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Finding Comfort in Uncomfortable Situations

Handling negative emotions

The other day I was in a dentist’s chair for two hours. There was drilling, grinding, polishing, glueing, grafting, washing, suctioning, and so on, and it became clear to me pretty early on that either I would find a way to relax or I’d be very uncomfortable for quite some time.

Fortunately, I realized that I had several tools from my research that could be helpful to me, and using them, I found I was able to be very comfortable the whole time. Some of the thanks goes to my dentist and dental assistant for their professionalism, but all the professionalism in the world doesn’t make it comfortable to have a needle pushed into the roof of your mouth–whereas other strategies can make this a bearable experience.

So here are the tools I used. These strategies are useful whenever it’s necessary to just wait through something that may be uncomfortable–not just appointments with the dentist–for instance plane takeoffs if you aren’t comfortable flying, or an overcrowded commute on a bus or subway.

1. Directing thoughts
Realistically, we don’t have many choices by the time we get to the dentist’s chair. Sure, if something seems to be going wrong that we think the dentist might be missing (an unusual situation), there might be a reason to raise one hand and make noises of distress, but that happens almost automatically, and other than that, we generally need to just sit still and open wide. Some uncomfortable situations require us to think and react, and those are not the kinds of situations I’m addressing in today’s article.

Knowing that there are no choices to be made, it becomes clear that “Oh no, this is going to hurt!” or “I can’t stand that drilling noise in my skull!” or any other negative idea is not going to be helpful, because negative thoughts are only helpful as indicators to help us change our behavior.

So it helps us to redirect our thoughts, in a way similar to how we might redirect a child who’s getting worked up about something that isn’t really causing problems. The basic technique amounts to “OK, but look at that over there!” We don’t have to squelch our negative thoughts, but we can acknowledge them without letting them drag us in. “Oh no, this is going to hurt!” can be followed up with “Yes, but then again, I seem to have survived everything that’s ever hurt in the past” and then focusing on something more interesting and pleasant, like plans for the weekend, a favorite book or movie, or whatever kind of thing keeps you interested.

2. Simple meditation
It’s easy to tense up in uncomfortable situations, but often a simple breath meditation can offer relief. To do this, don’t change your breathing itself, but instead focus your awareness lightly on breathing in, that moment of change when you go from inhaling to exhaling, breathing out, and the other moment of change when you go back to inhaling. It’s difficult to keep this up for a long time–though practice helps–but even with multiple interruptions or distractions can make the rest of the world recede while we become wrapped up in this serene activity.

3. Pay more attention, not less
As strange as it seems, often much of our suffering when we experience pain is fear of the very pain we’re experiencing, or of its consequences. After all, pain itself, like negative emotions, is just a signal that something might be going wrong. Pain is something that has developed because it’s useful to our survival: it helps us get clear of things before they cause too much damage. Unfortunately, sometimes we experience pain when things are actually fine, and at that point the more primitive parts of our brain panic. The more we try not to feel pain, the scarier it becomes.

So one useful approach when feeling pain is to really pay attention to it rather than mentally running away. What does it actually feel like? The process becomes a kind of meditation focused on the pain itself. This doesn’t make the pain go away, but surprisingly, it can relieve a lot of the suffering associated with it.

4. Keep the end in mind
It sometimes helps, when going through something difficult, to remember why you’re doing it. This is only useful if there’s something good waiting for you as a result, but this is often the case. Focusing on the relief a medical procedure will provide, on the friends or family waiting at the other end of a turbulent plane ride, or on the house you’ll eventually get to live in once you’ve filled out the unending paperwork for the loan can make an uncomfortable situation much more liveable by taking you out and placing you in a happier future.

The photo (which is not of me) is by The Doctr

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Heading off a Bad Day

Handling negative emotions

Here’s part of a novel opening I’ve admired since I first read it, the fifth paragraph of Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash:

The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

One of the things that always resonated with me in that confident, attitude-laden bit of writing was the phrase “starts like a bad day.” Maybe you know the experience, the feeling that just waking up in the morning, things are already stacked against you, that the day has chosen to be a mess without ever asking you what you thought of the idea. If so, you may have begun immediately reacting to that sense that things were going wrong, giving in to irritability or anxiety or depression out of a sense that a bad day was unavoidable.

I’ve certainly had that experience, but in the past year or so, with the topics from this site so often on my mind, I’ve realized the opportunity that those first moments of the day offer me. If I can use one of the many tools at my disposal to turn the day around right from the beginning, then the world seems to transform to a much kinder place. I may wake up feel harassed sometimes, but by the time I eat breakfast I usually feel serene or enthusiastic or cheerful. Here are some of the ways I’ve been able to take control of my mood first thing in the morning.

  • Meditation. If we’re am uselessly dwelling on bad experiences or concerns we can’t affect, some types of meditation can help us relax, let go, and find some peace of mind.
  • Emotional antidotes. Negative emotions can often be washed away by deliberately conjuring up memories or ideas that make us feel love, hope, joy, etc.
  • Mindfulness. Moods like anxiety and irritability often feel like they’re coming from nowhere when they’re really reactions to some specific situation or worry. Reflecting on what our biggest worries of the moment can often bring those worries right into focus. Simply acknowledging those concerns can be a relief: the bad mood no longer seems to be coming from nowhere, and in being understood has done its job of bringing our attention to the problem. If more effort is needed to make headway against the reaction to a particular thought, idea repair can be very helpful.
  • Journaling. Writing out thoughts, feelings and hopes for the day can help improve awareness of what’s going on with us while providing direction and helping make emotional reactions more understandable and manageable.

For more on turning difficult times around, see “How to Stop Having a Bad Day“. You may also be interested in reading my article “How emotions work“.

Photo by tombothetominator.

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Control, Direct Influence, and Indirect Influence

Handling negative emotions

should statements, such as “I shouldn’t have to do this without help!” or “I deserved that raise!” or “It’s not fair that it’s raining the weekend we were supposed to go camping!” (A note: “should statements” don’t necessarily contain the word “should”. A should statement is any thought or declaration declaring a need for someone or something else to do or not do something.) Should statements are a common example of a broken idea, a type of thinking that creates unnecessary trouble. To regard situations where we have influence only and not control in a healthy and constructive way, it’s important to come to terms with the possibility that things may not turn out the way we want them to.

Direct influence
Situations where we have influence come in two flavors: direct influence and indirect influence. Direct influence means that we can take specific steps to try to get the thing done. For instance, a person who wants a raise can usually go to his or her boss and request one, and someone who wants to be treated better by another person can confront that person.

Indirect influence
Indirect influence means that we can only take actions that encourage the results we want, but can’t control them or even push for a decision. Some examples of indirect influence are practicing more in order to have a better chance of winning a talent contest or writing letters to a representative to encourage a particular vote.

Social influence diagram by Bruce Dupree, via Anne Adrian.

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Two Top Tools for Reducing Stress

Handling negative emotions

 

The ridiculously cheery song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” offers advice that may be a little hard to follow sometimes. Sometimes we’re not prepared to let go of fears and anxieties, feeling that we need them–occasionally, we may even be right. But even when we’re ready to stop worrying and be happy, letting go of stress is easier said than done.

To help reduce stress, there are many useful approaches described on this site, including meditation, mindfulness, emotional antidotes, a brief walk in a natural setting, and more. However, there are two especially effective, immediate approaches that have both been shown to greatly reduce stress, although both take some effort.

One is social time: if you’re spending most of your time alone (or perhaps with people it’s hard to be with), spending a lot more time with people you like can help enormously: see “Want to Reduce Stress? Increase Social Time.” E-mailing, time on the phone, and even time working with others in the course of your job can “count” toward your total. People who get in at least six hours of some kind of social time per day report being happy and relatively free of stress. See the article for more details.

The other option is idea repair: noticing and fixing thoughts of yours that encourage you to feel anxiety or frustration over time. By learning to recognize and remake these thoughts, you can make immediate, dramatic changes in your stress level. The thoughts are likely to come back again soon, but then you just repair them again, and over time they stop coming back as much until they go away completely. I recently posted an article covering the most useful idea repair articles on this site, which may be a good place to start if you’d like to take this approach.

Of course, you could work on both social time and idea repair, but people tend to be much more successful when they focus on just one thing at a time. Trying to add too much to your obligations at once can be a little overwhelming, and the last thing most of us need is something else to stress about.

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When Is It Time to Make a Change?

Handling negative emotions

In my recent article “Dealing With Problems That Can’t Be Fixed,” I promised to follow up with a discussion of things that can be changed. If a situation is bad, there are circumstances in which we can’t do anything about it–for example, for most of us the recent Deepwater Horizon oil spill was such a situation (although even in instances like this we’re not completely powerless, as I’ll discuss in my upcoming article on ways we can affect the world). When we have little or no opportunity to change a situation, then in a way the situation is no longer our problem; instead, our challenge is to address our own feelings about the situation, as discussed in last week’s article.

But what about situations where we do have some control, influence, or future prospects? If you hate your job, does that mean it’s time to quit your job, or time to change your attitude toward your work? (See “6 Ways to Be Happy at a Job You Don’t Like“). If you’re having a lousy marriage, does that mean you should divorce, or that you should work on finding ways to be happier together? If you’re failing your first year of college, should you stay even though you think your chances of succeeding are slim or quit?

Questions that point the way
Although there’s no one simple answer to questions like these, often it comes down to one of three options:

  1. Stay and work on it
  2. Stay and reconcile yourself, or
  3. Leave.

These choices don’t apply to every single situation, but they do to most. Which one we choose depends on questions like the ones that follow. Asking questions like these helps us focus on key issues about our situation.

By the way, it’s best to answer these questions out loud–whether to yourself or while talking with a friend–or in writing, since this will lead to more specific, focused responses than quiet thought would do.

  • Do you have direct control over or responsibility for the problem? Note that this includes situations that feel out of control but that you are the sole actor in, such as eating habits or organization.
  • If you don’t have control, do you have some direct influence? Is there someone you can talk to, a request you can make, or an action you can take to encourage things to go in the right direction?
  • If you don’t have direct influence, do you have indirect influence? For example: if you want to be promoted, are there things you can do to stand out better at your job? If you want to be picked for a team or performing group, can you expand your practice schedule?
  • How much does this problem really matter? This isn’t always the same question as “how much do you care about this problem?” because it’s possible for us to get really worked up about things that may not necessarily be very important. (See “How emotions work“)
  • How much impact will your efforts be likely to make? If you’re worried about a situation in your neighborhood, you’re likely to be able to have more direct impact than if the problem is national or international, for instance. This doesn’t mean that you should only direct your efforts towards small or local things, only that it’s worth considering how big your contribution can be.
  • If one or more other people are involved, are their aspirations the same as yours? If they’re not, are you necessarily in conflict, or is it possible there might be an approach that could work for everyone, or at least for more people than the existing options would help? I’m not talking about compromise here, although I don’t deny that has some value in its place, but instead about getting away from the idea that when two people don’t agree, they necessarily have to duke it out. An excellent resource for learning how to work with someone who’s opposed to you is psychologist Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Another great book for navigating difficult negotiations is Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High. If you’re really interested in learning how to make constructive solutions in the midst of conflicts, either or both of these books can be invaluable.
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Mental Schemas #11: Lack of Self-Control

Handling negative emotions

This is the eleventh in a series of articles that draw on the field of schema therapy, an approach to addressing negative thinking patterns that was devised by Dr. Jeffrey Young. You can find an introduction to schemas and schema therapy, a list of schemas, and links to other schema articles on The Willpower Engine here.

A person with the Lack of Self-Control Schema has trouble with facing anything difficult or holding back impulses. Such a person might tend to avoid difficulty, pain, or responsibility even when the consequences are much worse than what’s being avoided. They might act out, choose rashly, react without thinking, or follow any desire that takes hold. Another common expression of this schema is having trouble putting up with boredom or frustration long enough to get something done.

To put it another way, the burden of the Lack of Self-Control Schema is that it prevents a person from working toward lasting happiness by sometimes keeping their focus on immediate gratification.

People with this schema generally don’t feel like they’re acting the way they want to: the impulsive actions feel (not surprisingly) out of their control.

Often, a person with a Lack of Self-Control Schema grew up in an environment where parents weren’t around enough or didn’t put enough effort into helping the child learn self-control. This schema can also arise when parents themselves have self-control issues, leaving a child with no ideal of self-control to follow.

Overcoming a Lack of Self-Control Schema
Unlike other schemas, Lack of Self-Control isn’t closely linked with specific broken ideas, but the approach to overcoming it is similar: the important skill to learn here is to recognize when the schema is kicking in and insert conscious thought between the impulse and the action. The key understanding to have along with that skill is that lasting happiness is different from immediate gratification–that doing exactly what we want whenever we want can actually be pretty miserable sometimes. That’s not to say that there isn’t a place for light-heartedness and spontaneity in life, only that longer-term thinking often pays off much better.

So if you have this schema, you might have a habit of reacting immediately. To overcome it, the new habit to create is to notice when the schema might be kicking in, stop yourself, think for a moment about your real goals and priorities, and focus on the things you want long-term instead of immediately.

For example, you might be in a conversation with someone you care about when that person says something thoughtless that is painful for you. A Lack of Self-Control schema might tell you to lash out, to insult or embarrass that person. Someone overcoming the self-control schema might still feel the urge to do that, but would stop and think something along the lines of “Wait: I care about my friendship with this person. If I start a fight over this, that could make ongoing problems for me and deprive me of my friend. Even though I’m angry right now, I feel better imagining the two of us getting along instead of imagining us fighting. Why don’t I try to just let go feeling offended about this, as a contribution to the friendship, or else tell my friend how I felt about what was just said and have a constructive conversation about it?”

The Lack of Self-Control schema is sometimes paired with another schema. For example, the Subjugation Schema, which we’ll talk about in the next article in this series, can lead a person to suppress emotions for a long time, after which they burst out uncontrolled. In these cases, while work on self-control will also help, progress on the other schema will relieve the pressure and intensity of the self-control problems.

Photo courtesy of MIT Open Courseware

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Dealing With Problems That Can’t Be Fixed

Handling negative emotions

From all my talk about how idea repair can be used to deal with negative emotions–anger, sadness, fear, etc.–you might get the sense I’m trying to say that negative emotions are always a bad thing. Yet negative emotions can serve the purpose of focusing our attention where it’s needed (see “The Benefits of Feeling Bad“). So when is a negative emotion helpful and when is it just a drag?

If the problem in front of you can be changed and acted upon, then there are some questions to ask, and I’ll talk about these in a near-future post. But if the problem can’t be fixed, then the choice is simply between a) having the problem and being miserable and b) having the problem but being happy anyway.

If you’re in a situation that is not going to change on its own, can’t be changed by you, and can’t be avoided (or is too important to avoid), then the only thing left to do is to change your feelings toward the situation. This requires surrender and being willing to find and repair broken ideas about the problem, something that’s not easy for most of us. After all, we’re generally taught that if something is broken, someone should fix it. Not many of us are raised to deal comfortably with things that can’t be fixed.

Things that will fix themselves or that can be fixed by you but that will take some time to get there also require surrender and idea repair (or the equivalent) if you don’t want to be miserable in the mean time. For example, if you’re in a very bad financial situation that won’t get any better until your house sells, then you have the choice of being miserable until your house sells or of dealing with your feelings immediately, even though the situation will go away in future. Unfortunately, temporary problems often weigh on us just as heavily as permanent ones, and call for the same strategies if we want to stop them from causing pain.

The benefits of reconciling ourselves to things we can’t change come whether the problem is large or small, fair or unfair, permanent or temporary, our fault or someone else’s fault or no one’s fault: letting go of negative emotions that can’t be acted upon creates a happier daily existence and clears the mind to focus on situations where we can make a different right now.

Photo by poritsky

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Mental Schemas #10: Entitlement

Handling negative emotions

This is the tenth in a series of articles that draw on the field of schema therapy, an approach to addressing negative thinking patterns that was devised by Dr. Jeffrey Young. You can find an introduction to schemas and schema therapy, a list of schemas, and links to other schema articles on The Willpower Engine here.

While the articles in this series so far have been about schemas that I’ve seen mainly in other people’s lives, I’m all too familiar with the subject of today’s post, entitlement. This schema is sometimes referred to as “grandiosity” or “superiority,” but the version that I have experience with fits the term “entitlement” best: it’s the sense that you’re naturally owed something. People with the entitlement schema may feel as though there are things they should be getting regardless of how practical, reasonable, possible, or equitable that is. Entitlement is the sense that somehow, the world owes you a living. For some people, this goes with a sense of being superior to most other people, or of having a special status or destiny that means that the rules that apply to other people don’t apply to you.

Entitled to act like an idiot
An example: when I was young, money was very tight around our house. Being a Vermonter, I was very familiar with maple syrup, but since it was fairly expensive, we didn’t get much of it. My entitlement schema told me that this was unfair and inappropriate, and that I especially, considering my excellent qualities, deserved to have maple syrup pretty much whenever I liked. One morning I was up earlier than anyone in the house and was getting milk from the refrigerator for my morning cereal when I spied the syrup can. Instead of having the cereal, I took out a small glass and filled it–with maple syrup. Then I drank it. Finally! The maple syrup I deserved!

A lot of things didn’t seem to matter to me as I drank my glass of maple syrup. It didn’t occur to me that if this syrup were replaced, it would increase the family grocery bill in an uncomfortable way. It didn’t occur to me that the syrup would not be available to my siblings, who after all liked maple syrup just as much as I did (except for my older sister, who bizarrely and inexplicably preferred fake syrup). It did not seem to give me pause that after the first mouthful, the huge amount of sweetness began to be a bit sickening. And at that time I didn’t know, and by all the evidence wouldn’t have cared, that the jolt of simple sugars in my body would give me a dizzying sugar high followed by a crashing sugar low, probably with a headache in the bargain. No sir, I was entitled to that syrup, gosh darn it, and I was going to drink my syrup and like it.

I drank my syrup, but I definitely did not like it. I apparently could ignore the sickening effects as I downed the glass, but I couldn’t ignore the much-too-powerful taste afterward or the awful way it made me feel. After that incident, I couldn’t stand to eat anything maple for months.

Broken ideas for the entitled
Entitlement schemas are often traced to two kinds of childhoods. One version is the truly entitled child, who is constantly indulged and/or assured of having a special status above normal people. The other is of feeling deprived (regardless of whether or not the child can really be said to be deprived), in reaction to which the child develops a belief that something is owed them–often, again, with a sense of having a special status.

People with the entitlement schema get fixated on the idea that they should be able to have or do something, or should be treated a particular way–even if the thing they think they’re entitled to does them or others harm, isn’t available to others, isn’t practical, takes more resources than they can afford, etc. This amounts to a huge use of the broken idea called a “should statement”–that is, “I should be able to have this!” Entitlement can also come out as “emotional reasoning”: “I feel as though I have a right to this, so I do have a right to it.” These attitudes only reinforce feelings of deprivation and lead to disappointment, selfish behavior, and ignoring consequences.

Breaking out of an entitlement schema
I’m glad to say that while my entitlement schema still pesters me every once in a while, over time it’s been whittled down to almost nothing as I gradually was forced to face the results of actions that, over and over again, proved that feeling entitled wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Every time I stayed up well into the night on the idea that I was owed some time and then felt exhausted the next day, every time I ate food my body didn’t need and then didn’t feel healthy and energetic, and every time I was late because I thought I was entitled to do a few more things before I went out the door, I ran smack into the reality that the idea of “deserving” things is not only untrue and useless, but dangerous and painful. Our feelings about how appropriate we think it is to have something, regardless of where they come from, do not generally have any effect on how practical, fair, kind, appropriate, or beneficial having that thing will be.

So every time an entitled person’s schema claims “You should be able to have/do this!” in a situation where “this” is something that would be best to avoid, the response that will diminish the schema and help shape a healthier vision of reality is to redo that thought, to repair the broken idea. The repaired version will often be something like “I can see that I want that thing, but that doesn’t mean I have to get it, especially since it _____” (and here you list the things that matter to you that would be harmed by following through on the desire). In the case of my glass of maple syrup, that blank might have been filled with something like “will make me sick and I’ll regret it for months” or “will take scarce resources from my family.”

Like any schema, entitlement schemas supply plenty of opportunities to act embarrassingly or in ways that hurt ourselves or other people. What’s truly joyful is being able to break out of a schema by paying attention to our thoughts and shaping a future that will actually create happiness and fulfillment rather than being dragged down by the bad ideas we may have adopted long ago.

Photo by Sighthound

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Mental Schemas #9: Failure

Handling negative emotions

This is the ninth in a series of articles that draw on the field of schema therapy, an approach to addressing negative thinking patterns that was devised by Dr. Jeffrey Young. You can find an introduction to schemas and schema therapy, a list of schemas, and links to other schema articles on The Willpower Engine here.

 

“Now Linus, I want you to take a good look at Charlie Brown’s face. Would you please hold still a minute, Charlie Brown? I want Linus to study your face. Now, this is what you call a Failure Face, Linus. Notice how it has failure written all over it. Study it carefully, Linus. You rarely see such a good example. Notice the deep lines, the dull, vacant look in the eyes. Yes, I would say this is one of the finest examples of a Failure Face that you’re liable to see for a long while.”

— Lucy Van Pelt in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown

There are a good number of articles on The Willpower Engine about failure: what to do when it happens, why certain kinds of tactics generally fail, and how to deal with the worry that failure will happen. Some people feel as though they’re basically incompetent, with no good skills or resources (for more on this, read “Mental Schemas #6: Incompetence“). Others, when they’re successful, assume that it was by mistake or only achieved because they’ve fooled everyone into thinking they’re good enough (for more on this, read “Impostor Syndrome“).

What failure schemas look like
People with the failure schema may or may not feel incompetent, and may or may not feel like impostors, but regardless they believe that they are failures, that successes don’t happen to them. Often such people were brought up in environments where the people important to them would tell them over and over that they were failures, or where this idea was always pushed on them in some other way. Sue of Healthy Within Journey describes just such a childhood in this post:

“Then I remembered that every time I brought home a sewing project (from home ec class), my mom would criticize my work, rip out my stitches and resew the project. She also critized how I practiced the piano and would often ‘show me’ how to play a piece correctly. She discounted my academic success by telling me that I may be good at school but I didn’t have any common sense so I would never succeed in life. No matter how much I succeeded she reminded me that my cousin and/or brother were successful in other, more important areas. Even years later whenever I had difficulty with any project, I could hear her criticizing me and telling me I would never succeed at anything important. I feared even a tiny ‘failure’ would mean she was right, that I would never succeed.”

Some people with failure schemas make themselves fail through their beliefs: they assume they can never succeed and therefore never try hard when it’s most needed. Others work away desperately out of fear of failure, but none of their successes convince them: they continue to feel in their hearts that they are essentially failures, even when the evidence says otherwise.

Overcoming a failure schema
As with many negative ideas, overcoming a failure schema requires both facing the fear of failure and refuting the idea that failure is inevitable. This takes work over time to change deeply-ingrained thoughts. Facing the fear means some form of recognition that sometimes we fail, and that this is just a normal part of life and is not catastrophic. Refuting the idea that failure is inevitable means really understanding on a gut level that it is possible to succeed in some things at some times, regardless of what other people may say.

On a day to day basis, feelings of being doomed to failure can be handled as broken ideas: in other words, it’s necessary first to recognize when a thought has come by that is contributing to this unrealistic idea of failure, and then to take the falsehood out of the thought and rephrase it in a fully truthful way, as described in the article How to Repair a Broken Idea, Step by Step.

Some examples of broken ideas about failure:

  • “I’m a failure.” (labeling)
  • “This is going to be a catastrophe.” (fortune telling)
  • “Nobody believes I can do it.” (mind reading)
  • “The only reason they picked my submission is because everybody felt sorry for me.” (disqualifying the positive)
  • “See how badly that went? I fail at everything.” (overgeneralization)

Photo by Behrooz Nobakht

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A Simple Way to Start Dealing With Worries

Handling negative emotions

I don’t know about you, sometimes I find myself in a mood where I feel out of sorts but can’t point to any one thing as being the cause. That kind of state rarely does me any good: usually it means I won’t get a lot done, won’t enjoy the day as much, and am no help to the moods of people around me–unless I get out of it. To accomplish that, I have a very simple process I use, which is to list out worries in writing.

The idea here is just emptying my head. It’s related to David Allen‘s recommended practice of getting all of your thoughts and concerns on paper so that you can organize them, although in this case organization isn’t the point. It’s also related to decision logging, the practice of writing down notes about your own situation and choices as things happen in order to increase mindfulness, but it isn’t about mindfulness per se. In fact, the thing it’s most like that I’ve mentioned is swatting deer flies by letting them settle on you before you hit them (although I promise it’s much less nerve-wracking): that is, it’s about paying simple, direct attention to worries individually, one after the other.

This tactic doesn’t take any preparation: just grab paper and pen or fire up a computer, then start writing a list of whatever comes to mind that’s bugging you. It might look something like this:

– I’m still annoyed about that guy at the store who wouldn’t stop talking to me
– I can’t believe I forgot to pay my cell phone bill on time
– How in the world am I going to find time to take that refresher course?
– Do I need to go shopping? I don’t think there’s anything for dinner
– My car’s making that noise again

It’s not necessary to do anything about these issues as they come up, but when you’re done listing, you might want to start writing out your thoughts about each one, and to look for broken ideas. Sometimes all that’s needed to completely solve an issue is to reframe it in a healthy and accurate way.

You might think that writing these things down would cause more anxiety instead of less, but it really tends to produce relief. Instead of being plagued with multiple, unnamed anxieties, instead we’ve now got a list of clear, specific issues–issues we might even be able to do something about, although just getting them down in writing itself makes a real difference. My favorite moment in this process is when I ask myself “OK, what else?” and I just can’t think of anything. In that moment I’m reminded that the things I worry about have a limit, and that I might be able to make some progress in fixing them them … or even, until I can do something about them, just accept them … just for now.

Photo by Phoney Nickle

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