Redesign Your Mind

The Breakthrough Program for Real Cognitive Change

Eric Maisel

• Publisher: Mango Media
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781642505122
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
• Index: Psychology

"Applying the metaphor of a complete 'home rehab' to the mind, [ Redesign Your Mind ] presents an engaging series of visualization techniques." — Publishers Weekly Your mind is like a room that is yours to redesign—a space that you can declutter, air out, furnish, decorate, and turn into a truly congenial place. Today, cognitive-behavioral therapy and CBT techniques are the tools that help us do this. In this book, Dr. Eric Maisel, Ph.D. moves cognitive change a giant step forward by describing the room that is your mind and how human consciousness is experienced there. Packed with visualization exercises, this accessible guide makes redesigning your mind and changing what—and how—you think easy and simple, an upgrade to the CBT method that lets you promote cognitive growth, healing, and change. · Increase your creativity
· Reduce your anxiety
· Rid yourself of chronic depression
· Recover from addiction
· Heal from past trauma
· Stop negativity, boredom, and self-sabotage
· Overcome procrastination
· Achieve emotional wellbeing

Part I

Redesigning Your Mind 

Chapter 1 

Letting a Breeze In 

We are not going to trouble ourselves with arcane debates about what consciousness is, where it’s located, or whether the brain and the mind are exactly the same or seriously different things. We are focusing on one beautiful idea: the room that is your mind can be redesigned to serve you better.

The first thing we’re going to do is get all that stuffiness out of your mindroom! (The phrase “the room that is your mind” is a bit cumbersome, so let’s use “mindroom” instead.) You’ve been living in your mindroom forever, thinking the same thoughts, repeating the same opinions, remembering the same hurts. It’s time to throw open the windows and let a cleansing breeze blow through. That breeze will clear the air of worry and despair and clear your mind of all those thoughts that aren’t serving you.

In order to throw open those windows, you first need to install them. Let’s visualize that right now. Shut your eyes and picture your mindroom. If you can’t quite picture it, just picture it indistinctly. Its contours will become clearer as we proceed. For now, just “feel” it, all its stuffiness and airlessness. Now, pick a wall and install a pair of windows. Choose any sort of window you like, and have them look out onto any sort of vista you like. What windows will you choose? And what vista?

My wife and I once rented a ground-floor apartment in Paris with tall living room windows that opened onto a lovely, quiet side street. Seated at the table by those windows, eating baguettes and drinking wine, we watched the world go by. The windows installed in my mindroom are those tall French windows. What sort of windows would you like to install? Windows looking down on Broadway, with jazz playing in the background? Old-fashioned windows with screens on them, looking out onto a lake? Exotic windows looking out at sand dunes and the sea beyond? Choose yours now!

Now, throw them wide open!

If your mindroom is like most mindrooms, it is stuffy, troubling, and much too familiar. It’s full of secrets that we keep from others and secrets that we keep from ourselves. It’s full of intimations of our own mortality, whispers of insults not forgotten, strange, destructive urges, and ghosts of the distant past. It is anything but light and airy! Now, you get to transform that dark place into a space that is lighter and airier. With your windows thrown wide open, let all that mustiness blow away!

When you add windows to your mindroom, throw them open, and let a welcome breeze blow through, you immediately relax, reduce your anxiety, and provide a way for sadness to escape. You make life feel less stale, repetitive, and oppressive, just like that. You can picture regrets and disappointments leaving, and you can find peace without having to engage in soothing peace substitutes like endlessly surfing the Net or drinking too much alcohol. When I throw open the windows of my mindroom, I receive amazing benefits. I feel calmer and more loving, and I think more clearly. Everything changes for the better, just as life changes for the better when a cloud passes and the sun reappears.

The Buddha’s advice to “get a grip on your mind” suggests work. It is certainly work that cognitive therapists are suggesting when they ask you to engage in thought stopping, thought substituting, and so on. But adding windows and opening them wide is easy. It’s, well, a breeze!

Please take a few moments and visualize your mindroom filled with cheery light and a gentle breeze. Just be there. There’s nothing to think and nothing to do. Just throw those windows open and let a breeze blow through.

I’ve written fifty books and I know what writing a book takes. It takes the opposite of claustrophobia. It takes airiness, a breeze, and a blue sky. It takes concentration, but while swinging in a hammock. It takes focus, but as in a sea gaze. To write well, I need the mental equivalent of a still summer afternoon with the sounds of bees buzzing and air circulating. And I can have that! All I need to do is visit my mindroom and throw open the windows.

Let’s do some right thinking to go along with that new breeziness. Let’s support your intention to get rid of all that stuffiness by thinking some new thoughts that will serve you. Think one of your customary unhelpful thoughts, like “I’m not very talented,” or “I’ve wasted a lot of time in life,” or “I’m feeling very sad.” At the same time, picture those open windows, feel a gentle breeze blow through, and exclaim (silently or out loud), “Breeze, take this thought away!”

Watch the thought float right out the window. Follow it in your mind’s eye all the way to the sea and watch it evaporate in shafts of sunlight. Can you even remember the thought that you were thinking? No! It floated off and is gone because you installed windows and gave it a way to exit.

This is your new learning. You can always visit your mindroom, indwell there peacefully, and have the thoughts that aren’t serving you drift right out the windows you’ve installed. Thinking about playing another video game? Visit your mindroom and let that craving drift off. Feeling sad? Visit your mindroom and let that feeling float away. Those windows really are a bit of miracle. They let everything you don’t need pass right out of your mindroom and dissolve into the ether.

In the next chapter, we’ll get an easy chair installed in your mindroom. How nice it will be to sit in your easy chair with a lovely breeze blowing the cobwebs away! But before we leave this chapter, I want you to visit your mindroom one last time. Go there now and picture a sunny day, your windows thrown open, and a gentle breeze blowing through. Shut your eyes, be there, and relax. This is the first major change in how you indwell, without all the usual stuffiness. Be there for a while and enjoy the experience. There’s no rush. Take a moment to indwell peacefully before moving on to the next chapter.

Every chapter will end with a visualization and a writing prompt. I hope you’ll engage with both.

Visualization: Visualize the room that is your mind. Add windows. Open those windows. Let a breeze in!

Writing Prompt: Look around your mindroom. Do you see a piece of furniture or something else that ought to be removed? What is it and why should you get rid of it?

Chapter 2

Adding an Easy Chair

I hope you’re getting comfortable with our metaphor of “the room that is your mind,” or as we’re now calling it, your mindr...