Uncategorized November 6, 2018 By Admin 0 Comments

how to get out of reactivity

There’s an old adage, often attributed to Buddhism but very appropriate to modern life: don’t trust your feelings.[1] It’s fitting for modern life because at this time we appear to privilege with a somewhat urgent primacy our feelings[2], but our feelings come and go, and in reality are perhaps no more real that leaves being caught and transported in a stream, the rushing water being our stream of conscious awareness.

Its also long been pointed out that we don’t just have feelings, if they are very strong they, in effect have us-we live and behave caught up in triggered emotions. These triggered emotions or nervous states[3] impact on our thoughts and our actions; when we are triggered by unprocessed or powerful emotions or feelings we act in ways we would not do normally, we react and are often stuck in reactivity, at least for a while. This, essentially, is the world of social media, a world that exists to get your attention and harvest your data: we are perhaps getting more and more stocked up and reactive, turbocharged by the flash of our digital lives.

So, because this is essentially a reaction of the nervous system we can get stuck here, becoming more and more reactive.

But we can change.

Both practice in mindfulness and good counselling offer ways to challenge and change this “stuckness”.

There are connecting areas to explore here, but perhaps the most important thing to do is to stop, literally pause before you go further so you can observe what’s happening. Ask yourself

What am I feeling?
What am I thinking?
What are my bodily sensations?
What do I believe I should do next?

All of the above are linked, and it only by exploring and unpacking how they are linked that we can begin to see how are behaviours are often caught up in these “shoulds” in our life, as in “this is what I should do next” when we actually have choice, we can choose to respond rather than react to life events by gently challenging our beliefs.