State Shifting

How to change your mood at will and permanently shift your baseline state.

State shifting is a mental technique of shifting your state of mind (roughly equivalent to your mood) to a preferred state. Because our thoughts, worldview, and even the memories that are easiest to access are all linked to our state of mind, state shifting is a powerful technique to gain mastery over your emotional life.

We usually shift states unconsciously as we go through the day. If we see a negative news story, we might suddenly feel sad. Once you are sad, you will often start thinking of other sad things, until it is more than just a feeling response to an event, but rather becomes a pervasive mood. Over time, this creates habitual mood states.

You can learn to deliberately shift your mood.

Training yourself to shift your state of mind at will is like gaining a superpower. Each time you deliberately shift your state, you are strengthening those neural pathways until eventually your brain will spontaneously shift. It takes a few weeks of consistent daily practice (several times a day) to wire in a new brain pathway. This is how I permanently shifted my baseline mood to consistent happiness. It’s awesome!

The technique is not that hard to learn—the hardest part is actually overcoming beliefs that one should have to “earn” happiness somehow, or that self-generated happiness isn’t “real”. (More on the belief side of things here.)

How to shift your state

The technique is simple. It involves bringing to mind something that makes you feel genuinely joyful and then focus on the feeling itself, letting it fill your whole being.

  1. Bring to mind a happy memory, or think of a person you have genuinely joyful feelings toward—someone or something that makes you happy.
  2. Feel into the feeling of joy that this thought brings, and immerse yourself in it. Let it completely fill your awareness, and just sit in that feeling. You might notice yourself smile spontaneously as you review these memories.
  3. Once you have a solid sense of the feeling of joy, drop the memory and focus just on the feeling of joy itself. 
  4. Continue to immerse yourself deeper into this pure feeling state.
  5. Only go until you feel yourself wanting to do something else. (Don’t push yourself to continue—force neutralizes joy.)

Then, practice this repetitively. That is how you build new neural pathways.

Making it a habitual state

Over time, as your neural pathways get built up, you will be able to go directly to focusing on the feeling of joy without needing a memory. And that’s a magic feeling. You suddenly realize you can self-generate states of feeling incredibly good!

But you still need to practice more once you get to this point. I recommend doing it several times a day, for several weeks. That is what it takes to shift your baseline mood.

Here is how it will progress:

  1. You need to use a memory to shift to joy.
  2. You can self-generate states of joy.
  3. You occasionally start spontaneously feeling joyful for no reason.
  4. Your baseline mood will permanently change to being happier.

Downsides?

There is one—unfortunately, you will start to notice how miserable many people are, and all the reasons they have for that misery, and you will want to shake them and say, “You don’t have to feel this way!”. But I don’t recommend doing that. 😆

But seriously, one of the downsides of doing this is that “feeling bad together” is legit a bonding activity that many people are used to doing, and you won’t want to do it anymore. But, I think it’s worth it, because it feels amazing.

Very important cautions!

The biggest caveat I want to give for this technique is if you are feeling desperate to feel better, you could end up suppressing negative feelings rather than shifting states. Don’t do that.  This technique is not a substitute for doing emotional processing or grief work. If there are real reasons you feel sad or upset, you need to work with those feelings.

This technique is for shifting habitual negative states that aren’t related to real events. So instead of feeling bad for no reason, you now feel good for no reason.

When doing this technique, be very sure you are not suppressing negative emotions, and you are not trying to force positive emotions. There is no force involved here. It’s just directing your attention and allowing the emotions to unfold from your attention.

Learn more:

(I really need to reorganize the articles below as there is a bit of overlap, but they each talk about more specific aspects to this).