Using the Power of the Mind

How do you use the power of your mind? In the weight room, my workout partner prepares himself for a really heavy bench press lift by vividly imagining a guy in college who tried to steal his girlfriend. And by visualizing this nemesis, he mentally takes himself back in time and gets really mad. He feels the anger. And he says it fuels his strength and his subsequent accomplishment with the lift.

It's amazing to me that he can still get so worked up about something that happened thirty years ago. But he can. And he uses it well. But I can't do that. I take a really different approach.

When I lie down on the bench with three hundred pounds or more looming over me, I go to a happy place. I imagine a beautiful day at the beach near my home. The sand is soft, and just the right hue of very light beige, the sky is an amazing blue, with a few little puffy white clouds floating by, over to the east and the water is a stunning aquamarine, with great waves tossing off sparkling whitecaps.

My workout partner likes to call this my "Puppies, Butterflies, and Rainbows Approach." But it works. It Zens me out and lifts me up. It's exactly what I need. I don't try to talk my friend out of his college rage re-creation, despite my worries about his blood pressure. And he doesn't try to get me away from those cute little puppies on the beach. We use different approaches, but to the same end - to get our minds into a place where we can draw more deeply on the resources we have, in order to face the challenge that confronts us.

What do you do? Should you do more? Those puppies could use some attention.

Emotional Sunburn

When a small problem comes along and makes a grab for your emotions, do you give it power or refuse it power? 

Many people walk around with the emotional version of severely sunburned skin - contact with almost anything will cause them upset, distress, or even pain. They're always getting worked up about little things, except that if you asked them, they wouldn't ever acknowledge that any of their problems is little. "What are you talking about? This is HUGE!" Such a person manufactures drama out of whatever is available, while actually thinking that it's other people who are causing it.

There is a better way to live. You can rise above the fray, keep calm, and stick to the high road. It's up to you. With the right mindset, you can utterly ignore what others see as slights, insults, provocations, schemes, and even threats. With the right way of thinking, you don't give little irritants the power to bother you. It's all about perspective, and a measure of inner peace.

As the stoics taught us, it's always up to us how we interpret the world. We can blame external events for how we feel, but it's in every case our own opinions about those events that are to blame.

Your world isn't responsible for your feelings. Change your mind, and you change your world, in just the right way as to free your emotional life for truly bigger and better things.

Take a deep breath. Smile. Release the initial worry or irritation or anger. Rise above it. It's in your power. And it's the only way to prevent that sunburn.

Heavy and Hot Emotions

Why are there so many angry people in the world? At the gym the other day, some of us were talking about this. And I have a simple hypothesis. Anger is often an avoidance response.

Here's what I mean: Many people who express anger over little things, or even for no apparent reason at all, are subconsciously attempting to deflect an experience of certain other emotions that they will do almost anything to avoid.

This is the idea. There are certain heavy emotions like sadness, grief, disappointment, anxiety, discouragement, fear, and guilt. Such feelings can weigh on us. They can bring us down. We can be terribly oppressed by them. And when we acknowledge and express these emotions, that often just makes us feel worse. We wallow. We're stricken. We're crushed even lower.

And, on another side of the negativity spectrum, there are hot emotions like frustration, irritation, and - most of all - anger. When you express these emotions, it can be cathartic. You release the negative energy. You get it out. You stomp your foot, or throw a book, or punch a pillow. You curse. You send the power of the feelings through your voice or limbs and actively discharge it out into the world where you think it can't hurt you. Well, maybe you don't do this, but many people do.

You may know people who act like this all the time. In a situation where another person in their place would be feeling bad, or sad, or anxious, they instead turn the tables and attack someone who happens to be nearby, and often for transparently bogus reasons. But by doing this, they send any unpleasant inner energy they might be feeling out into the world for other people to deal with. They've transformed their guilt into offense, or their anxiety into rage. There's nothing wrong with them, they think. It's you, or the boss, or the neighbor, or the colleague, or the so-called friend who's just a jerk and the only source of any real problems in the situation.

It seems like many people won't allow themselves an authentic experience of the heavy emotions and, to avoid one or more of them, will deflect and externalize in these ways, instead. So, when you find yourself in the midst of an explosion of some hot emotion on the part of anyone close to you, and you can't figure out how it makes any sense in context, or in its degree or focus, consider that it may simply be avoidance behavior. It may be deflecting something deeper and too heavy to bear. And then, the only effective way to respond is to try to help your irate friend identify and deal with the real source of the problem, to the extent that he or she will let you. Otherwise, just let it go. It's not really about you, or the boss, or the neighbor, at all.

At least, that's my opinion as a simple philosopher utterly untrained in psychology, or psychiatry, or any of the disciplines that would actually cost you something to consult on such an issue. But then again, as they say, you get what you pay for. And if you disagree with me, just don't get hot about it. Ok?