In 1993, Antonio DeMasio made a remarkable discovery. One that seems intuitively obvious to anyone who’s ever impulse-purchased any item while walking through a grocery store or on late night TV, but nevertheless, one that the scientific community had up until that point, failed to prove. And one, that should have radically transformed the way we think about decision making.
In his work as the head of neuroscience at Massacheuttes Institute of Technology (MIT), he studied people with brain lesions.
Most programs that try to help you change your thoughts, feelings, and emotions make the same three mistakes.
Mistake 1: They focus on your conscious mind, not your unconscious
They belive that your conscious mind is in control and try to reprogram your conscisous mind. But it’s not in control. The biggest indicator of that is that if you have you use your conscious mind to reprogram your actions, then by definition, it’s not in control. Something else is in control
Mistake 2: They focus on the past and not the present
Mistake 3: They try to remove the issue rather than replace it