You End Up Attracting What You Try To Avoid

We spend a lot of time and energy trying to avoid what we don’t want to happen, but why do we end up achieving the exact opposite? This is an issue that we usually face. It is possible that the solution is to be found in changing our perspective and our focus of attention.

There are many situations that we want to control in our lives: work, studies, love relationships, social relationships, etc. We need to have a certain illusion of control that goes along with the feeling that everything is in order. For this, we audit all possible dangers, believing that this way we can intervene to protect ourselves from their possible consequences.

The reality is quite different. These dangers that we think about and even prepare for are a re-creation of our mind that makes us anxious to anticipate what might happen. We end up getting lost in the possibilities of everything that can happen, thus preventing us from enjoying and enjoying what we are experiencing now.

Where can we place our attention?

Somehow,  with our thoughts we are determining our conduct, our habits and, finally, our destiny. Therefore, it is very important to answer where we are placing our attention. Without realizing it, we can easily anchor ourselves in suffering by ruminating negative thoughts, especially those that are connected in a circular fashion.

A good strategy to identify our “thinking tendency” is to observe these thoughts to somehow “catch ourselves in the act” in the middle of a self-destructive intellectual process. In this way, we will understand the problem that we do not stop going around and want to avoid, and we will be able to ask ourselves what is the use of continuing to think about it so much.

Questioning our own thoughts is essential in order to modify them in our favor. It is also important not to believe everything you think, leaving open the possibility that there are other perspectives that we are not currently able to see.

Our brain doesn’t understand denial

Our mind is prepared to understand a certain type of information through language. Depending on what our brain understands, we may experience one experience or another. That’s why we may be communicating with ourselves in a harmful way without realizing it.

Our brain associates thoughts with images and the “NO” is not integrated in these images. If you want to take the test, you can say “I won’t think about a pink elephant” and it will see how you end up thinking about this pink elephant. This phenomenon that takes place in our minds is known in psychology as “Theory of ironic processes” (Wegner, 1994).

Wegner’s theory tells us that attempts to control internal experiences tend to fail because we don’t understand how they work, and so we get the opposite of what we intended. This is how we generate the opposite of what we wanted to control.  

When we are worried and hurt about something, repeating over and over that we don’t want to think about it will only intensify that we keep thinking about it more. The same is true when we give this advice to others.

Attract what we want instead of avoiding what we don’t want

One strategy for not falling into this common mistake by which we attract what we want to avoid is to change our perspective. Change the reference point and guide our thoughts in a conscious way, choosing ourselves (and not them by inertia) the place where we will set them free. When we have recurring thoughts about some unpleasant subject, we can use the following strategies:

• Speak positively, building affirmative messages about what we want to achieve. Instead of saying, “I don’t want to think about the argument with my boyfriend,” say, “I want to think about how much I love my boyfriend.”
• Put the focus of attention on some pleasurable activity: listening to music you like, dancing, cooking, playing a sport, etc.
• If you want to change something important, you will have to do something different,  change habits and behaviors that are keeping what you don’t like.
• Think and go after what you want to achieve, what you need or what you would like to attract to you.  Incorporate these messages into your way of communicating.

Trying to control what we want to avoid in our life will only make us think more about it. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy: we’ll end up attracting this. Think that trying to suppress the thought is not only not the solution, it also makes the problem appear more and more. The smartest strategy is to pay attention to what we want and focus on it, rather than focusing on what we want to avoid.