So Much Happier Blog
Where the Mind Can't Go
“You’ll never find peace of mind until you listen to your heart.”
Lately, without even trying, I seem to be seeing a lot of advice everywhere about using logic to think your way to every solution. I’ve heard people vilify emotions as “not real,” confusing temptations, and distractions that entrap the weak. There’s nothing new about this, because frankly, it’s all most people have ever been taught; what is new (to us in this century, anyway) is the idea that your emotional world actually has a useful purpose in your overall health and wholeness. This used to be more of an accepted common-sense principle, but from the advent of the idea of rigorous scientific thought came the collective decision to generally discount, and even bash, anything that could not be mechanistically explained and proven. In fact, in the last hundred years or so in which quantum physics experimentation has yielded some pretty wild and seemingly inexplicable results, many scientists have ignored or actively resisted this particular kind of scientific rigor because it’s just too challenging to their mechanistic beliefs. Unfortunately for society, so are emotions. So they’ve been painted as ridiculous, useless dead ends. Never mind that they’re key to maintaining overall health, most current science wants to write them off as random products of chemical reactions, all sound and fury signifying nothing. Sigh.
Don’t buy the hype. Yes, mental rigor and the exercise of sound logic can do much to improve our lives. But no, they are absolutely not the right tool for every job. If you think they are, you will allow your mind to spin in overdrive so that you can’t sleep or rest mentally because you’re always trying desperately to be multiple steps ahead of everything. You’ll have a hard time being aware of, and thus taking proper care of, your body. You’ll be almost unable to be “in the moment,” aware of who and what is all around you, able to take advantage of the opportunities available to you in that unique moment before they’re gone. You’ll find yourself feeling bereft of meaning and purpose, spun every which way by your mind’s attempts to explain everything—even that which is mysterious and not inherently linear. If you are dealing with any of the following, you will not be able to “convince” yourself out of your issue:
Heartbreak. We love and lose, whether because it was time for a relationship to end or change, or because someone died and we no longer have them available to us physically. These endings can be one of the hardest things to deal with in a lifetime, and the mind can’t solve the pain of them. We can learn to think more positively about them, but the emotions and desires that come up around them must be dealt with head on if they are not to ruin our life vitality and outlook.
Trauma. Thinking and talking about truly traumatic experiences can help us in some ways, but only somatic (body-based) techniques tend to really lighten the load permanently. Of these, the best I’ve encountered is EFT, because it’s among the most effective, it’s a self-help technique that is within your control to benefit from at any time and in any area that you feel safe confronting on your own, and because it encompasses so many different techniques that can be modified to best fit your situation. Sometimes working with a practitioner is the best thing, but there’s much relief you can create with it yourself.
Ingrained Fears. No amount of rationalizing will unwind major fears. Again, it’s techniques involving the body and the subconscious that seem able to get at where our biggest, most intractable fears reside.
Emotional Habits. While thinking and talking about your long-held patterns can help you to understand where they came from and to feel heard, you may need to find a way to allow an emotional release in order to be able to fully move beyond old patterns and create new ones.
Spiritual or Values-Based Conundrums. Sometimes logic is very helpful in looking at how to resolve conflicts of values, but sometimes they need to be felt through with the heart and in cooperation with the whispers from your spirit. As you contemplate these, the mind will tend to spit out judgmental, final-sounding solutions based on what you’ve learned from others throughout your life. Only when you have the courage to find your own solution, one that expresses your own truth and the messages you have to share with the world, will you find peace in the midst of such contradiction.
Some of the principles that will make your experience of life most meaningful, such as being guided by love, thoughtfulness, compassion, and contributing to the creation of a better world (principles that underlie most religious and moral systems of thought, by the way) are not always logical and linear. They involve truths exhibited by signals you receive from your body, mind, and spirit, and these form a complex web that can reveal what’s most important to you even you’d rather not admit it. Minimizing or fighting the existence of these other parts of self, other than rational thought, is a recipe for unhappiness. If you learn to listen to yourself on all of your natural human levels, you find your way forward to wholistic solutions. You progress in a way that feels authentic and respectful of you as well as of others who might be involved in your process.
The Limits of Logic
“If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.”
I talk a lot about emotions in these blogs (mostly because they constitute a maligned and often forcibly ignored area of human functioning), but since there’s a highly symbiotic relationship between thoughts and emotions, it’s important to note the role of the mind in working on emotions. I remember the first time I encountered the assertion that thoughts come before and cause emotions. It was an intriguing idea, and one that I have found to be mostly true in practice.
It’s not always this simple—for example, when you lose a loved one, what causes pain is mostly the thought of separation from that person, and possibly thoughts about what seems left undone between you, but there can be a very physical component. Physical touch creates soothing, “happy” chemicals to be produced in the body. If this was someone you lived in close proximity with, the loss of daily physical touch as well as the ease of access to a supportive relationship can also be powerful factors in how you feel.
Even so, the mind does have a great deal of useful power that can be harnessed when your goal is to clear old emotions from your system and stop generating so many of the “difficult” emotions that result from our minds engaging in negative thought loops. For instance, if you decide to watch for and consciously stop yourself from indulging when you notice that you’re harping on negative, destructive, or hostile thoughts, you’ll notice two things: One, that this is way harder than you thought it would be, and two, that when you do this throughout the day, you do actually feel better and have more energy.
Note that the goal is not to stop feeling emotions—they serve useful purposes, the most obvious of which is to jolt us, in a way that’s difficult to ignore, into noticing when a situation needs our attention. When anger rises in response to a situation, this generally tells us that we perceive an injustice or threat here that we need to get ready for or find a way to right once it has occurred. We may need to apply strategy, communication skills that need to be practiced, and set boundaries or enforce them. This is another place where the mind can kick in and help. Its job is not to “silence” the emotion, but to assist in the creation of a strategy once you’ve understood what the emotion has to say. The mind can remember past strategies that worked for you and others, as well as the Tapping techniques that you can use to deescalate your emotional responses once you no longer need them as signposts!
It is also not the mind’s job to “figure out” the emotions and what they mean. If you try to stand distant from your emotions and never engage them, your mind will try to solve everything on its own. This is partly because this is what it does—it always thinks it knows best—and partly because we’ve been taught to rely heavily on it. In most developed countries, the value of the mind is emphasized over all other parts of the self; mental intelligence and computations, logical, linear thinking, and precise memory are prized as the highest and best abilities to which humans should aspire. While the mind is immensely powerful, as my partner Andrew likes to put it, it’s not the right tool for every job! It can be great at processing a vast amount of information and distilling it down to a useful result using the filters you have in place. You may be aware of many of these filters, such as the values and beliefs you would use as examples of what’s important to you. There are also filters of which you are less aware—those held in place by your subconscious because of events and messages you don’t even remember. The mind uses its power within this framework. As with a computer, when you don’t like its results, you need to consider the underlying code, and the limitations of the system.
Only by entering the world of symbol and engaging with our emotions can we access their most comprehensive messages in ways that are suited to us. When we allow ourselves to actually feel our emotions, we can find connections to past events that would not have been evident through pure logic. We might suddenly perceive how a current situation feels the way it does because of something that happened in childhood that felt very similar. Realizing this gives us a chance to do the work of healing old trauma so that it doesn’t have to dictate our future. It allows us to think through the ways in which this situation, and we ourselves, are not the same as the past situation and person. The “past you” probably didn’t have the knowledge, experience, and resources at her fingertips that you now have.
Once you feel vividly what would need to change for you to handle your current situation better, the mind can help you hone the plan to create space for the healing you need, and fill in gaps in your resources. It helps to give it very specific tasks, though! Instead of asking an extremely open-ended question like, “How can I get what I want,” it may work better to add conditions, such as, “How can I get my money back from this chronic cheater in a way that will succeed but still allow me to feel good about myself and stay out of trouble with the law?” If you ask an open-ended question, the mind will usually spit out an answer very quickly, but it’s likely to be a bad solution that may leave you feeling judged and cornered. Even if you did add conditions, you may need to keep adding new ones when you see the flaws in what your mind initially suggests.
By identifying the valuable, unique function of the emotions, and knowing the limits of the mind in comprehending them and their non-linear messages, we clarify what is needed in each moment. Is this a time for checking in with the emotions about what is needed in a deep sense, or is this just a time to add conditions in order to refine a plan? Try to notice the difference this week and see if this clarifies your tasks.
Are You Your Mind?
“Negative emotions like loneliness, envy, and guilt have an important role to play in a happy life; they’re big, flashing signs that something needs to change.”
In working with clients, I often find that it’s difficult for them initially to connect with their emotions and their bodies. Our culture clings to the virtues of logic and mental activity, sometimes to the exclusion of all else. When we’re young, one of the primary ways we get attention is through succeeding in school at feats of memorization, math, and reading comprehension (or by failing spectacularly in these areas). As we get older, the pressures toward mental achievement grow, and overall success markers like money often flow to those who can conceal emotion and physical needs, and operate, seemingly, solely in the realm of the mental. This societal conditioning may cause us to conceal and deny body, heart, and spirit until they are so isolated that we ourselves believe them to be irrelevant to our happiness and fulfillment—nice if you have time to be self-indulgent, but kind of a waste of time.
Getting clients to tune back into these aspects of self is a process. Noticing and acknowledging the validity of emotions and what they are telling us; awareness of how these emotions affect our physical bodies in the short and long term; the ability to see the ways in which our thoughts and actions contribute to and can solve emotional and physical discomfort; these are learned skills. They can be learned in a surprisingly short time frame, though, if it becomes clear that this is a highly practical and enjoyable pursuit, worthy of time and effort invested. My clients are often delighted at what happens when they allow some initial awkwardness with the process of getting to know their emotions and follow the unfolding of revelations that ensue. When you start to experience firsthand the fruits of honoring your emotions and desires, there’s a rush of exhilaration, empowerment, and optimism that often arises. When you see that you have the ability to harness the wisdom of your neglected parts, a joyful and holistic confidence sprouts. When you know that you can actually DO something about how you feel about your life and your ability to craft your future, new ideas about your potential, and how to solve your most knotty problems, start to bubble up to the surface.
When you first try to get specific about what’s troubling you in any given area, you may run up against all kinds of resistance. You might feel overwhelmed, like if you start to open that Pandora’s Box you’ll become completely overtaken by the volume of what’s been hiding there. You might be convinced that this whole thing is dumb and definitely won’t help you. You might feel uncomfortable because trying something new is always a bit of a challenge. Or you might just find the slippery, ethereal realm of emotion to be confusing because things refuse to stand still as you observe. I encourage you to be patient and keep trying little bits at a time. At some point you notice that you’re starting to recognize pieces of the landscape, and it doesn’t feel so foreign anymore. As you relax and sink into following a process, whether it’s Tapping or something else, you make progress. You understand yourself and others in new ways. You’re able to clear out old stuff from the past that’s been cluttering up your inner world.
The benefits of welcoming your emotions, heart, and spirit back into the room are hard to overstate. Living as a well-integrated human makes so much more of your innate capacity available to you. It helps relieve stress by broadening your perspective and dialing up your creativity. It helps you to admit when the mysterious, non-linear parts of you know something your mind doesn’t, like whether a particular course of action is right for you. It helps to remind you of what gives your life a sense of purpose, and the ways in which just being alive is enjoyable. When you’re living your life trying to do everything with your mind, it’s like trying to navigate with a compass that only ever points north. So take a look around and notice all the directions. Even if you don’t know what to do with them yet, just starting to take them in opens up a whole new world; once you’ve explored it, it will be less exotic and unreachable, and more productive of joyous dimension in your life experience.
Where the Rubber Meets the Road
“Endure and persist; this pain will turn to good by and by.”
There are many personal qualities that are important contributors to long-term success, but I’ve been writing about some of the most powerful ones over the last few weeks. Along with focus and creativity, persistence is absolutely necessary if you’re to keep yourself moving ever forward in life toward greater mastery of your chosen subject matter. Life has a way of surprising us with all manner of challenges no matter how well we plan. It’s easy to become discouraged by the constant disruptions and the necessary adjustments those challenges call upon us to make. In order to hang in there long enough to get where you want to go, you’ll need to be able to fire up your persistence day in and day out, almost no matter what may be happening around you. Yes, I know, that’s a tall order! I can hear some of you groaning already—this is starting to sound very un-fun.
And yet, what if you could find ways to maintain a calm sense of balance in the midst of chaos? What if you knew how to feed your confidence throughout challenge so that persistence didn’t seem like such a Herculean effort? These are just skills that can be learned, like any other. While some people will be more naturally gifted than others in any area, almost everyone can become at least functional in most skill sets. If you’re someone whose motivation gets knocked off course often, such that you’re often starting and stopping your efforts on things that really matter to you, here are some things to try on the road to becoming unstoppable.
· Remember the importance of focus? You’ll need to apply it to keep reminding yourself that persistence is a skill, not some magical quality that you weren’t born with, so why bother? Some people were taught the skills that feed persistence early, and some need to learn them later, but you have to acknowledge that it’s possible to learn them before you can effectively build them.
· You’ll also need to focus on what’s important to you consistently. Every day. Find ways to do this that appeal to you. It’s good to make this fun, so indulge yourself! If you like, write reminders to yourself on bright sticky notes and scatter them around where you’ll see them throughout the day, or make a recording of yourself repeating your top priorities and play it back in the car, or take a few minutes before you get out of bed and before you go to sleep at night to go over them in your mind and enjoy how they express the truth of you. There can be great joy in just repeating your most important values to yourself often. You might be surprised how enjoyable and inspiring this becomes.
· Practice reviewing your priorities before making decisions throughout your day. When you get into the habit of making sure that what’s most important to you is at least considered in your smallest decisions, you reinforce your ability to strategize with them always in mind. When the larger, more pivotal decisions come up, it will be easier to do the same, and you’ll become brilliant at making decisions that serve your values and goals.
· Keep a journal on decisions you made and how well they support your goals. This is an excellent way to give yourself credit for and celebrate good decisions, as well as notice decisions that you made in a hurry, forgetting to think through what would really be best for you and everyone else before charging ahead. If you don’t take time to frequently review what’s happening in your life, it’s easy to fall back into old patterns and find that you’re getting nowhere. If you keep an eye on things, you have opportunities to do better every day, and you’ll progress much more quickly.
· Sometimes, you will have a bad day. You will need the love and support of at least a few people who you can count on to care about you no matter what. Practice reaching out to them when things aren’t terrible just to talk through a choice or share a win or a concern. This will make it more natural and easy for you to ask for attention when you really need it. Everyone needs support sometimes, and being reminded that someone else cares about you and believes in you helps restore your courage and keep you in the game.
· Manage your mind and your emotions. This cannot be said enough. Your mind will have a tendency to judge you, and others, and spiral into negativity. If you want to build persistence, you must gain the ability to arrest this cycle and bring your mind back to a neutral state at least, and practice more resourceful thinking. You don’t have to pretend that everything is always rosy, but if you’re always indulging in negativity, there’s no way you’re going to reach your goals—and if you did by some stroke of luck, you wouldn’t be able to enjoy them. Your emotions, in the moment at least, proceed from your thinking. There are also probably a bunch stuck in your system from previous events and thinking. For clearing those, the best technique I’ve ever found is EFT/Tapping, and it’s easy and free to do, so if you haven’t taken the time yet, learn the basics and try it! It’s so much easier to make good decisions when you’re not being overwhelmed with outdated mental and emotional habits left over from the past.
· Be stubborn. Every two-year-old knows how to do this like a champ. If you’ve forgotten how, channel your inner two-year-old and stamp your feet and yell, “No! No, no NO! I want _______!” at the top of your lungs every once in a while. Jump up and down for added effect. In addition to being hilarious and getting your blood pumping, this can reconnect you with your most basic desires and your conviction that you deserve to get them. Small children don’t spend time worrying about whether it’s prudent to want a pet unicorn, they just go ahead and want it. When you really connect with your desires, a lot of energy becomes available to you that you can use to take action. Your zest for life resurfaces. You can’t achieve goals if you’re always exhausted and don’t remember what all the effort is for. You have to let yourself want things in order to feel fully alive. Even if they seem impossible, your desires have important messages for you, and help you to keep finding your direction in the face of adversity.
A few caveats:
· Sometimes persistence is not the right tool for the job. If you’re persisting but continually missing the mark, it may be time for a new strategy and some course correction. Mindless persistence can end up looking a lot like reckless stupidity. You want to stay open to learning new things, and benefiting from outside perspectives.
· There will always be moments in any life when it’s time to take a break, either just for vacation, to rest and recharge, or because you’re going through a major transition of some sort—but when you can decide when to take time rather than always struggling to recover enough to get back on the horse, that’s a better place to be.
· Each of us has things we’re just really, really not suited for, in addition to things we’re great at. If you’ve applied yourself enough to gain some ability, but still loathe and get bogged down by a certain activity, it’s wise to partner with someone who is good at it, or find other ways to work around doing it.
· If you’re someone who is motivated by joining with others in some way, then by all means find a buddy who can help you keep at it on a daily basis, or pay a coach to help you stay focused on your goals and the actions you need to take to keep growing. Most people enjoy effort more if they can share accomplishments with others who cheer them on and appreciate their progress. Relationships make life, and our successes, more meaningful and more fun. Look, we brought it back around to fun! And we should. Why be so serious when we can build fun into all of our days with just the intention to do so? Balance means playing as well as we work, because play helps us to relax, de-stress, and regain creativity.
Maintaining persistence is a lifelong pursuit, like maintaining good health. We’re never done. But if you don’t ever get around to investing time and effort into creating basic habits that will keep you going, you can’t expect to live the kind of life you want. Start small if persistence is hard for you, but start! You can do this.
Squirrel!
“The direction of your focus is the direction your life will move. Let yourself move toward what is good, valuable, strong and true.”
In last week’s blog about time management, I mentioned that creating change requires focus, creativity, and persistence. This week I’d like to zero in on focus. The achievement of any long-term goal requires sustained application of focused effort and attention, so let’s consider what this means and how we can bring focus to bear for maximum results.
Focus is:
· Cultivating the ability to apply your consciousness to a goal in the present moment so that you can get high-quality work done
· Tuning out everyday distractions like ambient noise, junk mail, and anything else unimportant that might tempt you to swing your attention away from what is important to you
· Keeping any fears and doubts that crop up along the way in perspective so that they don’t stop you short
· Continually returning to the work that needs to be done in order to keep your project moving
Bringing all of your mental powers to the subject at hand requires that you live in such a way that you’re prepared to do so when it’s time. There’s no way around it—if you want to stay the course over time and reach your biggest goals, you have to take care of yourself, consuming adequate nutrition, getting the amount of sleep that is optimal for you most of the time, and managing your mind and emotions. It takes practice to build your attention span and to keep returning your busy mind to the task in front of you, as well as a strong, calm emotional center. Meditation is, in my experience, one of the best tools for creating these abilities and conditions, and I suggest that you look for a variety that suits you and practice it to help support your ability to focus. If you get into the habit of calming your mind, you supercharge your capacity to expand your attention span and the quality of attention you’re capable of offering to any given task or person.
In order to resist the senseless pull of distractions, you need to devote time to reminding yourself of what you’re working so hard for. You need to imagine vividly and savor the sweet rewards of achieving your goal before you do so, constantly remembering the compelling reasons why it’s worth the effort so you can stay inspired. And you need to attend to uncomfortable emotions that arise and make it difficult for you to stay on task. Tapping/EFT is a fantastic help in this, as it can make it much quicker and easier to process and release emotional buildup, and clarify any actions you authentically want to take from a calm, balanced place so you don’t make mistakes by acting impulsively.
It’s a great idea to make sure that your workspace is clean, uncluttered, and comfortable enough for you to spend time there. If you can make it attractive and fun to be in, even better. Making sure you can play music you like, look at artwork you love, and have supplies at hand that are colorful and appealing can all be important. This is worth your thought and effort, because everything you can do to make your work enjoyable helps to keep you engaged—if you like your environment, it will be easier to be productive.
Time management is also important to protecting your ability to focus, as if you’re always hurrying and overwhelmed, you’ll find it hard to be fully present where you are and get your best work done. It’s important to find time for everything that’s a priority in your life even if it means slowing the pace of your progress toward your goals. If time management is hard for you, go back and read last week’s blog again for ideas about how to regain some control over your schedule. There are some basic skills we all need to work on that make working effectively with time possible, but it’s not something we tend to get a lot of formal support for. It’s also very unglamorous to do the work to build these skills, so it may not seem like an attractive way to spend our time. Even so, these skills make so much more possible that it makes sense to do it anyway.
If you’ve done your best with all of these points and you’re still struggling, it might be a good time to consider whether you could use some help. Maybe you just need some support from a friend or through coaching, or maybe you’re dealing with a specific issue like a learning disability (there are lots of great resources and techniques for coping with these now) or ADD/ADHD. Before I knew adults with ADD who could explain it to me, I can safely say that I was not aware of just how different someone else’s inner world could be from mine, despite having had a variety of experiences as well as a history of relating to eclectic friends. There are chemical conditions like this one, depression, and others that can make everyday tasks a struggle beyond what most people encounter. If you suspect that you may be in this boat, get some more information and find a professional to help guide you as you explore your personal experience and your options. Any unnecessary struggle is a waste of your time and vital energy, plus it’s just super frustrating and demoralizing. There is help available if you just reach out for it.
Next week we’ll explore the importance of developing persistence, which also strongly supports focus. In the meantime, I hope this gives you a few things to think about as you look for ways to optimize your happiness and productivity.