Is your entertainment anaesthetising you?

In the last blog, Sharon talked about what makes a problem a problem. If you haven’t seen that, why not have a look at that framework and try to apply it to challenges in your life. The first thing you might encounter is the lack of space in your life to even think about addressing those challenges, let alone actually doing something about them.

Anaesthetics are a wonderful miracle that allow skilled medical teams to carry out the most extraordinary procedures on our bodies without the excruciating pain that might accompany those procedures. My limited understanding from speaking to a couple of anaesthetists over the years is that anaesthetising someone is highly complex, very skilled and the potential for something to go wrong is always present.

Wikipedia describes local anaesthetics as causing a reversible loss of sensation for a limited region of the body without necessarily affecting consciousness. In order to do that, the anaesthetics are significantly affecting our brains. Sadly, many people turn to alcohol, drugs and other things to anaesthetise themselves from painful or traumatic events in their lives. These situations are often desperately sad, but thankfully, there are some wonderful people and organisations with a passion for supporting people to freedom.

But what if many of us are regularly anaesthetising ourselves in other ways? Maybe it’s a mechanism for avoiding things in our lives that we either don’t want to confront, or we believe are too painful to confront. So how might we anaesthetise ourselves without medical intervention or the use of alcohol or drugs? It seems to me that it’s a really easy thing to do, can be difficult to acknowledge, and can be really challenging to break free from.

Watch TV, listen to the radio, surf your favourite social media apps, shop, have people around you constantly, plan in plenty of activities, trips way, things for the kids, work and fill any gaps with music, eating, drinking, reading books, and working on your fitness. And perhaps throw in a number of passing conversations with others where you share how busy you are! But whatever you do, avoid silence. Avoid being alone for too long. Don’t let your brain drift into anything that might offer up some searching questions or enquiries about yourself.

It seems to me that everything mentioned has its place. It’s not a matter of whether something is good or bad, right or wrong – that doesn’t really take us anywhere. But what if you examined this for yourself? What might you be anaesthetising yourself with? And how might your life be transformed if you really took this on?