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A sense of Awareness (Part 2)

In part one, we talked about the automatic brain that we love to utilise so much and the process in which emotion can become a personality trait if we let it consume us. As a reminder, here is the table of the two systems we have at hand:


Our ease in creating habits:

If we reflect for a minute on how we behave. The moment we wake up, we think about our problems. We recall a memory from the past which is generally associated with time, people, and places such as the place we work, the person who betrayed us, the perfume on the pillow, the alarm that woke us up, and other things that we might not even be aware of. Now depending on the categories of problems we face in life; we say to ourselves “I am tired”, “I don’t like the way I feel”, “why am I alone”, “my life is hard”, “I am unlucky” and all of the things that can come to mind.


However, our human nature does not like to face problems, we like happy, Jolie, fun, easy stuff. Therefore, we get our phones and start connecting with the world. We catch up on missed notifications, then jump on feeds, read comments, watch the news, or compare who has and hasn’t watched our published post videos (…). All of the time spent on those platforms can bring to life other sets of emotions, we will come back to this in the future. After loading ourselves with what we are familiar with, we now decide to get out of bed and kick off the day. As we do know, we are creatures’ habits, we do the same things over and over again. We get out of bed on the same side, brush our teeth (if we do 😊), get a coffee and get ready for work. We go to the same place, meet the same people, talk about the same topics do the same things, and push the same emotional buttons, until bedtime. As we do not sleep straight away, we take our phones and catch up on information until we fall asleep. We wake up the following day, and the cycle starts again.

As we do this redundancy cycle, it becomes unconscious. We have done this so many times that it is part of our automatic system. However, the underlying factor that started the whole cycle was our problems. But now, we have done this cycle so many times that it became a habit, it is part of our routine. We have, without noticing, created a routine, that we believe works for us. In our brain where all the magic happens, every single experience listed above generates emotions and creates memories.


In conclusion, this is our new processing system, every time the associated problems arouse, we felt the associated emotions to it and then we acted by distracting ourselves. The chart below shows in a way how we behave as humans.



We think about something (problem, opportunity…), we feel (anxiety, fear, love, excitement…) and we act, whether towards the thoughts or we divert by doing something else (phone, tv, social media…)


As we do this process again and again, it becomes a cycle engrained in us.


What does that mean altogether:

It is important to note that about 95% of who we are by the time we are 35 years old is a memorised set of behaviours, emotional reactions, unconscious habits, hardwired attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions that function like a computer program. Our environment, and past experience, are products of “the fit-in mindset” that we have inherited from the world. It is our nature; we want to belong.


The remaining 5% is what we have left for our reflective system to be self-aware, understand what happened to us and start to believe in powerful words such as “I want to be healthy; I want to be happy; I want to be free”.


The greatest realisation we can have as a human is to be aware of our thoughts. We have about 60 to 70 thousand thoughts in a day and mainly about 90% of them are the same as our thoughts of yesterday. The same thoughts lead to the same choice, the same choices lead to the same behaviours, the same behaviours lead to the same experiences, and the same experiences lead to the same emotions.


In Summary:

If we refer back to the first part on how an emotion can evolve and become a personality trait, we can confidently conclude that it all starts with thoughts. Thinking is the problem and also the solution. However, are we confident about our thinking process, as mentioned above 95% of who we are is “the fit in” syndrome that influenced us all throughout our lives. What if we think is not real, not true?


In the next part of “A sense of Awareness”, we will be looking at what thinking means and how to reprogram our brain for the better.


Thank you for your time and apologies if anything you have read looks familiar or is a waste of time for you. We are doing this because we care.

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