Foundations

Almost everyone I’ve ever worked with had an addiction of some kind. Not necessarily a clinical addiction as we would usually understand the term, but an attraction or habit keeping them in a cycle of behavior which was, to some extent, destructive. Often, it would be an intermittent thing, where the person would be fine for a while, and then lapse again into their negative cycle. Maybe an addiction to pleasure, or depression, or a deep melancholy that would cause them to withdraw. But just about everybody has something.

There is a lot of wonderful advice out there on what to do when you find yourself falling into such a cycle, but most of it shares a common flaw (which became abundantly clear to my wife and I during her long bout with depression): you have to want to do it.

That may seem counterintuitive and even insulting, but let me assure you that I am not trying to place blame. Facing up to these things is frequently painful and frightening—but even more than that, when these issues reach a certain point, they can become so overwhelming that it practically removes your ability to make a real choice. When my wife was at the worst of her depression, she did not say “I don’t want to take steps forward,” she said, “I can’t!” And I believe her.

My energy healing methods were pretty much designed to fight that problem, and I’m happy to say they work very well. But today, I’m not going to look at those extremes. What about the rest of us, who have our share of problems and are just trying to improve ourselves during the ordinary course of a working week? Well, there are a couple of easy steps we can take.

There’s a reason I started this post by talking about addiction, even though the technical definition doesn’t entirely describe today’s subject. Most of what we do in a day is responsive and habitual, including many of the mistakes. If you can remember the process of learning any complicated skill, then you can probably remember a time when you kept making the same simple mistake over and over again, perhaps with an instructor of some kind gently reprimanding you each time. The mistake had become a minor habit, and you were fighting muscle memory.

Naturally, this happens in everyday life as well. I’ve found that a great first step is just to create a few hours of quiet for yourself. Let me explain what I mean by that: today, more than at any previous time in history, we are bombarded with information, ideas, and provocative language many times per day. We are constantly reacting, and if we are not careful, it can leave us with no time or mental bandwidth to act deliberately, from our own internal state.

One of the best habits you can form is simply giving yourself the time and distance from all these daily demands to think for yourself, and to make choices based on something more than just habit.

Have a blessed, wonderful day!

Dr. Alex Loyd