Mind Optimization Part 10: Over Dialing It

Patience is key. When we force things to change too fast, we don’t give things time to work – and some things, take time.

This video is part ten of twenty-six excerpts from a presentation hosted by SOUL Food Salon in March 2019.

You may check out the full playlist of this video series on The Art and Science on Mind Optimization here. Alternatively, you can also click here to watch the previous video and here for the next one.

Video Transcript

Have you guys ever seen these shower dials, the kind that you turn and the temperature changes a minute later? You know what kind of shower experience that is. You know it. You’ve been there. Believe it or not, the same thing happens in life, where people don’t have the patience to wait to see what happens. You tried getting to bed early for three nights in a row, and you didn’t feel much better, so you said, “To hell with that. Over it. I’m not doing this anymore.” That’s not necessarily the right answer. We see this all the time in pharmacology also. People decided, “I took Zoloft for five days. I’m not sure if it helped, so I stopped it,” or, “I had a bad day, and I divided to take more.”

People are doing this zigzagging all the time. What you see is basically the same kind of shower experience that you get. I compare it also to jerky driving. It’s like imagine if somebody was driving the car like this. It doesn’t make for a very good ride. In my work as a psychiatrist, it also doesn’t make for a good treatment. That’s why I encourage people to just have patience and give things time to see how they go. If you’re fiddling with the shower dial too much, you’re not going to have a good shower. That’s what we’re trying to accomplish here.