Get Off Autopilot: How Automatic Behaviors Control Your Life

The vast majority of what you do today will be automatic. The vast majority of what I do today will be automatic.

And for much of it, that's a very good thing. If I had to think about every single thought and action that was involved in driving a car or doing a host of other kind of ordinary things, I would be crippled. I would be paralyzed, unable to do them. There's just simply too many things. So one of the great features of the human is that we simplify and place on automatic a host of our behaviors throughout the day.

That's the good news.

The bad news is that that automaticity extends to all sorts of things that perhaps we shouldn't be so automatic about. I care for this person. Therefore, when they are in distress, I am stressed.

Is that something we really want to hardwire into our automatic thinking, our automatic behavior? Perhaps not.

This politician makes such and such a statement, and therefore I get angry automatically. Is that something I really want on autopilot? This is why it's so valuable for us to actually reflect on our automatic behaviors, to hold them up before us and say, is this something I really want to have on autopilot? I bet you if you started to examine your automatic behaviors, you might start to make some different choices than your habits would dictate.

Get off autopilot, at least for some things.

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