There’s a funny print cartoon that has a man and woman sitting on the couch staring at a TV screen and the caption below reads, “It’s 12 O’clock, do you know where your mind is?” As time goes on and we grow up from children to adolescents to adults, for many of us, somewhere along the way life begins to become routine. Day in and day out whether we’re walking, driving, talking, eating, going to the grocery store, or being with our families our minds get kicked onto auto-pilot and continue to develop their habitual ways of thinking, interpreting, expecting, and relating to other people. These habits of the mind can keep us stuck in stress, anxiety, depression, or even addictive behaviors. Here are a few habits of the mind and a mindfulness practice to help you break out of auto-pilot and gain more control over your life.
Common habits of the mind that are not effective for well-being:
Catastrophizing - If you’re prone to stress and anxiety, you may recognize this habitual mind trap. This is where the mind interprets an event as the worst case scenario. If your heart is beating fast, you may think you’re having a heart attack. If your boss didn’t look at you while walking down the hall, you thinking you’re going to get fired. You get the picture. This style of thinking will support increased stress, anxiety, and even panic.
Discounting the positive and exaggerating the negative - The news is wonderful at supporting us with this one. This is where we habitually reject or minimize any positive feedback and magnify the negative feedback. The glass is always half empty. If you catch yourself saying something positive and then saying “but” followed by a negative, you are practicing this. “I got a 95% on this test, but I didnt’ get a 100%”. Without awareness, this style of thinking will likely land you in a depressed mood.
Blaming - Be careful of this one. We all do it, pointing the finger at someone else for our woes or point the finger at ourselves for others woes. “If my boss wasn’t so hard on me at work, I wouldn’t be so anxious” or “It’s my fault my parents got divorced”. Just check in with yourself after noticing this style of thinking. It doesn’t cultivate any solutions and just makes you feel stuck, anxious, or depressed.
Cultivating the ability to be more present to these mind traps will help you break free from them and shift your attention on more effective ways of interacting with life. If you notice catastrophizing, actually say to yourself “catastrophizing is happening right now”, then bring your attention to your breath for a moment to steady your mind and then ask yourself, “what are some other possible reasons why my heart is racing fast (e.g. , I just ran upstairs, I’m nervous)? If discounting the positive, come back to the breath, and then switch the “but” to an “and” so at least the positive statement get its equal weight, being more realistic and balanced. If blaming, call it out, say to yourself “blaming is happening”. Remind yourself that blaming simply isn’t effective for anyone and then come back to your breath to steady your mind and bring yourself back to the task you were just doing.
This is not an easy process, yet an important one for regaining control from the ineffective habits we develop in our minds. If we’re not mindful in our daily lives, our minds could just fall into their habitual states to the point we’re on our deathbeds asking “where did it all go?”
Just check in with yourself during the day, look at the clock and say, “It’s X O’clock, do I know where my mind is?” You may catch yourself in some mind traps and if not, just notice whatever you are doing in the moment and then continue if you still want to be doing that or change if you’d rather be doing something else.
Try to be patient through this process and not judge yourself if you find the mind traps arising. Judging yourself as bad or wrong is another mind trap that holds keep you stuck. Breathe in, breathe out, and just redirect your focus.
As always, please comment below on thoughts or questions about this blog. Do you notice when you’re on auto-pilot? What kind of mind traps do you catch in your daily life, what works for you? Writing below helps create a living wisdom that we can all share and benefit from.
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some great tips and nicely written!
Thank you for your wise words on mindfulness. I have an experience that I wrote of on my own blog that I will never forget. Although longer than a “comment” I will share… Occasionally the universe (however one may define universe!) provides a gift and reminds us to live in the moment. On a particularly horrible day I experienced a tap on the shoulder that literally brought me front and center to the present. My 19 year old daughter was in a psychiatric unit of a trauma 1 hospital in Seattle, newly diagnosed with bipolar disorder, preparing for a series of ECT treatments. It was Mother’s Day. She is a musician and had just played and sang “Blackbird” for me as my gift when she suddenly crashed again, back down into her depression and asked us to leave. I was about as low as I had been over the last 6 months of hell. My husband talked me into taking a walk through an old growth forest arboretum. It was an absolutely beautiful day and suddenly I had this feeling of smallness in an ancient world. I was simply in the moment of that beautiful place, a tiny speck on our earth’s curve. I relaxed, I let out and took in a breath of air. I was in that moment, at peace (www.cindajohnson.blogspot.com).
With my busy work schedule and long hours I find myself on auto-pilot all the time. Thanks for the great tips…I can already see how they will be helpful.
Thank you for that beautiful personal story Cinda.
Thank you for your work! My daughter and I are finishing a book together about her experiences with and treatment of bipolar. Psychiatrists and psychologists rock!
I am a mid-life woman with major life decisions to make and I need to be able to function optimally in the meantime. How could a mindfulness orientation help to manage the preoccupying issues related to making major changes and decisions and result in a constant underlying stress. The underlying stress is difficult and damaging (to mind and body). I know about meditation and relaxation, I am more curious about cognitive or other strategies a mindfulness perspective might offer.
Hi Marion, it sounds like this may be a particularly stressing time. Here’s how it can help with major life decisions. Major life decisions are stressful and when we’re stressed our focus becomes narrow, we start to get tunnel vision. We begin worrying about how things are going to turn out and go into ‘fix it’ mode, even if we’re not in the best place to fix anything. From a cognitive perspective we’re getting caught in a mental trap where we begin worrying about how to fix our major life issue and when we do this we lose sight of all our available options in that moment that could not only help us with calm, but allows us to see a greater set of options to be more skillful and effective in the moment. We become less of a slave to auto-pilot and reactive behavior and more able to be present and respond from a grounded place.
Great tips. We are all guilty of what I call negative self talk, most of which is done without ever thinking. It just becomes habit.
What a serendipitous GEM! Just what I needed for a quick recap reminder: thank you so much for writing it in such a personably accessible style. Glad to have located your site;-)
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