How to Deal with Toothache at Work

Most tips on Self-Hacker are not as specific as this but if you find yourself developing toothache at work you may be grateful you read this.

Whilst some people in the UK get free dentistry, the looming prospect of having to cough up over £200 on the fly is not one that fills many people with joy. But it hurts and so you either load up the credit card or try this unusual psychological technique from John Burton, author of Hypnotic Metaphors.

The Technique

1. Concentrate on your toes on both feet.
2. Maintaining awareness of your toes (keeping them in mind) become aware of the rest of your feet.
3. Maintaining awareness of your toes and feet, bring your ankles into awareness.
4. Maintaining awareness of your toes, feet and ankles, bring your awareness up to your shins and your
   knees.
5. Maintaining awareness of your toes, feet and ankles, shins and knees, include your legs and thig hs.
6. Keeping awareness of everything so far in mind, keep adding in other body parts up your body to the top of your head.
7. Include every part of you THAT DOESN’t HURT
8. When you’ve included the whole of your body, estimate the percentage of you that doesn’t hurt.
9. Let’s say for example it’s 99%.
10. Holding awareness of the 99% ask yourself:
11. “What happens when I bring the feeling of the 99% of my body onto the 1% that hurts? How does
    that change things?”
12. Mentally imagine bringing the feelings of the 99% over and onto the area that hurts.
13. Hold for 20 seconds. You will experience a lessening of the pain.

The technique works by using our brain’s tendency to bring some information into the foreground and leave some in the background. If you have seen the classic illusion picture of the old crone and young woman you’ll realise it’s impossible to see both at once. This is foregrounding and back-grounding in action.

When you force yourself to concentrate on increasingly large amounts of your body your mind is in a position to do a gestalt-swap – and moves your attention away from the pain to the larger ‘mass’ that does not hurt.

I have personally used this technique with about five people over the years including myself. I was in South America one time and a relative’s daughter, who had very little prospect of immediate dental treatment told me her jaw hurt badly.

Within five minutes she gave me a surprised look and exclaimed that the pain had diminished completely. This is something you can rush to the toilet, and spend a few minutes refocusing your attention. The effect lasts some hours, enough time to figure out if uncle Bill will lend you the money.

Doug Cartwright

www.overcomingprocrastination.co.uk