Breaking Your State

Have you ever decided to wake up early, but when the alarm clock rang, you just sleepily peered at it, mumbled “never mind”, and went straight back to sleep?

(cue black and white video of a person doing just that)

Have you EVER decided to do something for a limited amount of time (like idly browsing the web for only half an hour), but when the time was up, you muttered “just 5 more minutes…” and kept on going… and going… and going…?

(cue a black and white shot of a person who’s fallen asleep on their computer keyboard. A small pool of spit is forming under their mouth)

Now what if I could tell you that there’s actually a very simple solution to dealing with that? That you can let your logical mind make the decision in that moment, instead of letting your body carry on automatically?

(cue bright colors and loud exciting music!)

And NOW, for a LIMITED time ONLY, for the LOW LOW PRICE of $199… ahem *cough* *cough*. I mean…

There IS a simple solution! It’s called “breaking your state”, and I’ll share it with you right now!

Breaking somebody else’s state

I was recently listening to some Tony Robbins self-improvement materials. One of the principles he talks about a lot is breaking state.

For example, a client would come to Tony, and they would immediately start sobbing “Gosh, Tony, I don’t know what to do anymore, I…” and Tony would shout “WHOA there! Wait! We haven’t started yet!”

The client would blink in shock and immediately stop crying. Then Tony would go “Okay, now tell me about your problem.”
“Uh, okay. So, in my job…” and the client’s eyes would start to swell with tears again.
“Wait!” Tony would say. “What side of your front door is the doorknob on?”
“What!?”
“This question is of supreme importance, trust me. On your house, what side of the front door is the doorknob on?”
“Uh… on the right side.”
“I see. Okay, NOW tell me about your problem.”
“Alright…”

And the client would proceed to tell Tony about the problem calmly and logically. What Tony did was to interrupt the client’s state every time the client started crying about the situation. Pretty soon, they wouldn’t be able to go back to that behavior, because it kept getting interrupted. It’s like taking a vinyl record and repeatedly scratching across it. After you scratch it enough times, it will start skipping and you will have broken the pattern! It will never play the same way again.

Now that was a rather mild example of what Tony would do. He also talks about throwing some water on his clients (in good humor), or having them squeeze their nose and go “Yip yip yip!” – All of that in order to break their old pattern of behavior and get them into a more resourceful state.

But you can also use the principle of breaking state on yourself!

Breaking your own state

In fact, I did this back when I was waking up early in the morning. I knew that I couldn’t trust my sleepy self to make the decision to stay out of bed. So I simply decided that when my alarm clock rang, I would get up and go to the bathroom and brush my teeth. Only THEN would I decide if I wanted to stay up.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that would break my sleepy state. I could then decide with a clear head whether staying up was really worth it. (It usually was.)

Remember when I talked about activation energy? That starting action is like rolling a boulder from the top of a hill. It takes some effort to get over the initial hump, but after that the boulder will keep rolling by itself.

In fact, the boulder of action will tend to keep rolling even if you try to stop it! It’s got inertia! You need to pretty radically break your state to STOP doing something! That is, unless you want to wait until the boulder gets all the way to the bottom of the mountain and stops. That would be like waking up at 11, and going “Ah, FINALLY I don’t feel like staying in bed anymore!”

How to break your state

Breaking your state is pretty simple. All you need to do is do something radically different*. And by “do”, I mean move your body!

So if you’re lying in bed reading a book, and a friend calls you and says “Hey, wanna go out tonight?”, your first thought would be “Nah, don’t feel like it.” But that’s only because you’re lying in bed, in a deep book-reading state.

So what to do? Tell your friend “Give me a second”. Then jump out of bed! Move with energy! Squeeze your nose, hop in one spot and go “Yip yip yip!” That should break your state pretty radically . (Bonus points if somebody else can see you.) Only THEN consider going out that night, and maybe realize it’s actually a pretty good idea!

So every time you need to break your state, just do something silly and outrageous . That’s the quickest way to break your state.

You can also break your state to interrupt a pattern of behavior that isn’t helping you. Like Tony’s client who would start crying every time they thought about their problems. That’s a completely useless pattern of behavior! And we all have less than useful patterns of behavior in our lives, where all we need are a few well-timed pattern interrupts.

In fact, in my next blog post, I will share how I managed to conquer my computer addiction! I didn’t realize it at first, but it involved breaking my state! (among other things)

Until then,
Vlad