Do you close your eyes when?…..

A thought for the day, my day or your day. It is okay you can own it all to yourself, if ya wanna.
Do you close your eyes? When…. Drum roll please, wait for it, wait for it.
Nope not during sex, ya filthy minded fecker.
Do you close your eyes when you use shampoo?
Ya see, it got me thinking about how we develope over the years and how we have many behaviors. There are two main types of behaviors, 1. is called instinctive behavior & the second is called learned behavior.

Instinctive behavior, what? It is the things we do on instinct. To keep it basic, we have instincts as we are part of, let’s call it the animal kingdom for want of a better term to understand. We, like animals have instincts that kick in based upon a whole bunch of chemical actions and reactions inside of our brains and our body. The very common one, well common enough that one may have heard of it before, “fight or flight” when we sense danger there are different chemicals that begin to rush around our mind and our body. These help us to make the decision of, should we “do a legger” ~ make a run for it.
OR
Do we stand our ground and fight. Based upon the chemical levels activated is where our instinct of should we run or should we stand our ground comes from. I am using a basic example and though things can get pretty deep when dive deeper into psychology and the chemistry of the body, the basic idea is of our instinctive nature. A baby cries for food, this is instinct, instinct to survive. The baby needs food. The baby will get up and walk eventually which is a combination of instinct of survival to climb to two feet and walk and run, although it is also a learned behavior activity. Why so? The baby is watching everybody else walking around and so the baby has learned that in order to get to the fridge and back and enjoy some food that it instinctively craves, best get up and walk.

There are a whole bunch of ways in which to shed a light on what is instinctive behavior and what is learned behavior.
So, do you close your eyes when your wash your hair with shampoo?
Is this instinctively or is it learned? Once upon a time your parent (mom or dad) said, close your eyes so the soap doesn’t sting your eyes.
This could have been the way you learned how to always close your eyes when shampooing your hair. This would be an example of something that was learned.
Again, it is possible to criss cross with instinctive, because our eyelids react very quickly to protect our eyes. Many times without ever thinking. A reflex response to survive and protect. When we were growing in the womb, the body was protecting our eyes all of the time naturally without any great amount or thought on our own part. We do have a simple protective reflex response of instinct to protect our own bodies in the continued act of survival. A very simple, basic core value of being human is that we instictively will survive. That is in our nature.

So did we learn to protect our eyes from the shampoo or do we do it instinctively?
Answer below with a comment.

The intetesting part of the thought for today is that when I look at this concept and take a position of aligning it to leaned behaviour, I think also of how we can learn a lot from this.

Here is the light bulb moment.
When we tilt our head backwards so that all the water is running towards the back of our head and our forehead is the highest point on our body while washing our hair, the shampoo will not go into our eyes and we can keep our eyes open, if we choose to do so.
Try it the next time you wash your hair, tilt your head back and let the shampoo and water all flow towards your back.

So why mention it right?
I wish to highlight that whether instinct or protective reflex reactions or learned behavior, there are some simple techniques that can be applied to bring about a change. Tilt our head back, no need to close our eyes. For me as I think about it, that is a simple adjustment to bring about a change from what we have become habitual in doing.

Do you think in your own life that you may have a few learned behaviors that hinder you or have brought about difficult situations for you in your life? Based upon how we learned to react to others. How we “learned” to survive?

Instinctively we will gasp for breath in any life threatening situation, we will instinctively survive without ever having to think about it. When we think about it, we begin to kick in a whole bunch of learned behaviors on how we think we should be in order to survive. Survive of course can be as simple as “make it through the day”.

No matter the environment where we grew up or what the home life was like, there are ways to break habits of learned behavior. There are simple adjustments that can be made to bring about happier more enjoying moments into our lives. All we have to do is be willing to make some slight adjustments.

When you think that you cannot break habits of learned behaviors, go take a shower and tilt your head back while you are doing the shampooing. For me it has been important to realise that when I allow my mind and my body to go on to auto pilot and do less thinking, the peace and enjoyment begins to flow.

Hey, maybe peace and enjoyment of life is not your gig, perhaps your own “normal” requires complicated and chaos. I really do not know. These are things for you to research and decide upon.
I want to present to you the avenue of possibility. When we simplify our approach and do less of the over active thinking, we can begin to see that learned behavior is something that can be turned on it’s head. We can begin to learn new, more simple ways. We can change.

Layman’s Handbook in life by Aidan Mc Nally
Full of, “Simple tools to change how we live”
Grab a copy from amazon, available on paperback or kindle e reader.

Have a great April & keep thebsoap out yo eyes.

@TWOsonsTOOmany