The Mind Trap | How to Actually Let Go of Emotional Blockages and Love Life

The mind trap is simple: 

• The way to "solve" emotional issues is to let them go but this isn't actionable advice; they seem to come right back
  
  
• When we are caught up in our thoughts we are not present and we miss out on life. Eventually, we build up a deep sense of subtly missing out.
  
  
• Thoughts come from emotions, and as our emotions build up over time, so do our thoughts
  
  
• Because these senses are so immersive, we start to identify ourselves as the sum of our thoughts and emotions
  
  
• We've learned that we can solve feelings like fear or anger by "fixing" things in the world around us. This has become our default
  
  
• This is a band-aid fix. Underneath the base feeling remains. A new layer of the emotional onion is grown and a muted version of that feeling emerges. Fear becomes anger, anger becomes sadness, sadness becomes irritation.
  
  
• We create newer and more complex emotions along the way and consequently, we now endlessly discover new disturbances; This translates to an endless number of things to solve in the world.
  
  
• Why? Because we are now fixers. We default to troubleshooting our emotions which doesn't work; we become blocked and ineffective.
  
  
• This is the Karmic trap: To solve our problems, we create more problems. This is like borrowing at higher rates to pay off past debts
  
  
• The secret is to learn that we have to solve the inner disturbance
  
  
• To solve inner disturbances we need to allow ourselves to feel those feeling at several levels, both physical and emotional, without any type of analytical process, aka judgement
  
  
• When we do this, the feelings start to work themselves out, and we release our emotional blockages, the literal barriers between who we are and who we aspire to be.
  
  
• Then we have fewer problems and more freedom, external events don't require us to spend our time resolving them, we accept them as they are
  
  
• We learn to also accept ourselves and others as is, this opens the gate to genuine connection and happiness because the experience of living isn't triggering endless internal disturbances
  
  
• Disturbances from which we escape by retreating into our minds, phones, memories of the past, thoughts about the future, bottles of wine, televisions, etc.
  
  
• Instead, we live in a beautiful present moment, which we can finally fully enjoy because we don't need to fix it.

Video Transcript (Autogenerated by Youtube):

What's up gang welcome to a new series that I am informally calling in Mitch talks because here I am talking to you all right so it's a little break from the usual writing format and I'm hoping I can get the ideas that I'm working on across and a more compelling and maybe even a little faster way so let's start.

Today I want to talk about how our mind is pretty much a giant trap this is something that I've been getting wrong my entire life and pretty much most people observational er making the same mistake this learning is too important not to share and so here I am trying to read a few sit in my own words share it with all of you and also make sure that I understand it really well by hashing it up as much as I can so how is the mind a trap here's what we normally do 

I'm saying here's what I definitely do and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people are doing I have a thought right or a feeling like I'm not feeling very happy oh I'm not feeling very happy well why not right I'm trying to problem solve it and so how do I solve this problem well I'm not feeling very happy I need to know why so well I wasn't really happy at my job yesterday that I like my job it's a great role it fits me really well I like the people I work with but I don't like my job so maybe I'm not really happy at work maybe I don't want to work maybe I need to figure out and take a vacation or maybe maybe this maybe that maybe this coworker is the problem maybe the way that we're working is the problem maybe maybe it's my CEO and she said this thing that upset me and maybe it's my partner maybe maybe it's all these things that are going wrong right and I'm trying to understand what in the outside world is causing my emotion so I can change fix it troubleshoot it boom problem solved done right

so here's the trap thoughts are pretty low bandwidth reading for example is pretty slow as a process right you have to process every word after the other and so when we say a picture's worth a thousand words it really is a very true statement you can look at a picture in an instant you can understand something that would take pages and pages to explain the image is higher bandwidth now when we deal with thoughts they're a lot like those words like the reading their analytical they come in a row you can understand something very quickly intuitively and then when you go to explain it it takes a very long time or maybe several books or decades because again analytical information is much much lower mental so what we're trying to do is we're trying to solve our emotions the fear I feel the anger I feel the discomfort whatever internal negative thing I'm feeling and I'm trying to troubleshoot and think through it so I am really going in a very ineffective way I mean I'm trying to cut the grass with the pair of scissors but it's a really big lawn and I am never going to get there the grass is always gonna have to grow my says they're cutting maybe this analogy isn't working perfectly but you know bear with me on it so how do you deal with emotions right you let them go 

how do you let them go everyone says let go of your feelings ok I'm angry just let it go but it came back I'm thinking about it again so what's the secret the first thing to understand is that thoughts come from feelings at least I'm pretty sure of that so when you're upset about something it's going to generate a lot of thoughts you can think about the emotions as the roots of the tree and the thoughts of the leaves if you're trying to get rid of the leaves you can sit there hacking away at them or you can go straight for the roots of the tree so let's stop hacking it believes and let's look at the roots of the tree so forget our thoughts let's look at the emotions right what happens when we look at our emotions well why am i angry we're looking at the emotion right I'm angry because bla bla bla bla bla this person that this this guy did that I have an endless number of reasons why they're all convincing I'm certain about all of them even though some of them can probably be debunked I'll come up with more Ruby the end result is that it's endless now why is that because the second I asked why am I feeling this way I'm using my thoughts to solve my emotions doesn't work we're back to cutting that lawn with the with the scissors it's just it's slow it's painful it's not really a fact that will be cutting forever so what do we do we feel the emotions it's crazy right 

so here is the issue most people aren't even really sure how to feel the emotions most people aren't in touch with all their emotions I sure as hell aren't you know each week since I've understood this and it's been about two to three weeks I've actually come in touch with new emotions I'm gonna back off at that point for a moment but we'll come back to it so how do we feel our emotions let me give you a few examples normally before we can actually feel an emotion we have a sort of automatic process that kicks in and it band-aids the emotion it takes us away from it and in that way we think we're feeling things look I'm angry I'm feeling it but I've just picked up my phone and now I'm doing this thing and I've thought about all the solutions to my anger so I can solve it and this isn't this isn't feeling the anger this is indulging the anger there's a huge difference and this is where we get to a practice of mindfulness so let's again back out for a second and let's take a look at the nature of feelings the nature of thoughts and our other senses you can see things outside and sometimes things you see upset you but just because you see something doesn't mean you believe you are it you can see something violent but not be a violent person you can hear a car coming but know that you're not a car and that might sound really silly but we have these five senses and then we have our internal senses our thoughts and our emotions where this breaks down is that our thoughts are a sense they're a form of intelligence and they're processing the world and they're really useful we need to be analytical sometimes we need to be able to think critically sometimes all of this is really important but what happens when we believe the thoughts for example the other day I was planning something for a friend a little surprise and that friend just didn't really react so well I mean they didn't blame me but they did say that they didn't really enjoy the thing and they were very disappointed because they were looking forward to it now I had a thought 

I really hate doing things for this friend and I felt angry do I am I that thought am i a person who doesn't like doing things for friends no not really I don't believe I'm that I don't believe I'm that thought I just realized that I thought okay so I can start thinking why did I think that because this this and that and again we're getting down that rabbit hole forget it so instead what is the feeling if I avoid going down the analytical rabbit hole of saying how do I make this not happen again how do I avoid this feeling can I just pull out my phone and I know that's not an active thought process but if I do just pull out my phone and avoid thinking about it altogether or watch TV or have a drink or whatever it is all of these are avoiding the issue so what I have to do is allow the thought to be just a symptom a finger pointing at a higher level emotional issue right we said emotions are higher bandwidth than thoughts or if we didn't say that that's where I was getting with the analogy of words versus images emotions are the images they carry so much information they're so tangible they're so visceral we we feel these things and and when we feel these emotions we get a really deep and intuitive sense of what's actually happening we just have to feel so where does this story go when I had my thought about why sorry when I had my thought about disliking doing things for this friend I allowed that thought to pass and then I kind of searched a little bit for the emotion and it wasn't far behind when we allow ourselves rather than going for a crutch rather than going to try to solve the problem rather than picking up the phone and just avoiding it when we don't do that and when we keep an open heart when we literally breathe and be mindful of the areas where tension build up and try to avoid tensing those areas when we emotionally keep an openness where we don't shut down where we don't allow the anger to say to build up a righteous force where we don't get caught up in that anger and say yeah cuz this friend always is rejecting my efforts and they're so ungrateful and I try so hard and them and why do I even if we don't indulge all them but stay mindful if just like the thought that we don't identify with if just like the car driving by on the road that we know we can sense the car but we're not the car if I know that I'm not the angry emotion that's not me that's a sense I'm adding there's a situation and the very very complex all of the nuance and all of my experience and my past experiences dealing with people and the vulnerabilities I've had and times that I've been rejected and all of these things just come together in this huge bandwidth instance of feeling really upset because this is a situation that isn't desirable if instead of trying to solve it I sit there and with my open heart and my mindful well centered presence as best I can 

if I just feel that emotion physically allow it to pass through me feel that maybe my eyes almost start to water up because I'm sad because I tried and put myself out there and it just wasn't good enough and maybe I'm sad because I wanted to make my friend happy and I didn't there's a hundred other reasons and they don't really matter what matters is that I feel them I feel sad I feel angry I feel that anger passed through me I imagine myself as the Human Torch just erupting in flames ah man I am so angry that this didn't go well and it passes and the thoughts passed with it in twenty thirty seconds of feeling it not judging myself for feeling not analyzing why I'm feeling it just being angry it's okay to be angry it's okay to be sad I don't need to know why I feel that way in that time the blockage clears and the next day or maybe even a few minutes later in my case the next day I spoke to that friend that I told them honestly I had this feeling I'm not blaming you this was my feeling you know I realized that you actually wanted me to do more things for you and I'm not engaging very much with you as a friend and 

I wondered if this was part of the reason I wondered if because I feel it's very challenging to do things for you because I feel that there's no middle ground where it's hey you tried but I didn't love it but I still appreciate you it's really 80% failure and 20% I love it and I never end up in that 20% maybe that's why I've started disengaging so I'm not telling you to change I'm only telling you I think I think this is why that's happening and I want to work on it because now I I've seen what's happening in that process that's my the emotions have cleared and I just have a clarity now the muddy water is settled because I didn't shake it up I didn't run around in my mind spinning circles trying to troubleshoot my thoughts it actually just came to me without any effort at all this is actually the art of minimalism this is doing nothing and being very effective in solving all of our problems let me give you an analogy imagine you're vacuuming your carpet right when you vacuum your carpet you don't care about the dirt that's on it you care about the clean carpet under the dirt that's all you're after when you vacuum every so often you'll hear one of those click click click or maybe even a little cthe um and you go man that was a big one what was it you don't care it didn't break the vacuum the vacuum is fine you're not gonna go digging through the bag of dirt in order to figure out what that thing was or else you're gonna get the carpet dirty again it's really counterproductive when we deal with our emotions so often work in a few things in the process of starting to actually air out my emotions and have allowed myself to feel my feelings without trying to analyze or troubleshoot them I've had some huge ones I've had feelings that I didn't know what they were and it doesn't matter and they physically gave me either shivers I felt them through my whole body 

I felt tingling in my fingers and these are things that have probably been pent up for 20 years 25 years honestly really big feelings that have probably been even determining points in my life I'm happy with where I am I regret nothing but I don't want these energies inside of me anymore I don't want them affecting me so I'm letting them out when a big one passes through do I stop to analyze it and say what was that? 

honestly sometimes I start to do that and then I have to remember it doesn't matter it actually has passed and the only thing I have to do to not have to deal with that emotion again in a healthy way is don't start opening that vacuum bag and digging through I don't need to trace back and say wow what the was that huge feeling let's dig into it why did I have it no I'd just be reeling it back in after it passed this is letting go we let go of our feelings we feel them we don't have to troubleshoot them we don't even have to understand them analytically intuitively soon enough that understanding will come to us here's the message I want to end this video with when it comes to others you know there's this huge stereotype right and it's a stereotype of men but I definitely know a lot of women that do it as well which is they say you know when you bring a problem to a man he's always gonna want to troubleshoot it and solve it hey I know the answer this is the answer you can just solve it why are you still talking about and the stereotype is that women just want to feel the feeling and have it be heard it turns out that you might be right and again I've seen people on both sides of this line behave both ways so I don't really want to lean on the stereotype but just to illustrate is when someone comes to you and you give them solutions they actually often get annoyed they don't want your solutions they'll solve it themselves eventually they actually just want to process and unlock the emotion they normally want a sounding board what everyone wants really deeply is to be understood but we don't understand each other very well because we don't sit and listen we just try and solve trying to analyze and trouble solve and problem shoot is a form of judgment it's analysis it's breaking things into little pieces it's saying how they're gonna work in the future it's projecting forward predicting and saying do this do that that's all judgment the greatest thing we can do for someone is simply listen compassionately understand them not why are you feeling this way why is a justification question justify this thing it's happening for a reason justify why why is it happening we don't need any of that we don't need it with other people and we don't need it with ourselves we are so generally bad at understanding other people and deeply listening to them and this is one of the most important things in a relationship period why are we so bad in it because we're not good at listening to and understanding ourselves yeah this sounds a lot like mindfulness a lot like meditation these are great ways to build that ability the ability to be able to listen to ourselves to deeply understand ourselves and it starts to happen the second we stop trying to judge every thought and feeling we have the second we stop following all our thoughts and feelings and just hanging on to them and running away with them when we can sit back and do for ourselves what we need to do for others when we can be that friend and sounding board and compassionate listener the impartial objective observer who says I noticed this thing exists I noticed that thing exists hmm a sad feeling great it's good to label it I don't even think we need to label it analytically so we can say I feel an intense feeling it is pressure in my chest it's pressure in my eyes and they're starting to feel watery okay I know that it's sadness maybe it's anxiety maybe it's a bit of fear whatever it is when we can feel these feelings without about judging them and stay objective and just notice them and experience them we can finally become that best that good friend that we need that coach that sounding board that really that presence that understanding for ourselves and when we can just be with ourselves without judging then we'll start to unblock a lot of our emotional layers not only will we become incredible doing this for others and have deeper awesome relationships but we will start to work through the layers of the onion that is our psyche so from my experience over the past three or so weeks 

I started with sadness I had a lot of sadness in me why it honestly doesn't matter but I had it and that's fine and after three four or five days of feeling that I got to a thought that was common enough in my past and that thought was man and I have a lot of sadness am i depressed I don't want to be a person I don't think I should feel all the sadness well great what does that do so instead I reminded myself that this is a process that I have a lot of feelings inside of me a lot of them are built up over decades and they'll come up and soon when they all come out it'll be happiness it'll be energy it'll be abundance it won't be fear and sadness and anger and frustration it'll just be more of the good stuff the positivity where I want to be and still do already spend a decent amount of my time how do I spend more of my time in the happiness in the awesome feeling in the unblocked in the not just needing to hit the couch and watch TV at the end of the day because I'm so drained from you know being afraid and scared and and and all these things it becomes a pretty simple process first I allow all my sadness to come out it came out on its own I used my mind a bit to prod around their events in my past that are easy enough to see that they probably made me sad and so the mind is good for that 

I use it to poke around to try and if you imagine taking a carpet that's a little bit dusty and flapping it out on the balcony I poked around with my mind back memories and as I do that feelings often come in and as those feelings come out I try to stay present and mindful and allow them to be experienced without wondering too much about them without needing to analyze them and sure enough they go from that sadness I've gone through a few layers I got from sadness to anxiety I got from anxiety to fear this past week I became aware of how many things I was really afraid of some of them big some of them small one of them was recording this video what if I didn't have enough to say is something that was in my mind not an issue it turns out wasn't likely to be an issue if you know me at all but I was a little afraid and that fear would make me pick up my phone procrastinate go TV all these other things it was just enough just enough to take me from my idea to go downstairs into the office and film this video - hmm let's just go off to the side here a little bit and maybe I'll just pick up my phone and like oh that's very exciting and then I could waste a half an hour I'm there well what happens when 

I don't pick up my phone here is the really big trick all of these things that we do is crutches whether it's being on our phone whether it's drinking maybe just having a beer at the end of the day for me even coffee during my day when I feel a little bit afraid and I start procrastinating because I'm overwhelmed if I drink a bit of coffee I just pushed through all of it the second I feel like picking up my phone as a procrastination but I don't what happens if I just sit there and I resist the temptation and I don't go along with it then after that comes the feeling I had a crazy experience about a week and a half ago where instead of picking up my phone feeling a little more mindful than usual I realized I was doing this as a procrastination and didn't need to what happened all of a sudden I felt this enormous wave of anxiety like huge huge if you'll excuse the crude analogy it's like when you sit down to go to the bathroom and you're surprised that you actually had a lot to deposit I put that as delicately as I could so bear with me and maybe it takes like 5-10 minutes and there's not much pause I painted enough of a picture but this is the emotional equivalent 

I can almost imagine from my chest from the area where my heart is this giant giant wave of anxiety of all the things that all the pressures in my life having to be a good husband having starting a new company having recently been laid off being a mentor in the second brain group and many many other things you know I caught images of what it was related to but wow it was a minute two minutes of solid wave after wave things and now it's at but otherwise it would have been inside of me driving me to less mindfulness driving me to distraction driving me to always look for ways to not be present and taking my energy away making me snappier and less patient with everyone around me because it would be repressed negative energy that I'm holding in that's preventing me from opening my heart 

I want to wrap up this video by reminding you guys the formula as far as I found it so far is resist the temptation we need to become mindful enough to notice the things we are doing that are essentially symptomatic of some negative feeling so again coffee is probably a huge one anything that registers is an addiction right like whether it's over eating whether it's over phone use whether it is there's there's so many examples whether it's playing video games whether it's just constantly going on Twitter to avoid work like everything that is essentially an unhealthy activity not that the activity itself is bad but that we overdo it these are the urges that are causing us to hide from a bigger emotion that realistically we're not even feeling because we're using the oh I'm gonna go on Twitter as a cover but what's under that I'm procrastinating because I'm afraid I'm going to connect with people because I'm lonely whatever these feelings are we're gonna start to feel them very quickly if we resist the temptation probably go to notice the temptation first so through meditation that's helped me I'm not going to instruct you guys on mindful practice right now but however you come to it you need to build your mindfulness to a point where you notice that activity coming on where you don't just do it and realize that like an hour later or half an hour later oh crap I've been on my phone I don't remember picking it up at the moment where you're about to do that thing about to pull the phone out of the pocket catch yourself don't allow a moment breathe and open your heart and see what passes through and after you've done that a few times for a few weeks honestly maybe a few years I'm not sure it's good start to get better for me it's a couple of weeks and I'm gonna say 

I have a decent amount of baggage a good enough amount I've no doubt you do as well it's probably a reason you're watching this video so I'm gonna go over this again because it's so important notice the temptation to do the activity that's covering the emotion overeating pulling out your phone grabbing a coffee and coffees fine I'm just saying notice how you're using it right to stop take a breath 3 allow the feeling without judging without analyzing to pass through you open your heart and feel what you're actually feeling and as you do this you'll start to gain access to more and more emotions I'm gonna credit Daniel Vinci from a second brain community who gave me that exact phrasing starting to access your emotions so for me I gained access the sadness really understanding that that's what I was feeling I'm not a sad person but I had a lot of sad feelings there's a difference 

I didn't used to understand that difference and not understanding that difference prevented me from moving forward I would freak out that I'm a sad person and some part of me would shut it down and look for distraction elsewhere so first sadness then it was anxiety then it was fear I'm one to bet the next one is pain because once you get to fear I think you're pretty close to pain and what is pain it's things that happened in our past I was rejected in the past by whoever person and that stuck with me had left an impression and I don't want that to happen again 

I had this bad experience at work so I don't want to open myself up and let that kind of thing happen again so much of our life can even be dictated by the damage that's been done to us I know a person who's very lonely but she was cheated on and she swore that she would never that was it four men she was old enough she had kids that was it four men for her for the rest of her life that's a lot of pain and loneliness just to avoid dealing with the initial pain of having been cheated on and left and betrayed so so often we avoid dealing with the actual issue and it multiplies out into something that drives and controls our life this is coming back to the essence of minimalism the secret to doing less to genuinely doing less is to realize that all we need is to be okay with things and that everything we need to control in the world around us is actually something that we're not okay with inside and if we become okay with it inside we don't have to do anything in the outside world and that's how we become less busy that's how we have less things to do that's how we learn to be present and enjoy life and love the people around us and connect because we're not busy thinking about what needs to be fixed and all the projects that we can launch to change the world and make our internal feeling better we're just there thanks for listening guys 

I hope this is helpful leave your comments where are you in your emotional journey what emotions have you gained access to you recently or are you still at the point where you don't have access to most of them are you still rationalizing everything saying I can see myself saying you need to work out but I don't do it because I don't like to work it and that's it I'm a person who doesn't like to work out are you still at that point or are you starting to realize that underneath everything your emotions are driving all of your decisions