Time for an Attitude Adjustment?

"...the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude..."

—Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl

Spring is just around the corner and it’s time to freshen up–especially when it comes to our attitude and emotional health!

A number of healing systems advocate doing a body detoxification program to coincide with the changing of the seasons. The rationale for this is that the seasons affect our physiology and we should clean out our internal environment to better adapt to the outside environment.

Despite our best intentions, however, our emotional environment has the capacity to override the benefits of even the strictest diet or exercise regime. Having long-term stress or anxiety has been shown to alter the rhythm of our heart, digestion, and sugar metabolism. A little emotional housecleaning goes a long way toward wellness and a healthier lifestyle.

Bad “Thought” Habits

Many of the thoughts and feelings we have during a typical day are the same thoughts and feelings we had the day before. Our way of thinking and reacting to things becomes a habit, and we begin to shape our personalities based on our thought habits.

These thoughts and emotions create the backdrop for our inner dialogue, and it’s from the viewpoint of this dialogue that we view the world around us. The downside to this phenomenon is that our mind is often in the habit of looking for drama and problems.

It’s this chatter that distracts us from what writers such as Eckert Tolle describe as the “now.” Under stress, this background dialogue grows louder and robs us of energy that could be used for a healthy lifestyle. (Meditation is useful to quiet this chatter and make more energy available to us.)

We create or eliminate opportunities for ourselves based on how our background chatter allows us to interpret what is happening around us. Have you had one of those days when things seem to go against you early on, and then for the rest of the day while you continue to think this, you become convinced that all of nature’s forces are picking on you specifically?

Habits, in particularly our thinking habits, can be difficult to break. This accounts for the ease with which we can become “stuck in a rut” since it is often more uncomfortable to change the habit and think differently. Once we become locked into a certain viewpoint about a person, place, or event it can be very difficult to change how we have things “pigeon-holed.”

If a restaurant serves you a very bad meal, for example, it will be very hard to change your negative opinion. Each time the person, place, or event gets talked about we have a tendency to replay the opinion we hold, and the opinion becomes even more firmly rooted. To make sense of our world we prefer to categorize the people around us; for example, he’s the athlete or she’s the musician. First impressions are the longest lasting.

Our mind tends to prefer one-sided judgments unless we practise otherwise. Finding the opposite emotion to the one that is throwing you off balance will make you feel refreshed and empower your spring season.

Detox Bad “Thought” Habits

We can “detox” unhelpful ways of thinking and create a habit of successful thinking to manifest our preferred thoughts. Begin slowly with the following easy steps.

1. To begin your “housecleaning” you first need to notice where the “dirt” is and what caused it. The first step in gaining control of your mind chatter is to first pay more attention to it. Notice the judgments and feelings that make up your chatter.
2. Isolate, specifically, what prompted the judgment. If your work upsets you, what is it about work that bothers you? For example, is it lack of freedom, crabby co-workers, an inconvenient drive to work?
3. Whatever your complaint, look to other areas of your life and find areas where you have the opposite occurring. For example, if work is imposing on your freedom, think of other areas where you experience more freedom. In this case, work imposes on your time, but it also provides financial freedom and the freedom to live in a house or travel with your family.