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

I wanna be just like Spiderman!
Creative Commons License 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.

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Aug 23

How Not to Change Your Life: Stay Ignorant

Posted in Techniques

When you’re ignorant, you don’t know what you don’t know.

Think about a pool of ink dropped on a page. If the page represents everything that you can possibly know, and the ink represents what you actually know, then a small spot of ink will not only take in a small amount of knowledge. It will also have a small circumference, with limited contact with other knowledge – the things that you know you don’t know.

As the pool of ink grows, as you become more knowledgeable, so does the number of things you’re aware of that you don’t know yet.

spreading knowledge
Creative Commons License photo credit: billerr

So, what might be outside the inkblot that will keep you from changing your life?

Ignorance about needing to change

There’s ignorance that’s unintentional, and then there’s deliberate ignorance.

Deliberate ignorance usually comes out of arrogance or fear (if there’s a difference; arrogance is often a mask for fear of being wrong, after all). If you’re afraid to change, keeping a deliberate blind spot is one way of ensuring that you don’t feel the need to do so.

I’m going to assume that if you’re reading a personal development blog, your main problem is not that you’re carefully remaining ignorant of needing to change your life. You may be avoiding change in other ways, which is what this whole How Not to Change Your Life series is all about, but you’re aware that you need to change.

You may not, of course, be sure what about your life needs to change.

Ignorance about what to change

All too often, we feel a sense of unease about our lives. Something we can’t quite pin down. Something obviously needs to change – but what?

Should I change my job? My house? My partner? My appearance? What if I change all those things and the same sense of unease persists?

And even if I know that I need to change something on the inside… what, exactly? Do I need to be more confident? Less anxious? Deal with my stress better? Get on better with the people around me who irritate me? Do I need to care more about some things, less about others? Do I need to be more organised, more punctual and more motivated? And if I could just improve my memory and sleep better….

Often enough, a cluster of things come together, and we don’t know what to change first. Everything I mentioned in the previous paragraph could describe one person’s issues, and none of them are uncommon. (I couldn’t tell you how many of my clients would have ticked all of those boxes when they came in to see me.)

Where do you start? Is it even possible?

Ignorance that change is possible

All too many people don’t even realise that they can change. It seems too hard. Some other, really disciplined people might be able to change, but not me, they think. I’ve always been like this, and I always will.

I take an optimistic view of personal change. I think that anyone who wants to can change, with the right help. It’s definitely hard – I don’t mean to suggest otherwise for a moment. But it is possible.

People who are less intelligent than you, have less money then you, have fewer opportunities and less support and less education and less anything else you might use as an excuse, have succeeded in changing. I guarantee it.

OK, how?

Ignorance about how to change

This is where we start to get real. What are the steps you follow to change your life? How’s it done?

This is a big part of what I call the Missing Curriculum. It’s something we weren’t taught at school (unless you went to a very unusual school).

There’s a process of change, and although going through it takes dedication and perseverance, the concept is simple.

  1. Your motivation to change needs to be, at least on average, stronger than your reasons to stay the same.
  2. You need to pay attention to what you’re doing and what you want to be doing instead.
  3. You need to practice regularly.

That’s it, really. There are no more secrets to change than that. Except maybe, “What your imagination got you into, it can get you out of – once you know what to do with it”.

Almost everything I write is about the change process and how to facilitate it, so I’m not going to try to repeat it all here. If you want a concise summary of a powerful technique for change – which incorporates attention, imagination, motivation and regular practice – take a look at my Self-Hypnosis How To site.

Action Now

So, if you’re in that place of feeling discontented and unsure, of knowing you want to change your life but not knowing what you want to change or how to do it, here are some concrete first steps.

  1. Let yourself dream. Get yourself into a “daydream” state and listen to yourself say what you really want to do and how you really want to be in the world, no matter how crazy or unrealistic it sounds.
  2. Figure out what’s stopping you from heading towards that dream – however slowly and hesitantly.
  3. Find out how people change that. Once you’ve identified what you want to change, research. Discover how it’s done, how other people have done it. Browse this site, and my other site, How to Be Amazing. Write down keywords. Google them.
  4. Put a practice in place. Do something on a regular basis that moves you in the direction of the person you want to be. I can’t stress this one enough.
  5. Watch yourself change. See what works, what doesn’t work, what continually trips you up. Every outcome is an education.
  6. Keep up your motivation by celebrating small successes, by holding on to the dream, by thinking about how it will be if you remain as you are.
  7. Get help when you need it. I’m here, and there are lots of other people around who are trained in helping you change. Talk to us.

There’s no need to remain ignorant about how to change your life. Make use of the amazing resources you have that earlier generations never dreamed of.

And tune in next week, when I talk about the dangers of becoming an expert.

This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life.

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Aug 16

How Not to Change Your Life: Expect Change to Happen By Itself

Posted in Techniques

Up to a point, change does happen by itself. But it’s not usually going to be the change you want.

There’s a cheesy 50s song to the effect that thinking and wishing and hoping and praying isn’t going to be enough. Hope, as I’ve said before, is not a strategy (sorry, Mr Obama).

No, for change – the right change, the important change – to happen, you’re going to have to do something. You’re going to have to do it consistently, in fact, for some time.

So what is it that you’ll need to do in order to make change happen? I’m glad you asked.

1. Decide what you want

This obvious first step can be easier said than done. Often, we just want something to change, but we’re more concerned with “change from” than “change to”. Here are a few questions to help you decide on your change destination.

  1. What about the current situation bothers you most?
  2. What are you most afraid of if the situation doesn’t change?
  3. If you could have any outcome you wanted, leaving practicality aside, what would it be?
  4. Is anything starting to change already that you want to encourage?
  5. Out of all the things you could change, what would give the greatest bang for your buck?

Somewhere among those questions, you’ll find the answer to determining what change you want to create.

2. Do a “now” versus “then”

Take a piece of paper.

Draw a line down it vertically to create two columns.

Label one “Now” and the other “Then”.

In the “Now” column, list the things you are unhappy with, that need to change.

In the “Then” column beside each one, list how you want them to turn out.

I’d suggest that in the “Then” column, you use the words “more” and “less” a lot. At least in the early stages, change will consist of doing some things more than you used to and other things less. It’s not going to be instantly a case of switching from an old behaviour to a new one.

3. Figure out your motivations and rewards

Trophies
Creative Commons License photo credit: Snap®

To make a significant change, you’re going to have to persevere. That means you’re going to need a strong enough motivation to get over your natural resistance to change and to keep you doing the practices that will help you.

According to research, the way to do this most effectively is to first imagine the negative consequences of not changing, and then have a dessert of the positive consequences of changing.

Then, once you’re clear on your motivations, immediately take the next step.

4. Get your process clear

Imagining the process by which you’re going to change is going to give you a much better outcome than if you just imagine the change having happened. It prepares you mentally to go through that process, and reminds you that change isn’t going to happen by itself.

When you think about your process, think about what’s worked for you before. What have you succeeded at? What changes have you made already? What are you good at doing that would make one process easier than another?

For example, in my fitness goals I’ve discovered that having a tracking system that also tells me what to attempt next is a process that works a lot better than deciding for myself how hard I’m going to work. Which leads me to Step 5.

5. Gather maximum resources

I firmly believe that the more resources and the more techniques you have available to you, the better your chances of success. That’s why I write so many posts about techniques. (I just checked: counting this one, there are 93 posts in the Techniques category on this site, which is almost a third of all the posts I’ve ever written here.)

What tools do you have? What skills? What knowledge? And what tools, skills and knowledge do other people around you have – your friends, certainly, but also professionals who help people make the kind of change you’re considering? You live in a society, which magnifies your personal power immensely – if you make use of it by connecting to others who have the skills you need.

Some extra guidance and encouragement from someone who helps people change all the time can mean the difference between success and failure, or between moderate success and resounding success.

6. Be aware of the pitfalls

Don’t kid yourself. Any significant change is going to be hard. That’s why most people don’t change much, and why change won’t happen by itself.

You are going to have to keep trying even after you fail. You are going to have to do the equivalent of going jogging in the rain. You are going to question your ability to change. You are going to find yourself back in your old patterns again, just when you thought you were making progress.

You are going to need to circle back to your motivations and reinforce them, practice your techniques, get help from the friends or professionals you’ve recruited.

Something else that can help: non-obsessively consider in advance what issues may come up, and how you’re going to deal with them. My post on How to Make Hard Things Easier may help.

7. Count the cost, assess the benefit

Back in Step 3, you thought through the negatives of remaining unchanged. But there’s a cost to change, a benefit of staying the same – again, this is why so few people change successfully. It pays to be clear-eyed about these things.

What are you going to be giving up with this change? Is it worth it to you? You’ll need to remind yourself, in those moments when the costs are particularly vividly presenting themselves to you, of what the benefits of changing are.

If you’re particularly alert, and have done my free Seven Steps to Effective Personal Change course, you may have recognised the outline I’ve used here. The course has a series of videos in which I talk more about each step, an ebook with some of the most effective personal change techniques, and a set of planning sheets that you can use for self-reflection about the steps I’ve laid out above.

If you feel you want to change something in your life, don’t expect it to happen by itself. Take some action – like signing up for the free Effective Personal Change course (and, naturally, putting in the work).

One more thing about change. You need to set aside time in which to work on it – otherwise it’s just another form of expecting it to happen by itself. Schedule yourself a time that you’re going to spend taking action.

Because hope is not a strategy.

This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life.

Sign up below to get early notification and a discount on my forthcoming book, How Not to Change Your Life.


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