A Simple Practice to Build Clarity
It’s hard to have clarity about what you want from life when all the so-called answers are coming from the outside. Knowing your true path can only come from the inside. But if you don’t have a connection to your inner self, you are never going to get the clarity you want.
No one else can tell you what’s right for you. You can follow the prescribed paths of what is supposedly “right” but it doesn’t mean that it’s right for you. When you’ve followed prescribed paths for too long, you have severely limited your capacity to see what’s right for you, much less believe in your choices. It’s a natural outcome of suppressing your impulses in the service of achieving goals. Which is not a bad thing, unless that’s the only thing you can do.
Letting go of the “have to”
Being able to let go of your “have to” can be tough. Especially when your ability to achieve has built your confidence. But what happens when you’re not doing what you’re “supposed” to do? Does your confidence from seeking achievement transfer to your ability to choose for yourself? In other words, can you enjoy life without a task to complete?
Without following someone else’s prescribed path, you tend to lose interest. You’re looking for the next thing to achieve, but you’re not sure how that achievement will be useful in your life.
Be your own authority
The only way to get clarity and experience your achievements as meaningful is to be your own authority. To do that, you must tune into your impulses and act on them.
That’s not to say you should be irresponsible. It means that you start a practice that allows you to fully notice and act upon your impulses.
This practice can be as simple as paying attention to your feelings when you make a choice about what food you want, or what clothing you feel like wearing. When you practice in simple ways like this, you build your capacity to notice the sensations in your body that motivate your choices. It is this capacity to notice your sensations that is the foundation of being your own authority. It is also the trick to having clarity about the bigger things in your life.
What having clarity looks like
When you are authentically motivated by your own impulses, you will have the clarity you are looking for. You will be able to make choices about what’s right for you, and you will know why you make those choices. The things you do will not be a mystery anymore.
Any resistance you get from others to conform to their standards will be easy to stand up to because you are confident in your own choices. Ridicule or humiliation used to try and sway your decisions will be weak against your confidence.
Clarity looks like a life where you enjoy what you’re doing because you know why you’re doing it and it has meaning for you. Your choices are in line with the overall goals you have for your life.
A Secret For Better Sleep
If you have trouble falling asleep because of racing thoughts, you are not alone.
This problem is so common that there are literally hundreds of thousands of sources where you can find lists of ideas about how to calm yourself down before you go to bed.
These include breathing techniques, meditation apps, and even lifestyle adjustments such as exercising moderately, avoiding caffeine late in the day, eating carbs to stimulate serotonin and getting sunlight in the morning. The list can be seemingly endless.
Why you may have trouble falling asleep
When your thoughts won’t stop racing it’s because there are feelings in your body that have split off from your consciousness. For whatever reason, you don’t want to feel them. Your mind is working really hard to keep you from feeling them. But by doing that, it’s creating a problem than if you were to simply feel your feelings.
During the day, there are lots of ways you can distract yourself from the sensations of your body and avoid your feelings. But at night, these feelings inevitably resurface and cause you to have trouble falling asleep.
The secret
Generally, the feelings that make your thoughts race are fear and sadness, mostly generated due to a feeling of helplessness. If you can’t figure out which feeling it is, then the content of your worrisome thoughts will probably clue you in. Once you can recognize feelings associated with your racing thoughts, you can try to let them move through you.
In other words, the secret to getting rid of the racing thoughts is to feel the feelings associated with them. It’s really the only way. You will never get relief from a feeling that isn’t expressed. And even if you try to avoid it, it will always find its way to being expressed, either directly or indirectly. Hence, the racing thoughts.
What this means is that if you follow this advice, you will probably find yourself feeling more emotions than usual. If you follow this advice and can’t seem to get to your feelings, there is some other work you need to do to prepare yourself to feel them more easily.
When you breathe more, you feel more
To feel more easily, you must deepen and expand your breathing. There are many ways to deepen and expand your breathing, but one of my favorites is sitting for five minutes over a stability ball with your arms raised. Once you have started breathing at a steady rhythm you are much more likely to notice and have access to emotions in your body. Now you can try to feel the feelings associated with your racing thoughts.
Once you have expressed whatever feelings you have inside you, your body will naturally return to a state of equilibrium. The racing thoughts will be gone and you will relax, and if you are tired, you will have no trouble falling asleep.
Intrusive Thoughts: Egosytonic vs Egodystonic
Intrusive Thoughts (ITs) intrude upon your ongoing thought processes and startle you with attention-grabbing content or imagery.
Intrusive thoughts are common - research says that 94% of the population experience them occasionally.
Intrusive Thoughts can be categorized in two forms:
- Egodystonic thoughts: which are an expression of wishes that oppose your values
- Egosyntonic thoughts: which are an expression of wishes aligned with our values.
It is best to understand what your intrusive thoughts say about you. These thoughts usually hone in on what is important to you. You will never have an intrusive thought about a topic your brain finds irrelevant, such as “oh no, what if my shoes get untied?” Your brain will only exert the effort to offer up an intrusive thought about something you care deeply about and its fears may be threatened.
The flip side of your intrusive thought is what you value the most.
However, these thoughts DO NOT reflect your hidden desires. Experiencing an intrusive thought does not make you “deranged” or “depraved” because the only unhealthy thing about your experiences with intrusive thoughts is how hard you are trying to not have these thoughts. What you may find to be true is that there is a difference between a bad thought and a bad behavior.
Thought Suppression Exercise
- Intentionally think about an intrusive thought.
- For the next minute, place your attention on anything except for the intrusive thought. (find something a sense can attract to - the sound of birds outside, the ac unit running, the pen in front of you, the mint inside your mouth, etc)
- After 1 minute, note your anxiety levels on a 0-10 scale
- Next, for another minute, practice bringing forth the same intrusive thought.
- After 1 minute, note your anxiety levels again on 0-10 scale.
With this exercise, you can teach your brain to grow bored with your intrusive thoughts as we have realized in neuroscience that repeated attention to the intrusive thought will reduce reactivity over time (not so instantly) and can be done without necessarily seeking some answer to the reasons why they are rising within our thoughts.