Our brains would rather be lazy than tired. Everything we regularly do tries to automate our brain as quickly as possible. Very useful if these are positive habits. But what if these are negative patterns? Learn how to discover and change these yourself. And participate in the live exercises!
The automatic brain
When you do something for the first time, it often takes a lot of your attention. The first driving lesson, for example, you had to try to keep the car on the road with a lot of attention. When we do something more often, the brain makes it all its own. So that at some point you can drive without thinking. This leaves room for other things and you don't have to pay all your attention to the daily things all the time.
When automation can go wrong
Our brains carry this 'automation' through to everything. This happens in the following ways
Thinking: Thoughts or patterns of thinking that you often have will occur more often. So also negative thoughts...
Feeling: Feelings that you often have, come up again more easily. Or certain feelings in certain situations. So also pain...
Do: You get better at what you often do and can do it with less and less attention. But even if you don't do things or avoid them...
Attention: The great controller
Attention can make the negative even more negative, but the right attention can make it smaller. Giving a lot of attention to negative thoughts makes you gloomier. Investigating negative thoughts with attention and adjusting them to help you, will make sure that you get less trouble.
By consciously focusing attention on these patterns, you can learn a lot. You learn to recognise patterns, and you can decide in which way you would rather deal with them. It is as if you take the patterns out of the 'automatic' for a moment and start working with them. If you do this often enough, you get new, hopefully better, automatic patterns. Better patterns in which the attention no longer automatically goes to the negative thoughts or pain. Or you can let go of negativity more easily.
Getting to work yourself
Exercises specifically designed for this purpose are called mindfulness exercises. Within Reducept we regularly pay attention to mindfulness. In our app, but also online. So this summer (2020) you can participate every week in Mindful Monday! Every Monday at 12.05pm you can join the mindfulness exercise for free. Members of Reducept can watch and listen to the exercises later on.