Keep at it, Journaling is a great tool for gaining the controls in designing your own life…Once we have the Thoughts, Ideas and Emotions labeled up with words, our minds can work pretty well with them.

And of course journaling events you will find new things you didn’t realize until you re-thought them a bit later and yourself is bout of everything that was going on while it happened.

It may work for you.  I have found this other part helpful:  [private] To journal events with actions you’d change/improve once you knew the ‘after’ information. By taking the time to organize the thoughts to journal a fictional account of what happened and what you would have done (as if you had)you now have these thoughts laid out in your head in order, so if something similar comes up you will think of it this way, almost like a preplan….it’s pretty cool.

Living life rather than letting life live you…

Yeah this system works well, I have quit smoking, installed new habits,
extinguished old habits with this structure:

“The secret of success is learning how to use pain and
pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do
that, you’re in control of your life. If you don’t, life
controls you.”

I don’t know…See if you can teach it back to me!!! xo.cj

Why do we go after pleasure and try to avoid pain?

It seems so obvious, doesn’t it? Pleasure is pleasurable and pain is painful. Doh!

And what controls these feelings of pleasure and pain?

Your brain, of course.

And why does it do it…?

Here is why:  Because it knows you will go for pleasure and try to avoid pain. And so, as an organ of survival, it drives you to do the things that are good for you. Yes, the things that are good for you are pleasurable.

WHAT? What did you say? So why do we overeat? Smoke? And all of those other bad things?

This is really important, so pay attention.

In your brain, there is a pleasure system. When you do things that are good for the organism (that’s you), there’s a reward mechanism that releases specific neurotransmitters in your brain that makes you feel good.

For thousands of years, these systems worked really well. Think about it: Sweet things found in nature — like fruits and berries — are good for you. Bitter things are usually poisonous.

And when you’re in good shape and you run around in the forest — you feel good — a lot of those rewarding neurotransmitters are released when your body is moving.

And eating — when there wasn’t the abundant supply of food that we have today, getting sugars and fats meant getting energy… crucial for survival, of course, and so your brain rewards the organism for it.

Do you see? The primitive part of your brain, the part that has kept you and your forefathers alive, is rewarding you for doing the things it thinks is best for you.

So What About Alcohol and Tobacco? And Other Drugs?

Ok, let’s take a tiny detour.

Can you remember the first time you had a sip of beer? Not very nice. Your first cigarette? Your first glass of whiskey? Cognac? All pretty bad experiences, I bet. But today, you’re hooked on some of these. You like them. No, you love them. They give you a great rush and they relax you, and you don’t want to live without them.

You know they are bad for you, of course (and maybe some more than others).

So why is your brain telling you not to quit? (At least the emotional part of it?) Why does it feel so good?

I’m not going to tell you that I understand addiction. Nobody really does. But we have some good theories. And here is one:

Your brain has a reward system that releases dopamine (a neurotransmitter) when you do something that is good for you (see http://www.addictionscience.net/ASNreport01.htm for a more scientific treatise on this).
Drugs, like alcohol and tobacco, short-circuit the reward system of the brain. They directly push the buttons of the reward system, and so your brain gets a rush of dopamine. And you take a delight in doing whatever it was you were doing at the time you got rewarded — like sipping merlot or smoking a cigarette.

What does this mean for you?

For one thing, it means that if you do want to quit smoking, for example, that you accept and acknowledge that some parts of you are actually hard wired to sabotage your efforts. Your brain obviously wants you to do what it thinks is best for you — such as some of these negative behaviors. You are a thinking, reflecting human being and you know it’s not good for you. But sorry, the reward system was there first. It developed long before the logical reasoning of your frontal lobes, which in evolutionary light can be seen as addendums to your brain. The reward system is deeper, lower down, and has a lot of say. It is there to keep you alive and kicking.

So you have to outsmart it. [/private]