Adopting New Attitudes – An extract from lecture 24 of The Calmness in Mind Process – Where I discuss my path to mental wellness.

An attitude is simply an established way of thinking or feeling that shows up in behaviour. When the current ones keep producing anxiety, exhaustion or a sense of being stuck, they are worth examining. Most people assume their attitudes are fixed — “I’m just an anxious person,” “I’m shy,” “I’m not the type who can change.” That assumption is rarely true. We were once relatively blank canvases, programmed by family, culture, school, religion and early events. What was programmed can be reprogrammed.

I did not begin this work until I was thirty-five. By then I was depressed, anxious, exhausted and trying to hide it. A six-month breakdown followed. Looking back, it was the end of the old self-torment and the beginning of something different. The key realisation was simple: the world inside the head is not the same as the world outside it. Different strategies are required for each.

One of the first attitude shifts was to stop treating rules as sacred. I asked a different question: “Would I be okay with the worst realistic consequence of this action?” If the answer was yes, the action became available. Late one night I drove the wrong way down a quiet one-way street to avoid lengthy roadworks. I decided I could live with a fine and points on my licence. A policeman stopped me. When I told him the truth and accepted responsibility without excuses, he smiled, called me an idiot and let me go. The point was not the rule-breaking. It was the discovery that the mind’s predicted disasters often fail to materialise, and that adult ownership of consequences changes the outcome.

The noisy internal dialogue that had always felt like “me” turned out to be a cast of outdated characters — Judge, Victim, Pleaser, Rebel, Worrier and others. Once I began observing them as the rider rather than identifying with them as the horse, their childish contradictions became obvious. They were old programmes still running. Safety, for that system, meant avoidance, control and predictability. That version of safety had become a familiar prison.

I asked myself what the opposite of that safety would look like: risk, embarrassment, being out of control, taking responsibility, saying what I thought, trying new things. The Warrior and Nomad parts of me recognised those possibilities with interest. The Settler part resisted. The work became the deliberate cultivation of attitudes that favoured the former.

A useful high-level model arrived unexpectedly. Whether or not the idea of a Soul having a human experience is literally true is irrelevant. As a working model it was powerful. Earth becomes a place to learn how to rise above the body’s fear of emotion and the ego’s protective programming. Under that model, death loses some of its terror. The greater fear becomes not living fully while the body is available. My godmother, near the end of her life, said she had no regrets because she had sampled the richness of experience. That statement became a quiet instruction: start saying yes.

I adopted the practical stance of being “selflessly selfish.” My own calmness, energy and direction come first, not because others do not matter, but because a depleted person has little of value to offer. The Four Agreements provided temporary scaffolding: nothing is personal, stop making assumptions, speak with integrity, do your best (knowing that “best” varies with circumstances). They worked well enough that they stayed.

Concrete attitude changes followed. Sleep was reframed as essential recharge rather than an inconvenient interruption. Body weight became more important than short-term food pleasure. Guilt was recognised as optional self-abuse. The demand for certainty about the future was replaced by the practice of deciding the next useful action in the present. Courage was redefined as feeling vulnerable and acting anyway.

The final and ongoing shift was to talk myself into useful action rather than out of it. When the old voice said “that will never work,” a new voice was deliberately installed: “I am looking forward to starting that.” Over time the Reticular Activating System begins to notice opportunities that match the new direction.

None of this is quick or comfortable. Eggs have to be broken. Relationships, locations, jobs and self-stories may need to change. The environment and the people in it exert a stronger influence than willpower alone, so boundaries or distance sometimes become necessary. Progress is measured by new behaviours, not by the absence of all discomfort.

If the current attitudes are producing exhaustion and restriction, something must change. Write down the dominant stories and the behaviours they produce. Flip them. Explore the opposite. Ignore the sabotage that will inevitably appear and get on with the experiment. Vulnerability plus action, regardless of feeling or outcome, is courage in practice. The new attitudes are not adopted by thinking about them. They are installed by living them.