How well do you know yourself?

I created this blog to have an outlet for my views on psychology with a focus on emotions. In order to come up with a good topic for today I asked myself: “What is it that interests me the most?” As much as I’m fascinated by phenomena like neuroplasticity or the effects of fasting on cognitive functions my favourite always was and still is – relationships. Maybe this idea was washed to the surface of my thought process because it’s Mother’s Day. The relationship with your mother is usually the first relationship of your life (and for some people it’s a constant source of stress and other negative emotions). Relationships hold everything together. The promotion you just learnt about, the new dress you bought, the 5-course menu you cooked – if you couldn’t share it with other people you wouldn’t enjoy it half as much. But the most important relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. And yet a lot of people don’t pay much attention to it. They spend hours analyzing their last break-up or the bad vibes between them and their colleague (and ya, I know how much fun that can be, I do like a bit of good drama here and there), but never once ask themselves: “How’s the vibe between me and – me?”

I remember reading about a case study that was meant to illustrate NLP methodology a couple of weeks ago (NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming and is a “tool box” of strategies based on understanding and changing the three components of subjective experience: physiology, mind and how the use of language affects us.): A client was asked to describe her inner voice, the one she hears when she talks to herself (she had difficulties motivating herself). It turned out that it sounded exactly like her father who had always made her feel like a failure. Which explains why she couldn’t bring herself to do things, even though she wanted to. Because telling herself to sit down and work on that report that was due would inevitably turn her into an 8 year-old child that has just been told to “stop being lazy and do something useful for once”. After a lot of practice and self-observation she was finally able to gradually change the way she talked to herself. And immediately became more productive.

One of the first things I learnt about how the unconscious works is that it doesn’t respond to negatives. What does that mean? Well, for example if you want to give up eating chocolate and tell yourself not to eat chocolate your unconscious only hears “chocolate”. Which makes you think of chocolate even more than before. That’s why motivating yourself away from something negative never works, you have to move towards something positive. Something to think about the next time you try to motivate yourself. Just leave out the “don’ts”.

The relationship with ourselves is often weighed down by burdens of the past. We would never consider wearing the same pair of shoes all our lives, but quite readily keep up habits we’ve developed at a very young age. What we eat today for example is more often than not dictated by what we ate yesterday. And not only what, also how. In a hurry? Standing? Not paying attention to our actual hunger signals? The same applies to how we deal with stress. My father used to let’s say not exactly stay calm and collected in stressful situations and so I find myself getting into the same rut if I want it or not. And it took me a long time to figure out why: I talked to myself just the way he would – impatiently, reproachful, focusing on the negative. Which would make me feel even more stressed. You can imagine the rest.

And the moral of the story is...: Great if you know exactly how your colleague gets your goat. Better if you know why you have so much trouble getting out of bed in the morning.