Mindfulness in Eight Weeks: The revolutionary 8 week plan to clear your mind and calm your life. Michael Chaskalson
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at home that he really needs to talk about as they’re affecting his work. But you miss it because you’re just doing your ‘arriving at work’ routine on automatic pilot.
So, although the capacity to do things on automatic pilot is really important and valuable, it’s also sometimes really important to come out of automatic pilot – to consciously show up for your life. A life lived mainly on automatic pilot is poorer and less effective than it might be. In some ways it’s barely a life at all.
And there are other issues as well.
Our Automatic-Pilot System can Become Overloaded
Running an automatic-pilot routine can be like opening a new window in a computer. That can be an efficient way of getting things done. But sometimes you can have too many windows open, too many routines running, and then the computer starts to slow and may even eventually crash. There’s just too much going on, too many conflicting routines running.
At work, for example, you begin to feel overwhelmed as yet another email pings into your inbox, while you’re speaking to a colleague who dropped in with an urgent request, as you were trying to work out what to do about that piece of work from last week that ran over deadline and wondering how your partner would take it if you cancelled yet another evening at home together ...
Sometimes you need to consciously come out of automatic pilot and choose to focus – but in a particular way.
At such times, it can be unhelpful to try to think your way out of the problem. That would be like opening yet another window on a computer that’s already running slowly and may be about to crash. Instead, you need to shut down some of the windows and allow your mental and emotional resources to engage with just one thing.
Mindfulness training helps you to spot when you’re overloaded before things start going wrong. It helps you to come away from automatic routines and focus more effectively on each simple passing moment.
Some of Our Automatic Routines can be Really Unhelpful
In Box 2 of the Introduction, ‘Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy’, (see here), I talked about Mary, who came home tired from work to an answerphone message from her partner saying he was going to be home late that evening. That sparked a cascade of automatic-pilot routines in Mary, which led to her low mood very rapidly escalating into depression. Whether things happen in quite that sort of way for you or not, the underlying propensity at work here is universal. We all find that one way or another we can run mental and emotional automatic-pilot routines that feed off one another in unhelpful ways and don’t serve us very well at all.
Some of us run an ‘I’m not good enough’ automatic routine. Whatever we try to do there’s a quiet inner voice in the background commenting on how we don’t quite measure up. Or we may run the opposite, an ‘I’m really great’ automatic routine, constantly evaluating ourselves against others, putting them down and trying to boost ourselves along. Or there are ‘catastrophising’ routines, where we always imagine a worst-case outcome. There is a really vast range of these unhelpful automatic routines, or cognitive distortions, that we can run and I’ve listed some of these in Box 2.
Here is a list of mental habits we can have that really don’t serve us very well. See if any of these ring a bell for you.
ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING. Here, you see things in black and white as opposed to shades of grey. ‘Things never go well for me!’ Or, if a waiter fumbles your order in a restaurant: ‘This place is rubbish – our evening is ruined!’ Or if someone you admire makes a minor mistake, your admiration quickly turns to contempt.
OVERGENERALISATION. This involves making rapid generalisations from insufficient experience or evidence. A lonely person spends most of her time at home. Friends sometimes invite her to dinner so she can meet new people. ‘There’s no point in that,’ she thinks. ‘No one would like me.’
FILTERING. We all have a tendency to filter out information that doesn’t conform to our already held beliefs. Often, this involves focusing entirely on negative elements of a situation to the exclusion of the positive. For example, you’ve just given a presentation to 20 people at work. Everyone says how useful they found it. As they’re leaving, one colleague mentions a small point where she thinks there may have been some confusion. Immediately you come to think that the presentation was dreadful and you didn’t do well enough.
DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE. On being congratulated about having done something really well, you put half of the congratulation down to flattery, and say – whether out of modesty or out of doubt – ‘Well, it wasn’t that good, really.’
MIND READING. Here, you infer someone’s probable, usually negative, thoughts from their behaviour and non-verbal communication. ‘I know he doesn’t like me from the way he turned just then.’ Or you take precautions against the worst suspected case without investigating further. ‘I know writing up my thoughts for her as she asked is going to be a waste of time – she’s already made up her mind.’
FORTUNE TELLING. This involves predicting, usually negatively, the outcome of events which might turn out quite differently. Despite being very well prepared for your exam you think: ‘I just know I’m going to fail.’
MAGNIFICATION AND MINIMISATION. Here, you give more weight to a perceived failure, weakness or threat and less weight to a perceived success, strength or opportunity. Or the other way around.
CATASTROPHISING. This involves giving undue weight to the worst possible outcome, however unlikely. ‘I just know this is going to be a disaster!’ It also involves experiencing a situation as unbearable or impossible when it is just uncomfortable.
EMOTIONAL REASONING. Here, you presume that any negative feelings you may have actually expose the true nature of things or you think something is true based solely on a feeling. ‘I feel I’m stupid or boring – therefore I must be.’ Or feeling that your fear of flying in planes actually means that planes are a very dangerous way to travel.
SHOULD STATEMENTS. This involves expecting yourself and others always and without exception to do what you morally should do, irrespective of the particular situation. For example, after a performance, a concert pianist believes he or she should not have made so many mistakes. Or, while waiting for an appointment, you think that your dentist should be on time, and feel bitter and resentful as a result, without considering any possible emergency they may be having to deal with.
LABELLING. This involves attributing someone’s actions to their character instead of to some accidental attribute. Instead of just thinking that you made a mistake, you think ‘I’m a loser’ because only a loser would make that kind of mistake. Or someone who makes a bad first impression is simply ‘a jerk’ and they’re written off without further evidence of their character.
MISLABELLING. This involves describing something with language that has a strong and often unconscious connotation of other values. So someone who really values the bond between a mother and child speaks of a woman who puts her children in a nursery as ‘abandoning her children to strangers’.
PERSONALISATION. Here, you take personal responsibility, including any praise or blame, for events over which you have no actual control. For instance, a mother whose child is struggling in school automatically blames herself for being a bad mother when, in fact, the real cause of her child’s perceived failure might have been something else entirely.
BLAMING. This involves holding other people exclusively responsible for your own distress. For example, a spouse may blame their husband or wife entirely for their marital problems, instead of looking at his or her own part in the situation.
ALWAYS BEING RIGHT. Here, you always imagine that whatever goes wrong in any situation