The importance of cleaning up your mind

Imagine you enter a poorly ventilated room where the smell of stale feet (or food) and other unpleasant body odors is so overwhelming that you think you will faint if you stay longer than 5 minutes. But if you have to – and chances are you do (on the subway, in a dojo, your granny’s living room just to name a few) – you find that your nose gets used to it and eventually doesn’t even register it any more. This phenomenon is called habituation. And it doesn’t only occur in our olfactory cells. Cognitive-behavioral psychotherapists utilize this automatic response of our body in therapy. One very common fear that patients with OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) report is the fear to “go crazy” if they actually listen to their obsessive thoughts instead of ignoring them or acting them out compulsively by washing their hands for example. Exposure therapy confronts OCD patients with exactly this fear by making them “watch” their obsessive thoughts without reacting to them in any way. If they do this long enough the anxiety level will at some point reach a plateau – and then diminish. Because we can’t stay scared forever. It’s not cost-efficient (in an evolutionary sense).

So what’s the application in everyday life you’re asking? Very simple – just remember the last time you pushed away a negative feeling. Yesterday? This morning maybe? It’s understandable – who likes to dwell on having been let down by a good friend or how inadequate your boss made you feel with her comments the other day. The problem is: If you ignore these feelings, stack them in the backroom of your mind, they will eventually seep out. Or – if you did an extraordinarily good job in not paying attention to your anger, fear, frustration etc. – they will blast the door of your mental storage room labelled “deal with this later” and run you down in the most inconvenient situations. A job interview maybe. Or at dinner with your parents-in-law. So that instead of being witty, well-balanced and self-confident you suddenly feel inadequate, sad or irritable. And of course show it.

Emotions steer our behavior so if we want to achieve our goals and lead fulfilled and well-balanced lives we better take care of them. Or learn how to. The inventor of introvision, Professor Angelika Wagner from the University of Hamburg, Germany, found that most mental blockages are caused by undigested negative emotions. One of her clients had trouble with her dissertation. She wrote endless to do lists and wasted time washing the dishes, but couldn’t get herself to sit down and work on her thesis. Until she realized that she had paralyzed herself with the subconscious command “You must get an A!”. Introvision allowed her to gradually dissolve her inner barrier by confronting herself with the possibility of failure. And the way this idea made her feel. At first she couldn’t bear it for more than a few seconds, but the more she practiced the better she got at it. Three weeks later she started writing. And got an A.

As you can see it doesn’t require extensive training to clean up your minds every now and then just the way you do it with your computer. Because clutter means slow. Just sit down and feel. Without judgement. And if you have trouble finding the door to your mental storage room, just shoot me a line. I’ll be happy to help!

The first - what this blog will be about

As the title tells you this is an “emo” blog. I’m not saying this to scare away the chauvinists and machos (you’re very welcome to read on – you know and I know you want to), but to clarify from the very beginning what my goal – you might even say mission – is: I want to deliver the term “emotions” from its sticky and cloying reputation. Why? Because we all have them. All the time. In case you haven’t noticed.

And in order to silence those among you who claim to be “100% rational 100% of the time” right away I’m gonna tell you a story I first heard in a psychology lecture a few years ago. A patient of the well-known neuroscientist Antonio Damasio had suffered brain damage and although his intellectual functions remained unimpaired he now was unable to make decisions. Even the most simple everyday life questions turned into unsolvable math mysteries for him. He couldn’t choose a restaurant to go to or decide which movie he wanted to see, just kept arguing the pros and cons – “restaurant x has been rather empty lately which indicates that the food isn’t very good...but it also makes it more likely for us to get a table...on the other hand...” and so on. What had happened? The explanation is simple: His decision-making process had lost its emotional foundation.

We might think that we take decisions based on sound reasoning, but in reality our brain just has us believe so by making up “rational” reasons for our emotional biases – afterwards. Which is pretty smart of Mother Nature; she knows exactly how to keep our fragile egos intact (“Me? Emotional? Never! I solely rely on my intellectual capacities, no matter what. I bought my Porsche for the following objective reasons...”)!

That’s why it didn’t surprise me to learn that the most successful managers, CEOs etc. listen to their gut feeling when they take decisions, even when they’re about multimillion dollar mergers. Because it does not only save time – the unconscious works way faster than any conscious process, especially when it involves any kind of list making! (and we all love to make lists, don’t we) – it is also much more effective. After all our unconscious stores all the experiences we’ve gathered and all the knowledge we’ve accumulated in the course of our life and takes all of that – you might say wisdom – into account when coming to a conclusion. We have a huge ass library at our disposal 24/7 and it automatically selects the books and articles and movies that best fit the problem at hand - let’s use it!

I mean it. The next time you face a difficult situation that requires immediate action – don’t think, just listen to your gut feeling. And if doing that in your job or relationships seems to be a tad too scary, start with something simple like “what’s for dinner”. I promise you won’t regret it. Let me know how it went.