Little Lies
Most of what we say isn’t true. We’re not intentional liars. But our minds aren’t trained to tell the truth. Being honest with ourselves is one of the most difficult challenges to living authentically and transparently. Being truthful with others is only possible when we have trained our minds to be honest with ourselves.
Stop Thinking
The mind’s most extraordinary job is to conserve energy and return to homeostasis. It accomplishes that goal by memorizing without remembering. It releases the need for conscious input and minimizes thinking. Several terms connect to this concept, such as habituation, automaticity, and imprinting.
Our minds must make sense of every experience we have, organize, and store it as information for future use. We adapt to our environment based on how our minds manage our experiences. Our minds adapt to the environment by replacing conscious thinking with automatic doing.
For example, automatic thinking is why you drive your car without looking for the turn signal. Automaticity helps you reach for it without looking. But, when you first learned to drive, you were scared to take your hand off the steering wheel and your eyes off the road. Repeated experiences driving allow you to operate a car with minimal conscious input.
The Normal Mind
Our bodies also use automaticity to adapt. When the temperature drops to 50 degrees in the summer, we wear a jacket, but we take off our coats if it climbs to 50 in February if we live in Chicago. In this case, the break of habituation triggers an adaptive response. Each season, our bodies adapt to an average temperature to experience homeostasis. Your perception of warmth changes four times a year if you live in a seasonal place like New York. If you live in an area with slight temperature variation, such as Hawaii, 50 always feels cold.
Our minds act on a combination of recurring, recent, and robust activity. Waking up at the same time on weekends, even though you don’t set your alarm clock, happens because your mind remembers your habits. Remembering at the unconscious level makes life convenient because it frees our minds to absorb or create new ideas.
The less we use our conscious memory for essential tasks, the more efficient the brain is. In psychology, we refer to the brain as a “cognitive miser” because it likes to store energy. The less energy it uses on tasks, the more it reserves for other jobs.
We have thousands of automatic reactions based on unconscious memories, that shape our behavior. Imagine driving your car, and the vehicle in front of you suddenly stops. You automatically hit your brake when you see the car’s lights in front of you. You’re doomed if you must think about where the brake is.
My Mind Made Me Do It
I bought a bike a year ago to diversify my workouts and run less. I had not ridden a bike in over a decade and had not owned one since I was a child. I have been running for 15 years and would do it every day if my knees didn’t bother me. I didn’t trust myself to commit to riding my new bike and wanted to ensure I hadn’t wasted money by letting it sit in the garage.
I knew I had better use it as much as possible as soon as I got it because the longer it took me to ride it, the less likely I would be to ride it. To encourage automaticity, I rode my bike daily for two months and didn’t run outdoors. As planned, grabbing my bike in the morning became an unconscious routine. But, something unexpected happened too.
My biking routine interfered with my running performance. I mimicked my riding patterns by running in the street for the first mile. I used the sidewalk after the first mile because the busy road I turn onto doesn’t have a bike lane.
But here’s where the run got silly. In my neighborhood, the curbs are accessible for wheels, but not where the streets intersect. I must ride 10ft around the corner to access the ramp to cross the road. I ran the same pattern as my bike ride instead of stepping off the curb like I used to do. It took a couple of runs before I noticed I was doing it.
My maladaptive mimicking made me appreciate how fragile memory can be. My mind failed to recognize the difference between my feet peddling and running. Just two months of daily riding altered my automaticity. Unfortunately, a necessary behavior for one part of living is maladaptive in another part.
Misconnections and unconscious memory unfold our lives in more complex ways than we imagine. Metaphorically, many people take longer to reach their destination because they follow the accessibility ramp instead of stepping off the curb to cross the street.
Mind Trapping
Adaptation is ongoing. Our mind constantly thumbs through old information to adapt to new experiences. The most profound experiences leave imprints and directions for future behavior. Trauma, loss, danger, and scarcity threaten life and leave grave impressions on our lives. The mind adapts quickly for survival.
Imprinted information feels natural and normal, so adults don’t question their beliefs about the world or themselves unless something critical occurs. An adult may feel naturally anxious and depressed in the same way that weeds naturally grow in a garden. Natural doesn’t mean desired or optimal. It means what happens without effort. It is what our mind remembers without remembering.
Many adults have imprints from childhood. They have been told, directly or indirectly, that they are not loveable, safe, worthy, or intelligent. They may believe love will not come to them. They continuously try to prove or protect themselves.
Imprints become scripts that guide our response to people, events, and circumstances. Our minds create stories to align with our imprinting. If you seek validation, your mind will create different stories than if you seek growth or safety. Your mind will summarize your imprinting as an identity.
Where Truth Lies
Identities drive our automatic responses. Like driving a car, we don’t think about where the brake is or how to turn down the radio. We’ve mastered the moves of driving so much that we can text a message, switch lanes, and roll down the window simultaneously.
Unconscious responses are imprinted as are our social, relationship, political, and gender identities. We cling to them, defend them, and manifest a reality based on them. We embrace our imprinted identities as natural and normal.
You can observe people revealing their imprinting. They accept the imprinting as who they are rather than what they have experienced. I’m this or I’m that; you can fill in the blank.
The mind doesn’t stop at imprinting personal identity. It also creates an identity of the world and everything in it. The mind’s relationship between you and the world is your narrative, which drives how you engage with others you believe are like or unlike you.
Your mind never reveals to you that your perception is speculation. It imprints as if it is objective reality. “Snakes are dangerous” is a shortcut to safety. But it’s also a lie. The truth is that some snakes are dangerous. Most people’s minds do not need to distinguish the difference. Instead, our reality is that snakes are dangerous, so if we see one, we act accordingly.
Here’s another example. I automatically declare, “It’s cold outside,” when my husband invites me on errands with him in the winter. My husband asserts, “It’s 40 degrees!” He has on a light jacket because his imprinting is different from mine. So, we have a spat about what temperature is cold in December, as if we are disputing something factual.
I don’t declare that “I’m cold.” I emphatically state that the weather is cold. My mind could tell me I would need a few layers to feel comfortable outside. But that’s not my immediate response. My quick reaction is based on my imprinting, which is discomfort to temperatures below 50.
Negotiating about the weather is less critical than most of our imprinting. But even in this lighthearted example, you may pick up on my missed opportunity to connect with my husband, engage with my community, and even increase my tolerance to lower temperatures.
Mind Your Narrative
My dad’s wisdom is relevant. The longer your mind talks, the more likely it is to tell you a lie. We must empower ourselves to limit the input from the mind and its imprinting.
We believe we make conscious decisions just because we are awake, but we do most things unconsciously. The untrained mind operates from past experiences where imprinting occurs. We make new decisions based on old information. Our past is having extended conversations with us that are little more than narrated lies.
We attach deeply to our narratives, confident that the world operates exactly as we perceive it. We hold someone responsible for our unhappiness, failures, or lack. Our mind-created narratives become our personalities, hopes, dreams, and grit. For better or worse, none of it is The Truth.
Let me offer you a more solemn example than the weather or riding a bike. An adult daughter is angry and distant with her mother for not being more caring. As a child, the daughter’s emotional needs were unmet. As an adult, the daughter continues to carry mind-made narratives about her relationship with her mother.
The daughter continues to live as a victim of an uncaring mother. She makes decisions about all relationships based on a fear of abandonment. She smothers her children with attention and affection, leaving them little room to develop independence. The daughter continues whatever role she adopted as a child. Her identity is imprinted.
Waking up
Being physically awake isn’t the conduit of consciousness. Being present is required. When we are present, we are connected to what is happening without interference from the past or future.
We loosen our programming when we show up as the observer of our minds. Changing our patterns may take time because it’s a process. You stop your mind from using scripts to escape processing. When you trust what comes up, dissolving obstacles is as natural as stepping off a curb to cross the street. All that is required is conscious attention.
Mindfulness
Shifting your memory and attention to being present requires unlearning, undoing, and “unremembering.” But being present doesn’t have to be difficult when you learn to quiet your mind. Awareness activities such as meditation, journaling, and professional help-seeking can enhance presence.
You must bring a great degree of presence into your life to transform it into something you have never experienced. The mind does not understand what it is allowing when it stops seeking validation, familiarity, safety, or comfort from which it derived its identity.
In transition, the perception of the world may feel unstable, unpredictable, and unknowable. Ironically, for the first time, you see the world as it is – unstable, unpredictable, and unknowable. The awakened mind doesn’t need to make up stories to make it feel otherwise.
In the acceptance of this state of vulnerability, presence arises. Life begins to feel fluid rather than unstable. Everything feels simultaneously new and known. Instead of relying on the past, you trust your presence.
Transformation is a way of life. It’s not a task that can be checked off a to-do list or a commodity. It is a process shared by those who willingly lose their mind to find their authentic selves. It is an awakening.
Your awakening is your willingness to direct your personal life from a state of awareness. You show up to see what is new instead of perpetually responding to old information.
Step off the curb to cross the street instead of following the accessibility path.
Your ten minutes are up, and you’ve been listening to lies about yourself and the world. Hang up the call on your mind before the conversation ends in discontent and a perception of lack. Stop remembering who you think you are and start paying attention to your being.
