Dr. Tabatha Barber explains that most thoughts and feelings don't reflect reality. By pausing before reacting, you engage your frontal lobe to evaluate the situation and choose a better response. Repeat this enough and the pause becomes automatic, shifting you from reactive to intentional.
Understanding that most of what you think and feel isn't true, and then deciding to think about those things before you react to them engages your frontal lobe in a way that then allows you to say, wait a minute. Last time I did this in this way, it didn't work out very well for me, so maybe I should choose a different response. And then you begin to automate that step, that little gap in there between stimulus and response. And before you know it, you're in charge of those things instead of reacting to them. And that's how you manage to sort of unstick yourself if you've been repeating the same old patterns over and over.
