How to Avoid the Life Traps
A science-based guide to staying in control of your life
Does life sometimes feel like running on a treadmill, endlessly going through one problem after another? Good things happen, but they often don’t last long, and very soon you are back to the everyday grind.
Some days are good, some days are bad… One year there is a pandemic, another year you get a dream job and fall in love. Some days you win, some days you don’t... But what is unique to us humans is that sooner or later we all experience negative feelings or we think that our life isn’t going exactly as planned. And that’s completely fine… as this happens in the mind of every single human being on the planet!
What many people don’t know is that worrying thoughts and negative feelings are the reason why we have been so successful as human species until this point. Our ancestors, earlier generations of homo sapiens, would not be able to survive if they were not aware of all of the things that can go bad. For example, worrying if they will bump into a bear while exploring a forest, or if they will step on a snake while picking vegetables. Always thinking about potential problems helped our ancestors to avoid the dangers that were looming in the nature around them. We should be proud of this mental behavior that happened and still happens in our brains because without it, we wouldn’t exist today!
But this mental behavior that is so focused on problem-solving can also be the cause of stress in this modern world which is increasingly more complex compared to the one in which our ancestors lived. Since it’s exponentially easier to survive nowadays, we are worrying about every little thing for no reason. We can instead let go and enjoy as it’s extremely difficult for us to make a life-threatening mistake in this day and age.
Most of the problems from our life that we stress about are actually an excellent opportunity to experience all of life’s dimensions without actually getting hurt in any real way… Would life be fun if every day was the same complete, perfect, boring sameness? Not at all! Life has the ability to surprise us every day and that’s what makes it worth living.
But because of how our brain works, some things happening in your life might start to add up. If you feel like you are wearing bigger baggage than you can handle, it’s certainly time for an oil check and a life-mechanic call! Even if that’s not the case right now, it will be helpful to know the methods of the life-mechanic if you will ever need it.
Luckily, the advice of this life-mechanic just happens to be hiding in the next few paragraphs…
If you ask the life-mechanic (and he knows!), what you need to do to stay in control of your life is to learn how to do these 4 things:
- Manage unhelpful thoughts
- Manage negative feelings
- Enjoy the present moment
- Live by your personal values
1. Manage unhelpful thoughts
Ever notice these moments when you have worrying or troublesome thoughts? You could have thoughts that are repeating and bothering you a lot or maybe they are just annoying thoughts that pop up in your mind for just a second. Whatever the case, they are actually the result of your mind doing the automatic problem-solving process we just explained. Since your mind evolved in that way a long time ago to solve problems, it’s only doing what its nature makes it do.
Our mind perceives 3 senses of ourselves: physical, thinking, and observing self. We make the mistake of assuming that our thinking self is representing us and our consciousness, but actually, the observing part is where our consciousness lives. In essence, we are separate from both our thinking and physical self as our existence is experienced from our observing self.
This all sounds very philosophical, so let’s see how this applies to everyday life. If you are separate from your thinking self, that means that you are really free to decide if products of your thinking mind are useful or not and if you are willing to focus on specific thoughts. You are free to decide if you want your mind to be your internal bully and a dictator who is going to tell you what to do or think or if you are willing to make peace with it and let it be your useful but imperfect advisor. Why not take the good advice that it gives you and discard the bad?
To create a rich and fulfilling life we need to be able to handle useless thoughts by distancing ourselves from them and looking at them as just words and images that are a product of the inherently-human mental limitations of the mind. To be able to do this, we can practice managing our automatic thoughts.
What to do with unhelpful thoughts:
- Take a step back and look at the thought as an observer by saying “I am having the thought that...”.
- Detach yourself from the thought and just notice it by saying “That is an interesting thought, but it’s not useful to me.”.
- Finally, notice that it’s only your mind that created this thought and you have the right to focus on it or not, so thank your mind for this thought by saying something like “Thanks, mind.”
2. Manage negative feelings
How to handle negative feelings? Feelings are different than thoughts since they operate on a more deep-rooted level.
There are three types of feelings: positive, negative, and neutral. Obviously, we don’t have issues handling positive and neutral feelings but what about handling negative ones? Usually, we will try to avoid or get rid of them but turns out that’s not a productive way to handle them.
What we should do instead is observe these feelings and accept them. By identifying and acknowledging their existence we can let them take their space and then by breathing deeply, we can get in touch with them. The goal is to neither hold onto these feelings, neither to discard them, but just to allow them to be and let them come and go in their own time. By doing this we can allow such feelings to be our advisors instead of dictating our lives. By making peace with our negative feelings we will transform them into something that blesses us with guidance instead of draining our energy. By releasing and accepting our feelings, even if they are positive or negative, we can continue to exist without fighting them.
What to do with negative feelings:
- Identify your feeling, accept it, and acknowledge it’s there.
- Observe the existence of that feeling and its particularities.
- Breathe into it by taking ten deep breaths and allowing it to exist. Don’t fight it.
- Bring your focus to your goals that are based on your personal values. (see Section 4:Live by your personal values)
3. Enjoy the present moment
Most of us run through our life like a character in a video game… Running errands, solving tasks, checking off items from our checklists. Brainlessly jumping from one thing to the next thing, without really stopping to hear the sounds of the birds chirping, to smell the flowers in the park that we are in, to breathe the fresh air around us, and to look at the bright blue sky above. Have we been scripted to live such a life? Or do we have free will and are able to stay in the present moment?
If you are always thinking about the future or the past and for you, the present moment passes so quickly while feeling that you were not even there… That means your brain could use a workout, the same way our bodies need exercise.
The most common way to retrain your brain is through meditation. While it’s an ancient tradition that’s well tested by scientists, it’s also often misunderstood as a practice where you sit cross-legged to relax and reduce your stress. But that’s not at all the purpose of meditation.
The purpose of meditation is to train and re-wire our brain to help us improve our awareness of the world and to improve our ability to be mindful in the present moment.
What to do:
- To start, breathe 10 times deeply in and out each morning and whenever you feel stressed or bored.
- Then continue by doing a meditation session every day. Start by practicing mindful breathing then try some other meditation techniques and use whichever works best for you. Experiment!
- Finally, try to incorporate what you learn through your meditation sessions into the rest of your day — in all of the moments that exist between your meditation practices.
4. Live by your personal values
Often times you will meet people who go from one day to the other without any plan or purpose. They are relaxed, don’t like planning, and don’t like to think about what will the future bring. They are too afraid or too lazy to plan for their future because they equate such thinking as something negative.
But other times, you will meet planners. They take life seriously and want to fulfill specific goals in their life. They don’t realize, though, that their goals are often heavily influenced by TV, newspapers, and mainstream media. They subconsciously create checklists of things they want to do without really checking if that’s something that truly makes sense for them or resonates with them as a person.
Both of these two ways of thinking are inherently wrong if we want to lead a fulfilling life. Luckily, there is another way.
Having goals in life is productive, but the goals need to be in line with your personal values and not made following external influence. Only by adjusting your goals with the values that are particular to you will you be able to live fully and find the purpose in life. And to find out your personal values it might be worth dedicating a bit of time to contemplate. Only after you have a clear idea of your personal values, you will be able to firmly set your goals that are based on them.
What to do:
- Identify your personal values, and divide them into 7 different life domains: family, romantic relationships, friendships, health, spirituality, career, leisure.
- Once you identified personal values for each of the life domains, identify one domain that is the most important for you right now, the one where you would like to make some changes. Then define short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals according to the personal values that you have for that particular domain. Make sure that each of the goals you defined is a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based) goal.
- Check regularly how are you are doing with your goals and update them if necessary. If you are finding it hard to accomplish a specific goal consider making it more realistic or dividing it into smaller ones. And if you prefer to change the focus to a different domain, feel free to do so.
Let me know how it goes!
Note: This article is mainly based on the books “The Happiness Trap” by Russ Harris and “Peace is every step” by Thich Nhat Hanh.
