Mindset for Life

Mindset for Life


#103: Shorten Your Suffering

March 28, 2022

This is episode number 103: Shorten your suffering. Welcome to the mindset for life Podcast. I'm Bethanie Hansen, your host, and I'm here to help you shorten your suffering today. The word suffering seems a little bit odd at times, I don't use that word in my vocabulary very much. Some people do. Perhaps you do. Maybe you don't. Regardless of how familiar that word is, we all suffer.

We might suffer other people's attitudes; we might suffer limits placed on us from the outside world or people around us. We might suffer from world events that are happening, that are far removed from us. Or we might suffer from them as they are literally impacting us. And we're involved in them.

We might suffer from the loss of other people; we might suffer from uncertainty. We might suffer from so many things in our lives that literally impact us every minute. But we can shorten our suffering.

And it doesn't mean that we're bad or wrong to try to do that. In fact, it means that we're intentionally trying to find something else to focus on. I used to think that if I was really happy in a negative situation, that other people would think I was out of touch with that situation. And that probably does happen. Maybe you've experienced that too, where either you or someone else was trying to be joyful or happy when it was a tough situation.

I've had my own share of difficult situations in life. And I choose intentionally. There's an option where I can review the events over and over. And I can sit in that horrible situation, and I can keep experiencing those same emotions. What we know about neuroscience is that our mindset of being stuck in a place mentally comes from replaying the same thoughts and the same emotions are going to happen.

Pretty soon those thought habits take over. And we have this whole habit of feeling those same feelings and thinking those same things. And then we behave in similar ways over time.

Somewhere in my life, when perhaps I was younger, I started to latch on to this idea that I could actually choose to focus on different thoughts. And over the course of my life, I have also learned that there are many other people out there, either through their research or their philosophy, who have discovered the same thing.

We can look at a situation and see what is negative, how it's impacting us. How it's hurt us. And we can feel those feelings and we can think those thoughts and we can experience them. And it will cause more suffering.

It increases our suffering to do that because every time we think about it, we are literally experiencing the chemical rush of emotions that fill our bodies with that negative sensation, whether it's sadness, or despair, or anger, or frustration, or a whole host of other feelings. And yet, there's always something in the future. Either something that is a lesson learned, something that will contrast with the experience we're having now, or something good that will come out of the experience.
Focusing on the Future Shortens Suffering
Regardless of what that thing in the future is, we can choose to believe something better is coming in the future. Something will come out of this, we're not sure what it is. But it's always going to lead to something that could be beneficial, or could be good. I like to lean on that side of things.

So my goal is to decrease suffering by focusing on the future. Now, living in the present is important too. We need to experience what's happening right now and live in reality. And be very sensitive to our own experience and others. And feel what others may be feeling with empathy, and understand what others are experiencing. And yet, looking towards the future can give us a brightness of hope.

It can help us to just pick ourselves up from this place that we're at, and see that there's somewhere to go. And even if we don't know where that somewhere is it simply opens up the idea of possibility.

When we're thinking about a fresh start,