It’s Friday night. You’ve had a rough week at work. Tiffany has been complaining about you every day of the week (it’s always the Tiffany’s) and you are completely over it. You get home, grab a bag of Doritos for dinner, and lay down on the couch with no intention of getting up until the next Monday comes up. Or when someone decides to check on you because they think you’ve gone missing. Whichever comes first.
Your phone lights up; it’s your friend asking you if you’re excited about the party tonight which you completely forgot about. The alcohol is of course very appealing but you have no interest in socializing whatsoever. It takes some convincing but your friend manages to drag your cranky face along.
You arrive and you resistantly socialize for an hour, trying to hide that you would much rather be watching some reality TV show at home on your own. But after a while, more people start coming in. Some you haven’t seen for a while and you start catching up with them. You drink a few beers or shots of vodka if that’s your thing. You get a little bit drunk, the music gets a little bit louder and before you know it you start dancing away in a night that turns out to be the highlight of your week.
Just a few hours ago your week was shit. You felt depressed, and unmotivated and life seemed pointless. Now you feel energetic, euphoric, and on top of the world. So what happened?
Controlling your state
Many of us live on autopilot. We wake up feeling some kind of way and accept that this is the “state” of the day. Maybe we chug some coffee to compensate but it doesn’t go much further than that.
But this is not the way it has to be. Our state is not fixed. We’ve all had nights where we didn’t feel like going out but decided to anyway and we turned out to feel great after the initial barriers. How great would it be to be able to queue these energetic and positive feelings whenever you want to? Well, you can. All you need to do is hack your own mind and body, no programming experience required.
Hacking the mind
Using imagery
Our minds are unable to tell the difference between something we imagine and something that is actually real. This on its own is the entire reason for stress: stress is hardly about something that is here right now. The majority of the time it is about something that either happened in the past (“I really screwed that up!”) or something that you think will happen in the future (“I’ll probably screw that up!”).
We will talk about managing stress in a different article, but for now what’s important is that you realize you can use this to your advantage, too. What if you don’t think about something negative, but instead think of something positive? Well, your mind still won’t be able to tell the difference between reality and your imagination. Give the following exercise a go.
Think of a moment in time when you were in an extremely positive state. You felt absolutely amazing. Maybe you felt intensely at peace when you were on top of a mountain. Maybe you felt euphoric at some party. It doesn’t matter. Just identify one of these moments in your life, we all have plenty.
Now take a moment to close your eyes and really envision what it was like to be there at this exact moment. What did you hear? What did you feel? What did you see and what were you doing? Who was around you? Place yourself back there like you’re in VR and fully emerge in the experience and just…relive it. Take a few minutes to relive that moment as intensely as you can.
By vividly imagining this, your brain will experience similar triggers as the actual moment you were there. You will start to feel the same feelings that you felt then – only now without actually having to be there. This technique is also used in many guided meditations. In order to get you calm, they tell you to imagine a beach, a field full of flowers, or something similar. This in turn will cause you to feel calm.
Whatever emotion you want to trigger, vividly imagine a situation in which you felt (or would feel) that way and wait for the magic to kick in.
Queueing a different perspective: your personal hero
Building on the concept that your mind can’t tell “real” from fake: another way to create positive states is by, well…faking it. You think positively, and you feel positive. You think confidently, and you feel confident. You think anxiously, and you feel anxious. What’s important is that you actually believe in it. Putting on a half-assed smile when you feel truly dead on the inside is not going to trigger your brain into feeling good. So how do you “believe in it”? You let your heroes take over your mind for a second.
We all have people we look up to and we all have various “versions” of ourselves. Some days our default state simply is more confident than other days. All you have to do is actively call upon them to steer your mind and thoughts. Give the following exercise a go.
Pick someone you look up to. It can be someone you admire. It can even be a god if you want it to be. But it could also be your own best version a few years from now: a version of you that has all their shit together. Looks their best. Works their hardest and is the most magnetic version of you. I would recommend this last option, as this tends to give more lasting effects.
When you’ve identified that person (or entity), act like their mind is in your body for a few minutes. Don’t overthink it (that would still be your mind), just imagine they are in control for a while. What would their thoughts be? How would they respond to your current thoughts? How would they approach life and deal with the things you are currently struggling with? How would they feel?
Just for a little while, either reflect on things that need reflecting or simply go about your day with them in control and see how it impacts your state. If you’ve chosen your own best version: repeat this exercise regularly. You will soon start to notice that it becomes less of an exercise and more of a reality and your default state will improve.
Speeding up
Lastly, one way to create a positive, energetic state is to increase arousal. In group sessions of any sort, there are often exercises in between to keep our attention focused and our energy high. These exercises are called “energizers”. Usually this is done by interacting with other people, but you can also generate your own energy. All you need to do is speed up.
In the example given at the start of the article, I referred to a party. Parties often make us feel good because we are actively using our minds by socializing with others, focusing, and talking. The socializing part is difficult on our own, but we can still activate our brains. Doing this creates arousal for us and generates energy. The same thing can be used as a hack for creating body energy, which we will dive into further after this section. Try the following exercise.
Grab your phone and set a timer for two minutes. Stand up and start the timer when you’re ready. For the full two minutes, I want you to keep moving and keep talking at a quick pace. For the movement, you can walk around your house quickly. For the talking: give your full focus to whatever object you see and just start talking out loud about anything you can think of related to that subject. If you want to practice your speaking skills you can force yourself to make sense, but it doesn’t have to. The point is that you’re activating your brain. If you run out of things to say, move on to a different subject.
An important aspect of this exercise is the pace. I want you to move and talk like someone who has ADHD. The quicker you speak, the more energy you will generate.
Hacking the body
When it comes to hacking your body things are a bit simpler. We’ve already talked about speeding up your body in the exercise above which can generate positive energy. However, for all exercises to have maximum impact we must make sure that our body is in good shape.
Firstly, you need to get quality sleep and you need to get enough sleep. You can do all the exercises you want but still get limited effects if your body did not get enough quality sleep. Many people underestimate the amount of sleep they need and have gotten used to living on 6 or 7 hours when they really need 8 or 9. It’s been so long since they’ve had a healthy sleeping pattern that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be actually well-rested. Unless you’re already sleeping 9 hours a night, I would highly recommend adding another hour to your sleeping schedule, just for a week, to see what effects it has on you. Also: cut out the screens and coffee an hour before bed and get some magnesium oil to rub on your palms. It works wonders.
Secondly, you must take care of your nutritients. We would all love to eat pizza and drink beer all day (or is that just me?), but this will screw you over big time. Similarly to lacking a little sleep, you often won’t notice the effect of this when you haven’t paid attention to your nutritients in a while, but you will notice once you start fixing it. Drink your water. Eat your greens. Use supplements if you have to.
Lastly, breathe. When is the last time you’ve taken a conscious breath? Many of us breathe the wrong way, quickly and shallowly, not allowing for air to come into our body in order to energize us. Getting into the habit of taking regular deep breaths will improve stress levels, blood pressure, and negative emotion.
Concluding
All of the information above has one thing in common: it takes effort. In order to control your state, you must put in the effort to control it. Most people don’t know how and even if they do, they are too lazy to implement it. Taking a few minutes to walk through these exercises will give you a head start on your day or will help you create positive states whenever you see fit. Just MAKE SURE to Put. In. The. Effort.
Happy living!