having a brain is a confusing frustrating and often counterintuitive experience we really do not have the amount of direct control over our thoughts and our feelings that a lot of folksy wisdom or well-meaning advice like just choose happiness or calm down would suggest that we have what actually happens inside of our minds is not so much a thing that we can just make be whatever we want it to as much as it is a byproduct of everything going on around us and inside of us at any given moment some of those things we can control
some of those things we cannot control the other really frustrating thing about our brains is they don't respond really well to Brute Force what I mean by brute force is when you try to just make some exact certain thing happen in your mind a lot of the times not only does it not work in many cases it ends up producing the opposite of the thing you were trying to produce and you get farther and farther away from your goal the harder that you try today I'm going to review the six most common mistakes that I
see people making in therapy sessions in their attempts to fix their mental health by controlling their own mind or the things happening around them and what I encourage my therapy clients to do instead of these ultimately ineffective techniques and the first thing is trying not to think about something this one is so hard I know but when you try not to think about something it almost always backfires and this one I can actually demonstrate to you in this video try not to think about a bottle of shampoo what just happened I know it's cheesy you've
probably seen this before but what actually happens when we try not to think about something is in order to prompt yourself to not think about a thing you have to first remind yourself of the thing that you are trying to not think about because in order to make trying not think about something a finished thought it has to contain the stimuli that you're trying not to think about so you accidentally prompt yourself to think about the thing you're trying to avoid thinking about which puts the idea in your mind now a shampoo bottle is a
very silly example of this right but what usually happens is the thing you're trying not to think about is a thing that causes you distress it's stressing you out it's something you're scared of it's something makes you sad it's something that makes you angry and so when this thought pops into your mind it doesn't just disappear like you probably stopped thinking about the shampoo bottle until just now because I said it again because it's not important right but When the Thought has an emotional component to it those are the thoughts that tend to get stuck
in our brains and so every time you try to tell yourself not to think about something you then also trigger your negativity bias which tends to focus on ideas that create distressing emotions excessively and you ruminate on it over and over again so there's no direct way to stop your brain from thinking about something super frustrating I know that doesn't mean you're helpless though there is an indirect way to stop your brain from thinking about something and that is to put other things in your brain instead not literally but other thoughts other ideas other sources
of stimulation your capacity for attention is limited it is finite your brain can only have so much stuff happening inside of it at one time so if you're trying to get your mind off something best way to do that is to do something or talk to someone or think about something that's really stimulating really engaging really interesting to you but not related to the thing you're trying not to think about that gives your brain minimal space to ruminate on the stresser which is ultimately going to be the only way you can get that idea mostly
if not all the way out of your mind the second mistake that I see people make well not literally because I'm not there when it happens but trying to make yourself go to sleep sleep is a frustratingly delicate process we don't really have an off switch um I mean there are certain you know supplements and substances you can take that do kind of make you just pass out but that's really not the same as falling asleep and it's not going to result in the same Sleep Quality as falling asleep naturally sleep is not something we
can just make ourselves do though sleep is a byproduct of the right circumstances being created and specifically we fall asleep when our stress level is relatively low so when you try to make yourself go to sleep when you're trying to remind yourself of like I only have you know I have to wake up in 6 hours and I'm going to be so tired if I don't go to bed now tomorrow is going to be a disaster and I'm G to be grumpy and I'm not going to be able to think straight and now it's only
five hours and 45 minutes and you're basically just trying to like through sheer shame and frustration make your brain turn off you're creating you're turning sleep into a performance situation and when sleep becomes a performance situation you have now made it a stressor you have now created the exact opposite of the conditions you need in order to help yourself fall asleep so rather than just trying to make yourself sleep the best way to improve quality and quantity of sleep is to focus on the circumstances or the situations in your sleeping environment internally and externally make
sure your environment is as conducive to sleep as possible make sure it's dark make sure it's quiet or has white noise or static noise make sure that it's kind of cool make sure you're physically comfortable I know these seem really basic but I'm Amazed by how often people don't have these things in place and internally try and again not through direct Force to not contradict number one about not trying to think about certain things try to indirectly help your brain focus on calming relaxing low stress things as you're working on sleep the harder you try
to fall asleep the more sleep will slip from your grasp so instead just try to focus on creating sleep circumstances the third mistake I see people make that absolutely tanks their mental health is ignoring their own needs when their life gets really busy so we all face these periods of time in life right where we just we don't feel like we can possibly do all of the things we're supposed to do it's work it's school it's our home it's our family it's it's there's so many expectations just piled on us every single day and and
sometimes there are brief periods of time sometimes it's entire seasons of life where just you feel like you're falling short every day and you feel like no matter how hard you try how much time you spend you're not going to be able to get all the stuff done you're not going to be able to live up to your own expectations or other people's expectations most people immediately start to throw away things that only benefit them when they find themselves in these circumstances this is the biggest mistake that you can make though because your life more
or less comes down to inputs and outputs within a system so every day you do things that give you time energy and attention and every day has things in your life that take all those away from you it's basically like a budget your self-care activities your sleep hygiene your nutrition your physical activity your relationships your time spent on Hobbies these are all inputs yes they do take some certain amount of time and energy and attention from you but they give you back more than they take away as long as they are done within reason so
when you start to cut these things out to try to get all your work done like you can do it for a day or two don't get me wrong but when this becomes a chronic pattern when this just becomes your lifestyle that you just stop taking care of yourself you create a downward spiral it's a little bit like saying I am having trouble paying all my bills so I'm going to stop working like I'm going to stop going to my job and stop generating income so that I have more time to pay all these bills
you have removed your ability to access the resource that you need to solve problem do not chronically neglect your self-care when you are feeling stressed or overwhelmed or out of control in fact I know this seems backwards that is the time to double down on those things that is the time not only to not neglect them but to work on improving them because every single one of those things you will get out of it more than you put in if your expenses in your system are high life is taking a lot from you your income
also needs to be high to account for these expenses and your income is the quality with which you take care of yourself do not neglect it when times are tough Double Down On It focus on it even more refine your processes because the only way you're going to get out of this cycle is if you're able to actually replace what each day takes from you the fourth mistake I see people make is trying to be happy that one might sound a little weird at first because we all like to be happy and and we all
deserve to experience happiness the problem with trying to be happy is that happiness is actually a lot like sleep in that it's a it's a really difficult thing for us to just directly create and it's more like a byproduct of internal and external circumstances if it wasn't then all these toxic positivity people who say just be happy just cheer up they would have the right idea because that would imply that happiness is something we can create through sheer force of will or through sheer desire and as much as I wish that were true I would
love for that to be the case it simply isn't happiness is an emotion that occurs under certain circumstances and those circumstances cannot always be created or controlled sometimes they cannot even be known sometimes we do things that we think will make us happy and they don't sometimes we do things that we don't think we're going to enjoy and we find unexpected happiness it's not a completely predictable thing the other thing that tends to happen is when we focus on happiness and when we Chase happiness it it often is just never enough like you get some
of it but because it's the thing you're focused on and because it's the thing you're trying to create you end up just wanting more of it anyway and you constantly wonder how could this have been better could I done more of that could I have done more of that I left out a word in that sentence how can I reconfigure these varials to be even more happy and it it takes you out of the actual experience it reminds me a little bit of like um I think this was Tom Bilu he's the founder of quest
who said that I remember on uh you know Quest Nutrition like the protein bars I was listening to his podcast one time and he was talking about how he built wealth and he said Quest was like his six business or something like that like he tried and not completely succeeded at several other careers before then and he said prior to starting Quest he was trying to get rich and so like every job he would take or every product he would create his goal wasn't to create something awesome his goal was to create something that would
make him rich and and it never quite worked and Quest was the first time he actually focused on the product rather than the outcom and interestingly enough when he was focused just on the product he actually achieved a better outcome that is how so many things in life and so many things in our brains work if you focus on just trying to craft a lifestyle that brings together variables that matter to you that that has things you value and is as much as possible things that are important to you and that minimizes no one can
ever fully get rid of them the things you find frustrating or annoying or boring if you just focus on the product that is your life you will experience more happiness than if you explicitly say I'm GNA try to be happy today or I'm gonna do this thing because it makes me happy happiness is a product and we can't force it and when we hyperfixate on it just like sleep it often tends to slip out of our grasp focus on the product not the outcome the fifth thing I see people do that tanks their Mental Health
is trying to make everybody happy hopefully you already know that this is impossible but let me just give you an example of how it is literally impossible to try to make everyone around you happy I have two children two not a terribly large amount and yet there are many times in my day it's probably a regular everyday occurrence where there is no possible decision I can make that will make both of them happy even things as simple as like where should we drive through on the way home for dinner sometimes there is no compromise to
be found where should we go today sometimes we we go through all of our normal activities and one kid is like yes for items one two three four and no for 5 six seven8 and the other kid is no for one 2 three 4 and yes for 5 six S8 there is no overlap between their wants or needs or desires and what often happens is the the longer we try to find something that makes everybody happy like the the what's what the magic ninth choice that we haven't explored yet people just get frustrated and we
spend a lot of time trying to find the answer and often we end up doing nothing like I've had entire nights with my kids where the whole night was spent trying to figure out what game to play and we never actually by the time we figured it out if we ever even did like it was bedtime that's two people you probably have more than two people in your life when you try to make everybody happy you often end up pleasing no one the other fou with trying to make everybody happy is you're usually it says
everyone like in in the in the phrase in your head right but usually the full phrase is everyone except me and you know I'm not saying we should be completely focused on ourselves but when you try to make everybody else in your life happy you often forget about yourself and and that is also an unsustainable pattern if you're only living for other people like I see this happen all the time with like sobriety for example is a great example I'll get sober for you I'll get sober to make you happy it's not a it's not
a sustainable resource it's not a reliable plan you have to be in the equation somewhere if your entire life leaves you out of the equation you will never experience happiness and other people around you won't be happy either because they probably care about you if they don't care about you why you trying to make them happy if they do care about you you constantly sacrificing your own wants and needs for them will not make them happy they will be unhappy with you if you do that so do not focus exclusively on others instead I encourage
people to try to live a life that is in alignment with their core values and what they think they should do for other people based on who they are not on what those other people are telling you and the sixth mistake I see people make this one might hurt a little bit it hurts me a lot to say this one is trying to make people love you I spent an entire decade of my life with all of my social engagements basically following this strategy I don't I don't even mean love just romantically I just mean
mean like like or respect or care about from roughly ages 13 to 23 my entire social strategy was basically to try to read the wants and needs and desires of the people around me and then reflect that back to them basically try to be the person that they were saying they had always wanted to meet whether that was someone I was dating someone I was trying to be friends with co-workers bosses I just tried to be what people wanted me to be because I thought that the closer I got to their standards and their benchmarks
the more they would like me or love me therefore the more satisfying my social life would be this backfired immensely and I think there were several reasons for that one is people usually figure it out if you're like too good to be true people get skeptical and people might eventually start acting in ways or like asking you questions or testing you to try to trap you and see if you really mean the things you say or see if you're really the person you're portraying yourself to be eventually you'll get caught you'll get caught in some
double standard some contradiction people will will realize like oh he doesn't actually like he's not actually like this he's just trying to be this person for me and most people don't like that most people find that very unsatisfying and unflattering and they will probably end their relationship with you when they figure it out another problem is it's freaking exhausting like to essentially have you know you you might have heard about like autistic masking for example which is when uh someone with autism spectrum disorder essentially tries to play themselves off as neurotypical or just you know
act like other people act and they have to inhibit a lot of impulses and desires to do that and they have to think very very hard about how they respond to people socially and what they say and don't say and it's it's incredibly draining and it's horrible for your mental health to be masking all the time many people mask and and sometimes some some amount of masking is is socially necessary don't get me wrong but if you're masking all the time for any reason you will get so burnt out so quickly because it requires just
an unbelievable amount of cognitive effort to try to remember like who am I to this person who do they want me to be what are their expectations for me what did I say last time this topic came up etc etc etc biggest reason it doesn't work though I saved the best for last is because even if it works it doesn't work because if you present yourself as this idealized human being for this other person and and they fall in love with you because of that you still don't feel loved because you are an inner layer
to this Persona you've created and and they're love they love the outer later they love the person you're acting like you are to try to make them love you and and it it can work sometimes but but the person you actually are on the inside the one who really wants to feel that love is untouched because you've got this shell you've got this barrier this Persona around you so you don't actually feel loved it just it it feels like an act it feels like your character's on a TV show or something it doesn't work so
as much as I hate to say it because this is probably the most cliche thing I've ever said on this channel when it comes to relationships you do ultimately have to be authentic if if you want to actually be able to feel loved and have at least the chance of enjoying your relationships you cannot do it by crafting an artificial Persona you can't even if you feel like well but the real me is unlovable no one's going to love that guy or that girl or whatever you're guaranteeing that that is your outcome if that person
is never in the world if that person remains hidden inside of you buried under a shell of who you think other people want you to be then then you're right that person has a zero percent chance of being loved because that person isn't isn't there no one meets them no one ever has the opportunity to love them that person has to exist in the world to have any chance of being loved that's a hard one that's a scary one I should probably make a whole other video about that and I probably will but that's where
I'm going to end things for today I hope this was helpful and I'll see you next time take care
