AUTOPILOT MODE

WHAT IS THE AUTOPILOT MODE?

One way to describe it would be your morning routine- You get up, brush your teeth, shower, and get dressed, all

without thinking about it. That's ok because you wouldn’t want to have to consciously think through repetitive tasks. 

But the problem is when negative habits and behaviours become automatic.

When we slip into autopilot mode, our attention is absorbed in our wandering minds and we are not really ‘present’ in our live.

On autopilot we get lost in ‘doing’ rather then just being, so we find ourselves constantly striving and struggling and ‘getting stuff done’ instead of being fully present with it.

We also become vulnerable to anxiety, stress, depression and reactivity. When unawareness dominates our wondering minds, all our decisions and actions can be dominated by it.

Living in a state of unawareness can cause to miss out much of what s most beautiful and meaningful in our lives.

When you begin paying attention mindfully to what your mind is doing, you will probably find that there is a great deal of mental and emotional activity going on beneath the surface.

 

‘If we’re not careful, it is all too easy to fall into becoming more of a human doing than a human being, and forget who is doing all the doing, and why.’  Jon Kabat Zinn

 

Few minutes breath awareness technique

 

 Few Minutes Breathing awareness technique

The breathing space provides a way to step out of ‘automatic pilot’ mode and reconnect with the present moment.

It consists in 3 steps Acknowledging, Gathering, Expanding.

CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS

The conscious mind contains all of the thoughts, memories, feelings, and wishes of which we are aware at any given moment. This is the aspect of our mental processing that we can think and talk about rationally.

This also includes our memory, which is not always part of consciousness but can be retrieved easily and brought into awareness.

The unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that are outside of our conscious awareness. The contents of the unconscious can be pleasant and positive but also contents can be unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict.

CONSCIOUS                               

- Manual part of the mind which you can directly control 

- Voluntary actions for example; 

- Moving hand

* Choosing to look at something 

- Logic and Reasoning for example 

- Deciding to do something or not 

- Working out a mathematical sum 



UNCONSCIOUS

- Automatic part of the mind which you can't directly control.  

- Feelings

- Behaviours

- Personality

- The unconscious mind can be likened to a video and audio recorder. 

- The conscious mind does our reasoning, thinking and communicating. 

The conscious mind points the video and audio recorder at that which we wish to learn and remember. 

Everything we have seen, experienced, touched, smelled. heard or tasted, is recorded in our unconscious mind.

The conscious mind is the playback unit for many of these recordings.

Example: A child touches a hot pot on a stove. The hot handle causes pain. The child jerks his hand away and feels the pain. 

This is seen and felt, so it is recorded in the unconscious mind. Each time the child touches a hot pot on the stove he experiences the same reaction.

After several repetition of the above, a behaviour pattern ( condition response) is formed. 

From that time on, when the child sees the hot pot on the stove, information from the unconscious mind, recollection of pain comes back into the conscious mind. 

The child does not touch the hot pot again. 

Thus the unconscious mind does not reason. It accepts information, stores that information and releases it for later usage in any life situation.

The unconscious mind is the seat of your emotions. 

If you feed in a sad thought, a sad emotion, for what happened in a past situation, will be projected into the consciousness. 

If you feed happy thoughts, positive emotions such  as joy, kindness, it will be projected into the consciousness. 

If you worry, consciously you will be feeding this negativity into your unconscious and so tension will be projected not only into your mind but also into your body.