Try this when you’re feeling off track

None of us needs another hack, technique or five simple steps, but the simplicity of this fact might be useful for you. I heard it from?Dr. Eugene Choi?last week when I was attending a mastermind meeting in South Carolina.

There are only two brain states: survival and executive state.

?Survival State

The average person spends 70% of their time in survival state which includes fight, flight and freeze states. Before you think that doesn’t cover much for you:

Fighting for survival?has obvious tendencies such as arguing, being angry and road rage but also includes hustling, trying to prove yourself, people pleasing, needing to be right, the need for control (OCD anyone?), people pleasing, judging and perfectionism.?

Fleeing for survival?has the obvious traits such as quitting and literally escaping a problem but also?includes numbing (escaping) behaviours. You tend to do these unwittingly and they include over-eating, drinking, drugs, sex, television/video games, and gambling.

?When I think about my own addictive tendencies, it can include other activities that don’t get talked about much such as over-exercising and my biggest numbing behaviour is also one of my greatest strengths – learning. When I am frustrated at my lack of results, I am often afraid it’s my ignorance about a topic and I think, “Oh I must find the answers in a book I haven’t read yet or need to re-read because I missed the ‘key’ point.”

One of the mistakes I used to make was to think that most (not all) of my addictive numbing tendencies were socially acceptable – like working too hard and too much (I pretended not to acknowledge that the symptoms of workaholism are exactly the same as alcoholism!). That cultural influence and my inability to tune into how I was really feeling led to years of living in denial about my frustrations and areas of my life where I wasn’t seeing the results I wanted.

We create a lot of noise and distraction to hide from our pain.?David Goggins learned this from his life and makes this point in?Can’t Hurt Me: “Denial is the ultimate comfort zone.”

?Freeze behaviours?include procrastination and all forms of inaction.

Executive state… is where you want to be!!!

This includes activities of creativity, intuition, inspiration, empathy, and problem solving. You are in a state of flow such that you are not focused on yourself but on serving the world by doing something a little challenging that you love to do and are good at.

What to Do:

You don’t need to keep fighting and avoiding your frustrations.?

First?just accept them?and avoid going into survival activities because one thing is certain:?they will never go away if you do that.?

Second, you will also want to increase your tolerance for the pain first (otherwise you will just numb it again). Trust that by leaning into the discomfort, you will come out the other side and the discomfort will subside.

Third: start asking yourself on the inside:?“What would feel like a more executive activity?”

Fourth, you might need to have some fun first, or you might need to slow down and make more time to relax instead of always hustling. Mark Black reminds us that: “Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is relax.” Our culture seems to have forgotten this as a human need.

Fifth, you need the right environment to flourish. You want people around you cheering you and steering you on to accomplish that. It’s an increasingly lonely world out there for too many people that now even governments (in Japan and the UK) are recognising this as a social epidemic by creating Departments of Loneliness. In May 2023 the US Surgeon General announced that loneliness was more perilous to your health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day or air pollution. It’s time to build yourself a stronger community. That’s why I created one; we do better when supported by like-minded people. If this resonates at all, do please stop by and see if it could help you too:?https://community.bearisingstar.com?

Changing your behaviours is not as easy as being aware of them (unfortunately) because by the time you are in your mid-thirties, 95% of what you do is done on autopilot. I wrote about this in my most recent book,?The 5 Habits to Mine Your Gold. Having spent a lifetime falling into these ruts myself, I know these roads. One way I help my coaching clients is to establish new habits and beliefs to move away from these traps.?

This is how you start to let your frustrations know that they are being heard and you can dilute them down versus fighting them. Rather like the over-quoted line from Einstein – you won’t be solving any of your problems at the same level you created them. It’s time to leave that state!

To your executive state!

Matt

Matt Anderson, 2023