Posted on August 14, 2015

Calibrate your Life

BY: Alan0 COMMENTS CATEGORY: Uncategorized

What happens in your mind when you wake up each morning? I find that some people wake up and their brain instantly fills their mind with the worries and concerns of the day. Other people just stumble off into their morning routine in a groggy state of habit. They aren’t ready to begin thinking for 20 or 30 minutes. Yet some people are capable of approaching each morning with a blank slate. A fresh template from which they can construct the kind of day they want to have.

It’s extremely important that we are intentional about how we begin the day. I think we need to know, and be in charge of what the brain been truly does in the first 10 to 30 minutes after waking up in the morning. If you’re the kind of person who moans and groans and complains about having to get up and do your day, then there are some very specific impacts that that introduction to the day is going to do to you.

If we begin the day with negativity, that negativity will be projected by your subconscious mind into the content of all of the rest of the events of that day. It becomes very difficult for us to have a successful and productive day. If you begin each day by letting the anxieties and the pressures and responsibilities that lie before you flood into your mind and fill you with pressure and worry, you set yourself up for a state of anxiety that will follow you throughout the day. For many of us, these waking up habits that we develop take on a life of their own, so that we don’t even realize that we have any choice to alter them.  They become so commonplace that we even assume that what we are experiencing is what everyone experiences when they wake up each morning.

Now this is where being intentional comes into play. I’ve had stressful times in my life when the executive board of my brain is seemingly just waiting to kick in with all cylinders the moment that I’m aware that I’ve woken up. I’ve also had times in my life where I’ve been down about a few things and those thoughts are ready to flood into my awareness the first thing in the morning, and that has driven down my mood for days and weeks on end. No I’m not saying that from time to time you won’t have stressful events in your life, or some depressing circumstances that you may be dealing with. That’s part of life. But what I am saying is that you do not have to subject yourself to those waking habits, even if they have become firmly established in your daily routine.

And therein lies the true beauty of the luxury that the daily wake sleep cycle affords us. Every day we have the opportunity to press the reset button on our lives. If something went horribly wrong yesterday, today gets to be a new day. Each day to be a fresh opportunity to start with a blank slate, and fill it however we choose to.

We live in a world that has a lot of instruments for measurement. There are thermometers, altimeters, compasses, oxygen sensors, air-quality devices, speedometers, etc… There are tons of devices all around us that measure all sorts of things. In the medical field, from radiology to blood tests, in the electrical industry you have voltage meters, load testing, in meteorology you have radar and rain gauges. What’s my point? That every instrument that measures anything, at some point needs to be calibrated. And many instruments need to be re-calibrated, or have the calibration checked at regular intervals to make sure that their measurements continue to be accurate.

Webster’s defines calibration as a set of graduations to indicate values or positions. What I want you to consider today is that each day provides you with an opportunity to recalibrate your thinking your mindset and your life. Through the course of day-to-day activity many instruments such as scales can become gradually out of alignment. Perhaps if you’ve ever stepped on old-fashioned analog scale, you’ve noticed that there’s a dial somewhere to reset the scale to zero. Through the course of getting on and off depending upon the surface that the scale sitting on, the scale may not be set to zero. If that happens, the weight that it gives you might not actually be your true weight.  What if you were able to identify a dial that you could adjust up or down that would help you recalibrate your attitude your feelings your emotions and your outlook towards life, and you could be in charge of adjusting that dial every morning?

So here’s the way to go about it. Tonight, as you’re waiting to fall asleep, set in your mind the idea that you’re going to wake up and immediately erase anything that’s on the blackboard of your mind the first moment you are aware of anything. Place in your mind the idea that the moment you hear your alarm, or come to in the morning, you are going to have a specific thought of clarity about the day ahead. Once we learn to program the mind the night before about the first thought we’re going to have when we wake up, we begin to realize that we have the ability of planting a specific thought in our minds that will occur at a particular time. Now that may not in and of itself completely eradicate some well-worn habits that you may have developed to begin your day with an anxious or depressed state of mind, but it will begin to provide you with an option upon waking up. When you do wake up, and become aware of the fresh opportunity that lies ahead of you, be very deliberate about beginning to write on that clean slate in your mind some positive characteristics about the day ahead. Here’s some options for thoughts to begin to set into motion during this process:

• “Today is a new and fresh opportunity for me to live the way I want to live.”
• “I get to make choices today that will positively impact me and those around me.”
• “I have the ability to turn the day ahead of me into a positive and fulfilling experience.”
• “This day has the potential to be a great day.”
• “I’m going to take charge of this day, instead of letting this day take charge of me.”

Now at first glance, this just looks like a bunch of self hype psychobabble. And if you want to think that that’s all it is or can be, go ahead and keep waking up the way that you like to wake up. But if you want to begin to change in a positive direction the energy motivation and hope you have for each day, you will take a list of statements like these, and customize them for where you are in life and what you need to hear yourself say.

Now the next step is vitally important. You need to allow those statements to not just reside in a cognitive logical place in your mind, but you need to move each statement one at a time over into your emotional mind. Any depression, any stress, any state you are habitually used to introducing at this time a day, will take place in the realm of your feelings and emotions. So the statements that you will be saying to yourself, need to also invade that part of your brain and you need to allow yourself the opportunity to feel the emotions that these statements will cause within you. From that point, the starting gun goes off, and you’re off to the races. You’re free to get out of bed and begin your day. But as you do that take some time each morning to begin to lay out and see yourself tackling the important aspects of the day ahead in a matter that lives into the positive thoughts that you have just laid into your mind. That allows you to frame up in your mind a positive and proactive approach to the tasks that like a head of you. Those ideas, that mentality, and those emotions, will then become more available to you as you approach the day ahead, even if some of those tasks and activities are things that would normally be stressful or difficult to deal with.

Just remember, old habits build deep roads into the neurons of our brains and those well-worn pathways are not easily re-routed, so this may be something that you will need to commit to for several weeks before it begins to become second nature to you. The good news is that we can retrain our brain. Brain scans of people who have been consistently exercising intentional new thought patterns are significantly different after a one month interval. You can actually alter the parts of your brain that naturally light up and retrain yourself to think differently. That’s not psychobabble, that’s empirical science. And what better way to begin to implement that ability than by training your brain to start each day with a positive outlook and forward-looking mindset.

A day in your life is a terrible thing to waste, so make sure you start each one that you are gifted with, with an intentional effort to make it great. Leave me some feedback on how this works for you. I would love to hear about what works, and what parts of this you may be struggling with as you attempt to claim each day.