How One Doing A Day Will Improve Your Life

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

An excerpt from a book by a psychotherapist on how to subdue the unconscious urge to procrastinate and consume cakes at night.

A client from a distant country once asked me: “Doctor, I am a specific person and I don’t like what I cannot touch, touch, see or hear. You tell me that my psyche, my head, my unconscious have not only some kind of their own, different from mine, outlook on my life, but they can arbitrarily and imperceptibly control my behavior, change it and thereby influence my life. To be honest, I do not notice this and therefore I have to trust you, which I would not want. Could you give specific examples of how this management takes place, so that I could see it myself and know that it exists?"

I did not begin to tell her about Freud and cite dreams ("the royal road to the unconscious") as an example for one reason. Dreams are not yet behavior. I can endlessly prove to you that dreams have meaning and we are not the creators of dreams, and we do not put this meaning into them. We do not go to bed thinking that today we must dream of this and that, and “when he starts hugging and kissing me on the couch, the door will open, my mother will come in and ask if I forgot to iron the clothes”. For your part, you will endlessly prove to me that dreams are just a collection of incoherent and meaningless fragments of experienced events and memories, in which the past day is distorted and chaotically reflected.

And I will have nothing to argue with you. I am not an orthodox psychoanalyst, so I am not afraid to offend my colleagues. I have no doubt that dreams have meaning, that this meaning can be understood, and that understanding this meaning can help a person change his life for the better. I only doubt that the modern interpretation of dreams is based on a solid objective scientific basis.

I will give just one argument. It will be possible to speak about any objective approach to the analysis of dreams when we see that ten psychoanalysts, independently of each other analyzing the dream of a particular person, will draw completely identical conclusions, and identical recommendations will be derived from these conclusions and these recommendations will lead to identical results. … I have not heard of such a miracle yet.

Ten botanists from different countries, having seen a dying plant, should theoretically come to the conclusion that the plant does not have enough water and that it needs to be watered. Then they have to water it, and objectively the plant should get better after some time.

Ten doctors, having seen a set of certain symptoms, must, on the basis of this, make a certain diagnosis and propose specific methods of treatment, the variations of which will again depend on specific details.

But not so in psychoanalysis.

I cannot say that I have fully studied all the existing professional literature, but I have never come across publications in which the results of a comparative study of the opinions of several dozen psychoanalysts regarding the same specific dream would be presented. I believe that if there were such data, they would be included in all basic manuals of psychoanalysis. But no.

Therefore, it seems to me that readers of dream books can more reasonably claim a scientific approach. At least they have no disagreements in the interpretation: if a tooth has fallen out in a dream, this is the death of a loved one, and if excrement is money. “Unscientificness” in dream books begins when the question is asked: “Why?”. But we are going too far from our topic. We return to the client.

I offered her another way. It is absolutely concrete, practical, tangible and known. I have written about him many times. And not only me. The only thing I have always emphasized is that the main meaning of this method is not what is attributed to it: not in the systematization and organization of your life. Its main value is that it allows the person himself to determine exactly how "everything is bad with his head", how much he himself controls his behavior, his life, and "who is dancing whom."

What is this magic way? I'm telling you. This is a system of "plans for tomorrow".

In its most elementary form, it looks like this: during the day you plan for the next day one small, small thing that should have been done for a long time, but you can not do it for another month or a year.

This business should not be mandatory, that is, you can do it or not, it should be small (you do not need to spend more than half an hour on it), simple, absolutely doable, and its implementation should depend only on you.

You can't plan to get up in the morning and go to the bathroom - you do it anyway. You can't plan to learn the conjugation of one hundred French verbs of the third group - it's impossible in a day. You cannot schedule a meeting with your friend or take your laundry to the dry cleaner - the friend may not come, and the dry cleaner may be closed. The plan should be useful, optional, simple, short-lived, and doable.

Then, during the next day, you must complete it and schedule another day for the next. And so every day. For not fulfilling the plan for any of the most valid reasons, as well as for forgetting to plan it, as well as for forgetting what you planned, you impose a fine on yourself in the amount of one percent of your total monthly income (including all sources of income). Total for a month in the worst case, you can lose thirty percent of your monthly income. Not fatal, but it bites.

This system has always been described as a tool for fighting procrastination (putting things off), as a tool for “completing gestalts” (a series of behaviors), and as a tool for step-by-step execution of large and complex tasks, allowing you to “eat the elephant piece by piece”. I agree with all this, but I do not agree that this is the main thing.

I believe that the main advantage of the system of "plans for tomorrow" is that it allows, thanks to concrete actions, to see, determine and realize the degree of uncontrollability of your psyche, the degree of uncontrollability of your behavior, to see and realize that it is something other than "you", interferes in your decisions and controls your behavior.

The introduction of this system into life is like throwing a stick into a stream of water. If you are sitting on the bank of a large and slow river, it is not always clear which way it flows.

To understand, you need to throw a stick into the water and determine the direction of the current by its movement. It's the same here.

"Plans for tomorrow" is an "atomic" system. There is nothing less than them.

Watch your hands. Do you plan what you need the next day? Yes. This is not necessary for the neighbor, not for the husband, not for the wife, not for the boss, but for you. Have you needed this for a long time? Yes. Can you do it tomorrow? Yes. Is it easy? Yes. Does it only depend on you? Yes. If you don’t do this, you will “get it in the head” - will you have to pay a fine? Yes.

And if you agree with all this and are 100% sure that you can cope with the fulfillment of "plans for tomorrow", then try it. Less than five percent of people, in my experience, do it. In 95% of cases, people easily agree to the introduction of a system of "plans" into their lives, but then they quickly discover that for some completely incomprehensible reason they forgot to plan something, forgot to do something and, of course, forgot to pay a fine for forgetting and not fulfilling.

And here the question is: if yesterday “you” made a decision that “plans” are an excellent solution to your problem of postponing things for later, then the question is, “who” did not fulfill this decision tomorrow, devalued and canceled?

It was your unconscious, which did not argue at the moment when you agreed to fulfill them and when you were sure that you could fulfill them. It didn't argue when you were planning something in the evening. It treated you like an unreasonable child who is going to fly into space tomorrow. Parents will not argue with the child and dissuade him. They will simply say in the evening “Sleep, little one”, and in the morning they will say: “Get up, let's go to kindergarten. The flight is canceled for technical reasons."

The system of "plans" allows you to determine "who is who": you are your subconscious or it is you.

And there is practically no room for maneuver and ambiguous interpretation. You have planned something, you want and can do it, but not you (!) Cancel it tomorrow, forget and somehow magically fail.

And first a sad conclusion. Gentlemen, if you cannot organize yourself to perform one small, absolutely necessary, absolutely doable task, then you have no reason to hope that you will be able to organize yourself to perform some large, complex and difficult tasks.

This does not mean at all that pleasant moments and even achievements will not happen in your life, but these will not be your achievements in the full sense of the word. A person who floats along the river may accidentally be nailed to some pleasant and pretty place, and he even “can achieve something”, but he should not indulge himself with the illusion that he controls his own life and makes decisions himself. Such a person feels himself in his life not as a master, but as a co-worker, who sadly sits in the kitchen and asks: "Is it possible to have supper?" And not the fact that she will not be fed. They will feed you if you are in a good mood. But she does not decide it.

Ask yourself, when in the morning you decide not to eat after seven in the evening, who on the same evening after seven tells you: “An interesting point of view, now let's go and eat, we have a delicious cake in the fridge, we are very tired today, no one loves us, and you can't live without a cake on such a difficult evening? Do you have an answer?

And now a pleasant conclusion, or rather, a life observation: those people who, through work, stress, constant fines and tears, introduced a pseudo-simple system of "plans for tomorrow" into their lives, within several years achieved not only what they dreamed of, but even what they could not even dream of.

Yuri Vagin is a candidate of medical sciences, a psychotherapist with 30 years of experience, an author of articles, books and a popularizer of psychology. Over the years of practice, the doctor has helped dozens of people understand the causes of their problems and showed how to organize their lives in order to make it as happy as possible.

In the book “Doctor, I'm under stress. Psychoses and fears of the big city”Vagin tells where they come from and what they lead to overstrain and overwork, how to deal with them and where to draw strength for productivity.