Awareness & Acceptance | Mind
Step one in our five-part series on the mind
Why it matters
You are your mind. The world you interact with, your feelings, and your thoughts are all part of your conscious experience. And you can change it. Your thoughts, feelings, and actions aren’t just happening to you but are a learnt response to your experiences, recursively influencing each other in a chaotic dance. Somehow, as part of this dance, you stumbled on this article, and what you learn in this article and the following posts will influence how your mind reacts in the future.
Top three things to do
The first step in taking care of your mind is to become aware of what’s actually happening. And accepting this as is. In the following posts, we will then dive into how you can shape your experience.
Become aware of your thoughts and feelings
Start with a curious and non-judgmental mindset. Thoughts come and go and are not the truth. Your feelings, both positive and negative, will pass. As always, different practices work for different people. Here are a few well-established approaches
Sit: The simplest of them all. Find a quiet place, sit down, and do nothing. Your brain will produce thoughts. Acknowledge them and let them pass. You can focus your mind back to your breath, your heartbeat, or another point of focus whenever thoughts pop up.
Name: A variation on the sitting meditation where you name an emotion or a thought whenever something comes up. Giving it a label often makes it smaller and more manageable. Often, when we start out we are missing the emotional vocabulary for this. Give the app How We Feel a try if you are curious to broaden yours.
Scan: Move your awareness slowly throughout your body, one part at a time. Notice any discomfort and how that often fades as you focus more on it. Over time you will recognize patterns - how for example different emotions lead to different reactions in your body - helping you recognize them easier in the future.
Pause: Establish a way to take a pause and see what comes up. Maybe you have a note stuck to your doorframe, or an app that pings you every few hours.
Write: Journal to surface your thinking patterns. A common approach is CBT’s “Thought Record”: 1) What happened? 2) How are you feeling? 3) Automatic thought 4) Evidence for 5) Evidence against 6) Balanced thought 7) Outcome. Others like a “morning pages” approach where you just write a stream of consciousness and see what comes up.
The eventual goal of all of these practices is that you can move from noticing your thoughts in the “practice space” to the real world. Building this muscle will help you pause between stimulus and response, allowing you to take a more active role in how you react to your environment.
I often heard about CBT and respective reflections, but didn’t deliberately take time out of my day to apply it further. That is until a friend recommended the “Unstuck: CBT Therapy Journal” app to me. You can choose what you would like to reflect upon, and it guides you step by step through the process, not blindly, but while explaining what the steps are about too! It’s simple and thought provoking. You can set daily reminders, and it also shows a little streak display within the app to make sure the habit sticks!
Sophie
Accept yourself
Noticing is the first step. Accepting those thoughts and feelings is the second. We live in a world where we are made to believe we can do anything; the world is our oyster. Then, when we can’t get the oyster, we blame ourselves. We try to push ourselves for higher performance and optimisation, and we suffer from things we can’t change.
Try the following practices to learn to accept what is.
Allow: Acknowledge reality as it is. You cannot change the facts. Accept your current situation, without fighting it. Only then focus on action and what you can change.
Explore: Acceptance poses that you are here now because of a chain of events in the past. Recognise those as unchangeable, but explore the chain. Be curious, not judgmental.
Pray: Prayer acknowledges your own limitations and shifts responsibility to a higher power. Not religious? Try the serenity prayer based on stoicism: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.”
Release: Use rituals to release things you can’t change. For example, writing down things and burning them
Your story here. We’d love to hear more from you. Reply to this email or join our community if you want to share a story about emotional regulation, next week’s topic.
Investigate your thoughts and feelings
Often, when you start noticing your thoughts and feelings more, you will notice patterns, things that come back. Notice that, too. Accept it. Only then start investigating it. The following angles can be useful in investigating:
Body: Where is the thought or feeling in your body? How does it feel? This is a great framework because it is in the present, objective and grounded. And it might remind you of similar sensations in your body in similar situations.
Mind: What is the script? Can I try visualising the feeling and talk to it? What would it say? Notice that it’s a story, not the truth. Avoid over-analysing or intellectualising - it’s the failure mode for most of us. Journaling can help here again.
Emotion: What’s the need? If we reduce our emotions to six basic ones, they each represent a core need:
Anger: Crossed boundary, blocked goal: Need for justice, safety, autonomy
Fear: Something isn’t faced, not safe: Need for safety, predictability
Sadness: Something needs to be honored: Need for connection, meaning
Shame: Something is threatening belonging: Need for acceptance, worthiness
Disgust: Something is toxic, wrong: Need for integrity, boundaries, health
Joy: Something needs to be celebrated, is good: Need for growth, contribution
One emotion that comes up a lot for me is background anxiety. One way to explain that is fear that just wasn’t properly dealt with and instead of facing the thing that fear was warning me about, I decided to ignore it and it transformed into background anxiety.
One recent example of this: Listening to our podcast. I feared that it would be bad, never listened to it, and as a result had some background anxiety around it. While writing this article this became clear to me, I listened to the episodes, was relieved that they weren’t terrible, and boom, less anxiety. Notice that even if they would’ve been terrible, anxiety would be gone, because I would then know about it and could act on it.
Christoph
Do something now
Want to try just one thing? Give RAIN meditation a try, which combines all three of these, plus a bonus one, “Nurture” that’ll be part of next week’s post.
What’s an emotion you’ve been feeling recently? What is it trying to tell you?
Schedule some time in your calendar to meditate or journal.
Curious to go deeper? Consider working with a therapist.
Want accountability? Reply to this post, and we will check in on you in a week.
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