Why Autopilot Thinking Makes You React Without Awareness and How to Break the Pattern, with Clinical Psychologist Dr Greg Obert | #610

[Agi Keramidas]
In this episode, you will discover how to stop reacting on autopilot under stress and regain control of your thoughts, emotions, and decisions. Welcome to Personal Development Mastery, the podcast that helps you gain clarity, overcome what holds you back, and take confident next steps towards a more meaningful and aligned life. I am your host, Dr. Aggie Keramidas, a personal development mentor and coach, and this is episode 610. If you are someone who often reacts quickly in stressful situations and later wishes you had responded differently, then this episode is for you. The following conversation explores how mindfulness and simple grounding techniques can help you think more clearly and respond more effectively in the moment. By listening, you will understand how autopilot thinking shapes your reactions and decisions without your conscious awareness.

And also, you will discover simple mindfulness techniques to interrupt thought loops in real time. Before we start, if you would like to find clearer direction and take confident next steps towards a life more meaningful and aligned, I offer one-to-one coaching to support you in your journey. To learn more, visit personaldevelopmentmasterypodcast.com slash mentor. The link is in the episode description. Now let's begin. Today, it is my real pleasure to speak with Dr. Gregory Obert. Greg, you are a clinical psychologist helping people to regulate their nervous system, interrupt reactive patterns, and think more clearly, especially under pressure so they can make better decisions. Greg, welcome to the show. It's a real pleasure to speak with you, and I'm really looking forward for this conversation.

[Greg Obert]
Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure to be here, and I also am looking forward to the conversation.

[Agi Keramidas]
The main thing that I want to explore with you today, and I think that is of useful to everyone or it should be to everyone, I think, and that is how to, and if you're listening right now, this is for you, it is about how to recognize and interrupt automatic reactions that we often have. By doing that, we can make better decisions, especially when the stress is high. For me, and Greg, this is my intention of exploring that with you, I think I will leave it for you to start with that because I don't know where you want to start in order to give us a little bit of context as well before we jump into the more practical and useful stuff.

[Greg Obert]
Yeah, absolutely. Happy to jump in there. I feel like I'm taking on the near impossible task of trying to convince people that mindfulness is actually useful, not just some buzzword that people use on social media to try and sell you something.

It's my goal today to save you and your listeners thousands of dollars on mindfulness seminars because you don't actually need someone to charge you $1,000 to explain what mindfulness is because I'm going to tell you what it is for free. Before we get there, more to your point about autopilot. It's a term I like to use because typically in the mindfulness literature, I see mindlessness, which makes us all sound crazy, which I don't particularly like.

I prefer the term autopilot. It's essentially this idea that we are acting without really thinking. We're just acting habitually, automatically because we don't really need to consciously think about what it is that we're doing.

Sometimes this is a useful tactic. For example, for people that aren't watching any video, I have a button down shirt on. When I put it on this morning, I wasn't thinking about how to fold the shirt so I could get the button through the hole.

I just did it. There's nothing wrong with that. Autopilot can save us a lot of time.

The problem is when autopilot ends up taking over for a lot of our bigger decisions in life. I'm not aware of what I'm thinking, what I'm feeling, and how this may impact a relationship, a business decision. I just automatically go with whatever the gut is.

That can get us into trouble, especially if the decision or the reaction we have is more emotionally charged or if it's based off a thought that is erroneous. As an example that I like to give, let's say you're sitting in your office and Johnny walks by. You know Johnny.

You go, hey, Johnny, how's it going? He just keeps on walking. What might be the first thought that pops into your head?

[Agi Keramidas]
Probably that he's very absorbed into something in his mind and he's really not paying attention to anything around him.

[Greg Obert]
That's very generous of you. You're clearly someone who practices mindfulness. When I usually ask that question, it's, Johnny is a jerk.

Johnny is ignoring me. Johnny's mad at me. I might feel some kind of way about Johnny.

I might feel upset with him. I might be nervous. I might be sad.

Then my reaction is going to be, well, I'm going to ignore Johnny back. I'm just going to cause this conflict to keep going versus if I'm aware of what the situation is, which is you said, hi, he walked by. That's all, you know, well now I can monitor my thoughts a little bit better.

When you were talking about giving him the benefit of the doubt, it's not that we need to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. It's that our thoughts are based on the evidence in front of us. That's taking us off autopilot and that's actually practicing mindfulness, which I teased earlier.

Here is the simple definition. It's paying attention on purpose to the present moment, nonjudgmentally. I'll say it again.

If anyone's taking notes, it's paying attention on purpose to the present moment, nonjudgmentally. And by nonjudgmentally, I mean focusing on the facts of the situation as they are, not as I want them to be. So in the case of Johnny, if I'm focusing on the situation and changing the facts, well, he walked by and didn't say anything because he's mad at me.

I don't know that. All I know is that he walked by and didn't say anything. And so if I'm being more mindful about the moment as it is with the information that I have, he just walked by and didn't say anything.

Now it could be that Johnny is a jerk and he hates your guts. You know, there might be some evidence for that in which case, okay, we have new evidence, but absent that evidence, if we try and make the situation what it isn't, that could potentially get us into trouble. So the more that we can be grounded in the present, the more effective we're going to be at making decisions in our lives.

So I'll pause there. Hopefully that kind of explains autopilot and mindfulness briefly.

[Agi Keramidas]
It sure does. And one thing I wanted to go deeper in the way you were describing the example is when Johnny passes by and does not greet me. And I have the thought that he's a jerk and he's ignoring me or he hates me because of what I said or whatever.

Those thoughts happen or come up automatically. So I think that is the, and earlier you were saying you used the word mindlessness, which then you rephrased, but I really like how it means that being unaware, basically. So my point, what I want to go deeper in is that particular thing.

Let's say that there is that thought that comes up that obviously it is a story that or an explanation about the event that happened. The question is how to distinguish that this is happening. In other words, how to bring back ourselves to the present moment when that thought arises and realizing that this is a thought, it is not necessarily the truth, as you will say.

[Greg Obert]
It's a great question. And what you're touching on is a term in a lot of mindfulness therapy literature, which is that idea of defusion. Because a lot of times when we have a thought or an emotion, we tend to just attach to it like it is gospel truth.

And sometimes it's true. And other times it's not, I don't know about you, but I've certainly had thoughts that crossed my mind that are not true and not based in reality. And that's okay.

It's natural for humans to have. It's just a matter of how do we, exactly what your question is, how do we distinguish what is true, what isn't so that we can start to defuse from the thoughts that are not true? Well, first off, we have to start practicing mindfulness in small ways so that we can start to practice mindfulness in the large ways.

I think for some reason in mindfulness circles, or at least people first starting to learn out, first starting to learn mindfulness, I should say, they tend to get this perfection mindset where it's, okay, well, Greg just told me the definition and now I need to go out and practice mindfulness everywhere. I need to execute it perfectly. And you know, if I screw up once or twice, well then clearly it's not for me.

We don't typically do that with other areas of our lives, right? I don't pick up a basketball and think I can play against LeBron James, or I don't go to the gym, you know, for the first time in my life and think I can bench 300 pounds. We have to work our way up.

And the same is true with mindfulness and being able to interrupt or autopilot. So one of the things that I encourage people to do is start small and we start with our senses. So as an example, I wonder how, for all the listeners out there, the shirt on your skin, shirt feels on your skin right now.

And if you're not wearing a shirt, go put a shirt on. But how does that shirt feel on your skin? And I suspect nobody out there was actually thinking about how the shirt felt on their skin until I said something about it.

Again, it's not a bad thing. It's not like, you know, we're failures because we didn't think about that. It's just tweaking our thought pattern, tweaking our experience a little bit to be a little bit more grounded in the present.

We can start with all sorts of small things. How does this chair feel on my back? How do the shoes feel on my feet?

If you want to do it a little bit more structured way, one activity I really enjoy is called five for five. So for five minutes, you spend one minute for each of your senses. First minute, everything that you can see.

Second minute, everything that you can hear and then taste and touch and smell. I got to make sure I got all five there. And what's fascinating about it is when I do this with clients, the sight and the sound, not so much of a big deal.

We can spend a minute identifying those things fairly easily. It's when we get to the taste and the smell, they'll kind of look around, they'll kind of look back at me and go, I don't have anything, Greg. I got nothing.

And I sort of nudge them a little bit and I go, just sit with it. Just see what you can come up with. And inevitably they give themselves permission to sit for five, 10 seconds.

They start to come up with some things. Well, actually, no, now that I'm thinking about it, I can think about the coffee that I just had, or, you know, the eggs I had this morning. And now they're starting to flex those mindfulness muscles.

Imagine what their daily lives could look like if they did this activity once a day for a week or two weeks or a month, they would be far more mindful of their senses. Once they practice that, they can start to build that out into other experiences. I had someone tell me the other day, just about how when they drive, they just keep the radio off.

They just kind of experience the drive as it is, or they go for a walk and they leave the phone at home and just be in the moment. And maybe the mind starts to wander and that's okay. Just gently bring it back.

We don't need to call ourselves failures or awful people. Just gently nudge ourselves back to the present. Once we've built up these skills, we can then start to be more mindful around our thinking.

We can then start be more mindful around our emotions so that when we are having thoughts about Johnny is such a jerk, hold up, pause, could be that he's a jerk. Doesn't really track with the evidence that I have from the past week because we've gone out to lunch three times and he invited me over this weekend to his house. So is this thought actually true or is this thought being influenced by maybe some stress in my life?

Maybe an emotional experience that is negatively influencing my view of Johnny. And already, if we can get to that space, we're doing something differently than what autopilot is pushing us to do. Because autopilot is pushing us to say, don't do that.

Just assume, just jump to conclusions and everything will be fine. And again, sometimes it is fine. Sometimes it's not.

[Agi Keramidas]
This is great. And thank you for the practicality of the five for five exercise that you said. So with that exercise, I can imagine someone doing it, you know, when they are in a, let's say, calm or safe environment, perhaps at the desk or, you know, sitting down, not doing much at the same time.

I would like to hear some tactic for more of a situation when, you know, the blood is starting to boil or, you know, there is some emotional response that as we all know very well, if it was only the thought that Johnny is, to carry on the example that Johnny is a jerk, it's not only the thought, it is the emotional load of anger that comes with it that, you know, intensifies the whole experience. So I would like to hear a tactic of breaking the autopilot when that happens, when we are, you know, also emotionally entangled in a situation.

[Greg Obert]
Yeah. So it depends on what level you're at. I think a lot of times people think an emotion is just on or off, but the truth is that we feel emotions at different intensity levels.

I think about it like, well, I guess everything's a touch screen now, but like a dial in a car where you're adjusting the temperature, right? Not everything is always all cold. Not everything's always all hot.

There's a lot in the middle. And the same is true with our emotions. So if we take anger, for example, I could be angry at a one out of 10.

And so maybe I might describe that as annoyed. You know I could also be angry at a nine or 10 out of 10, which might be rage, wrath, you know, exploding on somebody. Right.

And so it depends what level you're at. My rule of thumb is if you're in the zero to seven range, the logical part of your brain, which is the prefrontal cortex, which is just behind your forehead, this has a loud enough signal to regulate the emotional part of your brain better. This is when this is active, we can actually use these mindfulness skills to do diffusion, right?

So one practical skill is analyzing the gap. And so we'll put it this way. Johnny is a jerk.

That's the thought that I have. If I've practiced my mindfulness skills, I can pause in the moment and I can say, wait a minute, I'm having a thought that Johnny is a jerk. Now we've sort of detached, diffused from the thought a little bit.

And I presume your listeners can hear that as well. One thought, the first example, it's gospel truth. Johnny is a jerk.

There is no room for questioning versus a thought that's coming into my head is that Johnny is a jerk. That doesn't make it true or false. That's just a thought that we're experiencing.

The reason I love this is because it really helps us when our mind starts to race because we have a lot of thoughts every day. I've seen a ton of different numbers on this, but the one that I usually see the most often is we have about 10,000 thoughts a day. So the brain likes to be efficient.

We don't typically critically analyze all of these thoughts, which is fine because if we had to consciously think about 10,000 things a day, I don't know about you, but my day would just, I would be so unproductive. And so, you know, in this case, it's helpful to go through our thoughts quickly. The problem is when we go through our thoughts quickly in situations where the thoughts are not true.

So being able to pause in the moment and analyze that gap, defuse from the thoughts. Now, this is a good technique when we're in the zero to seven range. What about the eight to 10?

When you're in eight to 10, that logical part of your brain, it never shuts down completely, but the signal gets so quiet that the emotional part of your brain is able to take hold. There's nothing preventing it really from stopping there's nothing preventing the emotional part from taking over. And so we've all had this experience, I presume where it just, we start to see red, especially if it's anger and we just unload on somebody.

Even if all of our beliefs about the situation are completely erroneous, we, it doesn't matter. You can't logic with someone in that, in that moment. It's kind of like telling someone who's very upset.

We'll just calm down. It's going to be fine. You don't think that's ever worked for anybody.

And so the same is true here. When you find yourself in eight to 10, we need to actually use our physical body to bring the emotions down. And one of the best techniques is tipping the temperature.

I love this technique because it's very quick and I think very practical. And this technique uses the dive response to our advantage. So for those that are unfamiliar with the dive response in name, you're probably familiar with it in practice.

And it's that idea of, I'm going to jump into a pool of cold water. You know, what tends to happen when we jump into a pool of cold water? Well, of course, we're not really thinking about what came before, what we need to do after the body gets sent into shock.

And we're just trying to kind of survive and get out of that cold pool of water. We can take this reflex and use it to cool the body down, which then cools the emotions down. So I presume everyone here works at a place that has some sort of running water.

If you find yourself in the eight to 10 range, man, I'm getting so angry with Johnny. He just, I cannot believe he insulted me that way. I'm going to give him a piece of his mind.

First, I'm just going to go splash some cold water on my face just for a few seconds. Or one technique, of course, it doesn't have to be ice cold. And of course it depends on, whatever your lung capacity is, your medical conditions, but you can use a bowl of cold water, not freezing, just cool and submerge your face in it for about 30 seconds.

And I know that doesn't sound like a long time, but if you and I sat here not talking for 30 seconds, it would feel like a really long time. And the same is true if we were to put our face in cold water. Now, maybe you don't want to do that.

Maybe you have a cold compress and you can put that on your forehead. You can put that on the back of your neck, leave it there for 30 seconds. Because of the shock of the cold of the water, that's going to start to calm the body down because we're going to get hot, especially if it's anger that we're feeling.

It doesn't have to be anger. It could be fear. When we start to cool the body down, the emotions are naturally going to come down.

So maybe that nine becomes a seven. Well, a seven's not comfortable. I don't enjoy being angry at Johnny at a seven out of 10, but a seven is low enough that the logical part of my brain can start to get a little bit louder.

And so maybe then I can start to check that gap that I was saying earlier, start to defuse from the thought that I'm having. I hope that all makes sense, but I was talking quite a bit.

[Agi Keramidas]
It makes complete sense. And I liked very much the range between one and 10 about the zero to 10, the emotional range and the cutoff of seven, because I had never thought of it in such a way. It does make sense.

I have found personally cold to be very effective in the terms of a cold shower, which of course is not as practical. You can't do it anyway. But when I'm at home and I had the opportunity, I saw that there is a very quick, if not instant, change in the emotional state or the inner dialogue loop or whatever else is happening.

You said earlier and using the physical body generally, and I think the same is if I go out for a run or something like this, or if I start jumping up and down, this breaks the or lowers that number that you were saying earlier. And I suppose there's no harm in doing that, even if we're not at eight. If we feel like this would help do a five easier down, I think it's always good to utilize.

And I'm only saying that because I think sometimes we overestimate the importance that we have to bring to use the mind in order to control the mind somehow. And there are so many beautiful tools, the body, the cold, the breathing you touched on it. There are so many other tools that one can use to actually help the mind, observe the mind, if I can put it like that.

[Greg Obert]
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I agree with you wholeheartedly that if there's something else that helps calm those emotions down, I mean, going for a walk, going for a run, I mean, if you're able doing 30 jumping jacks even can be enough maybe to get some of that emotion out, especially if it's high, which then brings you down enough to have that logical part of your brain come back online. Hey, I'm all for it.

[Agi Keramidas]
And one other thing I will bring up again, you mentioned it and it's so important. It comes up now for me, you said about mindfulness that to practice it in small steps or in small ways first, to build it up as a skill. And I'm just reiterating that because it is indeed something that you work on it over and over and over again.

Constantly. It's not like at some point you won't have to do that anymore. It is the use of our will, our mental faculty to become present, you know, despite whatever the mind is saying at that point.

And I will now stop for a moment because I think I'm going to a completely different direction, but I don't know if you wanted to add something.

[Greg Obert]
No, but I think that's spot on and that the practice is so important because autopilot runs our lives most of the time. And again, as I've mentioned earlier, that's not a bad thing. It's just that sometimes it's not, it's not useful and we can't get off autopilot if you don't practice.

You know, it's like, I want to get good at playing the drums, but I practice one day a month. I mean, it might do something for me, but it's not going to help me out the same way as if I practiced two times a week or four times a week. So that idea of keeping up the practice wherever we can, that is really key if we want to get better with our mindfulness skills.

[Agi Keramidas]
Definitely. And thank you for repeating it in such a way. There is one other thing and I'm going to change gears just for a little bit before we start wrapping this up, but there is one other topic that I wanted to hear your thoughts about.

And that is, you know, when any motion comes up, there is a usual advice that if you observe it, you can let it go, let it run through and it passes. And indeed, that is the true. And anyone who has experienced that, it comes and goes.

However, in the case of uncomfortable emotions, and we all can relate to it, whatever is their favorite flavor. In these cases, being able to sit through it and wait for it, observe it until it passes can be challenging. I know we kind of touched on it earlier, but I wanted just your comment on this particular element as well.

You know, the difficulty sometimes to sit with the emotion and observe it rather than being taken over by it.

[Greg Obert]
It's a great question. And it's something that I deal with a lot in my practice, particularly with anxiety, or even people who've gone through trauma or have PTSD. That emotion, those uncomfortable emotions, whether it's anger, envy, fear, whatever the case may be.

We don't like to be uncomfortable. And there's no judgment around that. I don't particularly enjoy being anxious myself.

Yet, it's in pushing through and sitting with those emotions that growth can happen. Thinking about any kind of challenge that we've experienced in our lives, maybe it was tough in the moment, but when we look back on it, you know, that challenge actually helped me grow in some way, even if it was just a tiny way, even if it was just, I now know that that's something I don't ever want in my life. The challenge usually teaches us something as long as we allow it to.

And so the same is true with these difficult emotions, that if I'm sitting with, say, anxiety, which is just a clinical term for fear, I'm sitting with that fear at a seven out of 10, I'm uncomfortable. And maybe I want to immediately go and do something else just to try and feel better. It's in these moments that I encourage people to keep in mind what their goals are.

So a lot of times we tend to forget what our long-term goals are for our short-term goals. Or in other words, I forget about sort of the end goal for short-term comfort. So a classic example of this is, okay, I came home from a really long day of work and maybe I'm angry at a six out of 10 because of what happened at work.

So I'm not raging, but I'm just really not in a great place. And I know what's going to help me is immediately going for that mint chocolate chip ice cream. And I'm just going to give myself a big old bowl of that.

It's going make me feel good in the moment because ice cream's delicious. Yet if my long-term goal is to get better at working through an emotion, or maybe even one of my long-term goals is to cut out sweets or try and lose a little bit of weight, I'm forgetting those goals because I'm uncomfortable. And I just want to kind of get to that comfortable space.

So however somebody can remind themselves of what their goal is, I think is going to serve them really well. And it's going to give them a leg up on people who do forget their goals. So maybe that looks like I'm going to put a picture as my phone background to help me keep my goals in mind, even when I'm in an uncomfortable place.

Maybe this looks like setting calendar reminders or alarms on your phone. Maybe this looks like setting up your day in a different way so that you can accomplish your goals a little bit better. We were sort of talking about this before we started recording.

For those that aren't watching video, I have this giant water bottle here, full of water. And I often get comments on it like, what the heck is wrong with you? Why are you carrying around all this water?

Well, I know myself in that when I start to get involved in something, I usually push away the need to get up and go refill my water bottle. So if I have a small glass or a small water bottle, I'll just go for hours not drinking water, which isn't the best. So I decided to set up my day a little bit differently so that I can actually have the water when I need it.

And the same is true with our lives and our emotions. It could be that maybe I know this particular job I'm at right now, this particular project is stressful. I'm going to make sure that at the end of the day, I talk with a friend.

Even though I'm feeling kind of anxious, I can have somebody there to help me out. I'm going to make sure that before I leave for the day, on my desk at home or on my sofa, I'm going to sit my journal so that when I come home, the first thing I see is going to be my journal because I know I'm going to come home anxious. And now I can sit down and I can write and just get it out.

And even if it's just the same four letter curse word over and over and over and over again, at least it's getting something out so that I can work through the discomfort rather than immediately jump to the unhealthy coping skill of, say, ice cream or maybe go and get a drink or whatever the case might be.

[Agi Keramidas]
Thank you for all this also practical actionable things that you shared. Dr. Greg, where can someone that has been fascinated by this conversation can find out more about you?

[Greg Obert]
Yeah, absolutely. So as mentioned, I'm a therapist by trade, a psychologist by trade. So the best place to find me is my practice website, Royal Oasis Psychotherapy Institute, but I didn't want to make everyone type that out.

So it's more about what I do, my therapy philosophy. They can also check out various other projects that I do. My guided meditation podcast, the video streams I do, for example, I do a weekly series on dark psychology because everyone loves true crime these days.

So I figured I'd throw my hat in the ring. So we talk about all the kind of dark stuff in the human mind as well as silly stuff. So my wife and I stream games.

So if you want to watch me get scared by zombies, the game that we just finished up, you can always take a look at that as well.

[Agi Keramidas]
That's very interesting. I want to thank you very much, Greg, for this conversation. I believe that there were plenty of tools for things, practical things that someone who has listened could pick their own of the one that they chose for different situations.

But I think in the end, it is the goal is the same as to regain control of our awareness of realizing and becoming aware of the present moment of what is happening in our experience right now. I want to wish you all the very best with your mission and keeping on helping people with these things because everything happens through our mind. It is our mind which is the the state of our mind will determine how our life is.

So it's very important and useful what you offer. I will leave it to you for your final parting words and any message you want to share with someone who has listened to us so far.

[Greg Obert]
Yeah. Well, thank you for the well wishes. And again, thank you for having me on.

It's been a pleasure. I guess the final message I have for anyone out there is that you actually have more power than you think. And even though it can feel like our emotions or our thoughts are running our lives, you can actually be in control.

And maybe it's not all going to change in one day. But if you take a small actionable step today, you can, in fact, start to reclaim your power and live the life that you want. So I encourage you to take that step today.

[Agi Keramidas]
Thank you for listening to this conversation with Dr. Gregory Obert. I hope it has given you a new perspective on how autopilot thinking shapes your behavior and how you can regain control through awareness and presence. One practical action tip to remember from today is to pause and name the thought before reacting to it.

So next time you feel emotionally triggered, instead of immediately believing the story in your mind, try saying to yourself, I am having the thought that… and notice how that creates a little space between you and the reaction. That small pause can help you shift out of autopilot and respond rather than react.

Join us every Monday for in-depth conversations and every Thursday for shorter solo episodes with insights and tools you can use. If you would like to find clearer direction and take confident next steps towards a life more meaningful and aligned, I offer one-to-one coaching to support you on your journey. To learn more, visit personaldevelopmentmasterypodcast.com slash mentors. Until next time, stand out, don't fit in.