Crack the Code!

You have needs, which is probably not a newsflash. You may also be aware of what your needs are, for the most part. Survival needs, social needs, spiritual needs, and that set of subjective needs that come with being a self-conscious ego – your need to feel safe, loved, capable and worthy.

That last set is a little tricky given how easily your feelings can lose touch with what’s really going on (i.e., with Reality).

One of the most common types of unhappiness is known as disappointment, which registers the degree in which Reality fails to match up to your expectations. Have you ever been disappointed? Of course you have. You’re human.

If humans could crack the code of disappointment, there would be a lot less unhappiness in the world. Less regret, less depression, less suffering. Less resentment and hostility, too, since these are a common fallout when others and the world around us don’t fall in line with our expectations. So we could expect a decrease in interpersonal, intertribal, and international conflict as well.

The above window offers some insight into cracking the code of disappointment, and therefore also a way to authentic happiness.

Vertical lines divide the window into the three conventional frames of time: past, present, and future. A slanting line makes another division, distinguishing fields of things of which we are generally not conscious (unconscious) from what we have some consciousness of (conscious-ish). The image of a slingshot occupies the frame of present time, as a reminder that both happiness and unhappiness are created in the moment.

Let’s start there.

Anchored in the ground as the fulcrum of creative change, our slingshot is grounded in need. As newborn infants, our dominant needs concerned physical survival and to some extent connection and belonging. In Mentallurgy terms, our lower braintract was busy establishing a nervous state and emotional mood that mapped adaptively on the Reality of our early environment. Provident taller powers and a well-resourced environment trained our nervous system into a calm and coherent state, one that enabled us to let go and open up to Reality in a posture of basic trust.

More likely, however, our taller powers and early environment were not perfectly provident and fully sufficient to our needs. We didn’t always get what we needed when we needed it. This discrepancy between the demand of our needs and the provision of Reality prompted our lower braintract (in Mentallurgy LifeChange called “the Alchemist”) to mix an electrochemical and emotional concoction of anxiety – predisposing us in some degree to insecurity, uneasiness, and vigilance over whether Reality was all we needed it to be.

However it happened to go for us, our internal state was set somewhere between faith and anxiety, and this has continued as our default state ever since.

We can do things and take things and get distracted with other things that calm us down when we feel stressed, but it’s this baseline default internal state of our nervous system that we are seeking to adjust. It’s out of this internal state that our desire arises.

Desire is the appetitive energy that motivates us toward what we expect will satisfy a need. In the window above, expectation is correlated to the frame of future time, looking out (ex-specting) with anticipation to its fulfillment. Absent a drive to reach or move out in pursuit of what we need, we would likely suffer or even die without it.

So far, the code is pretty straightforward. We have needs which arouse the desire to satisfy those needs, along with an expectation of where, when, how and by what our satisfaction will come. Evolution has developed this program from need, through desire, and to satisfaction with a high level of efficiency across countless species over many millions of years.

With the arrival of our own species, this very efficient code in animal survival, adaptation, and fulfillment got complicated.

Typically we are conscious (-ish) of our desires and of what we expect will fulfill them. We don’t always get it right, though. Honestly, we hardly ever get it right. If we could record all of the expectations that we project into the future during the span of just a single day, we’d find only a small percentage of them actually “coming true.”

Most of the time we are having to manage our desires, modify our goals, adjust our aim, and update our expectations – or deal with the disappointment.

To really crack the code of disappointment we have to go below the threshold of conscious awareness. Otherwise we will just continue faulting Reality and blaming other people for falling short of our expectations – and that could go on for a long, long time. In a sense, the decisive “breakthrough” in cracking the code involves breaking through this threshold separating the field of what we are conscious (-ish) of, from what lies below and behind our conscious awareness.

So let’s come back to what was said about our needs, specifically those deeper survival and social needs that determined so much of our infantile experience. Because our taller powers weren’t perfect and those early conditions weren’t ideal, our Alchemist set the emotional tone of our internal nervous state to just off, or farther away from, the composure of inner calm. The mismatch between our need for safety, nourishment, intimacy and belonging and a Reality that did not provide for these needs prompted an “anxious adaptation.”

Part of this anxious adaptation was an emerging worldview or mental picture of Reality that corresponded to our experience. Our world, then, was – and to a large extent still is – the objective counterpart to our internal state and the satisfaction (or frustration) of needs that it registers. As Mentallurgy LifeChange frequently reminds us, our worldview is not a detailed and clear facsimile of Reality but is rather our impression of it as gathered and constructed from experience.

Our world is a construct of beliefs. Better yet, because most of it stands behind rather than in front of our conscious awareness and operates unconsciously, it is a construct of assumptions – beliefs that are built into our perspective and basically invisible to us.

Assumptions filter and shape our perception of what’s out there, like a pair of eyeglasses on our nose or contact lenses on our eyeballs.

When need arouses the desire that motivates our pursuit of what we expect will satisfy us, the particular trajectory and intended aim of our expectation is already set by certain assumptions we unconsciously hold – or do they hold us? In addition to representing Reality to fit our experience, assumptions often carry an ultimatum imperative that, if we could pull them up into the light of awareness like blind fish from the ocean depths, would sound something like, “I can’t (or won’t) be happy (or satisfied) unless (or until) this happens or that is true.”

And that is how so many of us suffer disappointment in life, occasionally or chronically unhappy over the sense that Reality has, yet again, let us down.

The Secret Door to Happiness

Let’s say you suffer from chronic anxiety. What do you know is real?

Certainly your anxiety is real, isn’t it? The muscle tension, jittery nerves, headache, elevated heart rate, high blood pressure, GI upset – all of that is not merely “in your head.” Basic medical instruments would be able to measure and verify these symptoms as real events occurring in your body.

So your anxiety is real. But consider what you are anxious about: Is that real?

We know that anxiety isn’t only a syndrome of physical events in the body. You also need to be telling yourself a story. Typically this is a story about something you can’t control (or believe you can’t), but which you are convinced will adversely impact your life.

In Mentallurgy LifeChange we call such lines of thinking “worry stories.” In most cases what you are anxious about is not real, but mostly (or maybe entirely) imaginary.

Many people have little awareness of how their body and mind interact. In your anxious state, it may be difficult to distinguish symptoms in your body and stories in your mind, tangled as they are in the stream of experience.

Our modern Western preference for rationalism (clear and logical distinctions) favors mind over body, since that’s where our ego is centered. Consequently Western therapies have leaned more into cognition (thinking) than emotion (feeling) for solutions to anxiety and other forms of mental suffering.

More recently we have discovered how intricately involved mind and body are with each other. There seems to be a reciprocal relationship between them, where events in the body communicate with thoughts in the mind. From this perspective, your chronic anxiety is a mind-body (or psychosomatic) experience generated out of the looping feedback from mind to body, and from body to mind.

The Western division of mind and body has continued to shape our theories and therapies, however. Now, in addition to a variety of rational “talk” therapies – where therapists talk with clients to help straighten out their thinking and clarify or correct erroneous beliefs – there have developed countless more “drug” therapies to address the symptoms of suffering in the body.

At the moment, you have numerous options of talk therapy or drug therapy, or some combination of both. The mental health industry is currently moving away from rational (talk) treatment protocols, to prescribing medications that purport to supplement or re-balance the biochemistry of your body and brain.

It’s moving this way largely because drugs are plentiful – with new ones being invented (or existing ones relabeled and pushed back to market) all the time.

Drugs are also quicker and more convenient than sitting in talk therapy, and prescribing doctors can simply adjust the dosage or add new drugs as they deem necessary. Insurance companies are more likely to cover prescription medications over talk therapy since labels, dosages, and symptoms are easier to measure than subjective reports of “feeling better” after talking with a counselor.

But whether it’s by talk therapy, drug therapy, or some combination that you’re seeking relief, the success rate across the board is dismal (less than 50 percent). Besides that, it’s costly and time-intensive (for talk therapy especially) and comes with side-effects that can sometimes be worse than the suffering it’s intended to alleviate (for drug therapy).

Mentallurgy LifeChange offers a better way.

It keeps mind and body in the picture, but not as divisions or parts of you that might be treated separately. Your mind (called the Storyteller) and your body (the Alchemist) are indeed in a reciprocal psychosomatic relationship, but your “door to happiness” and out of chronic anxiety will not be found in either one.

When your mind tells a worry story and trips your body into a panic state – or vice versa, when your body experiences the symptoms of panic and trips your mind into a worry story – everything is working by design.

The cognitive process (in your mind) is how you determine, discover, or invent what something means, while the emotional process (in your body) is how it feels. You are constantly checking in with what it means and how it feels.

But what exactly is “it”?

Your mind doesn’t tell just any story, and neither are the  symptoms in your body merely random events. Mentallurgy names “it” your mental object, as what presently occupies the focus of your attention. Your brain is the mental theater where this mental object is being projected, and the screen inside your mental theater is another name for present attention.

You can’t spin a worry story or fall into a panic state unless you are focusing on a mental object that feeds your mind and body the information such a story and state requires.

Information in the form of your mental object gets to the screen by one or more of three possible channels, which we can summarize with the terms perceive, retrieve, and conceive.

What you perceive with your senses is in the present and may be external or internal to your body. What you retrieve by memory presumably happened in the past. And what you conceive by your imagination might eventually be realized in the near or distant future, or it might be utterly unrealistic – even impossible.

The important thing to understand is that, by whatever single or combination of channels your mental object arrives on the screen of attention, your brain will faithfully send the information to your mind and body for processing into meaning and feeling, respectively.

So, how does that help you?

Well, good news up front is that you don’t have to take a lot of time analyzing the story you’re telling yourself, about how awful things are or what catastrophe is about to befall you. Nor is it necessary to pop pills in order to stabilize or elevate your mood.

Since your worry story and panic state are tied to and fed by what you’re focusing on, all you need to do is change your focus or its mental object.

Mentallurgy LifeChange offers four simple techniques that, with consistent practice, will help you begin living the life you really want.

• SWAP your mental object for another one in the same channel. Look at something else, recall a different memory, imagine a more positive outcome. The future is an open field of possibilities. If fantasy is your thing, why not create a picture of things going well?

• SWITCH the channel to a different one. If you’re dreading something that isn’t even real (conceive), turn your attention to something in your immediate environment (perceive). “Noticing Green” is one easy MLC switching skill: just look for anything colored green in your vicinity and you’ll notice the anxiety starting to dissipate.

• SHIFT attention from what you can’t control to something you can. By definition anxiety is the dread of being held accountable or negatively impacted by something outside your control. Instead of casting your focus far away or into the unknown future, SHIFT your attention to what you can do about it right now.

• Imagine a control panel (or mixing board) inside the projection room of your mental theater where you can change the attributes of your mental object. Simply SLIDE a setting to change the color or make it black and white. Make it blurry or more distinct. Increase the volume or drop it down; mute it if you want. Use a SLIDE to rotate your mental object and change its orientation. Move it from the center of your screen to the periphery, into a corner, or far into the background. Each seemingly minor change alters the information sent to your mind and body, changing also what it means and how it feels.

Mentallurgy LifeChange is about making choices and taking control where you can, in order to start living the life you really want. Obviously chronic anxiety is not the life you really want. Understand what you are doing to create the anxiety, then simply use a different “recipe” to produce a more desirable outcome.

You already know that you’re capable of creating an experience you don’t want. Now use that power for good!

What’s On Your Screen?

Mentallurgy LifeChange is a system for helping you create the life you really want. Rather than waste too much time (and money) on talking through your troubles or popping pills to help you cope, Mentallurgy gets you into the mental theater of your brain where you are creating the experience to begin with. Unhappy people don’t (and typically won’t) acknowledge their creative responsibility in how miserable they feel or how messed up their life is.

Your brain is a mediator, and what it mediates is the threshold between your body and its external environment. It is constantly working to match your internal state with the changing conditions of the outer world. If you come upon a wild lion in the street, your brain will quickly match those conditions with a state of anxiety, which will either freeze you in your tracks or get you running in the opposite direction. This matching work goes the other way as well, such as when you look out on the world from a depressed mood and fixate on everything wrong or hopeless that confirms how you feel.

Your internal state (or mood) is the product of numerous chemical events conspiring in your body as a syndrome. These various chemicals (e.g., enzymes, electrolytes, hormones, and peptides) serve to effect metabolic changes, activate cells, glands, and organs, and either store away or unlock the energy your body needs. These don’t simply happen on their own, but for the most part must be monitored and regulated by your brain.

But your brain isn’t a passive recorder of your outer world either. There is simply too much information out there for your brain to register, organize, and interpret, so it “pays attention” to what is most urgent, interesting, and relevant. It identifies or invents patterns out of the information coming in, putting it together in ways that make sense and carry meaning. This business of meaning-making uses logical operators called symbols to decipher and build the patterns that matter to you.

In Mentallurgy we distinguish these two “faces” of your brain – one face looking inward to the body and the other face looking outward as your pattern-finding mind – as your lower and upper braintracts, respectively.

Because the lower braintract is where the neural activity of your brain interacts with the endocrine (chemical) system of your body, we affectionately name it the Alchemist.

And because the upper braintract is where the neural activity of your brain uses language, symbols, and speech to construct the narratives of your mind, we name it the Storyteller.

We can further elucidate on these two braintracts by associating them with a preferred hemisphere of your brain. The Alchemist is centered in your right hemisphere, which neuroscience has shown to have more downward nerve projections than the left side.

For its part, your left hemisphere is host to the major language centers in your brain, which also makes it more gifted in symbolic and abstract processing. It is therefore home to the Storyteller and your more outward-looking mind.

So, by this two-way interaction of your mind and body through your brain, the experience your’re having right now is generated. Once again, your brain might be working to match a story to the mood you’re in, or it might be working to change your mood to better match the story of what’s going on around you. It’s not one or the other; adjustments and more major changes are constantly being made across both braintracts simultaneously.

When you give attention to “how it feels” – it referring to your object of focus or your more general experience – you are favoring the lower braintract of the Alchemist. When you give attention to “what it means” you are favoring the upper braintract of the Storyteller. At any given moment you can ask how it feels or what it means and you’ll get a very different perspective on what’s going on.

Just now I clarified the “it,” in how IT feels or what IT means, as the object of your mental focus – whatever you happen to be putting your attention on right now. In Mentallurgy this is called your mental object, and IT is the point where your two braintracts connect. If your IT is that wild lion in the street, then your Alchemist translates that mental object into the chemistry that will motivate an appropriate response, while your Storyteller translates the visual image into a narrative about dangerous predators and violent attacks.

Quite often the mental object on your screen isn’t registering the sensory information of something in your actual environment. You might be recalling and ruminating on something that happened yesterday or five years ago. Alternatively you could be imagining something in your future, tomorrow or five years from now. As far as your brain is concerned, how your mental object got there – by perception, recollection, or imagination – is secondary to the fact that it’s there. Real or unreal; past, present, or hypothetical, your brain is going to convert the mental object into a story and its matching mood – or into a mood and its matching story.

If you are ruminating on a past regret or fixating on a dreaded future, are you able to change your story or state very easily? Not so long as you keep that particular mental object on your screen of attention! You might spend time in talk therapy trying to rework your story and make it more realistic. Or you could start drug therapy with a handful of prescription medications to blunt your nerves and flatten your mood. But fair warning: You’re likely in for the long haul, and better prepare for the side-effects that no one can predict.

Or else you can change your mental object. Put your attention on something positive, something that attracts you or inspires you, or something you can accomplish and feel good about. In doing that, you’ll find your mood lifting and the story you’re living into will brighten and become more meaningful.

YOU control what’s on the screen. It’s time to take responsibility and start choosing the life you really want.

Happiness is Asking Better Questions

Mentallurgy LifeChange teaches you how to take creative control of your life. If you started the game from the beginning (“Start Here 1-2-3”) and followed the steps of the change process in order, then you are already enjoying more of the life you really want.

Creative change really begins with asking the right questions. Once upon a time you probably asked some good questions, and either received or discovered some decent answers. But then answers became conclusions (the formal end of questioning), conclusions became assumptions, and eventually assumptions closed off the possibility for greater growth, discovery, and innovation.

Truth is, creators never stop asking questions, and the best questions are the ones that can put your hands on the currents of change. There are four currents (or forces) constantly impinging on the quality and success of your life, and if you can better understand how they work and interact, you will soon be able to use them to your benefit.

As is our practice in Mentallurgy LifeChange, we will explore these four currents in light of what we know about the brain. At the center of the diagram above is your brain (facing right), split down the center lengthwise and showing the left hemisphere with your limbic system and brain stem exposed. The arrows show how your brain is involved in the coordination of what we are calling the four currents of change. Let’s look at them more closely.

Your brain stem is the part of your brain that regulates the autonomic process in your body – breathing, heart rate, body temperature, blood pressure, etc. In Mentallurgy we call your body The Alchemist, as its glands and organs interact to mix up the chemistry (enzymes and hormones) that produces your internal state, or mood. Your internal state is one of the major forces in the stream of creative change.

Moving upward along that same vertical axis brings us to the crown of your head, and the region of your brain called the parietal lobe. This is where your sense of orientation is managed, including not just how your body is oriented in space but where you are in the context of your surroundings. How aware of your present situation are you? Are you oblivious to what’s going on around you, or do you have an acute understanding of your context?

Shifting to the horizontal axis and starting at the left brings into view a third force, one that pushes you from behind. It can take some effort to make habit visible, so to speak, because it operates prior to conscious thought and choice. When you first learn a new skill there is significant dedication of conscious attention to the control and coordination of movement.

With practice, however, your brain begins to memorize the routine, which effectively moves it back and down into networks responsible for “muscle memory.” Your cerebellum – that dense region behind the brain stem in the diagram above – initiates the automatic routine (habit) in any mastered skill.

Across to the right puts us in your frontal cortex, where all that focused attention and deliberate control in the learning of a skill is concentrated. This is the part of your brain that enables you to look down the road and into the future, to inhibit spontaneous impulses in order to stay on track with your intended goal. In Mentallurgy LifeChange the process of designing a strategy capitalizes on (and further develops) your ability to look ahead, clarify your goal, and make forward progress.

To truly be a creator of the life you really want, it’s important to take these four currents into account. Ultimately to be successful you will need to:

1. Put yourself in a creative state (color code green: confidence, desire, joy, optimism).
2. Orient yourself responsibly and realistically to the larger system of your surroundings.
3. Scrutinize the habits that have been pushing you thus far.
4. Move strategically in the direction of what you really want.

So begin by asking yourself the following questions:

• Look within: How are you feeling? What are you saying to yourself?
• Look around: What is the situation? Where are your resources?
• Look behind: What have you been doing? Is it helping or hindering progress?
• Look ahead: Where do you want to go? What’s the best way to get there?

Unhappy people typically don’t ask such questions of themselves. All the while, however, they are engaged in self-talk that pulls them down into the whirlpool of negative moods. Because they are so preoccupied with their fear, anger, or sadness, unhappy people have a very narrow (not to mention skewed) view on the reality of their present situation.

They also keep doing things the same way over and over again, despite the meager payoff and frequent failure of their efforts. And if you should interview chronically unhappy people, you’d find they aren’t really reaching for much and lack clarity regarding what they really want.

Unhappy people tend to want only to be less unhappy. They are anxious and want to be less anxious. They are frustrated and want to be less frustrated. They are depressed and want to be less depressed. As you know, there are experts in the wings who will take their money, diagnose “the problem,” and design a treatment plan around the problem.

These so-called experts (talk therapists and drug therapists) will regard it a “success” if the anxiety, frustration, or depression has been managed (ideally eliminated). Therapeutic success, in other words, is a less unhappy client or patient! But less yellow (anxiety), less red (frustration), or less blue (depression) is not at all the same as green (happiness) – and more green, is it?

Is this new to you? Maybe now is the time to step into the game of Mentallurgy LifeChange. Just go the the category “Start Here 1-2-3” and proceed through the posts in their numbered order. There’s no reason you can’t start living the life you really want – right now!