Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

Losing weight. Stopping smoking. Getting out of a cycle of bad relationships. Exercising. Eating better. Getting out of your rut and doing what you really want to do. It’s hard, am I right? And you don’t know where to start.

I see people through my hypnotherapy practice all the time who are in this situation. They really, really want to change their life, but they just don’t know how. And for every person I see, there are hundreds who want to change just as much.

There are a lot of things I can tell them, and do tell them, but the key thing I do is this: I work on their awareness.

Awareness, attention, mindfulness if you’re a meditator, being conscious… All of these are names for a phenomenon that is absolutely central to personal change. If you’re not paying attention, you’re not going to change.

Our minds are very good at “protecting” us from being aware of things that will disturb us. So good, in fact, that they often prevent us from noticing things that we really need to know about. It’s like we’ve disconnected the wires to our dashboard because that “check engine” light kept coming on all the time, and it was bothering us…

The essential thing about awareness – conscious awareness of our own emotions and thoughts – is that when we are aware we’re able to integrate the rational and irrational parts of our mind and get them working together.

The mind is like a parliament, except that there doesn’t seem to be a Speaker. The closest thing we have is the prefrontal cortex, which regulates and inhibits emotion. The problem is, a lot of the time the emotional parts of the brain aren’t listening:

Member for Sadness: Chocolate is clearly required at this time.
Other members: Coffee! Cigarettes! Beer!
Member for Sadness: Chocolate! I say chocolate!

Member for Guilt: The Honorable Member is an idiot and should be ashamed of herself.
Prefrontal cortex: Order! Order! The Member for Guilt will withdraw that remark and apologise.
Member for Guilt: And she’s fat, and getting fatter.
Prefrontal cortex: Order! I will have order!

Member for Sadness: Chocolate! I will have chocolate!

Why does this disconnect occur, and how can we overcome it?

The short answer is, we’ve trained ourselves from childhood not to pay attention to our emotions, because they were calling for things that, as children, we didn’t have the ability to provide for them: security, stability, love. They’ve responded to this by calling for things that we can provide: coffee, cigarettes, beer, chocolate. These (and other legal and illegal drugs, and some behaviours as well) change the chemical balance of the brain and make us feel better, without ever addressing the underlying issue.

photo credit: Mzelle Biscotte

What I say to my clients is: As long as you turn your back on these things, it’s like you see a big shadow looming over you. But when you turn around and face them, they’re really not that big after all.

There are some easy ways to start facing your emotions and integrating your mind so that you feel more in control and can give up some of the other ways you manage your moods – ways that bring about problems of their own. I’ve written about two of the best previously in one simple step towards managing emotions and a simple mood control technique and how it works. But what I suggest to all my clients is the Relaxation Response Practice, which I give to them on one side of a bookmark (that’s how easy it is to explain). For those of you who prefer to have spoken guidance, you’ll find an audio version in my podcast.

So: Face your fear, anger, sadness, guilt or whatever it is you’re avoiding, and you’ll find, first, that it isn’t so bad, and second, that you can change your life after all.

Related posts:

1. A Simple Mood Control Technique and How it WorksOne of the simplest and most powerful techniques in the...
2. The Gut Bump: a technique to combat mild depressionEarlier this week, a few things weren’t going too well...
3. Regular practice: the path to changeEuclid is said to have told a king looking for...
4. The Paramount Pictures Technique for Crushing Fear like a Beer CanI hate the kind of marketing where people interrupt me...
5. How (and Why) to Let Go of Emotions“Don’t choke don’t choke don’t choke…” As we all know,...