Eli

Hi everyone, I watched how to master your emotions as well as how to deal with strong negative emotions and there's something that's very confusing there. In one video Leo's message is: be aware of the thought that you're having about whatever is happening and notice how that thought is what creates the emotion and he calls that a filter and says that we shouldn't have a lazy interpretation of things but rather a positive one even when the situation is not so good, so bottom line: take an active role. In the second video Leo says that we should just sit down with the emotion and let it be and allow ourselves to feel it without resisting it, which is a completely passive role here that he's asking us to take. Now here's my question: which attitude do you need to have? Do you sit down and feel the hurt and not control it and don't resist it or do you go ahead and change what you're thinking about the whole situation so you feel better about it? In other words do you need to be active or passive to master your emotions?

CAUTION ⚠ @Thirdeye I think that the reason this works so well is that it changes the balance, like right now what you're doing is drinking, well because you're doing that for maybe 7 days a week then it's easier to so an 8th one and a 9th one etc... But by not doing the behavior for 5 days and then doing it 2 days and jumping right back to not doing it. What you're doing here is creating more time you don't do it when you're doing something else. And that's what actually breaks the habit and replaces it with something else just make sure you don't replace it with another addiction such as video games, sex, food, watching TV, videos on the YouTube etc... You just got rid of it don't fall into something else!

@Thirdeye Hey I was a chain smoker about two years ago and I can tell you exactly what stopped my addiction once and for all. Here's the thing I used to smoke a lot but to the point I started having breathing issues and I was only 19! And so after a year of attempting to stop it I came up with a super solid plan that changed everything for me. So basically what I did was reading a bunch of books and material on how habits work and are formed. Good or bad habits it doesn't matter they're all formed by us and we create them. After reading these books I Realized that the more you do something the harder it is to stop doing it and vice versa, if you never did something it's just as hard to start doing that thing. So here's the key: I didn't smoke for 5 days straight Monday through Friday and on the weekend I allowed myself to smoke AS MUCH as I wanted with no restrictions and trust me I tried everything reducing the number of cigarettes, smoking only at night etc... Nothing worked. And so by only smoking on the weekends what started to happen is that I started looking forward for these weekends to smoke it was so obsessive that I almost didn't live during the weekdays all I could do is think about how the weekend was going to be. You do this for 3 weeks and trust me you're not going to want to wait for that weekend anymore, you're going to be sick of it and slowly start living life and forgetting about the weekend. I did this for 7 weeks exactly and on the 8th week I completely forgot to smoke on the weekend. And then I was like wow I can't believe I didn't smoke even though I totally could! If I could live for a week without doing it then it simply means that I can do this forever and since then I never smoked again. Another thing that helped was just looking at myself smoking and being very mindful of how disgusting that was and how little I was to wait so eagerly for that moment and actually seing myself doing it because what happens is that I was very unconscious of what I was doing.