How to Stop Sabotaging Yourself and Start Mastering Your State of Mind

If you could take complete control of your emotions and master your state of mind and the way you feel at any given time, you’d be unstoppable.

You would become unstoppable at your job. You would be relentless in the gym. And above all, you would be able to apply yourself to a task in a way that you previously would have thought impossible.

But you are probably not where you want to be in life because you’re undermining and sabotaging yourself and have difficulty controlling your emotions.

I’ll show you how to control your state of mind and exhibit.

Unlimited Strength (within reason, of course), Perfect Focus, Incredible Creativity, and Engaging Social Skills.

I can see you rolling your eyes. Really, I can. Just kidding. But hear me out.

Emotions and Strength

I’m a history nerd. I love everything history-related. Nobody wants to go to museums or exhibits with me because I have to read every plaque. Like every word of every one. Boring, right? Not for me.

Lately, I’ve begun reading history-based novels. Particularly Norse and early Anglo-Saxon war history. Some of the most feared fighters in this period were known as “berserkers.” They were so called because of their “berserker rage.” This was a state they would enter on the battlefield. It was an agitated trance-like state where they would bite the edge of their shields, cut down everyone in sight, were impervious to pain, and exhibited otherwise inhuman strength. In this heightened and agitated state, they were almost invulnerable.

There have been more recent accounts of a person exhibiting seemingly impossible feats of strength. Hysterical strength, as it’s called. We’ve heard the stories of 120-pound mommas that dug into an immense reserve of strength and lifted a car off one of their children trapped beneath it.

Think it’s just a myth? It turns out there’s a solid scientific explanation for how this might be possible. Under extreme stress, it seems likely that the body produces excess testosterone, adrenaline, and cortisol. These hormones increase the heart rate, focus, awareness, and muscle tone, and that is where the extra strength comes from.

It goes a little deeper than that even. You see, all of us have limits to our strength imposed by our minds and our biology. So when you go to lift a weight, you do so by recruiting muscle fiber. Little bands that make up the muscle and contract to give us our strength. The most muscle fiber that the average person can recruit at once under normal circumstances is around 30%.

The most that a highly trained athlete can recruit is closer to 50%. So, a highly trained athlete is only capable of tapping into roughly half of their maximum strength. This is what we mean when we refer to a ‘mind-muscle connection.’ 

The reason we can’t access so much of our strength is 

1. that it would likely cause us injury as we would break a muscle, pull a ligament, etc. and 
2. that it would fatigue us.

If we were to use that much of our muscle power in a single movement, we’d have no energy left for anything else!

But under the right circumstances, being able to dip into these vast reserves of strength is incredibly useful. And adrenaline and other hormones under the right conditions allow us to tap into that power.

Studies show that yelling in the gym can increase adrenaline and enhance muscle fiber recruitment, resulting in strength improvements! Now imagine if you could tap into even just 80% of that power at will? Simply by harnessing your emotions?

Emotions for Calm, Collected Focus

But there’s only so far that being able to leap tall buildings and punch through walls will get you. In the real world, physical strength isn’t really what matters. This then is where the ‘flow state’ comes in. A flow state is often described as a state of calm, focus, bliss. When the world seems to slow down, it happens because you are so intently focused and engaged in what you are doing.

Have you ever opened a cabinet and seen something fall out but moved in super-fast motion to catch it? That’s a flow state. More often, we hear about it in extreme sports – athletes finding their flow and being able to pull off incredible stunts at incredible speeds. It’s referred to as “being in the zone.” Outside of physical activities, it is seen in music. When the entire band synchronizes during a jam, this is a type of flow state.

When you have a conversation with someone that lasts all night, that’s a flow state. When you’re working on a project and work so long that you don’t even notice the time passing, that is a flow state.

So, what is flow? It’s a mental state that is triggered by the release of hormones and neurotransmitters. In this case, it is a subtle variation on the fight or flight response, a slight variation on stress and panic. Here, you believe something is just as crucial as preventing yourself from getting injured, it is just as compelling as fighting for your life, but it is also fun rather than scary.

You have the full attention of your body and mind, which brings about a release of excitatory hormones along with calming ones and those related to bliss, such as anandamide. This suppresses activity in the prefrontal cortex, triggering a state known as ‘transient hypofrontality.’ This prevents us from worrying, second-guessing, or over-thinking.

Many of us are anxious and fearful. Imagine being able to talk up to a woman/man at a networking event and deliver your wittiest conversation ever. Imagine being able to speak in front of an audience with passion and conviction and captivate them entirely in what you’re saying. Imagine working on the projects that matter to you for hours on end without even looking up.

No fear. No doubt. No bursts of anger or unwanted emotion. And this is when we do our best work. This is when we are happiest. So many people try and live their lives in flow as much as possible. The problem is that most of us are full of anxiety and busy with chores and things we need to do.

These limitations leave us stressed, anxious and busy, and they take our mind out of the moment. Our entire body and mind cannot possibly be in sync when we worry about debt or what our boss said at the office. Entering flow means being in the moment, which not only makes you happy and confident, it makes you unstoppable.

Creativity

Changing your emotions can even make you more creative. The opposite of a flow state is something called the default mode network. This brain region network springs into action when you are engaged in tedious, repetitious work or just relaxing. This is what happens when you allow yourself to become completely at ease and let your mind wander.

Now many people give this mental state a hard time. They say that this is when your ‘inner Woody Allen’ chirps up. This is the opposite of ‘living in the moment.’ But in fact, this is also when your creativity kicks in. This was Einstein’s state when he came up with his theory of relativity (while working in a patent office!).

This is daydreaming, and that is when we come up with plans, ideas, and more.

No emotion is a bad thing. The answer is just being able to tap into the right emotion at the right time. It’s about emotional control.

Social Skills

And finally, the obvious power of emotion: social skill. If you want to seem confident, then you need to stop worrying about what others think. If you’re going to be a leader, then you need to be able to take command, not second guess yourself, and not get upset and visibly riled when things go wrong. If you want to engage others and make friends and partners, you need to be charismatic, engaging, and entertaining.

All these things are based once again on having control over your emotions. But the thing is: most of us don’t have any control. Most of us sulk when we don’t have a good day and put ourselves in even more of a funk. Most of us are scared when things are wrong. When we’re stressed, we argue with our partners and avoid important work in the office. We sabotage ourselves, undermine ourselves and struggle to get things done. All because we can’t control our emotions.

Taking Control

So how do you take back control over your emotions? There are multiple ways, but let’s address two crucial points: physiology and mindset. Physiology refers to the fact that your emotions are an extension of how you feel. Emotions describe things like happiness, sadness, anger, fear. We think that these emotions are born from our minds, but a lot of the time, that’s not the case at all.

Instead, emotions come from our bodies. Emotions come from feelings that include things like hunger, tiredness, hot, cold. The very function of your emotions is to trigger behaviors that will help you fix the way you feel. For example, when you haven’t eaten enough lately, your blood sugar dips. This, in turn, triggers a release of cortisol – the stress hormone. This tells you that something needs to change and wakes you up, and in the wild, this would have encouraged you to look for food.

When you eat, your blood sugar spikes, you produce leptin and serotonin. This makes you happy and content and encourages you to sleep. Eventually, serotonin converts to melatonin, the sleep hormone. So, in other words, the way you feel is often the result of your physiology, which changes the way you think. For example, you think you’re angry because you had a bad day? Possibly. More likely, you had a bad day because you’re angry.

And you’re angry because:

• You didn’t sleep

• You’re in mild pain

• You haven’t eaten enough

• You’ve eaten the wrong things

You get the gist? So, one way to change your emotions and to take back control is to acknowledge this. But, first, recognize that it’s probably due to physiological reasons if you’re angry, and it will pass. At least it won’t seem so bad later.

Secondly, seek to change this. Eat something. Sleep. Take the cue. Learn to follow your rhythms and work when you’re naturally most productive. Follow the rhythms of the day and get your circadian cycles in check.

And at the same time, look at ways you can directly control your physiology. The very best way? Breathing!

If you learn to breathe correctly (using belly breathing to fill the lower portion of the lungs, then the upper part) and use slow, controlled breaths, you will lower your heart rate and calm your entire body. This will change your parasympathetic tone, taking you out of ‘fight or flight’ and into ‘rest and digest.’

Try it the next time you feel overly stressed, overly competitive, or worked up after an intense workout – your heart rate will slow, and your mind will grow calmer. The other tool you can use is something called CBT. Now we’re looking at the psychological, self-talk aspect. CBT stands for ‘Cognitive Behavioral Therapy,’ a popular form of psychotherapeutic intervention used to treat phobias and other anxiety disorders.

The idea is to look at the content of your thoughts. The self-talk that you give yourself to work yourself into a panic or to calm yourself down. If you are thinking things like, “I’m worried I might fall off that ledge,” then, of course, you are going to be scared. If you think things like “I’m grateful for my wife,” then you will be less likely to feel unhappy with where you are in life.

It goes deeper than that, of course. For example, you can use what is learned from CBT to challenge long-held beliefs and to break negative self-talk habits by challenging your thoughts and testing your hypotheses. This is called ‘cognitive restructuring.’

In the short term, you can use CBT techniques to assess your state of mind and emotions more honestly. This will then change the way you feel about a situation.

So if you are stressing that you have a deadline you can’t meet, and it’s ruining your evening, you might use cognitive restructuring to assess the thoughts that are making you stressed and replace them with more productive ones.

For example, you might consider:

• What is the point of being stressed? Will it make matters better?
• What’s the worst-case scenario? Would it really be that bad to tell the boss you can’t finish work on time? Are they expecting too much of you anyway?
• When was the last time you did this?
• Are there other ways you could lessen the blow?
• What would you rather pay attention to right now?

Combine this with controlled breathing and focus on the most helpful thing to you right now. In the long term, you can use CBT techniques to bridge the gap between your thoughts and your physiology. You see, your physiology and your emotions are designed to drive you toward desirable states: sex, food, shelter, love, success, social acceptance.

The problem is that the tasks you need to accomplish don’t often get you those things in the short term. In the long term, taking care of those menial tasks helps you keep your job, enabling you to pay for food and keep your family!

But in the short term, it just means more tedious work.

So now you need to remind yourself why you do what you do. And you’ll do this not only with words but with visualization—picture where you want to be. Picture the wealth you want to have, the success, the satisfaction. Then remind yourself that the things you do today are driving you toward the things you want. This is when your heart and mind will finally be on the same page. And that’s when anything becomes possible.