There are some costs, though, to traveling on automatic pilot.
Let’s look at a list of activities together. From this list, choose those activities for which automatic pilot can be useful and those for which you would prefer not to be on automatic pilot.
Automatic Pilot Exercise
For each item select “Autopilot” if automatic pilot would be useful or “Mindful” if you’d rather not be on automatic pilot.
- Eating your favorite dessert
- Autopilot
- Mindful
- Remembering your child’s name
- Autopilot
- Mindful
- Moving out of the way of a speeding car
- Autopilot
- Mindful
- Receiving an award at work
- Autopilot
- Mindful
- Multiplying 8 x 7
- Autopilot
- Mindful
- Watching a great movie.
- Autopilot
- Mindful
The Slippery Slope of Automatic Pilot
Being able to notice when we are on automatic pilot can be helpful in allowing us to understand some of our reactions throughout the day. This can be useful when we find ourselves reacting strongly, sometimes without knowing why. If we trace back our steps, we might find that there were a number of things that may have affected us, but in autopilot, we may have missed them at the time.
Hear From Your Guides
Press Play to learn more about automatic pilot from your guide.
Discussing Mindfulness in an MBCT Group
In its simplest terms, we can eat our food on automatic pilot, or we can eat it mindfully. You actually have a choice. Mindfulness consists of training your attention to become more aware of the pattern of your mind so that you can recognize this choice point more clearly, even in the middle of all the other things that may be going on around you.
Click on the questions to hear from each group member.
