A Guide to Mastering Your State of Mind
Life April 3rd, 2008 One of the most impactful things I’ve ever learned is to master the control of my state of mind. I first learned this from Anthony Robbins’ books and audio courses and I’ve since reinforced and enhanced this learning by studying the mind, dreams, and other authors and teachers of the mind and psychology. The premise behind what this is about, is that your state of mind affects everything you do in life, either directly or indirectly. Your state of mind has a direct impact on many actions within the body and these are highly tied to your emotions, or how you feel. So if you are willing to learn to control those things that affect your state of mind, then you can have whatever state of mind you like which ultimately leads you to feeling however you like!
What Affects Your State
Many physical attributes affect your state of mind as well as your experiences, words, actions and even things like your diet. However, a number of physical attributes are directly under your own control and so once you learn this, you can understand ways to control your own state. Here are some important things that have a direct response in your mind and on your body.
- Body posture – Hold your head up high and your shoulders back and its an automatic response in the mind of more confidence.
- Breathing – Slow deep breathing does many things for your health and body to remove toxins, this also delivers needed oxygen to your brain which affects your state.
- Facial Expressions – The most significant here is smiling. Its physically impossible to really smile and NOT affect the mind, its subconscious and automatic.
- Energy Levels – How well you energize your self including your activity, exercise, and health affect your mind as well.
- Diet – what you eat has an impact on your state of mind as well.
- Thoughts – Directly and massively impact your state of mind.
So, all these things are important, yet the most critical of all is your thoughts. It affects your emotions completely and the good thing and Psychic Mediums agree with this, thoughts are controlled entirely by the conscious mind, nothing else! What this means is that the way you feel and your state of mind is controlled by your thoughts.
Remembering a Specific State
The reasons this is important is that you can learn to remember a specific state of mind, and by thinking about that and visualizing everything about that state of mind, you can easily reproduce it and the response of feelings that it generated. You do this by:
- First pick the feeling you want to reproduce. For most people this is joy or happiness or peace or satisfaction.
- Then, think of the times that you completely feel that way. Spend some time to remember the details about those feelings and pick what has been the most intense moments of those feelings.
- Visualize the things you saw in that moment, put yourself into that surrounding, see the colors, the lights, the objects. Spend time visualizing the major components as well as the minor details, the imperfections you can see, the textures and shading, the shadows and reflections if there are any. Remember as many details as possible. Close your eyes if it helps to really visualize it in your mind. There is an interesting article on Practice This about closing your eyes to see more which is about visualization.
- Now remember the things you could hear in that moment. Think of all the sounds every object makes, or the actions or nature in that environment. Think of the sounds that each object makes when put into motion or moved.
- Move on to the sense of smell next. What specific smells can you remember. What season was it, can you smell it? Can you smell and sense the air, the humidity, the people and objects in that setting?
- What feelings or senses of touch did you have. What were you feeling in your body? What clothes are touching you skin? Can you feel anything against your skin, the wind perhaps? What are you touching and how does it feel exactly. Rough, smooth, what other textures. Spend some time and just imagine feeling all those things to put yourself into the same place that you experiences this emotion you are after.
- Change your own body or face to match what you remember. Were you smiling? Were you moving about in motion, if you can, do those things while visualizing all these other senses to put yourself back exactly into that memory.
All of these steps will bring back memories of that same emotion and state of mind which will in turn, leave you feeling that same state of mind just from remembering it.
Activate that State
The best thing to do with the ability to follow these visualization steps to get into a state of mind is to next, associate that state of mind with something instant. This allows you to activate that state and learn to call upon it whenever you want. One technique for this is to associate that state of mind with some words and actions you can do and say. Pick something that isn’t common for you to do and use that to activate that same state of mind. You want something unique. It could be to snap your fingers, clap your hands, a funny face, a specific body stance, a weird or loud word or phrase, any of these things could be used to associate with your state of mind. To associate it, just do your action or say your words and immediately begin thinking of all those feelings and memories about that state. Do this out loud and in action a number of times over and over. Put some energy into it and be enthusiastic. Keep repeating it until you seem to be able to really feel that every time you activate your state with your words or action you can feel or sense that state of mind and memories it is generated from.
Practice Switching States
And finally practice is where this all becomes useful. To change state, you need to not only associate that state but practice switching states quickly. Pick another state of mind (ideally something quite opposite to the state you first picked) and go through this process again. Do all the steps to learn that new state and really identify with the feelings and senses for that new state. Make a new association (or action) and repeat it a number of times.
Now, you have two separate states, each with its own action. Practice switching between these states by alternating your activation. Start off by giving yourself about 15 seconds in each state. Practice to change faster and faster until you can literally change your state of mind in just an instant. You should be able to activate all those feelings, your memories, thoughts and even all the senses in just a short moment. This can take a bit of time to practice, but just 10 minute sessions for a few nights in a row can really get you quick with this.
Actually Using your State of Mind
So, now that you know you can change your state of mind just by activating it and changing your thoughts and since you’ve conditioned your mind to instantly change its state basically on command, you can do this whenever you want. I’m assuming most people picked a positive set of feelings to learn to associate so you can now use that to change your perception, mood and responses in more difficult or not as friendly environments. Maybe its with someone or something you don’t like but want to kill the negative emotions that go along with that? Well, this will work for that too. As long as you have a stronger associations with your activation to put you into that state of mind, than the things in that situations to put in the state you don’t want, then you can instantly change your mindset make things more like how you really want them.
The more you use this, the more you’ll look to use it and the more you will train your subconscious to recover from feelings and mind sets you don’t want to experience. You can literally get to a point where anything you consider bad or to be replaced state wise, happens automatically by your mind once you’ve become so practiced at doing this.
So, I encourage you to look for ever opportunity to use your knew state associations and practice it. Learn new associations and use them as well. You will eventually be doing this to every negative response subconsciously or automatically without even thinking about. You can experience a lot more joy and happiness in life if you change the way your mind responds to stimuli. My next article I’m going to publish is about how you can use this idea of controlling your mind to impact EVERY response you make in your life.
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April 3rd, 2008 at 1:31 PM
i like the topic and the steps you describe one needs to go through: remember, activate, switch, repeatedly use.
I’ve adopted something similar to control my kids behavior. I switch my mind when they cross the line and I become very serious alerting they must behave. When they are back on track I am switching back to nice daddy. That way it is easy for me and for them to learn how to behave each with other and outside family too, which is more important. Outside world is less forgiving…
BTW, I think blogrdoc does something similar
http://blogrdoc.com/blog/2008/02/14/the-jedi-mind-trick-is-real-use-it-to-get-results/
April 3rd, 2008 at 6:34 PM
Alik, Its great to hear you are already practicing this to some degree. I wrote the article more on the angle of emotions but it certainly fits with something like how you respond to others as well. I’ll have a follow up article about this whole state of mind topic in a few days where I look at using it to control your response to something. I think you will definitely like that article as well as that sounds like what you are already doing with your kids for responding to their behavior!
I’d read that before from blogrdoc actually, I’m sure others will find the link interesting as well if this article sparked some interest.
April 6th, 2008 at 9:24 AM
“Life is a State of Mind”..great post keep up the good work I like your Pic.
April 6th, 2008 at 10:40 PM
hello,
I was wondering if you would like to exchange links. My readers would benefit from your blog, and vice versa. I’m sorry, I didn’t know any other way of getting in touch with you! Let me know.
best regards!
Frederic
May 27th, 2008 at 4:29 AM
I found your site at the blog carnival. Really impressive and informative site that you have here. Keep up the good work!
HomeSpun Granny
September 14th, 2009 at 12:12 AM
i liked your article a lot and i’m glad it’s something i’ve stumbeled upon because i’ve been wanting to be able to change my state of mind for quite some time now. i have a question though: i wasn’t clear on whether or not you recommended that one trains his/herself to be able to activate SEVERAL states of mind and be able to switch to any one of them instantanously or to just train self on ONE chosen state. maybe you meant that you develop several mind states and be able to turn to each with a different word or action? but how would you decide which state to resort to? maybe depending on the negative situation/feelings that you’re trying to free yourself from?
September 14th, 2009 at 8:14 AM
noha, I’d definitely say start with a single good state you want to practise with and learn to get into quickly. When you are able to hold that state of mind and jump to it easily, you can learn to use additional states for differing situations. Deciding is a matter of using the best response mode appropriate for that situation or environment. Picking the right one is simple picking the one that you have responded with before in the best way. States of mind all come from experience so you have to draw on your own experiences in order to activate a state of mind so it is something you must get from your own experiences. Good luck!
February 10th, 2011 at 7:14 AM
This is something really impressive and the info that you have shared is really good. I like the steps that you have told us to activate, remember, switch.
July 10th, 2012 at 9:16 AM
I believe I am sort of agoraphobic – but I’m not actually afraid of going out! I simply believe that it’s a difficult thing to do for me (past conditioning trauma-based). How can I change my belief in me? Like you say, I believe it, therefore I’m right, but my friend tells me I’m wrong. I want to change my belief, but don’t know how.