Written by: Kirsten Johansen, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
You drink to cope with the stress of undesirable news. It works. It takes the edge off and quiets your spinning mind. It works so well that you have a few more than you planned...You collapse on the couch with a pizza and stream that series you’ve seen twice before. This combination numbs you and helps you forget your plan to care for your body with yoga and a delicious salad. It works until you are awash in regret, remorse, recrimination, and a stomachache...Things are in order, but you feel that insidious tension. It cries to be tamped down like a smoldering campfire. Without realizing it, you are researching cosmetic procedures and products to shrink the bags under your eyes. The source of the tension remains a mystery, and you spend substantial resources on miracle eye creams.
Anesthesia Behaviors develop as a response to discomfort and suffering, sometimes resulting in additional harm and a cycle of short-term gratification leading to long-term pain. They start as medicine and morph into poison. The following steps can help you identify your anesthesia behaviors and mitigate their impact on your health, professional life, and relationships.
Notice and write down each of your anesthesia behaviors. Only you will see this list. Be radically honest.
Identify the consequences that you experience when you use this behavior to cope with discomfort. Consequences may be physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological, financial, relational, familial, etc.
Decide whether to keep, right-size, or abstain from the behavior, and note it on your inventory.
Choose a behavior to start with. You might choose one you’ve flagged for abstinence, as it’s likely a life detractor.
When you feel compelled to use the behavior to cope, commit to your abstinence, then have a conversation with yourself about the source and nature of your discomfort. Jot this down on your inventory.
No matter what happens, be kind, compassionate, and accepting of yourself. Never beat yourself up for using an anesthesia behavior. It will not help you to abstain from it or right-size it—quite the opposite. Self-criticism creates suffering and leads to anesthesia behaviors.
As you begin to abstain from and right-size your coping behaviors and understand the suffering that is driving them, opportunities for healing your wounds, grieving your losses, and extinguishing self-hate will arise.
Rise to this challenge. Get help from a coach, therapist, or trusted advisor to address and heal your core wounds. It is the healing of these wounds that will free you from the need for anesthesia and release you from sticky patterns that only exist to manage your suffering.
These are examples of common anesthesia behaviors. The goal is to see their role in harming you and obscuring your true source of suffering so you can make supportive decisions that free you from maladaptive patterns.
The classics
Alcohol lifts you, blurs your reality, drops you, and, in some cases, poisons you into a hangover. Managing the hangover becomes the thing. The thing that cries for your attention.
Drugs take you up, bring you down, quell your anxiety, mute your pain, and offer an altered reality. Not this one. One that exists only in your mind when your mind is on drugs.
Food fills you, starves you, shrinks and inflates you, nourishes you, and poisons you. You cannot live without it and struggle to live with it. A nemesis taunting you from…well, everywhere. You cannot abstain.
The snipers
Cutting slices, punctures, wounds, and injures your skin, bringing the discomfort you hope to curb to the surface where it can be bandaged, salved, concealed, and healed.
Repetitive grooming picks a pimple into a flesh-eating crater, plucks hair, one by one, into a tender bald spot, digs at your nose until it bleeds, and bites your nails to bloody nubs. These conditions need tending and become the focus.
Cosmetic procedures inject, cut, laser, peel, freeze, vacuum, and ultrasound your face and body into submission. Submission to the standards of beauty created to siphon your money and self-worth with the promise of replacing it with something better. The pain, downtime, and retreat from public view are all part of the exquisite pain of chasing what will never be caught.
The impersonators
Cleaning and organizing consume your time and take your mind off things…but what about those things that need to be handled by the mind? What is the opportunity cost of cleaning what is already clean and organizing where order already exists? It feels productive. It is sneaky.
Accumulation brings new sweaters to join the old, new shoes to join the other new shoes, a watch to put with the others, baubles for the baubles, stuff to fill the spaces, and the consumption of your time, your energy, your eyesight, your fingers as you scroll, and click, and purchase, and anticipate, and track, and receive, and feel something for a moment…and then nothing. Humans become immune. Newness always wanes.
Clutter surrounds you like a cocoon. The thing about a cocoon is that it’s a prison of sorts. Not enough opacity to look out and see the world clearly, but enough to know that it’s there. While you are here. With the clutter. The world is out there spinning. You are amongst your things.
The image makers
Wardrobe defines you and demonstrates your status and level of success. Labeling yourself with someone else’s label elevates you (you hope). You wear your wealth or your debt or your worth. When it is stripped away, you are a human being in a human body. What is the difference between this bag and that bag? They both tote your stuff.
Money ebbs and leaves you wanting, fearful, and questioning your worth. Money flows and leaves you wanting more, afraid that there might not be more, questioning your worth. It occupies your thoughts and your plans. It pokes, prods, and reminds, garnering undeserved attention and constantly nagging, never satisfied. Never quite enough.
Photos have edged out experiences in a tragic contest of musical chairs. Each feature created to serve the photo rather than the experience removes a chair of real life. Erase other humans that were present, remove the clouds from the sky, change the lighting, and blur the pores of human skin. When the last chair remains, do you want to fight for it?
Kirsten Johansen, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
There is a path to freedom; a path to the life you deserve and desire. As a resilient survivor of many of life’s challenges, Kirsten Johansen is a creative, intuitive, seasoned guide. She teaches tools, strategies and practices that center your beliefs about yourself, and the development of unconditional positive regard, to get to the source of the stubborn thought, feeling, and behavior patterns that cause you suffering and keep you from living your happiest and most authentic life. Her writing, radio show and coaching practice reflect her passion for radically honest and vulnerable storytelling that builds a bridge of connection for humans to heal and be released into the freedom of unconditional self-acceptance.
