Get Out Of Autopilot Mode

My 18 year old daughter recently secured her new driver’s license. It was a wonderful and stressful experience all at once. Living through her learning journey with her gave me a new appreciation for the rules of the road. If you drive you are aware of the principle, “you steer where you look”.  Since our eyes determine the path our vehicles will follow, new drivers are trained to keep their eyes on the road as a way to ensure safety and develop their skills which cultivates a discipline that help new drivers manage distractions.

Thoughts much like sight pilot us towards a healthy or unhealthy emotional and mental life and determine the direction in which we will go. Life circumstances, genetics and socio-economic influences and our experiences shape well-worn pathways in our thought life. Depressive thoughts, anxious thoughts, victim thinking or hopeful and purposeful thoughts are influenced by our life experiences and what was modeled to us in our home-life.

The challenge many of us experience is how to stop unhelpful thoughts and lay new neural track for different and healthier thoughts to travel on. We tend to get discouraged when we try something new and it does not work or when we try to think positive thoughts and the “feel good” feeling is temporary and fleeting.

Henry David Thoreau aptly writes, “As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”

Thoughts affect our emotions and pilot our behaviours. For example, if I think I have failed someone close to me, I may feel sadness and shame. If I continue to dwell on how I failed that person and how their opinion of me has changed for the worse, then I start to feel low mood and low energy. I will start to feel depressed and have self-pity. If I continue to think on the event in an unhealthy way, I may become hypersensitive to the fact that I have not heard from this person and may start to feel increased shame, rejection and a sense of unworthiness. My behaviour would be to withdraw and to isolate where I continue to ruminate on this pattern of thought and may become increasingly anxious.

This emotional and mental fact pattern indicates that my negative belief about my self-concept was activated putting me in “autopilot mode”. Staying in autopilot mode can be threatening to your well-being. At some point you have to choose to get out of robotically thinking harmful and depreciating thoughts. You can stop, challenge and change unhelpful thoughts and decide to think the kind of thoughts you “wish to dominate your life”. Continue to think these thoughts and pilot your life to a new destination (responses & behaviours).

Hope goes into your future and issues you an invitation to join it there. If you want a hopeful, fulfilling and joyous life you must choose to stop allowing your life circumstances to put you in autopilot focusing on what’s not working, how you failed, who rejected you and how you can never achieve your goals. Consider this blog an alarm signal going off in the cockpit of your life alerting you to the danger of self-sabotage, isolation, depression and anxiety. Get back to the instrumentation panel of your thought life – reset your coordinates towards happiness, hope, empowerment and freedom and then keep thinking these thoughts over and over and over again until you arrive at your new destination and, once there keep thinking these thoughts over and over and over again so that you stay out of the danger zone.