how does discomfort make us want to fix every detail of our lives?

“I want to fix everything in my life, my emotions, my relationships, my career and who I am”

Everything.

That “everything” is a tough one and let me tell you now that it’s not possible.

The things we feel from our lives are not something that we can grab and decide to put a few screws in order to “fix”.

First of all, there is nothing to fix.

Why? Because there is nothing wrong in the first place with who you are.

It is just who you are. Sure there might be some things that you want to transform or modify but there is nothing broken at all.

We tend to look at a lot of human qualities as broken. When in the end they are just part of who we are, they are part of our humanness.

Scissors are made to cut, but that doesn’t mean that they are broken or that something is wrong with them. That it’s just who they are. (I know scissors are not living).

Your emotions and the conflict you feel inside you are part of the processes of the body for when things happen in your environment.

Your body reflects your environment as a survival method and analyses what looks safe and what doesn’t.

But the brain doesn’t know that conflict is normal in relationships. Or that sadness doesn’t mean that you are going to die. It certainly acts as if though.

That is its mechanism, again it is not broken. It is meant to keep you alive and away from danger.

So when your brain faces heavy emotions from conflict, it can say run, or it can say solve.

It normally doesn’t allow us time to even process what is going on. It just wants to make you safe.

This is how you end up wanting to fix everything. (If you are reading this you are probably one of those people).

There needs to be a break and a pause between the impulse of the brain and the wisdom of the mind.

That space is super uncomfortable. That is when the thinking happens, the “I need time to think” happens.

When the survival functions of the brain override our minds we lose control, and we become even more confused.

So apart from wanting to fix everything, we don’t even know what there is to be fixed. Or how it is supposed to be fixed. Making us stay in that break or pause of discomfort for longer than we would’ve had to if we had made it a habit.

Once in a while, the brain will do that by itself for survival. What happens is that often when faced with that pause and break where we feel our emotions, we panic and the mind shuts down. That is when the override happens, like all habits, the more this happens it starts being automatic.

What we look for is that pause of discomfort in which we are forced to see everything as it is and not escape it.

This is the pause that allows us to process our emotions and thoughts and eventually think clearly and make sense of what happens around us.

If you try to fix or stop what happens in that discomfort without giving it the time it needs apart from becoming a habit you are repressing those things and stuffing it in the body and in the back of the mind ( to be found later when the last drop lands in the glass and everything spills).

I will use an analogy.

A dog barks when the doorbell rings. Frantically. It won’t stop barking until someone opens the door and they see who it is, or goes to the window and looks out. The dog is barking to keep the house safe, it goes into survival mode and its puppy charm and calmness go away, nothing can distract it from barking. If the dog were trained it would learn to go look who it is or completely pause the barking and wait patiently for someone to open the door.

The dog is our brain, the doorbell is any conflict or emotions that we are presented with.

The brain wants to stop those emotions by fixing everything around them (in the case of the dog barking like crazy to notify the entire neighbourhood).

The dog is in survival mode to keep its house safe and shuts off its calmness and puppy charm in the same way that the brain shuts off the mind when it goes into survival mode.

The only thing the dog needs to do is to either peak out of the window or wait for someone to open the door to see who it is, just like we need the pause of discomfort to see everything as it is to not escape it or rush to fix it.

If the dog is not trained it will keep barking every time the doorbell rings and it will not learn to peak out of the window, this is how we create the habit of wanting to fix everything instantly as well.

And I’m not saying that changing this is as easy as training a dog, cause a dog obviously can’t train itself. But it is about the mind taking the leash and the control to allow the survival mode of the brain to sit back down while the mind stays in the discomfort of figuring out what is going on around us without causing more confusion.

I know it can be even more uncomfortable to sit and observe when we have a bunch of already uncomfortable things going crazy around us. But when we don’t, we act on impulse and just like the dog we stop being able to fully control what we do.

Now how do we train that little puppy?

It takes time, it takes patience and it takes a lot of love.

We need to make the brain feel safe. We need to show it that even if it stops trying to fix and solve everything for a second that it will be fine. It will be safe. That we are just stepping back to look at things more calmly and to fully process our emotions instead of getting rid of them.

We can do this by learning different ways to create mindfulness and process emotions in the body. With modalities like yoga or EFT.

We can also help with this by learning to sit with the discomfort and allow ourselves to actually feel the emotions and thoughts that come up.

Here are some prompts that will guide you in understanding that discomfort and your tendency to fix everything:

You can go through this list of questions for different things you tend to run away from

1. When you feel the need to fix everything, what do you think will happen if you don’t?
2. What fears come up when you think of not being able to solve a problem?
3. What tends to happen when you act on impulse and avoid your emotions and instantly try to solve the conflict?
4. What does your body think will happen if it sits with discomfort vs what does your mind think?
5. If you created the habit of sitting in discomfort, what would be the best possible outcome?

This last question has the most powerful impact. It is important to always ask ourselves what would happen if we did a different thing from our normal routine. Remember the butterfly effect. A flap of a butterfly’s wing can create a hurricane somewhere else. So any small changes you make for the best can improve your life drastically.

Hint: improve not “fix.”

Enjoy your humanness and enjoy your mistakes, at the end of the day the process with which we learn something is the most powerful.