If an alien landed on earth, would it assume that people in the rich world were happy?
Read the article, or skip straight to resources.
If someone from a poor country came to a rich one, he might notice how people have rich lives, supermarkets, cars and buses, medicine and hospitals; he may notice that even the poorer people live luxury lives compared to his own life. He might, therefore, assume that everyone would be happy and comfortable.
Yet, this is not so. If he were to look more carefully, he would see that these lucky people had all sorts of problems of their own. He would notice some people drinking too much, some people always getting angry, others overeating, and so on.
He might look at all of this in bewilderment, thinking, "How can people have such emotional problems when their lives are so easy?"
The funny thing is that if he immigrated and joined these people, he might find in a few years that he, too, would start to have emotional stress.
So, what's going on?
Well, for all our modern civilisation, hardly anyone has learned how to use our minds and bodies to shape the way we feel. If you feel bad, do you know how to change the way you feel, or do you rely on the usual ineffective methods of drinking or eating, or doing something else that's not really going to help you?
You don't take control of a car until you've learned to drive it. If you need to use a chainsaw, you first read the instructions carefully. When using a telephone, you learn how to speak and how to use it.
But when you learned to take control of your body after you were born, did you learn how to use your mind?
Probably not — there was no one who knew how to teach you how!
You have daily stresses. That's normal. But if you're like most of the population, not knowing how to use your mind and take control of your emotions, then that emotional stress becomes emotional needs, and you cope with it in ways that don't help. Ways that don't change how you feel tomorrow about the same stresses.
Do you use emotional eating to cope? Or drinking? Or shopping for things you can't afford? How about chocolate or crisps? Do you dislike who you've become? Perhaps you smoke and can't give up, or you often get irritable and angry. Maybe you just feel generally yuck and demotivated.
Imagine for a moment that someone just like yourself were to learn how to take control of those feelings. Imagine that person starting to relax at the same things that used to cause all that tension. Imagine that the old things that used to stress you out instead now lead you to a point of calm, clear thinking, with a curious and active mind… and you start to find solutions where you used to find only problems.
What kind of a world would that be? How different would it be from how you've been feeling? What effects would it have on your life? Your body? Your wallet? The people around you and the people you love?
Learning to take control of your own mind is a vital part of modern life, and sadly terribly neglected. It's an important part of any therapy, and — I believe — a critical part of any long-term cure from serious emotional problems.
Resources
There are some things you can do to take back control of your emotions and emotional state. Here are a couple of resources for you to look at.
- Some fun everyday tips for managing your state.
- Some self-help tips for specific problems.
- A description of a few therapies and processes.
- A hypnotherapy download that you can burn to CD or play on an MP3 player; suggested titles are Stop your Negativity and Stress Relief.
- A book on self-hypnosis (or for the UK) to help yourself with all sorts of issues.
