Training your mental aikido

Channeling, not choosing, your mental state

We don’t often get the chance to choose how we feel about something. At best we can change how intensely bad or good we feel about something. Rarely can we change how something make us feel outright.

Even though you can’t always to choose to feel in the short term, it’s a let easier to choose with what you’re going to do with those emotions, once you have them.

If I get rejected, I usually don’t have the opportunity to choose to react with this the same way I might react to winning a millions dollars. I can rationalize, cope or distract myself to lessen the intensity, but getting rejected will still suck.

However, once I have that blip of unhappiness, I do have a choice in how I use it. I can spin it into something self-destructing where I use that single example as a means to attack my self-worth. Or I can spin it into something positive refocusing myself on self-improvement.

Mental aikido and redirected unhappiness

Aikido is a Japanese martial art that emphasizes redirecting the force of the attack rather that apposing it head on. From this perspective< the attacker’s own aggression can be turned against him. Similarly, if you’re stuck with a negative emotions, you can redirect that energy back towards something useful. This kind of mental aikido certainly isn’t something I practice perfectly, but I think it’s a better way to look at the problem of unhappy moments.

Two things have happened since I started taking this approach. First, the intensity of negative emotions goes down. Unhappiness doesn’t get a chance to fester when it is properly redirected.

Second, the feeling of control increases. Yes, you still feel lousy, but knowing you have some control as to where that energy is going gives a bit of calm in the center of storm.

Training your mental aikido

Practicing mental aikido is mostly two steps:

1. Separating the constructive uses of negative emotions from destructive ones.

2. Reminding yourself to use the first when you’re feeling unhappy.

For the first step, I’ve started to pay attention to what I’m good at when I’m facing a particular mental state. If I’m angry about something, I’m often better in exercising. When I’ve been rejected, that energy often helps in working harder. Stress allows me to do better on routine, non-mental tasks. Your deflection strategies will differ from mine, but if you try out many things you may be surprised to find your actually stronger, more creative or diligent when caught up in some bout of unhappiness that when you’re joyful.

The second step perhaps more difficult . Mental states have an addicting quality to them. Good or bad, we want to feed our emotions, not cancel them. Sad people listen to depressing music, not cheerful songs. Even if they don’t like feeling sad, they take steps to intensity that feeling. This is one reason I’ve found mental aikido more successful that trying to change my emotional state. Since we’re irrationally addicted to the emotions we experience rather then change it.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 652