The Comparison Trap, Chronic Pain & Identifying Gaslighting 💌 October Magic Mailbag

Before we get started, let's hear a quick word from our sponsors who make this free content possible. Hi, I'm Jessica Porter and welcome back to Sleep Magic, a podcast where I help you find the magic of your own mind, helping you to sleep better and live better. Welcome everyone to our October Mailbag episode. I get lots of questions from you guys through Spotify and Supercast and thank you for ascending all these questions. This is our way of addressing some of the things that aren't necessarily sleep related. So I'm going to do my best to just weigh in on these topics, understanding that I'm not an expert on any of them except hypnotherapy. So if you need help with any of these things and you don't feel like you're getting it here, please feel free to seek out and in fact, I encourage you to seek out help elsewhere. One last thing before we start, this episode is not intended for falling asleep too. So if you get sleepy when you hear my voice, you might want to make sure that you are in a safe and comfortable position and if you want to hear later, maybe listen to it on a walk or something, but definitely not in the car. Okay, great. Let's get started. Our first question is from M. She says she's a long time sleep magician even since Sleep Wave, which was the first iteration of the show. She says, I'm writing because I'd really like your input on something. Comparison. There's this saying comparison is the thief of joy and that's so true. But I find it really hard to feel worthy and joyful about things I love when I see others doing better. For example, my best friend, she's lovely and brilliant, but because we have so much in common, I really easily fall into the trap of comparison and spiral. Can you help? Oh, I'm so glad that you're addressing this issue. I think it's a big topic and I think every human mind wrestles with it to some extent or another and life is long. So there's a lot of comparing to do. So I'm going to begin with this. I want to begin by laying down a hard and fast rule. Now, you may forget it, but it will remain true nonetheless your entire life. You are creating your own movie of your life through your body, only you. It's basically a solo venture. You have your own personal camera, your consciousness, and that's it. You will never truly see life through someone else's eyes or through their feelings. You will cooperate with others and create with others and you may get glimpses of how they perceive and how they feel and try to perceive through their portals of consciousness, which is good. That will grow your empathy. But your body is your body and your consciousness is stuck in it. No one as far as we can tell has ever been able to jump from one body to another as much as that might be really fun. It just doesn't happen. So there you are. Here you are. This is your vehicle and everyone is just as stuck in their personal vehicle as you are in yours. And in that respect, life is very, very fair. So to indulge in comparison, to really expect yourself to be like someone else or to punish yourself because you're not like someone else, to indulge in comparisons is a form of kind of a delusion and a masochistic one at that, which doesn't mean we don't all do it at some points. But really it's a fool's errand. I mean, why compare? You could never steer your life through their vehicle, which includes their ancestry, their genes, their environment, their talents, their resources, no matter how much you fantasize or get angry at yourself for not being them. It is an impossible task. So encourage you to not let your mind indulge it. Comparison will only bring you pain. So that's the good news. You are you and that's final. You're living through your ancestry, your genes, your environment with your talents and your resources. And that is what you have to work with. No one could take any of those things away from you and much of it can't be changed like your genes or your ancestry or the environment you were born into, which is also true for everyone else. Prince William didn't ask to be Prince William. That's just the vehicle he showed up in. And he has to work with that. I say all of this M to help you stay firmly planted in reality. So given that reality, that truth, you can use your mind in one of two ways. You can deny reality and compare yourself to others. And there are two sort of subroads there. You will either compare yourself to some people and declare yourself superior to them, which is like your ego getting drunk on itself, or you will compare yourself to others and find yourself lacking, which will make you feel bad about yourself and eventually about them every single time. Both ways of comparing lead to separation from yourself and from others. And there's only really suffering there because even a drunken ego gets a hangover and feeling superior actually separates you from other people. Or choice number two, you can accept reality and really dig into this adventure of being you. You are unique and constantly evolving. So what are your gifts? You may not even be acquainted with some of them yet because gifts arrive at different times in our lives and we develop them. Life has a way of teasing them out of us. And one of the great pleasures of life is discovering yourself in different situations, relationships, and under different pressures. And sure, it's absolutely amazing to discover other people too. Don't get me wrong, we are here to connect and cooperate and create together. But you are with yourself for this entire journey. So if you don't embrace this primary relationship to yourself, then you're missing much of the ride and will simply end up reacting, comparing yourself to others. But sometimes getting to know ourselves is hard. We all have baggage and things we need to let go of. There are parts of ourselves we may not like or seem hidden in the shadows. But if you do the work of your own excavation and really embrace that you are making your own movie here, then that work is ultimately very liberating. And you can experience a very free and satisfying ride within yourself, giving lots and lots of good energy to those around you. Because here's the paradox, Em. As much as we are alone in our own bodies, creating our own lives, we are all actually made of the same stuff, the same natural, beautiful life force. Beneath our personalities, beneath our egos, beneath all the comparing. So while comparing will only make you feel separated from others, the truth is you are actually much more similar than different to everyone around you. We're all made from the same carbon and oxygen and a few other gases and minerals with a whole lot of universal energy running through us. And this switch in thinking doesn't have to be a heavy lift. I've learned as hypnotist that the conscious mind tends to be very dualistic, very black and white, making comparisons, analyzing, judging, trying to feel superior. But when you relax and slip into a more holistic way of perceiving things through your subconscious mind, boom, you land in your body and you see that everything is actually connected and working together and you tune in with that energy that connects you. This mode of perception feels less dramatic, sometimes slower, but ultimately it's much, much more powerful. And when you get down to this level, you can really celebrate everything, other people, even all the people, because they're all just channeling the life force too, doing it in their own way, in their own world, through their own portals of consciousness. So I think the antidote to comparison is learning how to celebrate other people's accomplishments to learn to be generous with your praise instead of miserly in comparison. So here's my tip for you. When you find yourself comparing yourself to your friend, notice it and notice that it probably makes you feel bad. Do you want to feel bad? Do you want to bring that to your relationship? I know you don't. So then, M, force your mind to find something good about your friend, whether it's a quality you were comparing yourself to or something else. Use some mental discipline and force your mind to find something that you can feel good about. Maybe it's her sense of humor or her kindness or her hair or her style. Find something and let yourself notice it and feel good about it. Honor her gifts. Celebrate her gifts. Now, this might feel hard at first and that you're somehow taking something away from yourself by giving this to her, but believe me, you are not. By honoring and praising her, you're actually giving to yourself. By appreciating her, you are bathing yourself in that light too. And this will become a very, very good habit that I encourage you to use all over the place in your life. This is a very powerful thing to do because when you celebrate others, you celebrate life itself and you celebrate yourself. Because when we come from this energy place, there's no actual division between us and the better you feel about others and other things, the better you feel about you. So it's a win-win. I hope that helps, M. I know I went all over the place, but I had to thread that needle. Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand, marketing tools that get your products out there, integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time from startups to scale-ups, online, in-person and on-the-go. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com. I started listening to Weather in Heights to help me fall asleep. The moment the narrator began, everything slowed. Whatever our souls are made of, isn't mine are the same. The moors, the stormy skies, the poetry of the story pulls me in and I just drift off. Life changes when you listen. Weather in Heights by Emily Bronte, now on Spotify. Thank you so much for writing and let us know how it goes. Next from Jay. How should I respond to gaslighting? Okay, this is a simple question. You've made it very simple, just one line, but it's a big question and it's difficult to answer specifically without more context. But let's define our terms here. I think of gaslighting as someone insisting on a fact or reality that is not how you perceive it. And in so doing, they're trying to make you doubt yourself. And unlike other more passive forms of deception or dishonesty, gaslighting is active, like the person's trying to make you feel crazy and unable to trust yourself. Gaslighting makes you not trust your own instincts and in that respect, it's very toxic. So Jay, if this is a person who knowingly causes you to doubt yourself, you need to create distance from them because you're not going to change them. Best case scenario, remove yourself from the relationship and find a healthier one or at least have a plan to do that. Because an individual who knowingly causes someone else to feel crazy is not ready for a healthy relationship and you shouldn't be their guinea pig to work on in their experiments. And it probably won't just work itself out over time. People only change if they really want to and that can take much more work than anyone recognizes. So do not try and fix them or forgive your way out of this or think that love will cure this. I'm not saying there aren't miracles in the world, but in general, people spend a lot of time and endure a lot of suffering believing that those things will just work themselves out. And after you get out of the relationship or as you do the work to get away, I think it's important to state your truth. Report on your instincts, report on your intuition wherever you need to and especially in safe environments where you can be reinforced and supported by people who can reflect your truth back to you. After being gaslit, you may need to reassert your perceptions and hang on to your sanity. Okay, that's all based on the idea that this person is actively gaslighting you. And like I said, I don't know if that's the case or not. If it is, take what you like and leave the rest. But I'd also like to rewind a little in case there's any wiggle room here. You haven't given me all the picture, so I was making the assumption that you are sure this is happening. And sometimes we are being gaslit or being fooled, but there could be room for some other interpretations. And believe me, I don't want to add to your confusion here, so I hope the following is helpful in some way or another. Like I said, if you feel you are in peril, get out and forget what I have to say about it. But if you want to explore more gray area here, let's do it. Whenever we enter a relationship of any kind, we are bringing our own projections. You see, we look at the world through our own unique lenses, lenses we've been trained to look through. And we're so used to these lenses, we often don't even know we have them. For instance, I spent my childhood in Canada, a very stable country where faith in institutions is pretty common and basically works for the collective, for the country itself. Now, who knows, maybe behind the scenes Canada is completely corrupted and our faith in institutions is naive. I hope not. But when I was growing up, that was what I learned. I have a friend here in LA who grew up in Iran during the revolution. So her faith in institutions is more tenuous than mine, for good reason. And sometimes we'll get into discussions and really come to a place where we disagree about politics or current events, but we both know ourselves well enough that we finally dial down to the lenses we are looking through. And as a Canadian, I automatically and unconsciously bring a sense of trust to institutions. And as someone who grew up in lots of upheaval, she does not automatically do that. And when we get down to these fundamental lenses, we can understand our differences and agree to disagree on things. And paradoxically, by acknowledging our different lenses, we get closer as people. We can recognize that our lenses are just that, not necessarily a hard truth, just projections we picked up through experience. So when we meet a new person, we tend not to realize that we are looking at them through our own set of lenses. We're looking at them through our own needs, our own preferences, our fears, or our own distorted sense of self-esteem. Maybe we see this person unconsciously as if they're one of our parents. And it's so funny because these days we meet strangers so quickly and easily online. And we think when we meet literally a perfect stranger online that we are somehow coming to the connection clear in ourselves without lenses and that we're meeting someone else who is clear and perfectly honest and available to themselves and to us. The truth is, and this is true in every relationship, there's this whole sort of silent black and white movie playing below the relationship through all these unconscious lenses. And then that's your side of the table. Take that weird reality and double it because the other person's also arriving with their own lenses. Looking at you in a particular way that might have nothing to do with you. And it can take a long time for all of that unconscious material to finally drop. And for you to be actual you, or for someone to be able to see actual you beyond your lenses and vice versa. So what you may consider gaslighting at this point may not be aimed at you or particularly personal, but maybe some weird distortion of reality as seen through that person's lens. That doesn't mean you shouldn't get out of the relationship if you're feeling crazy, but understand that not everyone is who they appear to be, nor might you be. So it's your job, Jay, to weigh and measure where you're at here. What exactly makes you think you're being gaslighted? How well do you know this person? Is your intuition giving you signals that aren't being reflected in the relationship? Has this happened to you before? What are your patterns? What are this other person's? What are the other person's patterns that you know of? And this could take a little while to find out. If you're having this relationship within a safe environment and you haven't placed all your relationship eggs in this particular basket yet, you may want to detach a little, observe, and gather more information. And here's a tip. Whenever I've been in relationships that were giving me difficulty or experiencing conflict that perplexed me, I would look at the other person as a wheel. I know that sounds weird, but I would imagine that person as the hub of a wheel at the center. And then based on what I knew about that person, I would ask myself if the spokes of the wheel, the connections or relationships radiating out from that hub were stable and strong and longstanding. For instance, if I get into a sticky place with someone and I remember, oh yeah, this person hasn't spoken to her mother in two years, or this person recently told me about all the best friends who failed him. And I start to see that the spokes of her or his wheel are somewhat broken. That's important information. And then I imagine myself as the hub of wheel, and I have to get really honest with myself about the spokes of my wheel. Do I have long-term friendships? Do I have strong relationships within my family? Are my business connections solid? This little exercise has been very helpful to me at times when I felt a little crazy in relationships. And remember, no one is perfect. It has perfect solid spokes. But when we look at ourselves at the center of our relationship lives, I think we can make an assessment that helps us see what we are bringing to the table and what the other person may be bringing to the table. If the spokes of your wheel are mainly stable and strong, while this other person has broken spokes and kind of a spotty history, it's time to detach. This exercise asks that we be very honest with ourselves and about our own behavior. And I know, Jay, that may not answer your question directly, but I hope it gives you some perspective. Thank you. Thank you for writing. Next from Carrie. I'm struggling with a strong emotion, depression. I have chronic pain in my neck, and sometimes I find it hard to remain positive. How do you remain positive when times are tough? Is a great question, Carrie. And I'm sorry to hear about that pain. I can imagine it would be distracting and exhausting. First, I think it's helpful to understand the nature of the mind. And that where you focus your mind, your whole life tends to fall. Now, it's a very natural thing when you experience suffering or an injury. It's very natural for the mind to focus on it. Everyone does that. But let's take a look at what continual focus on the injury can do. Because the mind is a very simple thing, and it tends to gain momentum in whatever direction it's going. So there may be a pattern being set up here. And like I said, I think everyone falls into this pattern. And unless you have the tools to intervene upon it, this is just what ends up happening. So here's the pattern. You feel the discomfort, which is the actual sensation you're feeling in your neck. And then you tense up because your nervous system has one choice. Relax or tense up. Well, if you're feeling pain, chances are you're going to tense up. But that tension makes for more discomfort, which causes more tension, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally, which feeds the cycle. And then you have some real momentum there between the sensation and the tension and the crappy feelings and all feeding the sensation. When I was 30, I got sciatica. I was on an exercise bike, and I remember the moment like it was yesterday. Some weird thing happened in the side of my butt cheek. It was like a wire snapped, and I felt this horrible pain. Now, I don't know the exact mechanism behind the pain. I think muscles might have cramped up around a nerve. But what I felt was like a horrible toothache in my butt cheek down the side, and it radiated down the side of my leg, shooting pains, and it was awful. And it didn't go away. Over time, over months, I started to feel like an old woman. Standing up from sitting was the worst. So I tended to remain sitting longer than I would have, wanting to avoid the pain. And after a while, I realized there was more going on than the discomfort. I realized that every time I felt the discomfort, I tensed up, like I just described to you, making most of the muscles of my whole body tense. Instead of just those that were tightening around the nerve, but that tension in me, it didn't help at all. It just made it worse. And then I realized that beyond the physical tension, I was creating a mental tension, having scary thoughts running through my head. Oh my God, I feel like I'm 80. This is never going to go away. This is only getting worse. And those thoughts were also making my whole body tight. Again, not helpful. And finally, I had to recognize that every single time I felt that toothache in my butt, I felt fear. And that was sending all sorts of stress hormones into my bloodstream, reinforcing all of the tension on the other levels. So it was very interesting to see that I had grown a little garden of tension around this one single sensation. I mean, the rest of my body was young and in relatively good shape. I was eating healthy food. I was doing a job that required lots of energy. But ever since feeling that little ping in my butt cheek, I had subconsciously built a whole scaffolding of negative energy around it. Now, I had just become a hypnotherapist at that point, maybe within that year. And I realized I had access to my mind in a way that I hadn't before. I had a whole new set of tools. So I started to think it through. I didn't have any power over the feeling in my body, the actual sciatic nerve getting pinched, but I did have power over my reaction to it. So I took myself into really deep relaxation and I gave myself the suggestion that every time I felt the sensation, I would relax. That's it. I would relax physically as soon as I registered the sensation, even if it took me a second to remember that suggestion. And that was the exact opposite of what I'd been doing. Up until that point, every time I felt the sensation, I tensed up. So now I thought, okay, if this thing's triggering a response, let's let it trigger the opposite. And with that suggestion of physical relaxation, I also gave myself permission to sort of give up mentally and emotionally. After about a year of the pain, I realized that my tensing up mentally and emotionally hadn't done me any good. In fact, I had evidence that it made things worse. So I just raised the white flag mentally and emotionally. I just gave up. Now, it's important here to understand I didn't have to force myself to feel positive. That wasn't the suggestion. Or to say something positive to myself. It was just relaxing. Just letting go. And I practiced that a lot because I felt the sensation a lot. And I just kept doing it and doing it, letting go, letting go, letting go. And I tell you, it was quite a relief to not be scaring the heck out of myself with the I'm an old lady stuff in my head. And it was really nice not to be walking around in fear all the time. And slowly, after a few months, I noticed that that sensation in my butt cheek just wasn't getting the attention anymore. It was like the squeaky wheels stopped getting the grease. And then after about six months, I noticed that I just wasn't really feeling it at all anymore. I had managed to relax around it. Really letting those muscles relax, supported by my mind and my heart, letting go to such a deep level that a healing had occurred. Like I'd actually allowed my body to come back into balance because I wasn't getting in the way anymore. And that was amazing. So I'm wondering, Carrie, if you can tease out how your mind and body are reacting to this neck issue. Now this is all based on the idea that you have some sort of doctor on board and you know exactly what's going on here because we don't want to ignore pain if it's a signal of something serious or if it's misunderstood. But if this discomfort is something that is understood and being supported in whatever way you can do it, I'd like you to imagine and notice how you're reacting to it. I presume you're having a whole cascade of reactions to it. And although you may not be able to fix the original issue yourself, you can let go of that set of reactions. And I encourage you to take the simple suggestion I gave myself that day. Every time I feel this discomfort or this feeling, I relax. Every time I feel this sensation, I relax. And then you allow your shoulders to drop. You feel your face letting go. You practice what you've practiced here at Sleep Magic. Allow your belly to soften and see what happens and do it again and again and again because the other road just doesn't work. You have more power than you know carry. So keep us posted. I'm wishing you all the best. Thank you for writing. That is it for now. Thank you everybody for listening. We do the monthly mailbag monthly with extended episodes for subscribers. So please submit your questions in the next few weeks and I'll try and answer them in the next episode. Now you can ask me anything, whether it's about an issue you're having, a question about me or just a question about life. I'm open to answering as many as I can, so be sure to send them in. If you listen to this podcast through Apple or through the Sleepiest app, send your questions to hello at sleepmagic.fm. If you listen on any other podcast player, go to the show notes, go to the Supercast link and you'll find an ask me anything feature and you can put your question there. I really, really look forward to hearing your next set of questions. Please let us know in the reviews what you thought of this episode and I'm sorry we couldn't get to everything. We will try and take questions I couldn't reach today and do them next time. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing. We couldn't do this without you and have a really, really good night.