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Doing Mode to Being Mode

from doing mode to being mode

Moving from doing mode to being mode is how mindfulness helps you to deal with stress. When problems arise, they cause stress. When we experience stress the natural tendency is to try to do something about it. The problem with this is that if you could do something about the stress you would have already done so, and you would no longer be stressed.

By moving from doing mode to being mode, we are able to just accept what we feel, without feeling obligated to do anything about it. Stress is a natural feeling and a natural response to problems. To expect not to feel stress from time to time is not a realistic expectation, and telling yourself not to stress out is stressful in itself. Think of it this way: Suppose I expect the weather to be sunny all the time. I complain whenever it rains, and my mood becomes irritable because of the cloudy weather. If I have such an expectation, I’ve set myself up to be disappointed, because rain is a natural part of the weather. So by grumbling every time it rains, I’m complaining about something that’s a perfectly natural part of existence.

Now suppose I complain every time I stress out. Stress is also a perfectly normal part of existence, so expecting never to be stressed out is unrealistic.

The more I tell myself not to stress out, the more stressed out I become. Instead, if I learn to welcome the stress and simply allow myself to be with it until it passes it no longer has a hold on me. Note also that telling myself not to stress out is doing something, and not just being with the stress.

If I notice stressful events with the goal of “trying to relax” or “trying to calm down,” trying is doing, and not being. My goal is to be and not to do.

In being mode, we recognize that when we have strong feelings we don’t have to do anything about them. So if we find ourselves having thoughts of refusing the Call to Adventure, such thoughts are just thoughts. However, if we find ourselves wanting to act on those thoughts by refusing the call, we are engaging in doing mode. One way to escape the Refusal of the Call is to merely shift from doing mode to being mode.

The first step to leaving doing mode is to become aware of the ways in which we engage in it.

Think about how you slip into Doing Mode throughout your day. Doing Mode involves solving problems, figuring things out, and participating in day-to-day activities. Right now, make a mental list of a few of the ways you engage in Doing Mode.

We sometimes create unrealistic expectations for ourselves by assuming that stressful or depressing thoughts and feelings are somehow not “natural.” In fact, just the opposite is true. It is perfectly natural to have stressful or depressing thoughts and feelings from time to time.

Try this sometime: Ask everyone you know if they’ve never in their entire lives had a depressing or stressful thought. I’m willing to bet that you won’t be able to find anyone who would say that they’ve never been depressed or anxious. That’s because, like cloudy days, stressful and depressing feelings are a natural part of being alive.

If we can accept that we don’t have to do anything to fix cloudy days, we can accept that we don’t have to do anything to fix negative thoughts and feelings as well. Sometimes our attempts to fix such thought cycles could be the very thing that makes them worse. Here’s an example of how this process works:

Suppose I am prone to panic attacks. One day I find myself feeling anxious. I can tell by the way my thoughts are racing and by the way my body feels that my anxiety is rising. I know from previous experience that rising anxiety has led to panic attacks in the past. As I realize this, my anxiety increases even more because I’m afraid that I’m about to have yet another panic attack. So I try to do something to stop it by forcing myself to calm down. But “trying to calm down” is doing mode. The harder I try to calm down, the more I stress out about the fact that I can’t calm down. The more I stress out about the fact that I can’t seem to calm down, the more my anxiety rises, because I’m trying to do something to fix it, and what I’m doing isn’t working. The more I fail at fixing it, the more I stress out and try even harder to fix it. This cycle builds and builds until I have another full-blown panic attack.

What if, when I felt my anxiety rising, I was able to say, “Oh, that’s another panic attack that’s about to happen. I’ve had them before. Yes, they’re unpleasant, but I’ve managed to survive them. No need to try to do anything to stop it.”
In this case, I’m not trying to do anything. I’m not trying to stop the attack. I’ve consciously chosen to sit with it and be in the moment with the natural experience, paying attention to and describing the sensations to myself. Because I’m not engaging in doing mode by trying to fix something, I’m not adding to the anxiety. I’m just allowing things to happen in their own time, while I observe with my senses. From this perspective, even if I do have another panic attack, I’m being still with it and observing it rather than interacting with it. I know from previous experience that it won’t kill me, however unpleasant the experience might be. I’m engaging my internal observer to be with the experience without having to do anything about it.

This ability to pay attention to the present moment is the essence of moving from doing mode to being mode.

One of the most basic ways to engage in Being Mode is to simply start paying attention to the sensations you experience in the world around you. One thing you can always focus on is your breath. This is because your breath is always with you. Try this now by going outside and taking a few deep breaths while noticing the sensations you’re experiencing. What did you feel in your body? Did you notice any smells in the air? Were you able to taste anything in the air as you exhaled? What does your breathing sound like? What physical sensations are you experiencing?
Leaving Doing Mode and entering Being Mode can be as simple as paying attention to what your senses are telling you in the present moment. Think about some ways you can engage all of your senses. For example, you might light a scented candle or go outside and smell the flowers.

From Doing Mode to Being Mode

Now that you have a list of activities you can engage in when feeling tempted to engage in doing mode, you can choose to be with these activities instead.

The Refusal of the Call often manifests in a temptation to return to the way things have always been. Change is difficult, and setting out on a path of personal and permanent change for the better can sometimes be the most difficult life-changing experience of all. We feel tempted to tell ourselves, “Change is too hard,” or “I’ve always been this way, why change now?” or “People won’t like me if I change.”

We’re very good at coming up with excuses because if we don’t then we have to take responsibility for our lives. That can be a scary place to be for those of us who have never done it before. When we take responsibility for our own lives we have nobody else to blame if we fail. What we sometimes forget, though, is that if we take responsibility for our own lives, then we are the only ones who can take credit for our successes.

Taking the leap of faith required to trust ourselves is a major step in answering the Call to Adventure. Sometimes it helps to have a little Supernatural Aid. We’ll talk about what this aid might look like in future posts and how it might help you to move from doing mode to being mode.

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Automatic Thinking

Learning to drive an automobile can be an overwhelming task. You have to focus on keeping the vehicle between the lines on the highway while watching for other cars, traffic signals and road signs. In addition to all of this, you must constantly glance at the speedometer to make sure that you are driving at a safe speed. You cannot look at the speedometer for too long because you must also concentrate on what may be happening on the highway. When learning to drive, you probably recited the ‘rules of the road’ to yourself over and over while driving (“Hands at two and ten,” “Watch out for animals and children running into the road,” etc.).

But as you gained knowledge and experience of driving, it became more and more of an automatic process. It may have become so automatic that now from time to time you make a routine drive without remembering anything about it. If you have ever let your mind wander and have missed an exit or a turn, then you are fully familiar with the process of automatization.

The process of automatization occurs in many areas of our lives. Just as the process of driving eventually becomes automatic, and can occur without our conscious awareness, so can thought and feeling processes become automatized.

If you have ever had a strong emotional reaction to a situation without knowing why, it is possible that one of your automatized emotional processes was activated (Moulds & Bryant, 2004).

Mindfulness is just the opposite of this automatic pilot experience. It is a way of paying close attention to your immediate experiences without getting lost in thought or shifting into automatic patterns of thinking or behaving. It is a shift from Doing Mode into Being Mode.

Doing Mode

Think about your morning routine. When you were in the shower this morning, were you actually ‘in’ the shower, or was your mind racing down the highway to your day-to-day errands? When you were there in the shower, were you feeling the warmth of the water on your skin, smelling the fragrance of the soap, and hearing the sound of the water, or was your mind elsewhere?

When we are preoccupied with thoughts of the past or the future, or with thoughts of getting things done, we are in Doing Mode. Doing Mode can also be expressed as Thinking Mode, because to get things done, we generally have to think about those things first. We make ‘to do’ lists in our minds and then do them in Doing Mode.

Thinking Mode takes us away from experiencing the world directly with our senses. When we leave Thinking Mode, and focus our awareness directly on the information provided by our senses, we have entered Sensing Mode.

Mindful Awareness teaches us to focus on the world experienced directly by our senses: touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight. Experiencing life in sensing mode introduces us to a richer world. It’s impossible to be bored or apathetic if you treat each experience as if it is happening to you for the first time. Approaching each new situation without any assumptions or expectations is referred to as Beginner’s Mind, or sometimes as Child’s Mind.

Being Mode

Williams (2008) presents research that indicates the benefits of mindful states of being. Mindfulness is associated with decreases in levels of rumination (a process of becoming ‘trapped’ in negative thought cycles), avoidance (refusing to accept the reality of a given situation), perfectionism (attempts to control a situation), and maladaptive self-guides (attempting solutions that maintain the problem). Taken together, this reduction in negative thought and behavior patterns form what is known as Being Mode.

By focusing on the present moment, we leave Thinking Mode and enter into Sensing Mode.

In Sensing Mode, we simply allow ourselves to become fully aware of what is going on around us and within us, without attempting to control or manipulate these events and sensations. Being Mode reduces ruminations by allowing us to become aware of our thoughts and feelings as internal processes that we can choose to participate in, or choose to simply observe. In Being Mode we learn that we are not our thoughts.

In Western modes of thought, we are taught that our thoughts and feelings are our identities. Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” but does that mean that if you stop thinking, you cease to exist?

Being Mode allows us to detach from our cognitive and emotional processes and observe them, or stop them, if we so choose.

Being Mode reduces avoidance by allowing us to be in the present moment. If you are trying to avoid an unpleasant emotional state, you set up a cycle of denial. This denial creates anxiety and stress, which leads to more unpleasant emotional states to be avoided, which starts the avoidance cycle all over again. Being Mode allows us to participate in the unpleasant situation without internalizing it; i.e., without allowing the unpleasantness to become a part of our identity.

Perfectionism can be seen as a control mechanism. It is a displacement technique. If we feel out of control of certain areas of our lives, and we feel powerless to change those areas, we may displace our attention on the areas that we can control. By engaging in compulsive, perfectionist behaviors we assert our control over tangible areas as a substitute for areas over which we may feel we have no control. The idea of “perfection” becomes an obsessive means of anxiety management.

Being Mode allows us to realize that perfection is a subjective ideal. For example, if I asked you to describe your “perfect” day, you are likely to give me a totally different answer to that question than I would give if I were asked the same question.

Since our answers to the question, “What is your idea of the perfect day?” would not be identical, there is no objective definition to the word “perfect.” Being Mode helps one to realize that perfection is a self-defined concept.

In Being Mode we learn that every moment is perfect in and of itself, if we allow it to be.

Finally, Being Mode allows us to disengage from our own cognitive and emotional processes for a time. By doing so, we can become objective observers of our own inner states, without feeling that we must participate in them. Being Mode is a type of metacognition, or “thinking about thinking.” By observing the thoughts and feelings that have led to maladaptive consequences, we gain the ability to change those thought and feeling processes to lead to more productive conclusions.


Moulds, M. L. & Bryant, R. A. (2004). Automatic Versus Effortful Influences in the Processing of Traumatic Material in Acute Stress Disorder. Journal of Cognitive Therapy and Research, Vol. 28, No. 6, December 2004, pp. 805–817.

Williams, G. (2008). Mindfulness, Depression and Modes of Mind. Journal of Cognitive Therapy and Research, Vol. 32, No. 6, December, 2008. Pages 721-733.