Simple
Today’s marketing draws a terrifying picture – we’ll never be happy without pimple covering make up, a new frying pen and antibacterial soap (ahh bacteria.. those little bastards will eat you alive!!). Besides, you just have to choose between Android and Apple or have a strong opinion against them both, otherwise – what do you know about life?
In books I have recently read (on success habits, leadership, neuroscience..), I noticed a common trend. If there’s a chapter on living a healthier and more fulfilled life, the advice is all and the same: exercise, eat healthy, connect with other humans. It sounds so simple, it’s plain boring! Nevertheless, let’s see where we stand:
- Exercise. We know it. We dread it. We reward ourselves with French fries and soda if we manage to exercise one day.
- Eat healthy. We know it. We dread it. We reward ourselves with a greasy burger with extra bacon after a month of strict diet.
- Connect with other humans. We know it. We’re scared of people and dread being authentic out of fear of rejection. We connect online and disconnect with our neighbours. We soothe ourselves with ice cream to forget how lonely we feel inside.
We simply miss the target.
Ignorance is bliss.
And knowledge is scary. One would think that once people discover the truth they would adjust their behaviour! However, have you met a single smoker who doesn’t know cigarettes are poisonous? If we know what’s right, what keeps us stuck in a toxic lifestyle? The answer is – fear.
Once we learn that our all-time favourite soda makes us sick, fear arises – we’re afraid of the potential consequences. The different responses we have to fear are known as the “3 F’s”:
- Flight: we escape the possible negative consequences by changing our behaviour and reinforcing our health
- Freeze: like a deer caught in the headlights, we’re aware of the danger but we can’t help it – we continue drinking the soda while beating ourselves up for it
- Fight: we call the freshly learned information “fake news” and continue business as usual
Apply this on a more global scale and we get a clearer picture why our efforts to mitigate climate change and social inequality are so ineffective.
Fear, oh dear
Many of us will agree that fear is an unpleasant feeling. And while we have no issue managing the states of serenity and euphoria, it is not as mainstream when it comes to the negative emotions. The most common responses include:
– Ignoring them, thanks to all the means of self-distraction available to us
– Arguing with them while we “fake it till we make it”
– Medicating them out of our system
– Shaming ourselves for having these emotions, telling ourselves to shut up, grow up and man up
Inner Critic: the initiation
It all starts in our childhood. Imagine a little girl picking flowers in a park, enjoying sunshine, until her mom calls her home. The girl wants to stay and she’s open about it, which gets her a shaming look from her mother and a bunch of arguments that she doesn’t really care about (we need to go grocery shopping, cook dinner, take a bath etc). In that moment she has 2 options before her:
- Insist on staying and risk being punished, shamed and sent into a time-out
- Obey and follow
At that age parents are our insurance for survival. The innate need of being our authentic self may be important to us, but if it doesn’t get us love from our caregivers it gets quickly overridden by a new program called Inner Critic. It’s coded with our caregivers’ instructions – here it will shame the little girl before her parents have a chance to do so, making her obey the orders. Without questioning the parent-child relationship, I’d like you to notice how Inner Critic is not an enemy – it does everything in its power to buy that little girl love and acceptance from her mom, which will guarantee her survival through fragile years.
Once its primary mission accomplished, this sub-identity of ours continues to keep us in check. This motivational bulldozer is the author of such movements as “starve yourself to fit into your jeans” and “pretend you’re happy to be appreciated”. And frankly, not all of us can take the abuse.
We then enter a vicious cycle – we punish ourselves into a certain behaviour, feel down, compensate (with shopping, binge-eating, smoking..), punish ourselves again for compensating, feel down, compensate.. you get the idea.
Do you recognize the pattern? Are you beating yourself up now for beating yourself up?
“Wait… we’re adults now!”
We don’t depend on our parents anymore. The threats that made us sustain that program no longer exist. So, what happened?
For starters, our brain is lazy. Once a behavior becomes automatic, the decision-making part of our brain goes into a sleep mode. We’re set to function on auto-pilot until further notice.
Besides, this punishment-reward pattern is labelled “normal” and that word has the capacity to swallow our critical thinking.
The “I see you” pattern
Now that we have made the scary acquaintance of the Meanie within, we have 2 options: accommodate it or go see an exorcist. Yes, I’m being ironic – Inner Critic is part of us and there’s no running away from ourselves.
Imagine it like that kid you once were, scared as hell of being rejected, abandoned and shamed. So, the next time your inner voice tells you “You’d better get up and run or you’ll never amount to anything”, hear the fear underneath it, listen to it, understand it. Making space for fear will help its release.
Following simple advice from the books will no longer feel like a heavy-lifting exercise. You will be pulled by a vision of yourself instead of being pushed by your fears. “Get on the treadmill you cow!” will be replaced with “eat like you love your body”.
Take this into the world
With current events we’ve amplified separation within our society. The war mentality is omnipresent – “if we could only eliminate the bad guy, we’d live happily ever after” (examples of modern “bad guys”: pro-vaxxers, anti-vaxxers, pro-5G, anti-5G..). We don’t realize that under the surface of every behaviour lie unfulfilled needs and fears. And unless we’re able to accommodate them, the chasm between us will grow wider.
It’s useless to hope that we’ll understand our fellow human if we even fail to accommodate our own negative emotions. Referring to the 2-wolves story, if we starve the “bad wolf” inside, we’ll starve half of ourselves. We’ll drag ourselves through life and wonder why we’re unfulfilled.
It’s that same pattern that ruins our relationships and society at large. By invalidating each other’s points of view, we push away any chance of finding a common ground. Let’s finally realize that the “bad wolf” is bad for a reason – one that we can comprehend, make space for and dissolve, if we dare to look it in the eyes.
Looking within and being present with that scared voice inside is the way to inner peace. Doing so with people around us will allow peace to spread in our society. This is the deep truth of Ghandi’s “be the change that you want to see in the world”. As promised – simple.
ENGLISH 
FRANCAIS