You Can Change Your Mind!

Jan’s boyfriend is a smart guy. He’s a psychotherapist. He deals in the workings of the human mind all day long. He’s also a jogger, a member of the Sierra Club, a democrat, he cares about the environment. He hasn’t used plastic containers or plastic wrap in the microwave for years. He’s had fluorescent light bulbs in most fixtures in his house since the time when they cost a lot more to buy than regular bulbs. He’s generally a guy who is willing to put his actions and even his money where his beliefs are. So, why then, would the following situation arise?nThey have a small kettle, which he uses every morning to boil water for his coffee. He has, for many years, come down every morning and filled the kettle with water and set it on the front burner (which is the largest burner), turned the gas onto high, and gone about his business until he noticed, or remembered, that it was boiling. The first time Jan found herself witness to this she calmly switched the kettle to the back burner, which is smaller, and showed him how the flames on the large burner go around and up the sides of the kettle, thus wasting a lot of energy and not boiling the water as quickly. With a smaller burner, the flames are positioned nicely around the bottom of the kettle. Simple logic, right? Fits right in with his apparent desires to be a good environmental citizen, right? A “no-brainer”, as they say.nWell, two years later he is still putting the kettle on the large burner and turning it up too high and Jan is coming along behind him and turning the gas down or switching the kettle to the back burner. On hearing Jan’s story, I recognized what was really going on. She wasn’t taking it personally that he just didn’t want to do it her way. She also wasn’t just chalking it up to “he’s a guy” either. When asked, he readily agreed that the only reason he is still doing it that way is that he’s been doing it that way for years. It’s a habit, simply that, nothing else. And habits can be difficult to change. But why?nHe readily adopted a new habit about light bulbs, and food containers, and lots of other things. He says it’s mainly because he’s still half asleep when he comes down to put on the kettle, so he’s really just not thinking about it. Bingo! It’s not about motivations or egos at all. There’s no secondary gain for him to waste some natural gas. But there also didn’t seem to be a desire to change how he boiled the kettle. Maybe subconsciously he saw it as Jan telling him what to do and didn’t want to respond to that. Maybe there’s some other motivation. And maybe there isn’t any motivation – it’s just a habit – it doesn’t get thought about, it just gets done.nI think this is the point. Jan is a liberal thinker, and she has always thrived on personal growth and change. She must have a pretty flexible brain. But not everyone does. In my experiences working for social change, third world development, and in health care, the simplest things can be the most difficult. For example, we all know that clean water and handwashing are good for basic hygiene – but getting poor people to do it when they are not accultured (as my niece is discovering in rural Ghana) is just not easy. We all know that if everyone ate their fruits and vegetables and stayed away from fast food, cigarettes, etc, and exercised every day, we wouldn’t have most of the chronic disease problems we have in our country. But it’s these simple things that fall down to each person to do on a daily basis – habits that must be changed or established – that are the most difficult to influence. And I think that the main reason for this is that most people really don’t live a very sentient existence. They just don’t spend time thinking about what they are doing, they just do it.nThis is the crux of personal and social change. To develop the ability to make conscious decisions about self-determination, in every way, about every nuance, and every action we take, including how we are going to think and feel, is the great existential quest. And let’s face it, most of us never get anywhere close. We are creatures of habit. In so many ways, conscious choice really doesn’t enter into it. Everything about how we interact with the world becomes habit after we’ve lived long enough. How we take care of ourselves, how we set up our routines (or lack thereof), what we eat, how we relate to people, how we react to someone cutting us off on the freeway – most of it isn’t conscious choice at all, it’s just habit, knee-jerk action or reaction.nSo what could our lives be like if we were somehow able to insert our conscious choice into more of what we do every day? Most of us really aren’t choosing to be unfit and overweight and stressed out – we just haven’t recognized that we even have a choice at all when it comes to these things. We feel like the external circumstances of our world drive us, rather than the other way around. We are always waiting for some magical opening of time and opportunity to allow us to finally get around to making some of those changes we’ve thought about. We forget that we as individuals, and we alone, are the ones who have both the power and the responsibility to create our own lives and our experiences. nLiving by choice, following your desires, the purpose-driven life, mindfulness, all of these clichés derive from a real truth. We spend so much time reacting to the world around us that we forget that we can stop and choose that reaction more carefully, more purposefully, in a way that allows us to get the desired result, rather than the default result. And, in taking this power-to-choose into every moment of our existence, we can begin to live a fully evolving life that is not based solely on habits. What a relief! What freedom! It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “sentient being”.nSo, the key to changing lifestyle habits, environmental problems, even the answer to war and peace, appears to lie only in the minds of every individual person on this planet. One at a time, we can each begin to make new choices. And the first step I would like to take is to give people the opportunity to even begin to THINK about it. nIt is from thoughts that the totality of what we are and what we experience emerges. We must start there, for I firmly believe that your mind is the most important part of your body. nLearning new habits is actually pretty easy, once we think about it. Jan’s boyfriend decided that she should remove the grill on the big burner when she sets her coffee up the night before, so as to remind him to use a different burner. She did that, and within only three days, he was happily using the small burner without any further reminders. You see, everyone’s brain is flexible, if you give it a chance.nAs a practitioner of mind/body medicine and psychophysiology, I have the gift of being able to help people to begin to make the connection between what goes on in the mind and in turn, what goes on in the body, and vice versa. Beginning with this basic understanding, and from there, building a sense of empowerment through learned self-regulation, is truly an excellent first step toward living a life of self-determination. nn-Margaret MacDonald,M.D.nMay,2008nNeurobehavioral RehabilitationnPrivate practice, Valencia, CAnwww.mind-connection.comn