Why are you so distracted and how to beat them?

Have you ever wondered why you get distracted so easily? 

Lori Gottileb in her book, "May you should talk to someone" says that most of our destructive habits start with the need to fill an emotional void. You find something easy to distract yourself and hide behind to forget the void. Before you know it the habits become so strong that you can't stop. 

To break the destructive habit, you have identify and fill that void. 

The best way to identify and break that is by giving yourself the space to observe the behavior from a distance. Meditation is exact tool that caters to this need. Once you become an impartial observer to your own thoughts, you can understand your needs. 

Then begins the real work required to meet those needs. You no longer need to hide behind a distraction.  

Past, Present & Future

 We expect something to happen in a certain way. We have built a future on that happening. It doesn't and we get depressed. 

There might be something that happened in the past either done by us or done to us. Either way, it caused us pain and we regret that. We keep going back there and hope to erase that. 

In both of these situations, what we are doing is not helpful. Both of them are a story that we tell ourselves and we have the power to rewrite the story. 

Lori Gottileb in her book - "Maybe you should talk to someone" talks about how to manage the pain the past and the future. 

Pain feels like it's in the present but it's actually in the past and the future. If we don't accept the notion that as much as we try and fix what happened years ago, our pasts will keep us stuck. We need to change our relationship to the past.  

Our notion of future can be as powerful roadblock to change. Future happens later but we're creating it in our minds everyday. When the present falls apart, so does the future we associated with it. 

If we try to spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we will remain stuck in place in regret. The solution is to focus on the present and focus less on the future.