The Struggle Switch
week, we'll look at how each and every one of us struggles with difficult thoughts and feelings. It's almost as if we've got a struggle switch at the back of our head. And as soon as painful emotions or difficult thoughts show up, we start to struggle with them. Unfortunately, this struggle usually just makes things worse.
It often seems like we've got a struggle switch in the back of our mind. And as soon as an uncomfortable emotion or painful feeling shows up, it's like the struggle switch goes on and we start to struggle. So let's suppose anxiety shows up a very common painful emotion that we all get to experience anxiety shows up and the struggle switch goes on. Ah here is anxiety. I don't like anxiety. I want to get rid of my anxiety now.
I've got anxiety about my anxiety. So it's getting bigger with the struggle switch on I now get oh my anxiety is getting bigger. How do I get rid of my anxiety? And now I've got even more anxiety with the struggle switch on I may then get angry about my anxiety. Why does this anxiety keep showing up? I hate this anxiety. Then I might even start to feel sad about my anger. Oh, is this my life? And then I may start to feel guilt about my sadness about my anger.
Oh, how pathetic my with the starving kids in Africa. So with my struggle switch on my emotions become amplified. I've now got guilt about my sadness about my anger about my anxiety about my anxiety and that kind of amplification of emotions gives them more impact and influence over my life and often gets me bogged down or pulls me into self-defeating behaviors. But what happens if I can switch off the struggle switch? with the struggle switch off anxiety shows up and it's not that I like it or want it or approve of it. It's just I'm not going to struggle with it. I'm not going to invest my time, energy, and effort in struggling with this anxiety. Instead I'm going to invest in doing meaningful life enhancing activities such as spending quality time with my friends and family and playing with my kids.
So with the struggle switch turns off, the anxiety is now free to move. It doesn't get amplified by other emotions, which make it hang around for a lot longer. It can come and stay and go in its own good time. There's no such thing as a life without anxiety. It shows up for all of us. But when it does show up it's so much easier to live with it when our struggle switches off.
Does that sound at all familiar to you? It certainly does to me and I'm curious what sorts of thoughts and feelings do you find yourself struggling with? For me, the big one is anxiety. Even after 25 years of practicing this stuff. There's still times I find myself getting pulled into fruitless struggles with anxiety that exacerbated and make it worse. So our emphasis this week is going to be on how you can step out of that struggle with difficult thoughts and feelings.
So you can invest your time and energy in doing more meaningful activities to build the sort of life you really want. Now in order to do that, I'm going introduce you to another very powerful tool called anchoring, which is your first step in taking control over your behavior in those difficult, challenging situations when difficult thoughts and feelings are showing up for you. The really cool thing about this tool is that no matter how challenging the situation, no matter how difficult the thoughts and feelings that are arising when you come back to anchoring it can really help you to handle it. So much more effectively. But before we get to that, I really want to highlight that a lot of the difficult thoughts and feelings that we struggle with are not within our control.
So let's have a look at what is in our control and what is not.