22 June

When kids learn to ride a bike, it just happens. They fumble around with training wheels for a while and then suddenly their body just knows how to balance and ride the bike. The curious thing about this is that we forget this automatic learning as we get older. Every activity an adult is engaged with, like sitting at a desk for hours, the body will learn to coordinate with complete effortless ease, if we leave it alone to do that. But instead so many of us try to do things like our posture, and we get stiff and sore because we’re not letting our bodies do that coordination.  This is actually also true for what we call mental and emotional things. By far the most effective treatment for anxiety and depression for example is to stop trying to control your feelings and allow them to self regulate. To carry on with our everyday activities without trying to improve anything, without trying to make ourselves feel a certain way.  Focusing on how we feel will lead to us fiddling with that, and then you’re trapped in this endless cycle of trying to get just the feelings that you want, as opposed to the feelings that make sense for a given situation. An anxious or depressed person has feelings that don’t make sense in a given situation, but if they leave them alone the situation will correct that. Your body will think okay these feelings are wrong here, I’ll stop firing them off.