How to learn to concentrate yourself and develop laser focus #²
Understanding the root cause — short term pleasure; how it manipulates your ability your focus.
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Guess most of you already know the answer but let’s start off with the question:
What really is short term pleasure?
Easily said, it’s connected to everything that causes your brain to emit dopamine into your body so you can experience a sense of fulfillment and joy. The pleasuring act of eating delicious food, like a cheesecake, for example.
Although you know it is physically not good for you body, it anyway because you want to experience that wonderful feeling of joy. Because the moment when the cake melts down in your mouth it causes you to slightly lean back in your chair, releasing a sigh with closed eyes, while eating that delicious peace of sweet temptation.
However, short term pleasure can be way more subtle in its appearance.
For example, it can manifest as acts of consumerism:
buying yourself an expensive watch, a new car, or the newest fashions. It can even appear in the form of seeking sexual fulfillment by engagement with the opposite sex.
Further said, it is a way to avoid stressful situations and to relieve you from that tense feeling of painful pressure inside your body and the negative emotions that have built up over the years.
The pain can sometimes get so intense, that it makes us crumble and feel like we could scream out loud to make it stop! It gives us sleepless nights and makes us endlessly toss and turn in bed. We begin thinking, thinking, and thinking again over situations in which we have — seemingly — failed.
It is rooted in your psyche as a way to deal with your emotions and you become addicted to pleasurable experiences in order to bury your negative emotions.
For example, the absolutely pleasing feeling of having sex with someone, the intimacy and touch of a person, works perfectly as a great valve to release stress. However this is only temporary unless the root cause — often just a believe or a simple thought pattern — is not treated or entirely eliminated.
However, it is nothing to be ashamed of because it’s natural in modern society to be overwhelmed and because the root cause lies deep beneath the surface of the conscious mind.
Whenever we find ourselves in situations of instant gratification, such as eating sweets or drug abuse — although we know it won’t do good on us — there was a trigger that subconsciously draws us to perform this specific behavior.
These triggers often get programmed into our mind in our early childhood.
Psychological studies suggest that the personality of a person is completely formed by the time we reach seven or eight years old.
Some people suggest that most triggers and behaviors are even set by the age of three.
That means that every single decision you make, has its roots in the experiences of your early childhood.
I personally believe the foundation of your personality is laid before one is born. Because we need a survival strategy that is completely adapted to the behavior of our parents so they respond the best way to our need of being nurtured and taken care of .
Is there a way to gain a better understanding about how I can change unwanted behaviors?
If you ever want to understand how you can change your behavior, you must emotionally, and not rationally, understand what happened to you in your early childhood.
It’s important to become aware of the connected beliefs and thoughts that pop up in your mind, right before you decide to perform a task that feeds your short term pleasure.
Now, why is it so crucial to know this?
It’s simply something you are not aware of and cannot be changed. Therefore it’s important that you understand that this will be a crucial cornerstone to change your undesired behaviors once and for all.
I suggest you talk to the people that know you from the very first day on earth and consult a psychologist or coach to help you detect these patterns. Also, if you haven’t done already, lay your hands on every topic you can get about cognitive behavioral therapy.
Please note, you cannot expect immediate results.
By this I mean anything you do! Sadly society has taught us otherwise. We’re conditioned to believe that change comes quickly.
But just because you can get your groceries ready to be picked up in the supermarket, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to work hard for what you want to have or change in your life. And by working hard I don’t mean working 16 hours a day for your business. Just continuously and steady grow without longer periods of interrupting the flow.
This is rather a long process to undertake. For me personally it took 10 years to finally have the right foundation to develop the right habits so I can keep writing my books instead of seeking fulfillment in visiting clubs, smoking a cigarette or meeting friends every day.
But there is more to come… in the next article we will cover some forms of short term pleasure and how you can detect these patterns to get your laser focus on your abilities.
Stay tuned for the next article!
