How does your time on Facebook or other social networking sites usually make you feel? Do you notice when your mood goes up or down? Do you notice the streams of memories, thoughts, or desires that get stimulated by the images and posts of others? Many people use social networking in a positive way to stay in touch with distant friends and family. In the same way, we need to constantly stay in touch with the “posts” we’re putting up in our own minds, as well as the instant “texting” sent to us by the body, all of which I like to think of as Inner-Facebooking.
Inner-Facebooking skills are all about how you use one of your most precious resources: your attention. Your attention is what you use here and now to navigate your world. While others may try to grab your attention for their own purposes, no one other than you, ultimately, can decide how to use and harness this gift of awareness.
To illustrate what I mean, take the following brief survey:
• In what ways have you used your attention today?
• How often did technology grab your attention?
• How good do you feel about where you placed your attention?
• Did you use attention to help you feel more balanced and at peace?
Attention is necessary to regulate your emotions and help you maintain your emotional equilibrium throughout your day. By Inner-Facebooking, you can be more aware of harmful or distracting external or internal “posts.” You notice the subtle signals of tightness, stress, or dis-ease your body is sending you. Knowing how to shift your attention lets you become skillful at putting up nurturing, feel-good posts that get you motivated, inspired, and involved. With Inner-Facebooking, you become proficient at noticing your moods, sensing emotions in your body, and cultivating the attitude of an impartial observer as you rebalance in the moment. To do this is to literally rewire and reshape how your brain makes connections.
On the other hand, if you lack Inner-Facebooking skills, you might find yourself hopelessly mired in negative clutter from the past. In one of the biggest studies of its kind in the United Kingdom, researchers analyzed more than 32,000 participants who completed an online survey related to stress and repetitive, self-defeating thoughts. While the study determined that traumatic life events and family history were the largest predictors of depression and anxiety, there was one vital variable that kept stress in check. That mediating variable was one’s perception of stress.
If you strongly believe that you can’t cope with a stressful situation, then you won’t. However, if you shift your attention so as to view the situation from a distance, you can think about it and assess it differently. You might say, “Yes, this is stressful, but I’ve handled these kinds of situations effectively before. And I can find resources to help me get through it successfully.”
As Professor Peter Kinderman, lead researcher of the UK study, said, “Whilst we can’t change a person’s family history or their life experiences, it is possible to help a person to change the way they think and to teach them positive coping strategies that can mitigate and reduce stress levels.”
Where’s your attention right now?
Do you ever feel like the more you pay attention to your emotional wounds, the more you continue to pay attention to them? Preoccupation with negative past experiences may inadvertently hardwire the emotional clutter circuits in the brain. Imagine rolling a rock down a hill over the same path time and time again. Before long you create a groove or rut that guides the rock down the exact same path every time.
Our brain has the ability to create pathways, and change them, in much the same way through the process of neuroplasticity. When we think and behave in a certain way, the brain generates a pathway. Over time, frequently used pathways get wired together, creating an established path or groove. It’s empowering to know that how we notice and respond to our thoughts can change the physical structure of the brain, even those habitually used emotional-clutter pathways.
Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, author of Brain Lock, is a pioneer in neuroplasticity and repairing negative brain grooves. He developed a four-part mindfulness method for patients with obsessive- compulsive disorder (OCD). Instead of having patients take their repetitive and alarming thoughts at face value, Schwartz directs them to mentally change their relationship to those damaging thoughts.
First, patients notice the old thoughts, and then they reappraise them in new ways. Before and after brain scans of patients have shown how their thinking can deactivate the OCD wiring in the brain by creating new neural pathways to replace the faulty ones. Patients learn how to harness the skill of Inner-Facebooking to notice and release their repetitive thoughts from the habitual groove.
Inner-Facebooking makes us aware of how we’re using our attention and gives us some constructive distance from offending thoughts so we can decide how to respond to them. We can shift attention in a number of ways, including reflecting inwardly on that initial thought, finding a more realistic thought, or engaging in an action or behavior that reflects our deeper values.
Excerpted from the book Clearing Emotional Clutter: Mindfulness Practices for Letting Go of What’s Blocking Your Fulfillment and Transformation. Copyright © 2016 by Donald Altman. Reprinted with permission from New World Library. www.newworldlibrary.com.
