Dealing With Life’s Challenges

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Catching your resisting brain

If you are at all like me and perhaps the majority of us, fairly often you want things to be different than they are…especially with life’s challenges.

For example, the tea bag I just tossed in my waste basket fell on the outside of it and I grumbled when I got up to pick it up to place it inside. I wanted it to land there to begin with and I was a bit irritated that it didn’t. Now that’s a very minor example of my resistance to what’s transpired and the subsequent emotional results that my resistance created.

But think about it, things happen all day long. When we have a want for life to be different than how it unfolds, we or rather I create a lot of pain for myself when I make evaluations of those unfolding events.

Minutes, hours, days, weeks, years of letting my brain keep doing what our wonderful brains do—evaluate and judge, adds up to a lot of accumulative distress, misery and pain.

Life is hard and painful enough without adding unnecessary misery to it when we don’t accept life as it is.

After all, I can’t change the fact that my tea bag didn’t arrive in the basket when I initially tossed it after the fact can I! I don’t have the power to go back in time to alter my aim. My grumbling about it and the irritation I felt just caused me a bit of distress that I did to myself by making a judgment.

What to do with life’s dissapointments

It can help us to become aware of our thinking and label our judging thoughts as we recognize what we’ve just done. It’s important however not to judge our judgments! Be gentle with yourself for having a brain that is actually doing what our brains our designed to do—evaluate.

Simply noticing the judgment thought will help you disengage from the emotional outcome of your judgment.

You may like me find yourself smiling with yourself too for being very human, for catching a behavior that has a costly emotional effect on your life and ultimately have a little less distress in your day!

What happens to you emotionally when you pass a judgment on things that happen in your day?

Contact Me together in therapy we can explore life coping tools for you to incorporate into your life’s journey!