It’s easy in the world we live in to spend a lot of your life on autopilot. It’s much harder to live your life with intention.
My life used to be predominantly dictated by my largely unconscious beliefs, feelings and thoughts. I struggled with disorder eating, over worked myself constantly, spent much of my time trying to control my anxiety and obsessive thinking and had a volatile relationship to myself and others. I was a highly stressed, quick to anger or tears, and prone to dealing with all of my feelings by making them other people’s problems.
It wasn’t until I started to practice mindfulness and began to make loving space for all my thoughts and emotions and feelings, that I started to see how much of my life I lived in a reactive state. Learning to be more present and actually responsive to my life, felt like waking up from a dream. I was here in my life directly, purposefully experiencing it.
The change was significant. Life lived in the present moment is filled with intention. It is multicolored and multifaceted. I am a different person BEing here than striving for somewhere else.
When it comes to living your life fully, stepping out of autopilot and actually showing up to your present moment experience is a good place to start. Here’s how to do it:
1) Understand living on autopilot vs. intentional living
First, you need to actually understand what even is living on autopilot. According to the researchers Lyddy and Good, autopilot is “entangled” thinking. . Entangled thinking is a way of moving through life where your thoughts instantly influence your actions without much space between. This creates reactivity rather than conscious, intentional response.
Examples of Entangled Thinking aka Autopilot:
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A trauma response (which is completely processed on autopilot through the primal part of our brains) that causes you to react in ways that are disproportionate to the situation and struggle to calm down and rest. (ie: Feeling on edge/ hyper-vigilance, explosive anger, avoidance)
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The narratives we tell ourselves about how the world works and how other people react to us. (ie: Instantly assuming someone doesn’t like you or will not listen to you.)
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The stories you tell yourself and the limiting beliefs you hold about who you are and what you are capable of. (ie: Self deprecating inner dialogue)
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Perfectionism, workaholism and other addictive behaviors (ie: scrolling social media, drug use)
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Doing one task and thinking of the next thing you have to do/ Chronic multitasking
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Burnout
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Ignoring our bodily needs like food, water and rest
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Holding a specific identity or personality characteristic that may not serve you but feels familiar (ie: Defining yourself as the quiet person and then acting that way even when you don’t want to do so)
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Maladaptive habits (ie: Being late for work)
The opposite of living life on autopilot, is living life with presence. Lyddy and Good call this mode of BEing “disentangled” thinking. Disentangled thinking involves intentional response. Your are living your life in direct experience. There is less reactivity and more space between thoughts and feelings to make decisions that feel aligned with your values. When it comes to our ability to lead more fulfilling, connected and authentic lives, it is this disentangled state or Being Mode that proves more useful because we can act with more conscious awareness.
2) Shift into Presence
Once you understand what disentangled BEing Mode feels like in relation to entangled, autopilot DOing mode, you can use the practice of mindfulness to shift between them.
Using mindfulness to shift into BEing mode involves getting to know yourself and what autopilot looks like to you. For me this is usually looks like an overwhelming sense of urgency, coupled with more frustration at other people, a sense I want to cry or yell and feelings in my body of over-tiredness/ thirst.
The process of learning what it feels like to be in autopilot is a practice in itself. It takes time to learn your own behavioral and mental patterns, but once you start to notice, you can make a conscious decision to draw your attention back to the present moment. It is in the present moment where you can create that intentional space to respond rather than react to what you are experiencing.
3) Focus your awareness on the present moment
Once you notice you are on autopilot and have begun to focus on the present moment what you are doing is shifting your attention. You are moving your focus to your direct experience, employing the principle of mindfulness to become aware of that direct experience without judgment. This process of bringing intention and attention to the moment is what enables you to live rooted in the now, responsive to your life rather than reactive to it.
Mindfulness practices that support you in building your awareness muscle so to speak are formal practices such as meditation or breathwork or anything that asks you to commit a specific amount of time to the act of being aware of the moment your are in. The point of a formal practice is to train your brain to be more aware and non-judgmental to the thoughts and emotions you experience.
Where on autopilot you are more reactive to your emotions and more prone to being caught up in thoughts, practicing bringing awareness to these aspects of yourself without reacting to them (just observing) creates the framework to do so at other times of the day and in your life as a whole especially in moments of higher stress.
If you would like support on learning how to build more presence through formal mindfulness practice, then check out the course: The Art of BEing, designed to help you do just that.
4) Practice, Practice, Practice
Know this is an imperfect practice and it would be very hard to do everything in life with conscious intention. That being said, if you are someone like my former self who lives, on the default, a life of high stress and reactivity, the practice is learning to more often recognize this state and switch into a more present, responsive mode of thinking and feeling. This enables you to consciously take action, and consciously make decisions rooted in things like your values or your relationships to others or to your emotional/ spiritual/ physical needs.
Shifting from autopilot to BEing mode takes practice. Its simple but not easy to focus your attention to live with more intention.
You are up against yourself. You are up against a brain and a nervous system that has had years of conditioning, of seeing the world in a certain way, predicting outcomes in a certain way, sensing in a certain way and reacting to literally everything in a certain way.
To that, give yourself some grace.
Ultimately, learning to live with intention involves learning how to live in the present moment, fully feeling into the depths of yourself and your life. No it’s not easy. No it’s not perfect, but in my personal experience, it’s more than worth it.
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