Understanding the autopilot mind

Being on autopilot is a problem we are all familiar with.

One evening, Alex trudged slowly up the stairs to his bedroom. He was still mulling over his day’s work as he undressed and put on his night clothes.


His thoughts hopped from subject to subject. 

Soon, Alex latched on to a job he needed to do out of town the following afternoon, before dithering over the best way to get there by car to avoid the roadworks.


The car! He remembered that his car insurance was due for renewal. He’d use his credit card tomorrow. The card! Had he remembered to pay his credit-card bill? 


He thought so. He remembered the printed bill with items reserving hotel rooms for next July’s big event.


Before he’d even realised it, he was thinking of his daughter’s upcoming wedding. ‘Alex,’ shouted his wife. ‘Are you ready yet? We’re all waiting and it’s time to go.’ With a start, Alex realised he’d gone upstairs to change for a party, not for bed. 


Alex isn’t suffering from dementia, nor does he have a particularly poor memory. He’d simply been on ‘automatic pilot’, his mind having been hijacked by his current concerns.

  • Mindfulness and your autopilot mind

    In so many ways, habits can take control of your life. As the years pass, this can become a huge problem as you cede more and more control of your life to the autopilot, including much of what you think. 


    Habits trigger thoughts which then triggers a steady flow of thoughts from there. Fragments of negative thoughts and feelings can form themselves into patterns which amplify your emotions. 


    Before you know it, you can become overwhelmed by deep-seated stresses, anxieties and sadness. And by the time you’ve noticed the unwanted thoughts and feelings, they’ll be having their impact. 


    A ‘thoughtless’ comment by a work colleague can leave you feeling upset and annoyed. A car driver who makes a mistake can suddenly make you feel irritable and angry. 


    You can be left feeling exhausted and cynically disconnected from the environment you’re in. This may then create additional emotional guilt and the downward spiral can continue.


    This all happens without you having any conscious input. Your autopilot mind believes it is looking after you. After many months and probably years of responding to negative stimuli in this way it becomes subconscious habit.


    When you become consciously aware of the negative autopilot you may try frantically to change the moment but the autopilot mind is already ‘locked’ and “engaged” and then it becomes difficult to change course. 


    That is why sometimes people say, “it’s really hard”, or “it’s such a fight”, or self-critical thoughts like, I’m stupid for feeling like this”, “things will never change”. Your autopilot subconscious mind is stronger than your conscious mind. When you try to change your responses or thoughts, the subconscious autopilot mind invariably wins.


    Your mind eventually slows down. You may become exhausted, anxious, frantic and chronically dissatisfied with life. And again, just like a computer, you may freeze or even crash. When you reach the point where such overload has seized up the conscious mind, it’s very difficult to reverse the process simply by thinking your way out, for this is like opening yet another program on the computer, over layering it with yet another window. Instead, you need to find a way of stepping outside the cycle almost as soon as you notice it’s begun. 


    This is the first step in learning to deal with life more mindfully. It involves training yourself to notice when your autopilot is taking over, so that you can then make a choice about what you want your mind to be focusing upon. You need to learn to close down some of the ‘programs’ that have been left running in the background of your mind. 


    The first stage of regaining your innate mindfulness involves returning to basics. You need to relearn how to focus your awareness on one thing at a time. 

Have you ever gone in to the kitchen and wondered what you have gone in there for? Or, got chicken out the deep freezer even though you had both discussed having fish or dinner? 


Habits on the whole help us in many ways and are incredibly powerful. Without warning, habits can seize control of your life and drive you in a totally different direction from that you’d intended. It’s almost as if the conscious mind thinks one thing and the autopilot, subconscious mind, has different plans. 


Even though our autopilot can let us down at unexpected moments, it believes that it is doing the right thing for you. Our minds have a bottleneck in the so-called ‘working memory’, that allows us to keep only a few simple things in them at any one time. 


If there’s too much information churning around in your mind, your working memory begins to overflow. You begin to feel stressed, anxious or get frustrated which results in negative responses due to the overflow. We then find ourselves being aware of negative and irrational thoughts which results in uncomfortable feelings and the resulting actions.


These all happen without conscious thought. After all, you do not get up in the morning with a pen and paper and plan your autopilot actions for the day!



Being more aware of your autopilot mind


Throughout this course of practical mindfulness you are going to be guided and reminded to create an awareness of your auto-it mind - the part that has a negative impact on you.


These may include:


  • thoughts and interpretations
  • feeling and emotions
  • urges to react to these
  • and how you do react and respond.


These are what may be termed as STOP moments: moments where you make the decision to take a step back and reset your mind, where you learn to be with a feelings or emotion and where you can let the moment pass through without following through with autopilot responses.

  • The autopilot mind - friend or foe?

    We are led to believe that our mind is there to be our friend, our ally, there to help us through sticky situations and give us advice. The bad news is — this is not always the case. The mind can trick us into believing what it wants us to believe.


    Our autopilot mind is there to help us and has positive intentions.


    It helps us perform many tasks at work so we can be more productive. It helps us get to locations we have been to before. It helps us prepare and cook meals we are familiar with. The list is endless where your autopilot mind plays a positive role in your day to day life.


    There is another part of our autopilot mind that isn’t so helpful. Our mind stores all things we have experienced, positive and negative and can come out to play when you least experience it.


    An example: Mary was always criticised by her father. He would always tell her she could do better. He would never praise her for her achievements. He would always say that he was disappointed in her. Mary felt useless. She felt inadequate; that she could never get things right. “If my Dad said so, it must be true”. 


    This is how the young mind interpreted the events and Mary grew up feeling insecure in her abilities. She also developed a sensitive nature and would feel anxious, (emotion), meeting deadlines at work. She believes that she won’t be able to do it with satisfactory conclusions and that her boss would be unhappy with her, (interpretation). 


    Mary finds it hard to run presentations for her fear of being judged, (autopilot belief that others will judge her competence). She believes that her colleagues would do a much better job and tries to find other people to fill in for her. 


    Mary’s autopilot mind developed a belief system that she wasn’t good enough. Because she experienced these situations so much in the younger years her mind began to believe the interpretations and this has manifested in many situations in her day to day adult life. The autopilot mind reminds Mary of this on a regular basis thus keeping the ‘belief system very much alive.

     Autopilot Learning Point


    Our autopilot mind behaves in the way it has been taught. Yes, it helps us get through many tasks in the day without having to consciously think about what we are doing but it also acts in a way that can have a negative impact on our wellbeing.


    We mustn’t accept our thoughts as fact. We mustn’t accept our feelings and emotions as being ‘the way it is’ and we mustn’t accept our responses to situations as, ‘who I am”


    By creating an increased awareness of your negative autopilot mind with the daily cognitive awareness exercise, you’ll be much better placed to manage ‘you’ in a more positive way.

  • Choosing to be more mindful

    Being mindful is a choice. 


    You can choose to continue your autopilot habits of behaviour or you can choose to be more mindful of your experiences.


    As you go through your day start to pay more attention to where you could be more mindful:


    • Pay more attention to thoughts that pass through your mind. Allow yourslf to isolate a thought and just let it sit there without engaging or being reactive. 

    • Pay more attention to bodily feelings and sensations. For example: if you feel anxious or panicky, where in your body do you experience unpleasant feelings? If you feel tense or angry notice where you feel these feelings. Allow yourself to observe these feelings just as if you have never experienced them before.

    • Be more aware of emotions. Observe the presence of, for example, sadness, disappointment, stress, frustration, irritation or worry. Acknowledge the presence of emotions and lable they are present.

    • Be more aware of the urges to respond to thoughts, feelings and emotions.

    Your mindfulness practices enable you to be in the moment with the object of practice.


    During your mindfulness practice, you are being encouraged to practice being in the moment with these, being observent of your experience, feeling the experience and staying in the moment whilst bringing yourself back from distraction when it occured.


    The aim is to help you use the same philosophy when negative stimuli comes your way.

     

    • We want to help you learn how to observe a thought and recognise it as a thought...no thought is permanent and we can let it pass through.

    • Bodily and emotional sensations are learned habits. Observing the presence of bodily feelings and sensations helps us to be less reactive to them.

    • Being aware of our emotions helps us to step back from them rather than play them out.

    • When we can become more aware of our intended responses we have the opportunity to create a more mindful response.

Understanding mindfulness


Before you start with your first day of mindfulness practice check out this page, 'understanding mindfulness'.

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