Bodies are very smart. They look at the curve you make throughout the day, from minimal to maximum intensity.
When you are not at your peak, you get thoughts and feelings about things that have already happened or things that are going to happen.
That is a very smart, energy-efficient system.
Because when you are at the peak of your peak in terms of performance, it is not useful to suddenly start thinking about something irrelevant that happened 11 years ago.
So when you are coming down from your peak, it is not necessarily logical to start doing breathing exercises so that you ‘don’t escape the here and now.’ You are always somewhere on the curve.
People who are good at this use their thoughts to ‘meet themselves’ when they notice that they are too low on the curve and need to shift up a gear.
Again, this system works very well. In a way, we are actually creating it ourselves, from the other side.
You look at it with the expectation of what it is.
Therefore, you can calculate possibilities.
But it’s more than that.
You have created that reality in the first place yourself.
Why daydreaming is a better strategy than staying in the here and now
First, it’s more convenient. You can’t really leave the here and now. If I think about something that’s going to happen in the future, that’s still something that happens in the here and now.
Letting yourself get distracted and dream away is actually a vital part of thinking. Since that’s the fastest way to form new connections. It’s an energy-efficient way. So by breathing your thoughts away, you block that system – for nothing.
It’s also very layered. Only focusing on seeing what is in front of you is only a small part of what consciousness is – simultaneously dreaming and thinking about it while you look at something is a part of consciousness too. So only focusing on your breathing is actually a pretty bad idea.
For a while, I believed that my ADHD medication would give me a panic attack.
Partly, this was probably a little bit true: it can indeed make you feel physically restless. But what mattered even more was that I had heard it from many other people.
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I believed it
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Because of that, I started to believe that it was going to happen
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And because of that, it also became a little bit true
This is the difficult thing about belief. It is such a powerful thing that the way you look at something can literally change reality. It becomes true because you believed it was true. Every signal in my body felt like it was preparing for the panic attack, while that didn’t have to be the case at all. It could have had any other cause.
The difficult thing about belief is that if you have believed something from a young age—for example, that you are worthless, or if you connected something physical to something mental because something happened when you were young—that connection, that little belief between those two things, can still exist.
Learning happens so fast that there is a chance that if you had surgery when you were young, there are still certain little beliefs about what happened in your body. And those things were simply true at that moment. Now you might be able to look at them with different eyes, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen that way from your perspective when you were young.
Maybe you wanted to make yourself as small as possible and curled up every time. So you taught yourself to do that.
How to let your feelings in when you normally push them away.
Step 1: Visualize a wooden stick in the middle of your body. That is you.
Step 2: Your feelings are like rings around it.
Step 3: Pull those rings toward you. Feel them. So don’t push them away from you, but instead pull them toward you.