How To Rewire Your Mind

How many times have we heard or read this advice from someone who is ill:

“Stop and smell the roses,” tell our loved ones how much we care, appreciate every single day, no matter how much it tests your mental endurance? No doubt, we’ve all heard it many times. Yet, how many of us really take the advice to heart, beyond maybe a few hours, a day or even a week? We fall right back into our routines, often getting frustrated, disheartened, depressed, or even downright mad at someone or something. Here are a few scenarios to which we can all relate:

• Our Time-Warner cable goes out at least once a week, and we are forced to do without the Internet for long periods. We call the customer service number, have to hold on and listen to irritating music for 33 minutes and then get someone who is absolutely useless to help us or explain the problem.
• We take a few minutes from our hectic day to call a friend just to say “hi” and she moans, “Sorry, but I’m just too busy to talk right now!”
• We read an article on the Internet about a really dumb subject, like whether Beyoncé and Jay-Z are divorcing, and we write an insulting comment about them.
• We can’t wait to get back from a vacation or business trip. We get to the airport and the plane is delayed for hours.

Most often, we have absolutely no control to change the situations or people that
are driving us wild.

Still, we can continue to let them raise our blood pressure, elicit our ill will and anger and divert our positive energy from doing something productive—not to mention cause us to waste massive amounts of time—or we can figure out how and where to seek another path.

But how, you ask? You swear you don’t want to think all these unpleasant, jealous, maddening thoughts, but you can’t seem to turn them off. A online community called rewireme.com says you can, and aims to do precisely what its name says: Help us to disconnect the ‘faulty wires’ in our brains that short-circuit to obstruct, inhibit and hinder us, and to connect the wires that can turn on our power to happily move ahead in our lives.

Launched in 2013 by Rose Caiola, a New York City real estate businesswoman, the rewireme.com mission statement says it wants to help us “learn, grow, and transform into our best selves by understanding emotions; making conscious decisions to acknowledge and experience rather than bury our feelings; expressing what we feel and communicating our understanding with one another; sharing our stories and receiving wisdom from one another.”

When we listen to what other people are going through, we can empathize and often see in them what we usually have a hard time seeing in ourselves,
the website says.

“The more we share, the deeper we’ll be able to go—to embrace growth. As we push the boundaries of our comfort zones and challenge ourselves, we’ll find ways to move from like to love, from status quo to passion. It’s exhilarating to conquer our fear of change together.”

I confess that I’m not typically inclined to be a fan of any single person who ‘preaches’ to the masses how he or she will help us to “be healthier, happier, wiser, more balanced” etc., if we will just listen to their expert advice, on anything from aging to eating; intimacy to motherhood. Yet, what I like about rewire.me is how it makes its community part of the whole learning process. Visitors are encouraged to share their stories of “discovery and change”; advice on the site often is based on scientific fact, such as the 11-minute, clever and entertaining video that explores the causes and cures for stress; and engaging activities promise to give us enjoyment while we learn.

So please take a few minutes to tool around rewireme.com and next time the cable company puts you on hold, your plane is endlessly delayed, or the Internet goes down, you’ll let it roll right off your back and move on.