Dr. Peter Strong and Alex Nottingham JD MBA discuss mindfulness and practical strategies to overcome chronic stress and emotional reactivity.
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About Dr. Peter Strong
Peter Strong, PhD is a Professional Psychotherapist, Teacher and Author, based in Colorado. Peter developed a system of psychotherapy called Mindfulness Therapy for healing the root cause of Anxiety, OCD, Depression, Stress, PTSD and Addiction.
About Alex Nottingham JD MBA
Alex is the CEO and Founder of All-Star Dental Academy®. He is a former Tony Robbins top coach and consultant, having worked with companies upwards of $100 million. His passion is to help others create personal wealth and make a positive impact on the people around them. Alex received his Juris Doctor (JD) and Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Florida International University.
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:02
This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management, and training. Welcome to Dental All-Stars. I’m Alex Nottingham, founder and CEO of All-Stars Dental Academy. And with me is Dr. Peter Strong, mindfulness therapist and speaker. We’re talking about liberation from stress. Please welcome Dr. Peter Strong. Greetings. Greetings, great to have you. So tell me a little bit about your background, Dr. Strong. How did you end up?
00:32
in mindfulness. Well, that’s a long story. The short version. Yeah. It’s something that has really developed as a theme in my life from very early times. Certainly when I was in college and university.
01:01
I became very interested in meditation and also with things like positive thinking and how we can actually take charge of our emotional and psychological wellbeing. My father was also very interested in this. So this is something we shared together. Oh, your father was interested in this as well. Okay. He was. This is long before.
01:31
It was popular. Mindfulness was never mentioned, but I mean, all in the field of education. I was a teacher, school teacher for many years, as well as a research scientist. So I’ve had quite a diverse background, but underneath, there was always this interest in mindfulness and its applications.
02:00
And basically when we came back to America, about 20 years ago now, I suppose, then I left the science field and sort of started to concentrate more and more on developing mindfulness and…
02:28
wrote a book on it, the path of mindfulness meditation, and started to develop a mindfulness therapy practice, which I offer online via Skype.
02:45
And very good at it. I must say right from the beginning, I had the pleasure of working with you for gosh, like half a year or at least a year, and Heather as well, learned, I call it the strong method. You don’t call it that, but I wrote my notes, but it’s very helpful. I like how you really, so we heard about mindfulness and meditation, and you really cut through a lot of the dogma.
03:12
and get right to, okay, how does this work therapeutically to work with your emotions for a particular result? Tell me, so our subject is stress. We’ll get into some of the prerequisites of whatever as we go along. But with, and how we liberate ourselves, how we free ourselves from stress, what is stress? How would you define stress?
03:37
Well, that’s a good question. I mean, you know, it’s a broad subject, but I think we’re talking primarily about chronic stress. That is the kind of underlying uneasiness, anxiety that doesn’t go away. We wake up with it in the morning, it plagues us through the day, makes it difficult to sleep at night.
04:05
and so on. So this chronic stress, that’s what we’re really talking about. Um, and I would define stress primarily as a, uh, condition where there’s a loss of relationship with our conditioned thoughts, or habitual conditioned thoughts. This is a theme that we work on very much.
04:35
in mindfulness therapy and mindfulness training in general. Stress is not created by difficult life conditions, external conditions. It’s not even created by thoughts either, which is fairly revolutionary and differs a lot from other mindfulness teachings out there.
05:03
These are triggers of stress, but not the cause. The cause of stress and anxiety and depression for that matter lies in the way we relate to these mental experiences that arise, that are triggered. So typically we may experience
05:32
difficulty at work, we maybe get criticized or fail to meet a deadline. That’s a trigger, that is not a cause. How people respond to those kind of triggers varies a great deal from person to person and also in your own individual life from day to day. It can depend on many different factors.
06:01
So it’s subjective. Stress is a subjective reaction. And it’s conditioned, which means that it becomes a habit. When those triggers get triggered, it just kicks, the mind just kicks into a conditioned habit that is learned. And that’s another way of thinking about stress. Stress is something that’s learned. We’re not born with it. It’s not inevitable. It’s something we…
06:32
learn, usually unconsciously without real choice or awareness of what’s happening, it becomes habitual, the conditioned habit. And that’s what we really address with mindfulness training to start to overcome this blind habitual conditioning.
06:58
That makes total sense. I was talking to Heather about that earlier, is just observing stuff that you taught about and questioning, right? Is there’s this primary pain that occurs in the body and the mind, and that’s not, as you would probably say, it’s not a problem that’s there, and there are ways of working with that, but our reaction to it, our resistance to it, our…
07:27
that’s where we start to get into suffering and situations. And then, and I like what you’re saying, it’s habitual. It’s really become, so anxiety, for example, which I know you’re a specialist on, is it’s a continual behavioral loop that just, you know, you had a fear or something and then there was this reaction and then that reaction continues to perpetuate. The fear wasn’t the problem.
07:55
It’s the reaction that continues to perpetuate and it’s finding a way to be able to disarm it. So you’re saying that, so stress is, I mean, and this kind of stress, as you probably know, like body, it depends on you to define stress, right? The body will have stress. You need stress to build muscles. You need, I guess they call this positive stress, eustress. So I mean, I guess it’s how we define it.
08:24
But we’re talking about in this liberation of stress is that ongoing habitual stress that keeps happening. It doesn’t arise and fall, it becomes ongoing. And then as the thinking mind continues to create stories and problems and situations, just to kind of put myself in, you said, oh, we should use you as an example at times. But I was talking to you the other day in our audio test, and I was trying to get advice from you. I said, Dr. Strong, you’re so wise. You’re very wise. I got a nickname for everybody listening is
08:53
Dr. Peter Strong is OB1. I think he prefers Dr. Strong, but I go with OB1. The wisdom, and I’m like, give me the answer. How do I handle the situation? And you didn’t take the bait. And like, no, Alex, where are you suffering? That’s where you have to go in that respect without feeling guilty. That’s the primary focus. So, okay, I understand stress.
09:23
is ongoing stress, is habitual, how do we start to detach from that? How do we, so just give you an example. Our followers are mostly entrepreneurs, dentists, and those that work in the dental field as well, assistants and front office. And like I said, we have a pretty broad following even beyond dentistry, but professionals that are working every day.
09:52
They have lives and they have office situations. They’re dealing with patients that are sometimes scared and they have their own. So it’s this compounding of stress. And then you have the world stress, political stress, all the stuff that goes on. And then they’re kind of being attached, almost like it’s getting sticky. So how does one start to untangle from all of that and be, I guess our goal is to be more happy and free?
10:22
Yeah, and that’s the most important. That’s really the purpose of this work. So the first thing I think to understand is that, as we’ve said, stress is subjective. It does not exist out there. We create our stress. We do so blindly, without conscious awareness. So mindfulness is all about developing conscious awareness.
10:53
So the first step is to, you know, if we’re really looking at practical details, first step is to write down all of your triggers, is to get to know your triggers, that trigger those habitual condition reactions.
11:13
Then we want to actually start training with those triggers and the reactions that get triggered. And that is the subject of meditation for me. Meditation is sometimes or frequently looked at as some form of escape from the mind, escape from stress, escape from thoughts.
11:43
I took a challenge that I felt that that was not very meaningful. It’s so for me, meditation, mindfulness meditation is about meditating on the mind. It’s about meditating on those thoughts, those emotional reactions, those triggers. So that we.
12:10
start to change our relationship to those habits because as long as the habits remain unconscious and just continually operating blindly like a machine, we simply continue to suffer. And what often happens is, as we’ve indicated, is we start reacting to the stress itself.
12:39
So we react with avoidance and dislike and criticism. I’m not good enough. I shouldn’t be stressed. I should be able to handle this, you know, and so on and so forth. And again, we fall into those reactions, those secondary reactions blindly without any choice or questioning at all. So.
13:08
That’s how stress works. It feeds on itself and it proliferates itself through reactivity. And it’s learning to see these reactions very clearly without adding to them is the heart of the practice. So we learn to meditate on our stress. We don’t meditate on the breath as is often taught. That’s an avoidance of the problem.
13:39
that simply will feed the stress. It makes you feel good for, you know, a short period of time like any distraction will do. But it leaves those habits intact, which means you’re vulnerable. And mindfulness practice, mindfulness training is about overcoming vulnerabilities to stress, anxiety and depression. It’s about
14:10
Freeing, liberating.
14:13
It doesn’t actually matter if there are thoughts there. That’s just a natural part of the flow of consciousness. That’s how the mind works, it creates thoughts. That’s not the problem. It’s our relationship to those thoughts and emotions. That’s where the problem is. So to change this, we train with those thoughts and emotional reaction.
14:43
by deliberately bringing them into the mind, deliberately meditating on that stressful conversation at work or that failure to meet a deadline. We meditate on them to find these habitual reactions and develop mindfulness of those reactions. If this is making sense, I will continue in a minute.
15:13
If you have any questions on that, no, it makes total sense. Yeah. And I’m also, uh, we’re like, we’re streaming live. So as questions come up, I can, uh, interject as we go along. So, all right. So like you said earlier, you, you, and some may not be familiar with this, but in meditation, one method is to meditate on the breath or to have some sort of mantra or, uh, and so on. And you’re saying that that’s a,
15:42
a potential distracting mechanism or there’s obvious distractions beyond this meditation. I notice a lot that when I’m bored or stressed, I might just go on the phone. Does this go through YouTube or social media or something just to kind of keep my… and I’m like, I’m watching, oh, my mind, you know, I’m doing something to kind of distract. So let’s use that as an example, simple example.
16:12
What do I want to do? So I go to social media or I go and I sort of start doing or working or something distracting. That would not be mindful, right? That’s a way of distracting. No, yeah, that’s right. That is falling into the trap of reactivity. In that case, we would classify that as behavioral reactivity. Behavioral reactivity. I’m trying to escape the cause of my suffering by finding another activity that
16:41
takes my mind off the condition. Eating disorders are based very much on the same avoidance strategy. We try to find comfort in food to counteract the suffering that we’re feeling. Addictions, quite frankly, are based on this avoidance strategy. Avoidance is one form of
17:10
reactivity. In Buddhist psychology, we call it aversion, hatred, one of the three primary types of reaction, you know, the others grasping, you know, I want to find something nice to take my mind off things. You know, or going to seminars on how to make myself better.
17:39
And, you know, it’s a big industry. And the third type of reaction that is really the root of everything is this blind identification with those reactions, those thought reactions, those emotional actions, statements like, I am bored. I am irritated. I am angry. We just blindly.
18:08
accepted, we identify with the reaction. What we’re trying to do with mindfulness is to turn those reactions into objects, which is what they actually are in the first place, mental objects that arise in the mind. So one very simple, if you like, psychological practice
18:39
that really can help start this process of breaking free from stress is just to see the emotion instead of saying I am irritated. So I notice irritation arising in my mind and notice anger in my mind because you’re not merging with it. So I am not identifying with it.
19:08
but I’m seeing it as a mental object that has gotten triggered in the mind. But I am no longer identified with it. I am now the observer, the one who sees this emotion, this thought, this stress, this irritation, this anger. I become the observer. And that in mindfulness therapy, as I teach it.
19:37
is referred to as your true self, the one that is the observer, not the observed. You are not the content of your mind. This is the big delusion that we fall into, the trap of identification. We think we are our thoughts, we think we are our emotions, our memories, our beliefs, whatever.
20:07
arises in the mind. But that’s not who we are. We are actually something much bigger than that. We’re observing. Think about it. I can be angry.
20:23
And with a little bit of training I can say, oh, there’s anger. I see it in me.
20:31
Who is it that sees the anger? You see, that’s the question to really contemplate. And that starts to point at your true self. You are not the anger. You are the consciousness that sees the anger. And then again, in Buddhist psychology, this is referred to as your original mind or your Buddha mind.
21:01
That is really what Buddha means. It means the one who is awakened. Awakened to what? Awakened to those contents or reactions that arise in the mind. So you’re, if you like, you’re independent of those thoughts, you’re developing independence. But this only makes sense when you start to train in it.
21:31
You can’t just apply this as a nice concept or belief. That just becomes another problem. So that’s why we meditate, if there’s stress, we meditate on the stress. If there’s anxiety, we meditate on the anxiety. If there’s anger, we meditate on that conversation we had earlier in the day. So when you say meditate, because I know you define it very differently.
21:58
What’s happening? So you’re not focusing on the breath. What is, how would you define meditation? What is the process? So here’s anxiety, here’s stress, here’s boredom, here’s something arising. Uh, we say I’m noticing something in me or I’m noticing anxiety or I’m noticing boredom or I’m noticing stress. Um, uh, now we, you know, meditate, what’s happening? What, what, what, what is meditation in your mind?
22:28
Meditation is building that new relationship or healthy relationship with the mind. So we can’t just have it be a one second event and then go back to something else. We have to train with those thoughts so that you can train to be your true self in relationship.
22:58
with those thoughts, emotions. It’s mental, it’s mental training, meditation, essentially. And how do you avoid, so what if the feelings are really strong? Like, I think that’s where, obviously, it’s easier if, to be with things that are uncomfortable, when it’s lighter dose, or you’re in a better state. But how do you avoid falling into the stress? So here’s the stress, here I am, ooh, it’s big. Do you
23:27
Do you recommend like just touching in, then go back to your boredom, distracting, come back? Like is it kind of like you’re building your tolerance? Like so what’s, what do you recommend? Right, so the first thing to get clear is if the suffering is strong, the emotional reactions, stress, anxiety, then my path is to meditate more, not less.
23:57
Oh, really? I really, really get stuck in to proper meditation. But you do it in a balanced way. Yes. A very good approach to meditation might be five minutes on, five minutes off. Five minutes meditating on that stressful conversation or that emotion that got triggered or that argument that happened.
24:26
But we’re now doing it deliberately, consciously. It’s now coming from our true self. Instead of us just being a victim of habit, we’re now making a conscious choice. And that is very much a part of mindfulness training and meditation. It’s consciously choosing to sit with
24:55
those painful emotions, because at the end of the day, that is the only thing that will change those painful emotions. A very good analogy always with this work is to think of those painful emotions as being like a child, right? And you, as your true self, is like a parent. The most important thing,
25:24
that a child needs is for you to be present with it when it’s suffering. Not to try and talk it out of its suffering and telling it has nothing to be afraid of, it’s all irrational or whatever. Rational, irrational is completely meaningless, of no value. It is there. That is of that. There is.
25:54
suffering in the child. It needs to be acknowledged with an open mind. That is mindfulness, a road. That’s what we’re bringing to our own minds, where it’s most needed, our own inner pain. We treat it like we were with a child. The beauty is we already know how to do that, that inner wisdom, that innate wisdom as we call it.
26:24
is already within us. You don’t have to learn it. You already know how to comfort a child, how to comfort a pet, who’s afraid of the lightning, or whatever it might be. You know. So we bring that quality of kindness, of compassion, friendliness, of openness to our emotions, and that really sets the right conditions for healing.
26:52
So instead of looking outside of us from other people or other things or distractions, it’s step one recognizing, okay, there’s something arising within me. It’s not who I am. It’s an emotion. It’s a pain or whatever. And it’s developing. And the reason why it’s important, what I’m hearing you say, is it’s got to be an object that I can relate to. If it is me, I can’t relate to it. I’ve merged with it.
27:20
So once I can separate myself with it, and then like you’re saying, it’s built into our system to be, I think once I took my notes years ago with you, you can be a grandmother or parent of loving. I see my wife and whenever my son, she’ll say, I don’t want to deal with other people’s kids. But once Zachary’s, our son is in pain, she goes to him naturally.
27:48
She could be, and this is what’s so cool, she could be in a terrible mood, right? But once they’re suffering, light goes on, take care of the baby, the child, and so it’s within us. Which also is another point, that sometimes we can have both things arise, happiness and sadness, all there too, hello. And so we go to the suffering, which is innate with us, to be able to care for others, and we do that for ourselves, for those objects that arise in our awareness, to be able to untangle.
28:17
So what I like, what you teach is that we are going, because often, and look, we are a personal development company, we, business development as well, and there’s some, what our coaches would call, coaching hacks that can help you in the moment. There’s emotional, there are certainly things that can help you on the surface to problem solve quickly, but they will keep coming up until you get to the root.
28:47
It’s almost, I know you’re a pretty good gardener. I’m not. That’s why I have artificial turf. But if you’re taking a weed out and you just take the top of it, looks good. It’s gonna grow back. You gotta get to the root. And so what you’re talking about, we have to get to the root of the stress, of the suffering. And that is unblend from it, be able to build a relationship with it. And I love a line you taught before where you said, and this is pretty radical.
29:16
People say, let go, just let go, just let go. And you say, correct me if I’m wrong, you say you cannot let go of your emotions. They have to let go of you. No. So tell me about that, that’s pretty radical. It is radical, we hear this all the time. Oh, just let go of your thoughts and focus on being in the present. Very puzzling statement to me as a scientist.
29:46
because those thoughts are occurring in the present. So much of mindfulness I see is actually just teaching a kind of aversion or judgmental mind and saying this is good experience and that is a bad experience. You know, and that is the ultimate opposite of what mindfulness is. Mindfulness is about developing a relationship to experience good.
30:16
That doesn’t matter, whatever is there. Yeah, so trying to let go of negative reactions, anger, fear, is really just another form of reactivity. It’s a form of aversion. You know, the three kinds of reactivity, aversion is the strongest. Grasping is the second.
30:45
and identification. So, we don’t try to let go, but rather we try to learn how to be present with it without reacting further. And that is what we find, and you can verify this for yourself by doing some practice, is what actually leads to healing. With the example of the child again, or the quietened
31:15
dog or whatever. Yeah. You don’t have to come up with solutions, right? You just have to be present. You have to be really present in a friendly, open, non-threatening way. And the fear resolves itself. The fear needs to feel the presence of the parent for the child to overcome its fear.
31:45
that fear to let go would be like with a child. And it’s the same with us. We need to develop this strong relationship between your true self, which is like the parent, and the fear or stress, anxiety that has arisen in you, think of it like a visitor has come to you but a little. It’s a different way of looking at stress.
32:15
suffering is not bad, it’s come to you for healing. It cannot heal itself, it’s a conditioned reaction. It’s not able to heal itself. It can only heal through the strength of the relationship that’s formed between what we also often refer to as your little self, thoughts, emotions, and other reactions, and your true self.
32:44
the observable consciousness, that ability to be present, to hold that emotion within that space of consciousness is often referred to as a therapeutic space. The healing happens in that space of conscious, mindful relationship. Now, I will say that
33:13
as a lawyer, MBA, all these great things. I’ve developed my, we can call the left brain quite well, right, the rational side of the, and so on. And there’s some wonderful, brilliant thinking and brilliant ideas. But when it comes to this realm of emotions, I find them,
33:37
And you know, they give some guidance, but it’s not that where the ultimate healing happens. And this we’re talking about liberation from stress. It isn’t an idea. It isn’t a script. It isn’t a prayer. It isn’t a meditation. It is from what I’m hearing you and I found this to be true in my own practice. It is being able to create a relationship with your emotions and the stronger your degree of presence of loving kindness with yourself.
34:06
with this and I mentioned Sandy, I’m interviewing you today and she was excited. She looks forward to watching. She’s a focusing instructor that you work with at times. I know focusing is a whole other model or we weave in, but it’s this concept that it can be this way as long as it needs to be. That’s presence. I’m with it as long as it needs to be because really, like you said, it’s going to let go when it…
34:36
wants to let go. We are so like results-driven. It has to happen now. I need this now. I need transformation now. I need that. And it doesn’t work that way. It’s when you build a relationship like a little child, you know, force it, get better. Darn it. You know, it’s when the kid, when it’s ready in its own wisdom, it will heal. And another thing that you teach that I love is that all of your processes, your whole being is geared towards healing.
35:06
It’s that we get in the way. And that’s a very important concept that’s not emphasized enough. Yeah, we have this sort of illusion that we have to fix everything. But actually, when you look at reality, you’ll see that everything that arises in the mind changes.
35:36
with us, the primary teaching in Buddhism, of so-called impermanence. But it’s much more than that. When you look very closely, you’ll see that everything that arises changes, yes, but in a direction of healing. It’s always moving back to a baseline, a place of stability, of balance, of equilibrium. Change is not a random.
36:06
process is a very intelligent process that is part of the inner wisdom of the mind as it is in the body. When you injure a part of the body, cut yourself or whatever it might be, what happens? Immediately the body sets a series of changes in motion that leads to a healing.
36:36
not the other way. So this is the intelligence of the body and the same intelligence also exists in the mind when it’s free to operate. That’s the kind of law of the law. When you are not reacting, you are giving things the freedom to operate, to change.
37:05
and heal. It’s the reactivity that’s the problem that takes away that freedom to operate and it simply reinforces the suffering. This principle in the body and in the mind we call homeostasis. This natural principle of healing, returning to a state of balance and well-being. But it’s also
37:35
Remember coming out of a much wider context, which is what we see in nature. For example, a fire. What is the whole purpose of a fire? You know, if you make a bonfire and, you know, sit around it or whatever, and, you know, when you’re camping. Every fire that’s ever happened, ever and ever will happen, has only one purpose.
38:05
in its life, we can call it, is to burn itself out, to extinguish itself, to return to baseline, the state of maximum stability. So this principle is also aligning with the great principles of how the universe actually works. Everything always moves in that direction.
38:35
unless you pump energy into it, which is what reactivity does. It’s like putting fuel on that fire. But if you don’t put fuel on the fire, the fire has no choice but to burn itself on. And the same is true with suffering and with stress. The same exact principle operates with suffering.
39:03
and stress, which is one form of suffering. Same principle operates for anxiety and depression. It’s in a way, any form of emotion can be followed as a fire. It’s unstable, basically. It’s unstable energy. And that energy will always move to a direction of resolution, healing.
39:32
Back to homeostasis. Yeah, that’s beautiful. Well, Dr. Peter Strong, I could spend hours going through the depths with you. It’s so wonderful to connect again. And let’s talk about, for those that are listening and want to learn more, read up about your book or perhaps, because you also do sessions, mindfulness therapy sessions that they can, and you do it through Skype, so anywhere in the world, quite that matter.
40:01
you can support them. So where can one go to connect with you and be able to learn more? Well, you can go to my website, which is pdmstrong at wordpress.com, or even just Google online mindfulness therapy with Peter Strong and I’ll come up. And you just simply
40:32
use the contact form and then we get started and establish a relationship and schedule a session. And most people, mindfulness is very natural. It’s something we already know at some level, these principles. And most people start to see really quite dramatic changes within three to four sessions. That’s it.
41:01
as I say on my website. And once you start establishing a practice of mindfulness and mindfulness meditation, then you can start to really develop this in your life to really develop and cultivate freedom and liberation from suffering, including stress, anxiety, depression, and so on.
41:29
They all operate in the same basic way. They’re all based on reactive condition.
41:39
thoughts and emotions, they’re habits. We learn strengths, just like everything else. But it can be unlearned when you bring conscious awareness to those habits. And that’s the whole point of mindfulness, finding mindfulness therapy. Well, thank you, Dr. Peter Strong. And I will put those in the show notes and all of the sources that we’re gonna be posting the interview.
42:09
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42:27
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