Speaker 1
Instead of using much energy to try and calm ourselves, calm ourselves, calm ourselves when we feel anxious or angry, or we're judging that other person and how they're reacting, instead of using all of these aps and all of this money that is now being spent in a lot of organizations to alleviate that symptom, i think opening up and illuminating the bigger perspective and the historical data that feeds into all this, i think can lead to a natural shift that makes mindfulness more easily. So we're going to look at these things on a personal level and then what i call a sociobiological level. So on a personal level, the reason why i'm calling it a dark side of mindfulness is, once again, it's not illuminating all the systems that have led up to your mental chatter, mental noise, anxiety, all stuff in the first place. And what i believe to be a big part of that anxiety and noise and all those other things comes from some misguided efforts we have to self soothe. And the reason why we are attempting to do all these things to self soothe or self regulate is because we quite get enough guidance or modelling or nourishment of some of those mechanisms throughout our lives, on both an explicit and an implicit level. So let me explain that if you are experiencing what we call a mental chat or mental noise anxiety, and it feels like it just can't stop, there may be a possibility of what i would even call an atrophying of the self regulating circuits that exist within you. And because these are so atrophied, you have other mechanisms, other feedback loops, like i mentioned in the previous episode, that compensate for this, and that may even come in as like a muscle memory to help you figure out how to get into a different state to avoid the state that you might currently be in if you are having these anxious or spiralling kind of thoughts. And some of these mechanisms are things that are external to us, like i also mentioned in the last episode, these conditional regulators, where we use television or shopping, or even an over reliance on communicating with people, in order to avoid a state that we are not enjoying or preferring in a certain moment.