And when we objectify the experience, this gets to the Viktor Frankl quote, which many of you may have heard before, and certainly if you've read my work or have heard me talk before, you've heard this before because it's been an incredibly inspiring quote that has been attributed to him anyway, which says, "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." So if we can objectify the reaction that's happening and get space from it, in that space lies our power to choose a response, meaning in that space lies our choice point. We have perspective now because we have a little bit of distance, just like we can fly up in an airplane and have perspective on the ground, or get some distance from a painting and get perspective on that painting.
We have some perspective now and we might be able to be aware of more choices, which encourage cognitive flexibility, which is the exact opposite of when we're caught in a stress reaction, or stress loop, or depressive loop, whichever way we want to say it, it's the exact opposite. So we're working on objectifying this. Some of the things that we do to encourage this, some of the bad habits I might say that encourage this, surprise people sometime because when people think of bad habits, they oftentimes think of sitting on a couch and eating a bag of potato chips, or smoking, or not exercising, or getting caught in this thing too long. People are surprised to find out that their number one bad habit is actually their thinking.
Before any behavioral bad habit happens, we have this thought of "Uh oh I've got to get away from this right now", procrastination, whatever. "Uh oh, I've got to get some distance from this right now." I'm gonna slide into this habit, which is then usually a habit that is something that we aren't too proud of necessarily, it's an avoidance habit. It again ignites this right prefrontal area and then we feel shame around the habit oftentimes "Why can't I get a hold of this? I wish I had done this before, negative thoughts, negative thoughts, encouraging negative emotions, negative states, negative physical states". Of course we don't wanna feel that so we fall back into the bad habits. That's the depressive loop; easy to fall into that but it starts with a thought.
We have some perspective now and we might be able to be aware of more choices, which encourage cognitive flexibility, which is the exact opposite of when we're caught in a stress reaction, or stress loop, or depressive loop, whichever way we want to say it, it's the exact opposite. So we're working on objectifying this. Some of the things that we do to encourage this, some of the bad habits I might say that encourage this, surprise people sometime because when people think of bad habits, they oftentimes think of sitting on a couch and eating a bag of potato chips, or smoking, or not exercising, or getting caught in this thing too long. People are surprised to find out that their number one bad habit is actually their thinking.
Before any behavioral bad habit happens, we have this thought of "Uh oh I've got to get away from this right now", procrastination, whatever. "Uh oh, I've got to get some distance from this right now." I'm gonna slide into this habit, which is then usually a habit that is something that we aren't too proud of necessarily, it's an avoidance habit. It again ignites this right prefrontal area and then we feel shame around the habit oftentimes "Why can't I get a hold of this? I wish I had done this before, negative thoughts, negative thoughts, encouraging negative emotions, negative states, negative physical states". Of course we don't wanna feel that so we fall back into the bad habits. That's the depressive loop; easy to fall into that but it starts with a thought.
