Stress levels are increasing, and anxiety has become rampant in today’s fast-paced society. We are conditioned to keep up, meet the demands, and typically pay the price for doing so. I know, I have been there. Most people joke about admitting you have a problem is the first step, and I agree. Which is why developing awareness and understanding our automatic thinking and behaving is so important.
Awareness
Take a second and close your eyes and just be silent for 1 minute.
What did you notice? Were your distracted by your thoughts? What were your thoughts about?
Often times people find that their minds will take them many places. It is a busy place and our thoughts are very powerful and often demand a lot of our attention. When we are not aware of the volume of thought and the power of the thoughts we tend to go through life in a very mindless way.
Mindlessness
We rush through activities without being attentive to them. Perhaps we break, drop, or spill thing because of carelessness, inattention, or thinking of something else. We can find ourselves failing to notice subtle tensions or discomforts, and preoccupied with thoughts of the past or future.
The truth of the matter is that we spend most of our life inside our head and not in the present moment. Creating our own realities, versus the ones right in front of us.
Dealing with thoughts
Did you know we have at least 50,000 thoughts a day?!? Of course, some of these thoughts are helpful. They help us be creative, come up with new ideas and plan for the future. However, they can also be problematic as they create worry, rumination, and negative stories about the self.
So we try to suppress and push down these thoughts. We try to distract ourselves from them. We even try to challenge our thoughts, by minimizing the reality of our emotions. These strategies will work in the short term but typically cause pain long term.
Mindfully dealing with thoughts
- Try to observe your thoughts, rather than identifying with or dwelling on them.
- See yourself on top of a mountain and watch them come and go like clouds.
- Take your thoughts less seriously.
- Remember we have at least 50,000 a day; imagine what it does to us emotionally to take our thoughts so seriously.
- Let them pass.
- Everything is temporary. Good and bad things alike. When we stop the flow of these thoughts and cling to them we create distress and conflict inside.
- Focus attention on one point, an anchor, that can bring you back to your present reality.
- Find your breath, bodily sensations, an object, a sound or a smell that grounds you to the here and now.
Autopilot
Thoughts often emerge immediately and automatically. Our mind produces stores, and often our stores are not true.
There is a lot that we do that is automatic in our life; some of it we are unaware of. Many of our behaviors are automatic, some may estimate that it could be up to 90% of our behavior. These things include driving, eating, making gestures, etc. All which are produced through repetition.
Benefits
Creating Automatic behaviors allows us to do things quicker, and we can process several details at once with little effort. We can take mental shortcuts that allow us to not examine all options all the time, and we can multitask (i.e. talking to a passenger while driving).
Disadvantages
Often times become a slave to our habits.
These habits become difficult to change, and often when we are engaging in them we are more in our heads than in the moment. I think about when I am driving and I find myself in automatic pilot mode I am definitely not thinking about the road but something that I need to do or about something that came up in the day.
The automatic patterns can cause problems as we find ourselves possibly automatically desiring alcohol when in certain places or at certain times; ruminating when unpleasant situations occur, or automatically letting emotions guide our behaviors. These are all examples of impulse control issues and examples of being reactive.
Attention vs. Reactivity
The goal is to increase our attention to our thoughts and behaviors to reduce these impulses. We want to create a pause between the situation (trigger) and the reaction.
Helpful questions may be: What is going on? What do I feel? What am I about to do? (what is my impulse/tendency at this moment?
When we create this pause between trigger and reaction we allow ourselves to not get emotionally hijacked and learn to engage our decision making brain….hopefully creating a decision that helps us feel good, rather than having to backpedal and apologize or feel bad.
- Connect to the present moment (anchor)
- Allow feelings to be present—do not engage them.
- Notice when thinking takes over again.
- Return to the Anchor.
