Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

Oct 13

How (and Why) to Let Go of Emotions

Posted in Techniques

“Don’t choke don’t choke don’t choke…”

As we all know, thoughts like that lead inevitably to choking. Why?

Because trying to suppress a thought gives it power. It’s like pushing against a spring. The harder you push, the more force it pushes back with.

I was reminded of this recently by a post on PsyBlog: 8 Ironic Effects of Thought Suppression. It’s not just thoughts of failure this happens with. Whether you’re trying not to be attracted to someone or not to mention a secret, trying not to be depressed or trying to fall asleep, the harder you try, the more you fail.

Psychocybernetics

Back in the 1960s, Maxwell Maltz had an explanation for this. His book Psychocybernetics (which is excellent, by the way) talks about your mind as a guided missile, heading for the goals you present to it most vividly.

So when you’re trying to think unsexy thoughts, guess what happens?

Your mind heads straight for what you are so vividly imagining.

Suppressing thoughts takes effort

Of course, we can suppress thoughts to a certain degree. But it does take effort. A study in Biological Psychology led by Philippe R. Goldin used brain scans to investigate the difference between two strategies for dealing with distressing thoughts: expressive repression (that is, keeping a “stiff upper lip” and not showing your distress), and cognitive reappraisal (changing the way you think about the distressing situation). Expressive repression was less effective – and took more mental effort.

And this is why it’s harder to suppress thoughts when we’re tired. A pattern I’ve noticed with the people who come to me for help in changing the way they eat goes like this: In the early part of the day, even up to the afternoon, they eat healthily. But when they get home from work, they head for the junk food and undo all their good work.

One likely reason is that they’re tired, and the thoughts they’ve been suppressing all day about how good some chocolate would taste have become stronger than their ability to control them.

How not to be a (thought-suppression) hero

photo credit: The World According To Marty

So, if the battle against thoughts we don’t want to think is doomed to failure, what can we do instead?

We can think the thoughts and then let them go.

Both parts are equally important. Thinking the thoughts (which you’ve actually been doing anyway while you were trying to suppress them) brings them out into the clear light of day and gives our rationality time to kick in. Particularly for thoughts that hold a strong emotional charge, we respond emotionally before we respond rationally, and if we instantly react by pushing the thoughts down again, all we’re doing is winding ourselves up emotionally. We’re never thinking about the thoughts.

Often, when you think about a thought, it becomes obvious that it’s a stupid thought and you don’t really want to act on it. How often have you done something stupid and said, “I didn’t think that all the way through?”

Think your thoughts all the way through. Say you’re attracted to someone inappropriate, for example. Let yourself think about that. Your mind will come up with all the reasons that the attraction is inappropriate and the relationship couldn’t work.

The feeling, of course, will very likely still be there. And this is where the letting go comes in.

Letting thoughts and feelings go

If you’ve been reading my stuff for any length of time you probably know what’s coming next. Yes, it’s the Welcoming Practice. It’s such a good one that I keep teaching it at every opportunity.

First, notice how the feeling is in your body. Where is it located? What is it like? Is it warm, cool, tight, loose? Become aware of it as a body sensation. This simultaneously connects you to it and distances you from it – it’s like letting the thought come into consciousness. It stops the suppression and your attempts to ignore it, but it also gives you enough space to look at it from the outside instead of being carried along in it.

Second, name and acknowledge the feeling. Naming it sets up a circuit between the “feeling” and “rational” parts of your brain and starts to siphon off the activation of the “feeling” part. In the classic Welcoming Practice, you actually say “Welcome, [name of feeling]“, hence the name of the practice. You’re acknowledging the feeling as a part of yourself, as a genuine reaction. You’re not trying to push it away any more. (You’re not, of course, welcoming the situation that led to the feeling, which may be quite harmful and wrong.)

Take your time over each step. When you’re ready, the third step is to gently let the feeling go. Allow its activation to subside, without having led to any action. You might even make a mental or physical gesture of letting something go from your hand. I usually take a deep breath and let it slowly out as I let go of the feeling.

Now you can move on with your life.

Practicing the Welcoming Practice

You may have to keep letting the thoughts and feelings go for a while before they stop bothering you. That’s OK. It’s no more effort than you were spending suppressing them, after all, and that wasn’t working, whereas letting them go will.

So take a moment right now to set yourself a mental alarm. Take a few deep breaths, relax in your chair, close your eyes and tell yourself, “When I’m suppressing a thought or feeling, I notice and remember what to do. I think the thought and let the feeling go.”

For extra effectiveness, write that down and put it somewhere you’re going to see it frequently.

I think you’ll be surprised by the results.

comments: 0 » tags: anxiety, attention, brain, change your life, emotions, habits, personal change, practice

Sep 29

How I Found True Love (and 3 Things I Learned)

Posted in Background

This entry is part 7 of 7 in the series 3 Things I've Learned

True love. It’s not just for the Princess Bride. It turns out it’s for me as well.

This came as a big surprise to me. Growing up, I’d never had much of a clue about romance, and although I had a lot of female friends (and still do), I reached the age of 30 without ever having had a girlfriend.

Why am I talking about this now? Largely because one of my readers, who’s turning 30 soon and has never had a girlfriend, emailed me for advice (or really, for encouragement – he knew what action to take already).

That reminded me that I’d never told the story here of how it is that I come to be happily married, when for most of my life I thought that was never going to happen. I think it’s a good story – and maybe it’ll be inspirational, not only if you’re long-term single but if you struggle with any elusive dream.

Meant for someone else and not for me

Let’s start at the beginning. I have a mild form of a genetic condition called Marfan’s syndrome, the main visible signs of which in my case are that I’m very thin, with a noticeably distorted back. I was always self-conscious about my appearance, plus I wasn’t comfortable with emotions. (My family are very emotionally reserved, even for New Zealanders.)

All this meant that I was shy around girls-as-girls (girls as people I was mostly fine with), and asking one out was an impossibly scary thing. I was also very nerdy and unconventional, which didn’t help. I had a strange hyaena-like laugh, deliberately dressed unfashionably, and since my intelligence was the one thing about myself that I did feel confident about, I displayed it at every opportunity. Power tip: This isn’t an endearing trait.

I didn’t have a girlfriend at school, but that was normal in a way, because nor did my two great friends. As it turned out, one of them was gay; the other was just as big a nerd as I was. Once he and I got to university, though, he got a more fashionable haircut, started to dress in jeans and satin shirts (it was the 80s), lost the horn-rimmed glasses (his sight recovered when we were in our late teens), and eventually started dating. I didn’t.

I was very religious at the time, and at least some of the time I rationalised my singleness as a “calling”. Trouble was, I didn’t actually want to be single, deep down, and that led to several years of emotional struggle and internal conflict that didn’t really need to happen.

When I needed sunshine I got rain

And then I created a couple more years of unnecessary pain for myself by falling for a fellow student who only wanted to be friends, not saying anything to her for months, and not taking “no” as her final answer (as I recall, she wasn’t as direct and unambiguous as she could have been, but still).

The two of us then joined the staff of a voluntary organisation that we’d both been involved with at university and went off to Australia to train together, living in the same house. This organisation, incidentally, had a policy that if you were on their staff and wanted to get married, your spouse also had to be on staff already or join, and you can imagine how that distorted things.

I wasn’t over her, but didn’t say anything for more months, by which time I was severely stressed by other things that were happening in my life (like training for an occupation I was completely unsuited for), and I took her second and more definite “no” very hard. I then had to continue to see her almost daily for a few more months, until I left the organisation when it clearly wasn’t going to work out.

Back home, we ended up at the same church. She started going out with one of the other guys from the course – the three of us had been good friends and hung out a lot – and they eventually got married. Still very emotionally vulnerable from severe stress breakdown, I didn’t cope with that well. (I actually turned and fled once when I saw her walking towards me.)

Round and round in little unhappy circles

So that experience overshadowed my romantic life, or lack thereof, for a few years afterwards. It didn’t help that my next serious attempt to start a relationship, with another friend, also got a “no” response. I did go out with a woman for about six months, but “go out” was all we did, and at the end she “clarified” that it had always been on the basis of being just friends – definitely not the impression I had, or the impression that the mutual friend who introduced us had had either. Either I moved too slowly and she lost interest, or her clarification was actually the truth.

There were a couple of times that women did show interest in me. One invited me to a film at the film festival – Blade Runner, which I had watched before and not enjoyed – and it took me a second after I’d said “no” to realise that she’d asked me out. After another second’s review, I decided that my answer stood, though. She was – well, to be honest, she was kind of a female me, and I didn’t find her attractive. (This was back before nerd girls were confident and sexy.)

And then there was the friend of a friend who came on so strong and so desperate that I got horribly nervous, and had to visit the bathroom four or five times during our dinner date at my favourite restaurant. We didn’t go out a second time.

And so I reached 30, having had a total of one date that both people present had definitely considered a date, and it had been – kind of a train crash.

I take action at last

Towards the end of the year I turned 30, though, two things happened that created a shift. The first was something I did. I was aware that I wasn’t good at expressing emotions, though I certainly felt them powerfully enough (my years of romantic hope and disappointment had shown me that – several of those many rejections, even some that were indirect and happened before I’d even asked, had plunged me straight into depression, no stopping, no waiting). So I went and took a community acting class. I figured that if I learned to convey emotions that I wasn’t feeling, I’d be able to translate the skill into conveying emotions I was feeling.

The week before the class finished, the second thing happened: my father died suddenly. I was able to grieve him much better and more openly – the class had done its work – and my emotions began to open up. I also – this feels a little disloyal, but it’s the truth – felt released from the pressure of his expectations, including the expectation of not expressing emotion. He was a good man, but like all of us he had his issues, and emotional expression was definitely one of them. He’d been through the Depression and World War II and had learned to cope by not talking about it.

A fortunate friendship

My father’s death was the trigger for me to get back in touch with a friend I’d made online the previous year. This was the late 90s, when the Internet was still relatively new to most people and a lot of today’s ways of connecting didn’t exist or were in their infancy. But a guy I knew slightly on an email discussion list had started a site for people to meet each other, including as “just friends” with no romantic expectations, and I’d decided, “Why not check it out? What could be the harm?”

A woman had posted there with a very interesting-sounding profile, and she was just looking for a friend, so I emailed her. I was apparently the only normal, non-creepy person who contacted her, and we started mailing back and forth, discussing books, and our personal struggles (including with singleness), and psychology, which she was studying, and everything else that came to mind. But then she started having computer issues, and we lost touch for a while.

When I emailed her about my father, I was also emailing another woman, who had contacted me about an article I had written on singleness on my now-long-gone Geocities website (remember Geocities?). I mentioned this second woman to the first woman, Erin, and she became indignant that I’d been emailing someone else (however innocently). This was my first clue.

We started swapping audio tapes in the mail (this was before MP3s or Skype, and you could only do video on CD-ROM). She has a pleasant voice, and I started to notice an attraction – and started to suspect it was mutual. Summoning up all my courage, I asked. It was mutual. YES!

It was the very early days of Internet romance, and it had a bad reputation. To the initial dismay of her fellow psychology students and her father (“How do you know he’s not an axe murderer?”), we decided it was serious. I went and met her – she lived in California – and then a few months later brought her out to New Zealand for Christmas to meet my friends and family. They approved, not that they got a vote, and we were married in February of 1999.

What I learned

I’ve passed 1500 words here, and I haven’t brought out a personal development lesson yet (which is what this blog is for, after all). So here it is.

If you want a change, make a change. Your life isn’t going to magically change by itself and suddenly work out when it never did before. Work on your confidence, your ability to listen, your ability to connect, your emotional management skills. Worst case: you’ll be a better and more interesting person and you’ll like yourself more.

Secondly, learn to take action. The reader who emailed me has an excellent plan: read some of the books he’s bought about confidence and interacting with women, and then join an online dating site and start practicing. I wasted far too much time having conversations in my head that should have happened outside my head, where I would quickly have learned what was what and had the opportunity to move on.

And finally, don’t take it all so seriously. Enjoy your life as it is now, let go of some of your emotional overinvestment in particular outcomes, and roll with the punches. If you’re working actively on improving your life, you’re taking action, and you’re able to become resilient to rejection, disappointment and loss, eventually things do improve.

Keep the questions coming, by the way. If there’s something you’d like me to write about, or write more about, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or send an email. I love to connect with my readers and write about what you want to know about.

comments: 0 » tags: change your life, confidence, emotions, life lessons

Sep 13

How Not to Change Your Life: The Book (and what else is coming up)

Posted in Announcements

Well, my How Not to Change Your Life series is finished.

It’s been running since January, which is longer than I’ve ever run a series here before. I’ll probably do something similar again, though, because it’s been good to focus on one topic over a long period.

I didn’t want the original post to just be another list post. List posts are popular with blog readers because they’re easy to skim, but they can easily be shallow and lazy ways of blogging about a topic without engaging with it in any depth. Instead, I expanded each point in the list into its own post, averaging around a thousand words or more.

That’s 26,000 words, which is almost enough for a small book. And that’s exactly what I’m going to turn the series into.

I’m going to go through all the posts, of course, and revise and expand them, add in material that I deliberately left out for space reasons (or that I’ve thought of since), and write a few completely new chapters – I’m thinking seven for some reason. I might include some other relevant material from guest posts I’ve written, my other blog at How to Be Amazing, or my archives here. The whole thing will likely be 35,000 to 40,000 words by the time I finish.

A book? When?

I’m planning for that finish date to be early January 2012 – just in time for New Year’s resolutions, and a year after the series began. But if you want to be kept in touch (and get a discount on the book when it’s available, and some pre-release material that I won’t be sharing anywhere else), sign up down the bottom of this post to my “early notification” mailing list. I won’t flood you with a lot of email, just relevant updates about the book’s progress and how you can get some extras and special deals.

I’m self-publishing, of course. Not because I don’t think I could get a publisher, but because I can’t see the point in putting all that work into finding one in order to have less creative control and still do most of the marketing. (I used to work in traditional publishing, and I’ve self-published before. I know the ins and outs.)

That means, by the way, that if you’re a graphic designer and you fancy doing a book cover, you should email me a proposal (mikerm at hypno co nz). I’m offering to pay, of course, though if you wanted to swap some of your work for some of mine I’d be happy to discuss it. I got my last book cover that way.

If you, or someone you know, reviews books or personal development resources, get in touch with me as well. I’d like to have lots of reviews in hand by the time I launch in January. You’ll get an electronic copy for review, and if your review is published or I use a quote from you I’ll send you a physical book when they’re available. Sales of the book may also be part of my affiliate program.

I want to find a way to offer everyone who buys a print book an ebook version as well. That’s surprisingly difficult to achieve, technically, with the major print-on-demand services, but I want to make it work.

photo credit: ElvertBarnes

What this means for the blog

Obviously, some of the time I’ve been spending blogging is going to need to be spent on the book.

I’m also working on a cunning scheme which I hope will make my online personal development courses much more effective and engaging. And I’ve just joined Toastmasters, as I mentioned last week, and some of my blogging time needs to be diverted to preparing speeches. (Some of them may end up here as video posts.)

Also, as I hope you know, I’m posting weekly at How to Be Amazing. And I want to do some guest posting on other blogs, too.

All this, and a few other things I won’t bore you with, means that I won’t be posting as often here over the next few months. I’ve been posting regularly every week for, I think, a couple of years now. During that time, my average post length has roughly tripled, I’ve started another blog, and… well, see above. To be honest, the only reason I could keep up a weekly schedule for so long this year is that I was writing to an outline – the outline provided by the original 25 Ways Not to Change Your Life post.

My philosophy of blogging is that I’d rather post less regularly and more usefully than knock out a filler post each week for the sake of it. So you will hear from me when I have something substantial to say that fits here rather than at How to Be Amazing or on someone else’s blog as a guest post.

I’m going to aim for a post every two to three weeks, but it may be less. I’ll have to see how things go.

Action Now

If you’ve enjoyed the How Not to Change Your Life series, if you’re serious about changing your life for the better, if you want more and better, and if having a print book that you can read (or an ebook) rather than a series of blog posts appeals to you, I can’t think of a reason why you wouldn’t sign up for my pre-release email list below. There’s no obligation, it costs nothing, and I’ll offer a substantial discount and preview material to whoever signs up. Do it now!

And if you still want to get weekly blog posts from me, there’s now only one way. Head over to How to Be Amazing and subscribe. You get immediate free access to some great resources, too.

comments: 0 »