Four Steps

Your mind is your biggest ally. It gives you the capacity to choose where to focus your attention so that your actions align with your true self.

YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN

THE FOUR STEPS 

Step 1: Relabel—Identify your deceptive brain messages and the uncomfortable sensations; call them what they really are.  

 Step 2: Reframe—Change your perception of the importance of the deceptive brain messages; say why these thoughts keep bothering you: They are false brain messages (It’s not ME, it’s just my BRAIN!).   

Step 3: Refocus—Direct your attention toward an activity or mental process that is wholesome and productive—even while the false and deceptive  thoughts, and are still present and bothering you.   

Step 4: Revalue—Clearly see the thoughts,  for what they are, simply sensations caused by deceptive brain messages that are not true and that have little to no value (they are something to dismiss, not focus on).

FREE WON’T

While you are not responsible for the emergence of thoughts, you are responsible for what you do with them once they arise. 

You have a choice in whether or not to respond when your brain puts out the call—this is the essence of Free Won’t. 

The role of conscious free will [aka Free Won’t] would be, then, not to initiate a voluntary act but rather to control whether the act takes place. 

We may view the unconscious initiatives for voluntary actions as “bubbling up” in the brain. The conscious will then select  which of these initiatives may go forward to an action and which ones to veto and abort, with no act appearing. 

You really can’t decide or determine what will initially grab your attention—your brain does. 

However, once your initial attention is grabbed, you can determine whether you keep your attention focused on that object (and act on it) or veto it based on the principle of Free Won’t. 

Free Won’t turns out to be of the utmost importance because it tells us that we have, in essence, the power to veto almost any action, even though the desire to perform that action is generated by brain mechanisms entirely outside of our conscious attention and awareness.

When you refuse to give in to the content of your deceptive brain messages by not performing the action your brain is telling you to do, your Uh Oh Center fires even more intensely, which makes you feel extremely uncomfortable. You want to do virtually anything to get rid of those feelings both physical and emotional, and know that simply following your deceptive brain messages will accomplish that task in the short term. The problem, as we all must learn the hard way over time, is that doing so will only fuel the negative messages and further entrench the maladaptive circuits ever more powerfully into your brain. Said another way, short-term relief rapidly causes more pain and suffering, not less.