This article isn’t about breaking damaging cycles such as drug addiction, smoking, alcoholism, gambling etc. It’s about breaking thought cycles. Thought cycles are extremely unlikely to put you in an ambulance, but they are obstacles to living life better.
A thought cycle is…
You think about doing something, you decide almost immediately that you want to do it, you hesitate, you think about why it might be best not to do it, you end up not doing it. Then some time later you think about doing it again. There! Right there! That’s a thought cycle. If you do those steps once then it’s all well and good but if you go back to those thoughts again you’ve got a cycle on your hands.
Thought cycles are difficult to notice: unless you’re actually trying to spot them you probably won’t. This is because you become used to them. An old desire occurs to you and you wonder why you didn’t act on it, and then you remember why and the desire gets shot down again. The more often you repeat the cycle the faster you go through it and the less noticeable it is until before you know it, with some cycles, they become sort of standard.
A cycle is a waste of time and it makes you feel dissatisfied every time you go through it. The more cycles you have, the more time you waste and the more dissatisfied you feel.
Cycles I’ve broken
Karate:
Since I was very young I’d wanted to do a martial art, but my parents wouldn’t let me. Then when I reached some age (perhaps, 10 or 11-years-old – I can’t remember) they implicitly allowed me to take one up, but I didn’t. Doing a martial art was way in the back of my mind for a long time – it was a rarely occurring cycle, but a cycle nonetheless and one which would have continued for perhaps my entire life if I hadn’t broken it.
One day, when I was nearly 16, a member of Go Kan Ryu Karate knocked on the front door and asked if anyone living here would like to try doing Karate. Well, I did. But still I hesitated. Did I really want to? Was it likely to be something I’d enjoy? Was I likely to be any good at it? I said my parents wouldn’t be back until the evening and she said she’d come back at 7.00pm. That was that, no getting out of it now. So in the evening she was back and ready with a ring binder and information sheets to enthusiastically tell my parents and I about GKR Karate.
Today I’m a 3rd kyu brown belt and, despite having to stop to attend university, I still go to my local class in the holidays both as a student and often as an assistant instructor. Before I go back to university in September my sensei has proposed I go for my 2nd kyu (brown belt, black tip).
Doing Karate for around 3.5 years total hasn’t made me a whole lot fitter or made me excellent at self-defence, but it’s been enjoyable and has taught me, directly and indirectly, matters of philosophy, spirituality and personal development. I made a friend or two through it, learned that with teaching and public speaking confidence really can come from practice and I learned a bit about myself too. It was worth breaking the cycle for its own sake, but it’s surprising what I learned (and did not learn).
Stylish clothes:
When I was about 13 I wanted Adidas and Nike labelled clothes because I thought they were cool. Not long afterwards I admonished myself for being so ‘materialistic’. Later at 17 I read ‘Branded: The Buying And Selling Of Teenagers’
Anyway, some months ago I needed new clothes as my current ones were falling apart. My wardrobe consisted of fleeces, T-shirts and loose fitting trousers – all bought new but really cheaply. Not a brand name in sight. I didn’t see any problem with this but apparently I just wasn’t sartorially cutting it at all.
You see, the girls I’m friends with at university were only too happy to ‘assist’ me in buying lots of replacement clothes. Cue a long and uneasy shopping trip round Oxford as the girls gleefully endeavoured to make me fashionable (which I was actually quite enjoying by the end, truth be told). I consented to this shopping trip because buying brand name clothes and looking fashionable was a cycle I’d been battling for years.
Thus, £50 brown loafers replaced my £30 trainers, £30 shirts replaced my £5 Tesco-bought T-shirts and £35+ Levi jeans replaced my £10 cargo pants and cheapest possible chinos. Then there was a new watch, wallet, belt…I spent much more money than I was used to on clothes. It was scary to spend that sort of money and scary to have such a new look.
Once again, breaking the cycle was a worthy end in itself. In the end, all the results were positive for me. I started donating a lot more to charity each month (shrinks out there can have fun analysing that result) and I learned more about materialism and wrote a week’s worth of articles on the subject (see Materialism articles 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) which got the blog more traffic than ever.
Teeth Whitening:
I take Oxytetracycline tablets for my acne and over the years it’s caused my teeth to slightly discolor: staining them a mild yellow. It’s not all that noticeable, but it’s bugged me for ages. I don’t drink tea or coffee, I don’t smoke and I don’t even eat much chocolate: so why should my teeth be even mildly discolored just because of a side-effect of a medicine I take for a skin condition?
Professional tooth whitening is expensive though, and so for years I put it off. Recently I found I had the money to do so and in the spirit of breaking the cycle, I thought, yes – I’ll do it!
I’ve been applying the bleach now for a couple of weeks and it’s still a bit early to see any results. When my teeth are whitened it will have been worth the money and effort – and partly just to have broken the cycle.
Cycles I have yet to break
Creating a healthy diet
Been running with this one for over a year and the cycle is appearing more and more frequently in my mind. I’ve bought Nutrition for Dummies and now it’s a matter of reading the relevant section(s) and figuring out a diet that is healthy (and which won’t torture my taste buds) that can be bought from the local supermarket.
Becoming a vegan
Since reading about the benefits of the vegan diet on stevepavlina.com and becoming more interested in living more ethically I’ve been running this cycle. I want to become a vegan but I have yet to do all the leg-work. It’s slightly a less frequently appearing cycle than the healthy diet one. Obviously I’ll be breaking this cycle as I break the above one.
Putting NLP to the test
As much as I like ‘Change Your Life in Seven Days’
If they are as effective as McKenna claims then they’re worth practicing a lot, but I suspect very few readers (including myself) have ever gone through the effort to do so. It’s about time I did.
Should some cycles not be broken?
These are cycles and not one-off sequences of thoughts because you always have some cause for not acting on the desire you have. Sometimes you may wonder if it’s worth breaking such and such a cycle after all.
Well:
If the thing really weren’t worth doing it wouldn’t keep occurring to you.
It’s always worth breaking the cycle, but to do this only usually means taking the action you’re hesitant about.
Remember that these are thought cycles – so to break them you just need to change your thoughts. Usually the easiest and best way to do this is to take physical action: to actually do what you keep thinking of doing.
With some cycles the action you keep considering really shouldn’t be done. In these cases you have to figure out some other action to take to make these thoughts go away. Maybe you keep going through a thought cycle of wanting to get cosmetic surgery to look younger, but you know that this would not be a good move to make. With such a thought cycle the actions to take to break it may be to use skin creams, to get a new haircut, to change your clothes and to lose some weight.
But with some thought cycles there just don’t seem to be any worthwhile actions at all you can take to break them. Here you have to recognise that your thoughts still need to be addressed and so to break these cycles you need to do what might be hardest of all: to change you thoughts without taking any actions – maybe to accept a certain situation or to acquire more positive habits of thinking.
So, that’s the thought cycle for you – that tricky enemy to growth and living life well. What are your thought cycles? How can you break them?
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