If you practice this technique every time you experience a triggered feeling —an emotion such as anger, sadness, or confusion that causes a physiological and psychological reaction—you will benefit from the memory-retrieval processes involved in smart decision-making.

What do I mean by that?

People who make decisions through thinking alone, by trying to think through the perfect thing to do, are actually running away from the very feelings and memories that could help them make good decisions. If, as you begin to experience a triggered feeling, you drop to the blank screen, you give your brain an opportunity to remember every time you felt that way before and incorporate those memories into your current decision-making. This approach will resolve the triggered feeling and prevent you from retriggering that same feeling again later.

So, what is the blank screen, and how do we drop there?

The first thing I’m going to teach you is the physical position you need to be in to drop to the blank screen. Practice this position so that whenever you experience a triggered feeling that’s threatening to overwhelm you, you can take yourself physically to this position to work through it.

Sit in a chair with a back on it and feel the full weight of your lower body being totally supported by the surface beneath you. Be sure your hips aren’t locked. They should be released enough to feel the full weight of the legs. You’re totally supported, like dead weight on the chair, with no readiness—and no inclination—to get up and move.

Likewise, your upper body weight is fully supported by the surface behind you. Your shoulders aren’t scrunched up beside your ears or pulling into their sockets, but released enough to feel the full, dead weight of your arms against the chair.

Your tongue isn’t pushing against the roof of your mouth or the front of your teeth. And your throat is open enough to feel air go down into your lungs.

This neutral position you’re now in is the blank screen.

Your breathing and heart rate are even, your muscles are elongated, and thoughts are not spinning in your head. In this position, your brain receives maximum oxygen and blood flow and operates very efficiently in making decisions. Reaching this blank screen position indicates that you have not been triggered to feel yet. Or, if you were triggered to feel recently, you have made it through the feeling, and now sit in readiness to listen to yourself and make good decisions.

Why is that important?

When we drop to the blank screen, one of the most important things that happens is that the brain and the body return to neutral.

Because if we don’t allow ourselves to go through feelings that trigger us, we can’t be effective decision-­makers. When we drop to the blank screen, one of the most important things that happens is that the brain and the body return to neutral. Dropping resolves the physiological responses to each triggered feeling (that is, with the changes in physical and chemical processes occurring in the body, which I will often refer to the physical aspects of). I’ll discuss the science of dropping in more detail in Chapter 11.

The other important thing that this technique does is activate the brain. The brain is designed to spend just nanoseconds recalling and configuring every memory of the times you’ve felt a particular dilemma or trigger before. If you let it, your brain will show you what’s worked for you