• Bring Conscious Awareness to Your Actions

    Human bodies are exceptionally good at making complicated things routine, like driving cars down busy roadways at the same time that we’re singing along to music and adjusting the mirrors. This is really useful because it means I don’t have to waste my precious mental resources relearning everyday things, like how to move my hand to some food and bring it up to my mouth. Once I learn how to do it, my body just does it and I’m free to preserve my very precious resource of conscious attention for other really important things, like determining which of those things in the environment is safe or dangerous.

    One side effect of this continuous automation system is that once something becomes routine, we basically lose sight of the fact that it’s happening. It’s almost like it becomes invisible and we forget we’re even doing it. This can be challenging when it comes to managing stress. Many people speed up when they feel stressed. They try to cope by getting busier and doing more things more quickly. When we cope like that over and over, without any conscious awareness of what we’re actually doing, we can end up making challenging situations even worse.

    Here at Shift Cognitive Therapy + Assessment we work to help you tune in to the kinds of invisible thoughts and pressures that drive you to push yourself too hard, and to those behaviours you might still do even when you’d rather not be doing them. Learning how to pay better attention gives you the chance to make new choices, right now, to decide whether you want to continue performing habits that may be familiar but no longer helpful. Visit us at shiftct.com and see more about how we can help you change behaviours that are getting in your way.

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