Openness is the name of the game. Open to doing things differently. Open to dropping old habits. Open to having difficult physical and emotional experiences. Open to having a craving or an urge and allowing it to be there but not react to it. Open to learning how to support yourself by making new practices easier, by learning new skills that might have seemed impossible in the past.
So much of this work is simply about getting awesome at change. Whether we’re working on big changes around beliefs and feelings we’ve been covering up, or it’s the practical changes of using social media differently, clicking on different choices on websites, etc, those are both about change.
Getting skilled at change in life and understanding why change is challenging, will help you succeed with and sustain changes around how you use technology. You can’t expect to be awesome at change in only one specific area of your life. It’s something we can work on everywhere. So today’s exercise is about doing something differently, with openness, and awareness, to understand better why change is challenging.
It can be anything. It doesn’t matter if you judge it as good or bad. It could be as simple as the route you walk to school, or the order you get every day at your favorite coffee shop. Today, do it differently. And be a scientist. Grab a piece of paper and write or draw what happens before, during, and after making the change. Did you decide to do it in the morning but then forget because you didn’t put it in your schedule? Does the brain think up reasons why tomorrow is a better day to change things up? What’s challenging? What helps support you? How do you feel? Where do you feel it? What are you doing in your head?