In the previous section, we looked at an exercise for seeing what’s on the path, just off the path, and way off the path. Let’s delve more deeply into what’s just off the path. During this course, and also through your adventures in life, you’ve probably learned a lot about what makes changes difficult for you and what pushes you back into old habits.
Brains do have some consistent tricks they use to get us back into doing compulsions.
The fear of loss.
It might be resources and the fear of losing money on something. Or the fear of losing a job. It could also be the fear of losing a relationship. Maybe it’ll be the fear of losing control. This is often accompanied by an unexpected event where we feel like we’re losing control of something, and then react by trying to control things we don’t.
Something feels too important.
How we assess and assign importance to experiences in life, is something to work on as you explore taking care of your mental health. Are your assessments of importance useful to you? Are they accurate? For example, maybe we had a bad breakup and we believe we need to be checking our ex’s social media profiles, or we need to be sending messages and checking if they responded.
Physical discomfort & insomnia.
One of the biggest challenges might come in the physical discomfort or disruptions created by the physical responses to making changes. We touched on this during the first section. There might be some disruption to sleep or your health status, physical things you don’t really control, and the brain will hunt for rituals as an attempt to control and chase certainty, like offering the possibility of getting some sleep if you just go and get your phone and do some old habits that helped in the past.
Self-sabotage.
Sometimes I hear about people relapsing because they told themselves they “deserved” it. But it’s way more common that I hear about people punishing themselves with old compulsions. Maybe something terrible happens, a relationship ends badly, a long-sought goal is taken away, or perhaps things are going too well and that success is scary, so we reason our way back into an old familiar disaster. Scared of the world outside, we throw ourselves back in the cage.
Procrastination & Just-Over-The-Horizon Thinking
We can judge today as not the “right” day, or maybe an intrusive thought popped up so now it’s the “wrong” day. Or maybe we’re engaging in Just-Over-The-Horizon Thinking, convincing ourselves there is this perfect place not too far off, when all of the factors around us will be right and correct, and then we can get started on living!. But that place just never comes. There’s a video on the Toolkit YouTube channel explaining more on this cognitive distortion.
EXERCISE: Design Your Own Mental Fitness Exercise
To sustain this work, learn how to identify gaps in your skills, and design exercises to build up those skills. This will involve looking beyond your interaction with technology, and more broadly at how you interact with challenging experiences and uncertainties in life. Our interactions with technology are simply a reflection of the skills we’re practicing throughout life.
Step 1: Reflect on the challenges mentioned above. What is your experience with them throughout your life? Do any of those sound like things you might struggle with?
Step 2: Pick one of those challenges and flip it. What’s the opposite of it? What changes can you make this week to build skills around going in the opposite direction? What capacities do you want to build?
Step 3: Lay out a series of exercises you can do a few days this week to experience the anxiety or resistance around that challenge, and take your brain in a different direction.
Here are some examples of what this would look like:
Example: The Fear of Loss
Step 1: Reflect. I notice I keep lots of stuff and tell myself I might need it in the future. I have receipts from years ago, stacks of unused notebooks, containers I never fill, random kitchen gadgets and gym equipment I never use, social media accounts and urls I’m holding onto for plans I never take action on. I also avoid doing many things online because I’m afraid I’ll post something wrong and I’ll lose my job, lose my friends, or maybe in a relationship I see that I’m constantly checking messages and trying to read subtext in them to reassure myself I won’t lose the relationship.
Step 2: Flip it. I’m going to practice getting rid of stuff and not picking up new stuff just because my brain throws up a fear about not having it. I want to learn how to appreciate something and let go of it. I want to learn how to recognize I have enough to handle whatever happens in the future. I don’t need to collect useless junk like a comfort blanket fortress. I also want to learn how to post online and handle whatever fear my brain throws up.
Step 3: Take action. Exploring this, I would realize there’s so much I do to control the fear of loss! So I would setup several weeks of exercise. For the first week I’d start with the exercises easiest to do from a logistical standpoint, like recycling junk or selling sports equipment I don’t use.
A fun exercise with this is to place an appointment in your calendar that just says: “GET RID OF SOMETHING NOW”. And then I would take something down to the recycling bin or post it online for sale right then, moving quick before my brain even realizes what’s happening! I’d try doing that four days of the week.
The next week, I’d identify another exercise to add in. I would keep throwing things away four days of the week and I’d add in, not checking messages I’ve sent to reassure myself I didn’t say anything wrong, or not checking social media to make sure I didn’t accidentally post something I don’t want to post.
And the week after that, I’d add in more skill-building around the fear of loss, in all of the different ways I could practice it throughout my life, online and off.