Discover the hidden power of awareness and its transformative impact on your daily life! Imagine if you could shift from automatic pilot to a higher state of self-awareness, effortlessly managing your stress and enhancing your well-being. In this episode of the Islamic Life Coach School Podcast, we promise you'll gain valuable insights into how sensory adaptation can either be your friend or foe.
By understanding the C-NEAR formula—Circumstances, Nervous System, Thoughts, Emotions, Actions, and Results—you'll learn how to navigate cognitive overload and tap into a more mindful existence.
Join us as we unravel the three levels of awareness and their practical applications, from managing the flood of emails in your inbox to tackling life-changing decisions like moving to a new city and much more.
Find out how recognizing and reshaping your thoughts leads to profound shifts in your life.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If this podcast has benefited you, imagine the value of a one-on-one meeting with me! Click below to schedule your FREE consultation. Discover solutions with no obligation.
Discover the hidden power of awareness and its transformative impact on your daily life! Imagine if you could shift from automatic pilot to a higher state of self-awareness, effortlessly managing your stress and enhancing your well-being. In this episode of the Islamic Life Coach School Podcast, we promise you'll gain valuable insights into how sensory adaptation can either be your friend or foe.
By understanding the C-NEAR formula—Circumstances, Nervous System, Thoughts, Emotions, Actions, and Results—you'll learn how to navigate cognitive overload and tap into a more mindful existence.
Join us as we unravel the three levels of awareness and their practical applications, from managing the flood of emails in your inbox to tackling life-changing decisions like moving to a new city and much more.
Find out how recognizing and reshaping your thoughts leads to profound shifts in your life.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If this podcast has benefited you, imagine the value of a one-on-one meeting with me! Click below to schedule your FREE consultation. Discover solutions with no obligation.
Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, dr Kamal Atlar. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you.
Speaker 1:
Awareness is tricky, but it is everything, and today's podcast topic is exactly about that. Is tricky, but it is everything, and today's podcast topic is exactly about that. We don't become aware of our breathing because we're breathing constantly without consciously thinking about it. This happens because our respiratory system, controlled by the autonomic nervous system, lets us breathe without having to consciously put an effort to think about taking a breath. So, are we aware of our breathing? Yes, at times, if we direct ourselves to do so, but other than that, it's pretty much automatic.
Speaker 1:
Then there's peripheral vision. While focused on reading a text, your surroundings are within your vision, but you're not noticing them because they're out of your awareness. Also, on that note, did you know that your nose is constantly within the field of your vision but you don't actually notice it Because it's not in your awareness? The brain tunes it out? Or, with background noise, if you're currently working in an environment with continuous background sounds like running a fan or distant traffic, your brain will tune it out. You might notice them with initial exposure, but with habituation the brain filters them out because of constant exposure. This is also true with the pressure of clothes that you wear. When you first get dressed, especially if it's a new texture of clothing, then you'll notice it, but then you'll get used to it, unless it's something that you find irritating, in which case the attention keeps going back to the irritation.
Speaker 1:
All of this is sensory adaptation, which helps your brain to focus on more significant things in your environment. The biggest example of adaptation is the earth's rotation. Human beings haven't evolved on this earth. All of us are adapted to tune out the atmospheric pressure or the earth's rotation, or the earth's movement that it's moving at such a high speed. Our entire balancing system, the vestibular system, the inner ear, evolved to keep that adaptation in check, so we don't constantly feel bombarded by the information of earth's rotation. Now, if we wanted, we can bring our attention to the clothes that we wear or the smell that we got used to or our environmental noises, but we can't bring to our awareness earth's rotation. Our senses have adapted to completely take that out of our perception.
Speaker 1:
So I'm telling you all of this because there are multiple other things that are going out of our awareness that the brain is tuning out. That's actually harmful to us. So like when I click in a chart and I have 15 pop-ups of information about regular things that I can notice. Otherwise, my adaptive mechanism just says what's the easiest way to click through all of this without noticing, unless there's a pop-up with new information that I haven't seen before and my brain hasn't adapted before. Then my mind will pay attention. In this case it helps me to notice and slow down. So I don't click out of these pop-ups, especially if they have some important information in them. Or if you receive multiple emails in a day and you overlook an email because your busy work environment requires you to pay attention at other things. It's very common for you to read an email and then forget about it, even if it contains important information on your tasks.
Speaker 1:
All of this your brain is trying to adapt out of your awareness because of cognitive overload, no-transcript, where the stress is running on a constant like a background noise. Then you might not even notice it after a while, but it's still present. You're on this hedonic treadmill and the adaptation is explained by the psychological concept, which means you quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness that you're used to despite of any significant positive or negative events in your life, so that the underlying hum of a background stress becomes the new normal and less noticeable unless you bring it to your awareness. So there is much more that can be said about awareness and it is a fluid concept. But how is being unaware of your thought processes and internal state hurting you and how can you use the awareness of this internal state to your benefit? So that's when we go into levels of awareness.
Speaker 1:
So a higher level of awareness is that where you might be acting like your usual day-to-day self, but you are in a state of seeing how you're acting like your day-to-day self. You're aware that you are not your thoughts and your actions. You're aware of them. This is completely different than you waking up and walking into the kitchen and making coffee for the hundredth time. You being awake is an awareness state, and you watching yourself going to the kitchen and making the coffee and seeing yourself doing these actions is completely another level of awareness. So how can you and I, as ordinary human beings, get there and how can we use this to our benefit? How can we become more quote-unquote aware like this.
Speaker 1:
So I do teach a self-awareness formula to you guys, which is C-NEAR, which is an abbreviation C-N-E-A-R stands for Circumstances, nervous System, thoughts, emotions, actions and Results, and I'm going to break down the levels of awareness based on this hierarchy. So circumstances are everything outside of you, they're out of your control. Then, when you find yourself thinking about these circumstances, this is your gateway of interacting with the world and that's how you're becoming aware. This is just a basic, lower level of awareness that you're awake and making the coffee and doing the things you're supposed to do. And this basic level of awareness is through your thoughts and narratives about the circumstances, like now I'm awake, now let me go make coffee for myself. This narrative is being created by your awake nervous system and the nervous system then creates emotions. Each sentence in our mind creates a feeling. These emotions are vibrations in our body and then these vibrations lead to actions, which is the A in the formula, the C-near, and these actions lead to the result, which is the R.
Speaker 1:
So why do I tell you this? It's because first level awareness is that your circumstances do not cause your results. Your thoughts do, and so much of your life's problems get solved at this level of awareness. So awareness is impactful when you know you're doing the thinking, but it is much more impactful when you're aware of what you're thinking, about the thinking you're doing. It puts you in an open space if you ever want to question the type of thinking you're doing. Second level of awareness is that you know that your thoughts cause your result. So you stop thinking in a way that hurts you and start thinking in a way that helps you and it changes your result. This requires a foresight of predicting what result you want to create and that way you can recreate real life scenarios of how you think they'll play out, based on your thinking, before it actually transpires in reality around you, saves you a lot of trial and error, saves you a lot of energy and, yes, it is much more profound than the first level of awareness.
Speaker 1:
Then the third level is that everything is a circumstance, meaning anything outside of you that you cannot control does not cause your result and you have the freedom to think about it any way you want. What do you want to choose to think about your life? The circumstance this is the ultimate intentional life. This is when you create a very high level of life with the design that you envision and, in my belief, that's why you are here on this planet to work with the circumstances. You're given the qadr that Allah SWT wrote for you and to work towards creating the life of your choosing and creating results that help you in the afterlife. So let me break down these levels of awareness with real life examples.
Speaker 1:
So let's say you're working with a background stress that you're currently not aware of because you've just gotten so used to it. In the first level of awareness, the formula C-NIR would look something like this you have a job with a deadline. That's a circumstance. Your nervous system thought is that this is overwhelming and I have a lot of workload. Emotion is anxiety, stress, overwhelm and the like. Action that you take is you react by working long hours, you skip your breaks, you don't rest enough, you pressure yourself into meeting the deadline, you justify to yourself how high productivity is the reason why you have this job and the result you create is that you experience burnout. The deadline from the job does not create this result.
Speaker 1:
First level of awareness is that you're having this thought about the deadline in your job, that this is overwhelming. The second level of awareness with the same job and the same deadline is that I anticipate this workload, meaning you almost predict how you're going to think, because you observed yourself thinking previously on so many occasions and with every deadline you work under pressure. So this time you anticipate the stress and, instead of reacting with anxiety emotions, you create more relaxation technique to maybe help relieve the anxiety. And with the emotion of anticipation, you do the work anyways and you don't stress out about it. You remain calm, focused and all of the actions that you engage in are from the energy of focus. So the result that you create through these actions and this level of awareness is that you increase your productivity and you remain relaxed and you meet the deadline anyways.
Speaker 1:
So first level is you know you're thinking about the circumstance. Second level you not only know what you're thinking, but you're able to change it through your observation effect. Then comes the third level, which the circumstance is the same that you have a job with a deadline, but you also view everything in the world neutrally, meaning it's a job and there's a deadline and you get to choose how you think about it. You can come at it from any different direction you want, because you've practiced level one and level two with such rigor that at this point, you're a master at it. And in this case, you choose to feel confident and you choose to feel excited. So your thoughts are I love meeting deadlines, I love being productive, I love being able to provide what is expected of and the actions you'll take is prioritizing tasks, taking breaks, maintaining a healthy work-life balance, and the result you create is achieving your goals without stress. And you're doing that by choice ahead of time. If you see your job as just a circumstance and consciously choose your thoughts that empower you, that's when you create the beneficial result of a work-life balance.
Speaker 1:
Okay, so now let's go through an example of when you forget about an email because you have such a busy inbox. So if you've had a habit of overlooking your email, then how can levels of awareness help you? So the first level of awareness is the circumstance 100 emails in the inbox. The default nervous system thought is this is a lot of emails. The emotion is overwhelmed, hurried, rushed, anxious, frustrated or any of the like, and the action is that you skim through the email, forget the important ones. With the emotion of overwhelm, you don't tag what needs to be readdressed and the result is that you miss important tasks. So the first level of awareness is when you come to this formula and you realize that 100 emails in your inbox do not cause you to miss the results. Your overwhelm does. And the overwhelm is coming because of your thought. This is a lot.
Speaker 1:
The second level of awareness is that you become aware of this thought and you decide to change it through the power of observation, thinking about your thinking. So then the circumstance remains the same of 100 emails, but this time the nervous system thought is I can do this or something to that effect, and the emotion is empowered or confident, in which case you skim through tag what needs to be readdressed, and over time you create a structured approach of how to deal with email management. And just through the power of thinking about your thinking, you can learn to predict how your brain will react next time it sees 100 plus emails in your inbox, and then you can choose to respond to it the way you want to. That's the third level of awareness, meaning a circumstance of your inbox is neutral. You choose to come at it through the emotions of empowerment, curiosity, or you choose to come at it with confusion and overwhelm. So here I've given you professional examples of the three levels of awareness, but you can literally apply this to anything. If you've recently moved and you're trying to adjust to a new location, if you're ready to get married, but every time you find somebody it becomes hard for you to trust them. If you have a skill and a career but you're doubting your ability to manage your own finances, you can literally apply the level of awareness method to anything in your life and in that spirit, I'm just going to give you examples of each of these.
Speaker 1:
So if you are relocating, the first level of awareness is around the circumstance that you're in a new city for a new job or for a new marriage, the nervous system thought is this is unfamiliar. A new job or for a new marriage, the nervous system thought is this is unfamiliar. The emotion is anxiety or even loneliness, if you don't know anybody. Actions from anxiety or loneliness might be that you avoid exploring the city and socializing all together and the result you create is that you remain alone and isolated. Level one of awareness is that you understand what thoughts you're having about your circumstance. Level two is that you decide not to make a big deal out of this because you've observed what your thought is creating. So this time, instead of feeling out of place, you decide to be adventurous or curious. In the same new city you start to build social networks. You feel more at home with time. New city you start to build social networks. You feel more at home with time. The third level of awareness is that you understand fully that moving to a new city does not cause your results.
Speaker 1:
A new city is completely neutral and you want to deliberately choose how you want to think about your situation. You want to create excitement, you want to create exploration or you want to create stress with this relocation, because city is just a circumstance. You consciously choosing thoughts is what will make your experience positive or negative, is what will keep you engaged or disengaged with your environment, and that's what leads to a successful adjustment. Or let's say you're single and you're having trouble trusting men. Your circumstance of being single is followed by I don't trust men. That's a thought which will lead to emotions of suspiciousness or insecurity, and the actions you'll take from insecurity is that you'll either avoid any interaction with men or, if you do have it, you'll act distrustful and your brain will label any interaction as dangerous. First level of awareness is that you understand you're having these thoughts. Second level is that you can choose to think about this circumstance any way you want, because now, through the power of observation, you understand how you being suspicious of men is going to play out in your life. And the third level is that you live with an awareness that men are a circumstance. They are completely neutral. They do not create your mistrust. Your thoughts about them do.
Speaker 1:
Now, in all honesty, escalating and evolving up these levels of awareness takes time. It's not going to happen as fast as I'm describing in this podcast and that's completely natural. So give yourself time and space. Same thing with your financial insecurity. If you have a certain income but you feel insecure about your finances, it's with like, I don't trust myself with my financial decisions, and those thoughts might be related to your cultural upbringing. If, going through levels of awareness, you'll realize that you're having these thoughts, then you will realize you have the option of changing them to help strengthen your relationship with your money, to empower you towards your money. And the third level is that you understand money does not create anything. It is completely neutral. Your thoughts about your money create your results.
Speaker 1:
At this topmost third level of awareness, you become rather non-attached to life. It does not mean you become detached from life. It just means that you know, no matter what transpires outside of you, you can approach it in a way that benefits you, benefits your afterlife. So awareness is tricky, but it is everything, and I hope you guys choose to start at the most basic level today. With that, I pray to Allah, subhanahu wa ta'alaT O Allah, grant me the awareness in all aspects of my life. Allow me to be conscious of all of the blessings you've given me, ya Allah. Increase my awareness of the present moment. Allow all of us to live our life with intention and mindfulness. Grant us the foresight to predict my reactions and to understand the downstream effect of these actions, just so I can tailor my life in this dunya for your ultimate pleasure in the afterlife. Ameen, ya Rabbul Aalameen, please keep me in your duas. I will talk to you guys next time.
