About a Boy

Life Changing Book #1 See original post and explanation here.

Years ago, I was obsessed with a boy. It was not the first time I’d become fixated on winning someone’s affection and it certainly wasn’t the last. Obsession is a large part of how my brain works in bringing my ideas and desires to life. If I really want something, its as though a flip switches to the on position, and I become a dog possessed by a bone.

The particular boy in this story, let’s call him Charlie, emerged during a rough period of my life, and obsessing about him served as a much needed escape from reality. It also didn’t help that he was very hot and cold towards me. Some days he’d laugh at all my dumb jokes and like a couple of high school kids, we’d talk on the phone for hours. Other times he’d go days without returning my texts and seemed to be ignoring me on purpose. Charlie’s attention was completely unpredictable, and each day I lived and died by any signal or inkling of his affection.

Like all of my other boy-crazed-obsessions, this one was never really about Charlie. It was about the idea of Charlie and the story I’d created about who he was and how our relationship would play out over time. When he refused to follow along with the script and play the fictional role I’d envisioned for him, the joy of distraction turned into the agony of obsession, and I knew I had to move on. But it’s not like I could simply flip the obsession switch back down into the off position; as much as I wanted to stop, I felt powerless over the never ending loop of Charlie-related thoughts.

Then one afternoon, I don’t remember what prompted the idea, but I grabbed my phone and Googled, “how to stop obsessing about someone.” After skimming through a series of articles from Psychology Today and Cosmopolitan, I came across a link to a free e-book on amazon (back then it was free but it looks like it is now $14 for the kindle version).

At just 20 pages, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It by Kamal Ravikant qualified more as a pamphlet than an actual book. But in the short time it took to read, I felt my first glimmer of hope. It was exactly what I needed: instructions on how to do a hard reboot of my brain when it’s software gets stuck in obsession mode.

The concept is extraordinary simple. Ravikant explains that repeated thoughts (and the emotions they trigger) lay pathways in the brain. The more they are repeated, the deeper the pathway becomes, and if repeated enough, they form deep grooves like those carved in rocks by flowing water. He suggests fighting the existing loops is pointless because they are too entrenched. Instead, you must create new grooves in which more positive thoughts and feelings can flow.

Ravikant established a new groove by repeating just 3 words all day long, every day: I love myself. He played the loop on repeat, and whenever he caught himself going down the rabbit hole of habitual negative thoughts, he’d gently remind himself to switch back to the new loop. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

The results for Ravikant were transformative, and the concept was so simple I figured it couldn’t hurt to try it out. Throughout the day, I repeated the loop in my head. Inevitably I’d catch myself thinking of Charlie and would change the channel: I love myself I love myself I love myself….. After a week, I felt like a new person. Thoughts of Charlie still popped up now and then, but they had lost their power over me, and I felt free.

As a lifelong skeptic of new-agey, unscientific concepts that get popularized in books like The Secret, I admit it sounds too simple to be true. And while it is certainly simple, it’s not easy. It requires commitment, and at times it’s extremely annoying and feels frustrating and pointless. But I kept at it, and it worked extraordinarily well as a circuit breaker for my obsessive thought pattern.

But it was not a panacea. Ultimately it was a short term, positive distraction from other more negative distractions. Months after Charlie, I found myself fixated on some other project, person, or meaningless distraction. And at some point I had to finally ask myself: what am I distracting myself FROM?

Enter the second book on my list: The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael Singer. [post forthcoming!]