Cognition is The Key to Living Well

You want to: eat less, spend less, drink less, fight less, hide less.

And you want to: have more energy, have more motivation, have more confidence, have more money, have more health, have more success, have more peace of mind.

These are the reasons we spend money and time with a therapist, compulsively study personal development, and strive to be more productive.

Virtually all of us want change in our lives.

And virtually all of us think that willpower will do it for us. We work harder, we tell ourselves to be more disciplined, and we listen to guru after guru telling us how to live well when their way has absolutely nothing to do with us.

We think that if we take massive action first, the rest will take care of itself. Change will be inevitable. But if you have ever seen a therapist (as I have), you will note that their focus is first and foremost on our thoughts - not our actions. Taking different actions is certainly essential, but if we do this without first changing the way we think about it, the action will be a one-off and we will go straight back to our old habits after our initial effort.

And the therapist is right. We don't do anything without first having a picture of it in our mind. When we hold a clear picture of that hamburger in our mind, we will feel desperate to rush down to the fast-food outlet and eat it.

But if, as we are thinking about that hamburger, a call from work comes in telling us about a crisis, our focus will change and we will forget about the hamburger. We will lose the desire to drive to the restaurant and will forget about any feelings of hunger.

Willpower alone has no traction. Willpower driven by thought has the power to control how we feel and how we act.

If we are able to consciously use our thoughts to help us avoid bad things and get good things, we will have the power to change our life for the better.

The problem is that nearly all of us operate on auto-pilot, going through the day unaware of our thoughts, being driven by deeply embedded habits and routines. All the while our mind is running the show out of our awareness, making us eat, speak and behave in ways that damage our peace of mind, our body and our ability to succeed.

The solution, then, is to be able to switch from auto- to manual-pilot when needed.

I have a problem of over-eating. When I'm on auto-pilot, I eat quickly and ravenously, as if I haven't had a meal in months. I always finish whatever food is one the plate or in the dishes in front of me, because back in boarding school we were not allowed to leave the table until all the food had been consumed.

On auto-pilot, I am like a computer which has had a program uploaded that instructs it to consume as much as possible. I have no agency, no self-determination. I am at the whim of my early life programming that happily keeps running day after day.

But I have learnt about conscious living, so I am now able to switch from auto-pilot to manual-pilot and look at the thoughts that cause these eating behaviours. I don't always succeed in catching them before they run me ragged, but when I do, I notice these kinds of thoughts:

You have to finish your plate

You have to get this meal over and done with

You don't want to upset your wife by cutting back

None of these thoughts have any basis in today's reality. They come from programming that was uploaded to my subconscious before I became an adult. But decades later they continue to work flawlessly unless interrupted by awareness of them.

Once we can stop our compulsive behaviour and look at what we are thinking about, most of the battle is won. That's because once held up to the light, our thinking loses its power over us. We are now able to consciously intervene in our thoughts, switching to different thoughts such as how awful we are going to feel if we go beyond feeling full. We have the ability to choose any thought we like - we are not victims of our mind. It doesn't dictate what stuff goes through it unless we let it. Our thoughts do not control us. We are not helpless in the face of our thoughts. All it takes is awareness and mental effort to take back control and intentionally choose what we allow to run through our mind.

I have been talking about over-eating, but the principle of cognitive control applies to every aspect of our lives.

We can harness our thoughts to motivate ourselves to hit the gym, to perceive our work from a new, more effective angle, or to change destructive habits.

The power we actually have over our lives is enormous - so long as we make the effort to live consciously instead of on auto-pilot. Of course, we can't be aware of our thinking all day long. But we can develop the habit of stopping what we are doing every once in a while and tuning into what we have been thinking about. This practice will strengthen our awareness muscle, and gradually we will become the kind of person who is generally in control.

Best wishes,

James