Are you addicted to Attention Seeking?
Do you ever go out of your way just to be noticed, only to feel empty when the spotlight moves on? You’re not alone. We often chase attention, mistaking it for proof of our value— yet the thrill can fade as quickly as it came.
What if there were another way to gain real satisfaction instead of a temporary high?
Topic references:
MOTIONLESS SITTING
control of restlessness and agitation through determined motionless sitting
Mental Health Through Will Training, chapter 41, Sabotage Method No. 9: Failure to Practice Muscle Control, page 327 in the 3rd edition
For a detailed description see Manage Your Fears, Manage Your Anger, lecture 56, There Is No Hopeless Case (part 2), pages 352-353
ATTENTION GETTING
I shall admit that excitement, producing thrills, is the spice of life. But it is not life. It is merely its spice. If spices are added to food, they contribute nothing to its value as nourishment. They merely make the food more tasty and palatable, more appetizing and desirable. ... You may dispense with spices altogether, but you cannot eliminate food from your life any more than I can. In other words: food is an objective need, spices are subjective wants. Returning to our original subject, we may conclude that peace is the food of life, a value and objective need, while excitement is merely the spice and thrill of life, a desirability (not a value) and nothing but a subjective want. ...
There is another disturbing element in my function as a leader to my patients. ... Their daily round is carried on in an emotional void, in an atmosphere of drabness and boredom. In order to fill the void and to escape the boredom, they want excitement. And if they cannot secure it in routine channels, they hunt for it in devious paths, ... in all kinds of devices for attention-getting.
Mental Health Through Will Training, Subjective Wants and Objective Needs, chapter 22, pages 200, 201 in the 1997 edition
EXTREMES
But nobody can stay on a pinnacle for any length of time. There is always a dropping if you reach up too high. ...
So, will you understand that spotting means primarily to avoid extremes, to avoid extremes above and below. And the patient who told me that she was not discouraged, although I told her she was discouraged - she only said she was unhappy. She should have said discouraged. That's in the middle line between the extremes. Unhappiness, as she conceived of it, was down in the bottom. Happiness was up at the top. ... And, as I told you, it's a great satisfaction to be satisfied. One doesn't have to be happy. To be in good spirits, why must they be high spirits?
Manage Your Fears, Manage Your Anger, Expect the Setback and Spot Extremes (Part 2), lecture 66, pages 428, 432
EXCEPTIONALITY
You want to be superior. This means you depend on others to either recognize you, to give you credit as being not just average, to give you the honor of constantly catering to you, perhaps do you the favor of constantly flattering you. And if you don’t get credit and if you don’t get honor and if you don’t get flattery then you become tense because you expect it and you don’t get it.
Manage Your Fears, Manage Your Anger, Exceptionality and Control of Impulses, lecture 25, page 155
EXCITEMENT
In Recovery, the patient is made to realize the fallacy of the romanticist estimate that life is either supreme bliss or dreary desolation. He learns that there is a middle ground of solid averageness in which the tonic quality of realistic action does away with the hectic hunt for picnics which have a sorry way of turning into panics.
Selections from Dr. Low’s Works, The "Misunderstood" and "Unappreciated" Patient, page 52