Archivi dei tag: safety

The Thought Landscape – An Alternative Way To Deal with Negative Thoughts

I have been receiving Miguel’s emails for some time, cannot really say how long. Recently, I received this article in my mail box that perfectly matches with the purpose of my blog. Actually Miguel, also published a video, in case you prefer watching to reading. Enjoy it!

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Humans have a natural tendency to gravitate towards negative thinking.

We could assume that tendency is there because it gave our ancestors a small survival advantage.

Those that were happy-go-lucky optimists got eaten by wolves.

Those that were pessimists and hoping for the worst didn’t get eaten as much.

So here we are today with a lizard brain primed to expect the worst.

Although there might be an evolutionary advantage to being pessimistic, living your life pestered by gloomy doomy thoughts is no fun.

The truth is today we live in a much more safe environment than hundreds of thousands of years ago.

It’s very rare for people to succumb to hungry tooth sabre tigers and such.

Yet, we live in a constant state of alert and fear triggered in part by nature only exacerbated by the news and social media.

So how do we escape negative thoughts?

Besides recreational drugs, alcohol, mindless social media binging, and meditation, I dare to propose a new way to lead happier mental lives.

You could think of this method as a thought experiment, a new mental model to deal with pessimistic thinking.

I call it the thought landscape.

Disclaimer: if you have trouble using your imagination or suffer from aphantasia, it won’t be easy to implement this approach.

The concept is quite simple to understand but tricky to master.

It goes like this:

A: There is a large number of thoughts we can have (negative, positive, neutral)

B: However, at any given instant, we can only think of one thing.

C: We can choose what we think at any given instant (focus)

D: Therefore, we can choose to substitute any current thought with any other available thought from A.

These are vast assumptions so let me elaborate a bit on each point.

A: This one everyone should agree. The number of thoughts a human can have is between 0 and Many. Many could be thousands or millions, a lot.

If you have a working brain, A should always be many. 0 is only for dead people.

B: This could be debated. However, we could safely assume that we can only hold one thought at a time. Thinking two thoughts simultaneously is not possible. I.e., you cannot think blue or black simultaneously (“Bluk” is not a colour!)

C: This could be more debatable, but If I tell you to think of a white elephant, usually you’ll think of a white elephant, not of a purple platypus. So you were able to change your thinking deliberately.

D: If the three statements above hold true, then it has to be true that we can control what we think at any given moment.

And if D is true, then it is good news for all of us!

This means that thinking negatively is, for the most part, a choice.

So, if you catch yourself stuck on negative thinking, now you know it’s because you chose to do so.

Great, and then what?

Then you can discard that thought, take a step back and look at what other thoughts are available from A.

The goal of taking this imaginary step back is to gain a new perspective.

Is to gain some altitude and contemplate which other thoughts you could choose from.

In A., we established that there could be many other thoughts you could have.

The range of available thoughts is what I call the thought landscape.

Like a physical landscape, you’ll see valleys and hills.

Photo by Claudio Testa on Unsplash

Now that you’ve momentarily elevated yourself over your thought landscape, it’s time to choose.

What other thoughts do you see that you could choose to think next?

Let me give you a concrete example of how this would play out for me.

So here I am, thinking I’m not good enough, smart enough, that people suck, that the pandemic sucks, that politicians are hypocrites, etc.

I’m feeling like shit. This is no fun. Then I realize I can choose what to think.

I take a step back and look at what other thoughts are currently available across my thought landscape.

In the beginning, it’s hard to see past a few meters because all the negative thoughts are fighting for attention, clouding my vision.

I try to rise a bit higher, past the dark fog.

I know there are other thoughts across the dark valley of shitty thoughts.

There you go… I see some light.

About 2 km away, I see a couple of green hills peeking through the clouds.

I take a closer look.

I see my family on one of them.

They love me. I feel happy to know they are alive and they love me.

I see food. Yum! I can see I have plenty of food, and I can afford more if I need to.

That makes me happy.

Another hill. Wow! I’m relatively healthy. How lucky I am! I can still walk, play sports, dance, use my body. My hands work… I can build things!

Another hill further away.

I see people in need. People whose lives I could make better. It makes me happy I could help other people. That’s important.

This exercise took only a couple of minutes, and my outlook has completely changed.

I feel gratitude. I feel alive. I feel happy.

My thought landscape is full of wonderful thoughts to choose from.

I don’t want to discriminate against negative thoughts. I just don’t want them to dictate how I feel 90% of the time.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember a single day of my life where I didn’t have a moment where my mind wasn’t imprisoned by negative thinking.

Negative thinking is inevitable. It’s there for our survival. We just need to learn how to keep it at bay.

The thought landscape will always offer you plenty of alternative thoughts, equally or even more valid than the negative thoughts you currently hold in your mind.

Give your positive thoughts a chance to live.

They deserve some attention too.

Peace. Love. Happy-Cookies.

Miguel @ Grumo.com

Dealing with negative thoughts

Coping with Cabin Fever

A few days ago, listening to the news updating on the Covid-19 outbreak in Belgium, I heard that they were talking about the Cabin Fever. Since what they were saying sounded familiar to me, I decided to do some research. Having spent 9 weeks at home, without going to work and without seeing people other than my family, I must admit that I also felt something strange. I don’t feel like going back to a so-called normal life (then I should also know what it is the meaning of this normal life and see if I like it).

Actually, I don’t want to go back to work, I mean to my office premises, as I have been tele-working very well since the beginning of the crisis. It wasn’t clear to me why, so I decided to try to find it out and I drove nearby my office place. I found out with great relief that I did not feel anything in particular, neither stress nor anxiety, or fear.

However, this did not change my wish to continue teleworking.

Photo by Ella Jardim on Unsplash

What is it about?

The Cabin Fever is a syndrome that you may develop as a reaction to being isolated or confined for an extended period of time. It is not a real mental disorder, but it is associated with a particular condition linked to a long period of being lockdown, such as a disease, or a pathological condition, or in the case that we have been just experiencing, with the Coronavirus pandemic. We can feel anxiety, insecurity, fear of the future and of those we don’t know. You don’t want to leave your own place and only there you feel safe.

This syndrome, first described in the early twentieth century, is not fully recognised at a scientific level because there are not enough literature and case studies. At the time, they referred to people who, for example, worked in the high mountains and spent a lot of time within their home. It was discovered that these people found it difficult to go out, because they felt that they could not control the external space. This may also happen to prisoners when they go out of prison (that is why it is also called prisoner syndrome). You may feel infinitely small in front of a big world, out of your reach.

What to do then?

We spent about two months locked in our apartment or house, worried about the spread of the virus, fearing of ourselves getting sick, fearing that one of our loved ones would get sick and fearing of losing our job.

The media have also played a bit with our fears: put on the mask when you go out (but there were no masks available), don’t touch anything when you’re out if you don’t have disposable gloves (also unavailable on the market), above all do not touch your face (do you know how many times are we tempted to touch our face in an hour? On average 60 times, that is once a minute. Try to pay attention to it). It doesn’t matter then if on the street you see people wearing the mask in an absolutely inappropriate way which could also be more harmful than useful (wearing the mask around the neck, putting it on and taking it off maybe with unwashed hands, leaving the nose uncovered – I know it is difficult to breathe with something on your nose and mouth).

And now that, all of a sudden, they tell us that we can get out, we wonder if the danger has really passed. Our mind is still focused on everything that has just happened and it is normal to think that there may be a situation of danger and / or insecurity outside (think only if you have to use public transport for example).

Photo by Clément Falize on Unsplash

Now, however, it is time to plan the future, calmly. Did you appreciate the quietness found during the time spent at home? I have appreciated it very much and I would like teleworking from home to become a regular working pattern. I wish that we could choose to stay at home to tele-work (it is obvious that it is not a possible option for all types of job, but big companies like Twitter have already adopted this policy and have decided that only those who want will go back to their office). I list only some of the advantages that this choice entails: your ecological footprint will decrease, your quality of life will improve because you find yourself with “freed” time, for example from avoiding the journey home-work-home. This time could be dedicated to your well-being.

Then you can arrange a meeting with some (a few) friends and pay a visit to your family (though without being able to hug each other yet).

A few days ago it has been announced that from June 3 we can return to Italy without having to spend 14 days in quarantine. So, we can start planning vacations. You could start too.

What you shouldn’t do is listening obsessively and compulsively (transforming or even adding obsessive-compulsive disorder – OCD – to the Cabin Fever) the continuous updates on new infections, number of deaths, and the news coming from other continents. Don’t watch catastrophic movies, they don’t help you but rather will increase your anxiety. Then, try to think positive, because as the law of attraction teaches you, if you think negative then what happens to you will be negative. Also be aware that most of the bad things you think won’t happen, and that’s statistics.

Above all, try to be courageous, patient and safe: step by step the world will start to turn again, more or less well, but I hope better than before.

However, if you experience a sense of terrible anxiety, a malaise that paralyses you and you feel like being surrounded by flames, or by monsters, or by dangerous animals, you should go to a professional, such as a psychologist for example, if you don’t want this syndrome to turn into post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Photo by Petra Heryanova on Pexels.com