Welcome to the Pit. Although it’s on the map, it’s somewhere we aren’t going to be visiting too often, as it really belongs on your old map of the world.
It’s very important to recognize and fairly easy to describe, as it is anytime when you are not Present or anytime when you are not engaging in ‘life you love’-enhancing activities or thoughts. I’ve found it helps to think of this in black-and-white terms: you are either having a life you love or you are in the Pit.
Being in the Pit is not a nice place to be, although if you are in it much of the time it may appear comfortably familiar.
The Pit certainly has degrees of unpleasantness. You can be paddling in its shallows or drowning in its deepest waters, but wherever you are in that dark ocean, you are still in the Pit and NOT in a life you love.
The only other thing to work out is whether you’re treading water and at the mercy of its currents, swimming out deep into it, or heading back to shores of happiness. Identifying it is quite easy by asking yourself:
There are certain symptoms that will show you when you are in the Pit. These include:
There are many other symptoms, but this list should make you aware of the main ones to watch out for. Use the following exercise to get even clearer about how much the Pit is occupying your life.
Ask yourself the following questions and write down your answers.
If your answer to the first question is, ‘I am in the Pit 30 per cent of the time,’ but your answer to question two is ‘I am living the life I love only 20 per cent of the time,’ then, in fact, you are in the Pit, to one degree or another, 80 per cent of the time.
Any trips into the Pit, short or extensive, minor or major, are going to cost you enormously, due to that important process we mentioned earlier, neuroplasticity.
You’ll recall neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to rewire itself as a result of how it’s used. Pathways that get a lot of ‘traffic’ become faster and have a greater influence on all our brain function and types of thinking.
This is the danger of spending a lot of our brainpower ‘training up’ the neurology that leads us into the Pit. The brain works on the basis that if we’re using a particular pathway a lot then it will use the power of neuroplasticity to make it easier to activate that pathway. The brain is just trying to be helpful, responding to the way we’ve been using it.
The downside of this helpfulness is that it means that accessing the Pit becomes even easier the more time we spend in it. As a result, the Pit pathway receives ‘favoured’ status within the brain. It becomes much like an ‘A’ list celebrity who gets invited to all the best parties, it gets to connect up to many different pathways, making it much more influential on all brain functions.
Additionally, due to the highly developed interconnectivity that comes with being a well-used pathway, thoughts previously unconnected with the Pit can now trigger it.
You’ll recognize this aspect of our brain function in the following story.
Imagine I had a black VW Golf and it was my pride and joy. I kissed it goodnight every night, and polished it to a shine every Saturday.
Imagine my horror to find one day that my prized possession had been stolen, and when it was finally returned to me, it was a burnt-out shell.
Now, if I had read this book I would be able to deal with this better, but let us imagine for the moment that I had none of the skills of this book.
The next day I needed to go to town and I had to walk because now I had no car: can you guess which cars I noticed as I walked?
Yes, Golfs, and whether they were black or another colour, all reminded me of my precious black Golf and my loss.
Equally, if I saw the VW insignia on a camper van, guess what that reminded me of too?
In fact, all cars now reminded me of my loss.
When I saw other people walking, I noticed they didn’t have a car either and this in turn reminded me of my car, and my loss.
On my way home I passed a park. As I gazed across the grass, I noticed some young boys having fun playing around.
I looked closer: and, yes, they were playing golf.
This naturally reminded me of my Golf again and my loss.
And that’s how the brain works; it looks for patterns and connections, working hard to interpret the world based on these highly used pathways. The problem is, the more we spend life in the Pit, the easier it becomes to get into it in a millisecond’s notice. And then the Pit becomes our life.
Now if that all sounds rather bleak, then it’s time to recall there is some great news about neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is non-judgmental – it simply doesn’t care which pathways we’re activating, or whether they are good or bad. It purely develops and grows the ones that are used the most.
So the solution for moving out of the Pit, forever, is exactly the same one we used to get into the Pit – neuroplasticity.
Only this time you’ll be exercising the pathways that move you towards the life you love, while stopping using the pathways that take you into the Pit.
If that brain-changing process was so effective that it was able to get us that deep into the Pit, then as long as you point your brain in the right direction, it will naturally be just as smart, rapid and effective at getting you into a life you love.
So your first job has to be becoming very good at spotting the Pit. When you think about it, this has really been the focus of the book up until this point. All the topics you’ve worked through in the previous chapters, e.g. understanding genius, upside-down genius and picking through the brilliantly designed ELFs, have given you a deep familiarity with the detailed anatomy of the Pit.
Although, as mentioned above, it is essential to spot the Pit in order to move towards a life you love, I’ve found it’s very common to lack awareness of some of the ways we have of heading towards the Pit. Most people are usually quite good at spotting the most familiar and powerful versions of it, but less good at noticing the Pit in all its forms and varieties.
So, for example, we recognize when we’re unhappy or angry or being a victim, yet less likely to notice when we’re irritated due to, perhaps, waiting in line at the grocery checkout, being stuck in traffic or bored because there’s nothing interesting on TV. However, these versions of the Pit are just as important to recognize and take action to avoid, and the reason for this once again lies in neuroscience.
Not too long ago, when computers were slower and had less memory to work with, it took a long time between asking the computer to print and for the printer to spit out the finished document. The main reason for this was that the computer didn’t have enough processing power to create the document in the word-processing program (e.g. Word) and run the printing program at the same time.
With the advent of smarter, more capable machines, when we open a Word document and press print, the printer immediately starts printing it.
This is due to the extra ‘brainpower’ of today’s computers; they have enough spare capacity to predict what’s likely to happen next. So, when you open a Word document the computer knows there is a fairly good chance you might need to print the document and gets the printing software ready and fired up, in the background, just in case it’s required.
The brain does a very similar thing. It notices patterns and realizes that certain emotional states, such as anger, guilt or upset, all tend to be linked, and when we dû one of these emotions then one of the other ones quite often follows.
Seeing this link, the brain then creates, using neuroplasticity again, fast connections between the different groups of nerve pathways responsible for these various emotions. As a result, when one of these emotions is triggered, just like the printing software, the nerve pathways of those other emotions are readied and fired up in preparation for use. Each time this happens it exercises those pathways, making them stronger and easier to trigger.
Therefore, this is the problem of not spotting all the varieties of the Pit. If we successfully stop anger, for example, but continue to fire up guilt or boredom, then actually in the background we’re really invigorating the exact pathways (of anger) we want to avoid exercising.
The brain also recognizes that there are certain emotions and therefore nerve pathways that rarely fire together; e.g. it’s rare to move quickly from anger to happiness. As a result, there are very few connections between these two very different states.
This is a symbolic image: the brain doesn’t really have ‘good’ on the right side and ‘bad’ on the left side of the brain.
You can test this out by holding a pencil between your teeth while trying to think of something upsetting. You’ll find it quite difficult to do because holding the pencil in this way raises your mouth into a smile, activating the nerve pathways of ‘happy’, which makes it less easy to trigger the pathways of ‘upset’.
This ability to make connections between linked thoughts and emotions and the lack of linkage between unrelated areas is, again, good news. As you start to stimulate more happy pathways your brain starts to favour those new pathways. At the same time it also naturally becomes much more difficult for your brain to trigger the old negative pathways because there is such a poor connection between these ‘happy’ pathways and the ‘Pit’ ones.
Recognition that you are stimulating the kinds of neurology that lead you into the Pit is a brilliant lesson to have learned, and is a vital step in getting the life you love. However, on its own it only provides a theoretical understanding of the problem.
Much like an alcoholic’s (or more precisely someone who dôes unhelpful choices around alcohol) recognition that they have a problem relationship with alcohol, it is very much the first point of change. However, just continuing to drink in spite of that recognition isn’t going to lead to any meaningful improvement. To make real change, you have to move from recognition to action, but what action do you need to take?
Well, once you have become aware of when you are exercising your brain in that old ‘wrong’ way it’s time to move onto the next waymarker on the map of the New World, the ‘Stop’.
