Be Important to Someone
If you don’t feel a sense of purpose in life, you can find a purpose the same way most people do—by becoming important to some other person, pet, or group. When you feel important to the safety and wellbeing of another, you automatically feel a sense of purpose. If you want to keep it simple, volunteer to work at an animal shelter. That will give you an instant connection. But also form a plan to upgrade your social life, which might take longer. A great way to start is by taking your fitness routine to the next level. It will be good for your mind and will probably multiply your social and romantic options.
Make Stress Optional
If the stress of life is getting you down, I have a story that might help you. In the mid-1990s, I was working my day job at the local phone company while my comic strip side hustle slowly became my primary income. The minute I knew I didn’t need my day job for money, all the stress of work evaporated. Coworkers who were reliable at being unreliable stopped frustrating me and started to seem funny instead. My deadlines no longer weighed on my mind. I wasn’t concerned with making a professional impression or making my boss like me. My day job duties were the same bag of mini-horrors and insanity as always, but because I was by then only showing up for work by choice, work transformed in my mind to something closer to entertainment.
Here’s how that phenomenon can work for you. If you have decided (and I hope this never happens) to end your life, take a moment to imagine how that decision removes all stress from your daily life today. Once you know you have full control of whether you are alive or not, being alive might start to feel the way I felt when I didn’t need my day job but went to work anyway. You won’t care about the little frustrations when you know they’re optional. They might even make you laugh.
Reframes won’t necessarily be enough to completely turn things around for you, so also make sure you know how to get professional help for people in your situation. A quick Google search for a suicide hotline or therapy provider will serve you well.
Past Traumas
This is one of the most powerful reframes you will ever encounter. I performed this reframe on my livestream audience, and the immediate feedback was, “Make sure you put that one in the book!” Countless viewers reported immediate relief. You may feel this reframe right away, too. But like all reframes, the more you repeat them in your mind, the stronger they can get.
Usual Frame: I am a victim of my past traumas.
Reframe: History is imaginary.
This reframe works best with the context this book provides. If you paraphrase these points for someone else, you will be doing a form of “talking hypnosis” on your listener. That’s what I call it when there is no induction—the “you are getting sleepy” part—and instead just guide the subject’s thinking in a useful way.
History Does Not Exist (Still)
As I mentioned earlier, history doesn’t exist in any physical sense. It’s only a concept. Stop imagining the past controlling you with its invisible hand. Your past is non-existent. History is a dangling artifact of chemical and electrical reactions. Your past was real when it happened, but today it is 100 percent imaginary. Once you internalize that truth, you are free. You control the present.
What Is Real Is in the Room with You
Look at the objects in the room. They exist in your subjective reality. They matter. Now touch your arm or shoulder or chin. You are real, too. Is anyone else in the room? They are also real because they are present. Their history and your history are not in the room. Those memories are like loose wires and beverage stains in your brain. They have no importance.
Finding Now
Here’s a reframe that blew my mind. It’s a classic I hadn’t heard until recently. It belongs to Lao Tzu and goes like this:
If you are depressed, you are living in the past.
If you are anxious, you live in the future.
But if you are at peace, you are in the present.
I heard another version that seems to fit the times better:
If you are angry, you are living in the past.
If you are anxious, you are living in the future.
In reframe terms, it looks like this.
Usual Frame: I am angry because something happened.
Reframe: I am living in the past.
and . . .
Usual Frame: I am anxious.
Reframe: I am living in the future (but not in a good way).
You can take the edge off any negative emotion that is past-focused or future-focused—whether caused by trauma or not—by moving your focus to now. This next tip will help you find the now.
You Were Born Now
Imagine you were born into the world right now with no history, no childhood, no past. Would the dangling wires in your brain have meaning to you? You might have the memories still, but they would seem to you like remembering a dream and so of little consequence.
Your history and the dreams you remember have a lot in common in the sense that neither of them exists in the world of today. It makes no difference that your past happened in the real world and your dreams did not. From the perspective of right now, neither history nor dreams exist. They both round to zero. You probably already believe your dreams are not important. It’s a small step to say the same about your history; it once existed as events in the present, but today your history does not exist. And by virtue of not existing, it does not touch you.
Imagine a Positive Future
If you struggle to keep your mind in the present and want to avoid negative thoughts, remember that it isn’t possible to stop your mind from having thoughts in general. If you succeed in thinking less about your ugly past, new thoughts will flow in to fill the void. You don’t want those new thoughts to simply transfer the negativity you feel about the past to negativity about your future. Put conscious effort into imagining a wildly successful future for yourself. Picture the outcomes you want. Imagine a future in which everything goes your way and things turn out amazing.
For most of my life, I avoided negative thoughts about my past by imagining a future in which I somehow became such a famous cartoonist that the president of the United States would invite me to visit him in the Oval Office. That visit happened in 2018, and it ruined my system by making my fantasy real. I needed a new fantasy. So I upgraded my imaginary future to include winning a Nobel Prize. I’m not fussy about which one. Science or Peace would be good.
You can imagine winning a Nobel Prize, too! Imagination is free! And it’s way better than whatever else you were thinking about. If you prefer imagining you are winning a sporting event or inventing a new source of clean energy, those are good, too. Just make sure your fantasy is more engaging than your imaginary history, so your energy is pulled in that direction.
Delete Sketchy Causation Assumptions
I once believed I was the product of my childhood traumas. I could draw a straight line from my various bad experiences to the person I am today. It all seemed so obvious. And I wasn’t the only one who could do this. Everyone who had ever taken therapy seemed to be able to connect the dots in their lives as readily as I could. And science supported us. Your past is a big influence on who you become, they say.
There’s only one problem. As a hypnotist, I know I could persuade you that your current mental problems—whatever they might be—were caused by the bee sting you got when you were six. Even if you never got stung by a bee.
Oh, wait, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean you specifically. I think we can all agree you are too clever to fall for that sort of mental manipulation. I’m talking about other people. Approximately 20 percent of the public can experience profound effects from hypnosis, and the rest can get various degrees of benefits. Interestingly, almost no one believes they are in the 20 percent, including me.