A surgeon cuts into your knee, and you feel nothing.
No anesthesia. No painkillers. No pain.
Just hypnosis.
I can hardly believe it’s possible, remembering all the times at the dentist where I couldn’t bear even a tiny bit of pain without a proper injection.
Nir Eyal writes about it in Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results, apparently it’s more common than you’d think - doing operations under hypnosis.
The amount of pain you feel or don’t is totally “up to you”, and it all depends on what you pay attention to.
Hypnosis is just a tool to help you control your attention in a more powerful, reliable way.
That got me thinking more about how powerful attention management is as a tool, as a skill for anything we want to achieve or experience in life.
If attention is so powerful, that is can modulate our experience of intense pain during surgery, how else is it shaping our life experience overall?🤔
I wrote a while back about using attention management during a 36-hour fast.
The fast became almost effortless when I stayed busy and kept food out of my awareness.
The fast became challenging the moment I started paying attention to my hunger, my energy, thinking about how many things I need my energy for to get it all done, how my sleep and tomorrow’s workout can suffer etc
Same fast. Different focus. Completely different experience.
You probably already know this. You’ve been in this flow before. Worked through lunch without noticing. Forgotten a headache while solving an urgent problem. Watched pain shrink the moment you got absorbed in something that mattered more.
Sometimes I notice how kids hurt themselves and only start crying once parents rush to them to comfort them, once their attention is brought to their pain.
Attention isn’t just a productivity tool.
It’s the dial that controls your experience of reality.
How much you suffer, how much joy you find in the mundane.
Which brings me to the 2 wolves that live inside each of us at any moment.
“The Two Wolves: Inside everyone is a battle between darkness (envy, lies, ego) and light (joy, peace, love, humility).
The Choice: The “wolf” that dominates is the one nourished by your thoughts, actions, and attention.
The Lesson: It is a powerful lesson on self-discipline, mindfulness, and taking responsibility for your mental state and life’s direction”
What starts it all?
Attention.
The simple, repeatable act of choosing what you keep looking at in your mind’s eye.
In any challenging situation - whether you are trying to lose weight, grow your business, go through a rough relationship patch at home or at work, or simply function well, while there’s no running water due to a burst pipe - you have a choice to “feed” the wolf of frustration (which doesn’t change much), or to “feed” the wolf of peace and staying effective where you can move things forward (like your work).
Which one grows? Well, as the parable goes, the one you CHOOSE to feed.
Is it easy to do?
No.
If it were easy, rumination wouldn’t be an epidemic. Anxiety and worry wouldn’t be the defining mental health crisis of our time.
But is it doable?
Absof*ckinlutely!
The research on mindfulness, meditation, and CBT is overwhelming. The mechanism in all of them is the same — learning to notice where attention is going, and choosing to redirect it to where it serves your life.
Eyal uses my favorite question to help you choose the right attention point: Is this thought/belief/story you tell yourself useful?
Not: is it true.
Not: is it justified.
Just: is it useful?
If not, what else could you pay attention to right now?
That’s the wolf for you to feed.
Over to you, dear reader,
Where does your attention go most often? And does it make your life better?
Because if not, the shift is available right now.
Right now.