How Much Control Do You Really Have?
Right now the one who is in charge of your behavior/feeling center is your back office, not your newer, reasonable, thinking front office as you might hope. (In the book you will learn exactly what I mean by those terms.) Initially this older brain, the “back office” has most of the control in how you are influenced; it draws conclusions about people you don’t really know, deems others dumb or ignorant before you have even one conversation with them, and dislikes or champions people through beliefs you don’t even know you have. It will believe a total stranger and refute your friends based on a gut feeling instead of information, it will join a team of people you don’t know, and defend causes you know very little about. It is where your beliefs and opinions are protected to the death. In short, this is your ego personified. Only after you are practicing the techniques you will learn from the book will you be able to see clearly what has been controlling, or at least steering, your behavior. The goal of all the practices is to be able to know what messages are coming from your subconscious, or back office. However, something is standing in your way and that is your incessant mind chatter, which is your mind wandering from the here and now to whatever it thinks is more interesting.
The Cause of Absentmindedness
Although our prefrontal cortex is our head office, the back office (lizard brain) has been here longer, so it thinks it has seniority, so to speak. It is up to you to teach the front office to exercise its authority. You will learn to do that by training it to stop drifting; no more casual focus. In order to be in charge, it has to know what is coming out of the back office. When we don’t, we are like robots so lost in incessant thinking that we can drive home and have no idea how we got there, walk into rooms and have no clue why, and lose our keys, wallets, and purses all because our minds are convinced that the noise going on in our heads is more important than what is happening around us.
About a decade ago, neuroscience began probing the cause of this excessive mind wandering, and it seems to be what the default state the mind goes to whenever we lose interest in what we are doing or become tired. And now, thanks to all of our modern marvels, we have the attention span of eight seconds, so we are almost never here in the moment! The purpose of this wandering state seems to be so we can decide whether our reaction to our spouse this morning was warranted. However, this program is broken, so instead of thinking through the issues at hand and drawing helpful, insightful conclusions, we ruminate repeatedly over situations, conversations, and even a single sentence said to us ad nauseam.
This reptilian brain of yours is the seat of your unconscious and can process more than 200,000 bits of info per second! That is a lot of processing power. So about every eight seconds, or whenever you get bored, it takes over grabbing memories from your past, speculating on your future, and scanning your environment for danger, which could mean just a dirty look. This is so constant that it becomes an energy you can actually feel in your physical body, like an undercurrent of anxiety or worry, even though you may not be aware of it. Being distracted by all this internal noise can result in your moving about restlessly, recklessly, dropping things, or even being a klutz. The most common symptom, though, is that it leaves you absentminded and forgetful. Once you practice the techniques in Wired To Worry, in only two weeks you will notice a substantial difference in being able to stay focused on what is happening in front of you. The benefits of this are far reaching.
• Increased focus and concentration
•Reduce emotional reactivity
•Reduce stress
•Improve memory
•Enhance empathy
•Increase cognitive flexibility
•Lower sensitivity to pain
• Less physical and mental mistakes
•Calmer
•More interested in what is happening around you.
•Better listening skills
•More conscious decision making
This is just to name a few but the list could fill several pages.
Like a dog that knows how to be attentive when a sound suddenly breaks the night silence, so it is with most of us. We can concentrate when something of interest grabs our attention, but now we need to learn to stay in that place of focused attention. We need to learn to be present rather than running out into mental traffic, resulting in the awakening of our amygdala dressed in full battle gear!
This incessant thinking is happening to you. You are not doing it, but rather passively allowing it because the front office has not been properly trained. Your goal will be to disassociate with these passing thoughts, thereby distancing yourself from any emotion they trigger. You learn to observe them, not be dragged around by them. If you have ever tried to focus your attention during a lecture, meeting, or while in church I am sure you noticed your untrained mind chasing every passing thought, just like a dog trying to absorb every scent as he sticks his head out of the car window.
Any thought that makes you feel threatened, afraid, concerned, annoyed, frustrated, or demeaned—and of course, on the other spectrum, heroic, amazing, smart, creative, interesting, and funny—will all be a distraction. This is a tantalizing smörgåsbord for the mind, either happily keeping you from the reality of a bad day or burying you further in despair. Being tossed about all day at the mercy of whatever those seventy thousand thoughts want to say will leave you at the end of every day the way you began it—frustrated, upset, and tired.
Single-Minded Attention
After practicing about 3 weeks you will have a greater emotional tolerance when something does happen that you did not expect, such as traffic, no parking space, or lost keys. You will notice these issues won’t fluster you the way they did before.
The training will allow you to see how disruptions annoy your brain. If you’re reading, writing, talking, or watching TV, interruptions disrupt your flow and cause a slight annoyance. When you understand the way the brain processes information, you will easily see in the course of the average day how often your own mind races back and forth thinking about everything except the now. Then, when something happens in the now, like you spill some milk, it’s an interruption to your brain. Your brain has to stop its racing and focus on the here and now. You know this is happening when you hear yourself bark, “Damn it!” However, when you learn stop this racing back and forth you will notice almost zero frustration. You will experience things not catching you off guard. With some practice, you will begin to see things with an interest and slight fascination similar to that of a wide-eyed child so that almost anything that happens just draws more interest.
Now, at first glance you might think that stopping this ruminating might require control, but what it really takes is trust and courage. It will feel very unnerving to stop peering into the future for threats, dangers, and possible mishaps. However, you will learn that if you ignore even a few minutes down the road, you will begin to feel that happiness and peace you so deserve. Learn the rules: allowing your brain to go into the future unattended will bring anxiety, and allowing it to drift casually into the past will make you mad/sad. Remember, you hold the leash!
Upon hearing this you might feel that it is too difficult a shift for you to make from the incessant wandering you are used to, but not only will you be able to do it, you will be able start making these changes within 2-3 weeks. People are making this change every single day to improve their lives and those of their loved ones, and you too will be able to join them. It is the opposite of the way our culture encourages us to be, but the truth is we are less productive, less creative, less happy, less informed, and less likely to make good decisions if we are rushing toward the next thing and being ready to pounce on anything that does not go our way.