Friday, August 21, 2015

Our Mind like the Internet

Our minds are like the internet, and the internet contains billions of bits of information.  It stores anything from how to grow a square foot garden, to the best way to trim your nose hairs.  And it doesn’t care which page you look at or what you search.  The internet doesn’t have feelings.  It’s just information.  The question is how do we access the information, and what do we do with the information once we have it.

Google or Bing or any other search engine is like consciously bringing our attention to a specific topic.  If I search “how to lose weight”, even though I consciously choose what to search for, Google can only pull from what already exists (the subconscious).  That means that what it pulls from isn’t necessarily information that’s always true and healthy.  It can only give me feedback on what I search for by what is stored on the internet.  It's going to give me everything from Weight Watchers to the newest and greatest supplement that will likely get pulled off the shelf down the road due to harmful side effects.  And the more I continue to search for a similar topic, the more that those same pages of information are going to come up, even connecting me to the ads of the most frequented topics. 

Like Google and the internet, our minds work the same way.  When we are faced with choosing to do something different, or facing something stressful, our subconscious is going to give us feedback by making millions of connections based on what we’ve seen, heard, felt, or experienced.  That can mean past, present, or what we’ve projected out into the future of what we believe could happen.  So just because our minds pull up all our information doesn’t mean it’s true.  It’s just information.  (Our feelings are what reinforce what is stored within our minds and how much we hold to a specific belief.)  Whenever we want to change anything in our lives, our minds are only going to go to what’s stored inside unless we start to think differently.  So to truly make a conscious change, we must look at our beliefs and start to question them.  

For example, whenever I was faced with a stressful situation in the past, I would always comfort myself with some kind of treat.  So when I currently face anything stressful, my mind naturally goes to what it’s done before and I’m reaching for the sugar fix before I realize what I’m doing.  Every time I choose to comfort myself with a treat, it’s similar to liking that page, which only makes it easier to come up more often in my mind.  It then becomes difficult to think of anything else to replace the pattern.  (Not to mention how I am also creating floods of hormones and endorphins that love the sugar rush and in turn are reinforcing this unhealthy pattern on a physiological level.  That, however, is a topic for another day.)

From that example, one of my beliefs was that stress is a negative thing and I needed treats to “fix” the problem.  Even though it rationally makes no sense, on a subconscious level, it makes perfect sense.  And even though I temporarily feel comforted, the truth is that sweets will never truly help me cope well with stress, let alone help fix the true cause of the stress or how I manage it.  So how do we create change when our subconscious mind is filtering everything through the lens of our experience?  We begin by recognizing the reason the subconscious does this. 

Now on one level, it makes sense that we can only search for files that already exist.  And yet there’s a whole other reason our subconscious behaves this way.  One of the main jobs of the subconscious is to protect us.  And the best way to protect someone is to know the dangers and threats.  What better way to do that then use what information is already considered as a danger and threat?  And because we already have the resources, we can act quickly and easily to eliminate the threat. 

When we want to make a change in our lives, the reason we face so much resistance is because we are entering into the unknown.  Or, we have tried to travel the new path before and we met with all kinds of challenges.  Our subconscious is easily able to filter what we want to do through our experiences, and it will try to stop us from experiencing anything that it doesn’t know it can protect us from.  And it doesn’t know it can protect us from something we’ve never done.  It literally views something new as a possibility for death (Remember, it doesn't have feelings, just information based on experiences that it views as facts.)  

As silly as it may sound, when we choose to introduce a new habit, our subconscious views that as a potential death threat and will do everything it can to protect us.  That means giving us all kinds of thoughts/images/resistance to whatever it is that we want to change.  The subconscious is so quick to remind us (from our previous experience) what we may experience by continuing a new habit. 

An example of this is when I was really feeling un-grounded and I wanted to get back out in Nature.  I also wanted to get more fit by hiking.  Because of it's job, and because of how the subconscious works, my mind brought up all the times when I had run across a snake (even little garner snakes), when I had asthma so bad I couldn’t breathe, how exercising too much triggered several autoimmune responses and put me flat in bed, as well as bringing up the projected stories I’d heard from others of being lost all alone without food or water.  My mind was extremely good at flooding me with resources from my experience database.  Those thoughts and images almost made me stay home (I really don’t like snakes).  They almost kept me “safe” from some perceived harm.  So to work through this, I recognized my subconscious mind’s job to protect me.  I also realized that it was only information based on my previous experiences.  I simply thanked my subconscious, packed a backpack to deal rationally with the thoughts and fears, which included packing some first aid bandages (in case I fell), herbs (in case of a snake bite), some essential oils (to help open my air pathways so I could breathe easily), food and water (in case I got stranded), and I was happily on my way. 

Once my mom and I were actually on the path, I faced brief moments of panicked thoughts of "I can't do this", to which I reminded my mind of the reality that I was actually doing it, and I was prepared for whatever could possibly come up.  We made it farther than we had anticipated for our first time back in the mountains in several years and we went back the following several days.  And while it was much easier to get out the door and our feet on the trail the second day (due to having a new experience for my mind to draw upon), as we neared the previous stopping point on our first day, I started to have all kinds of resistance in my thoughts again.  My subconscious couldn’t know if it could protect me beyond the point where we’d already been.  So I got to go through the same experience of recognizing the job of my subconscious.  I reminded it that I was not in any previous experience anymore and that I was choosing to move forward and that I would be safe to do so.  And so I did.  And so is the path to truly changing anything in life.

I would invite you to look at an area of life you are wanting to change.  Perhaps it’s an area you haven’t felt successful before.  Hopefully, having a better understanding of how the mind works, I would ask that you first recognize the role of the subconscious mind.  Second, when facing any resistance or stress, simply thank your subconscious.  Thank it for trying to protect you and for doing it’s job.  And then consciously choose to move forward, giving the mind new information to draw upon, realizing that most of us live life from a place of reacting rather than acting


.  Choose to act.  Choose Joy…Because it’s always a choice (even when our subconscious doesn't believe it).           


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