Two weeks ago, I had the honour of delivering wellness sessions in British Columbia to a couple of distinct audiences. The first was to a collection of old colleagues through host agency, the International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts (IALEIA) and the other was at an event called, Pilates & Pinot.
While the audiences couldn’t have been more different, the sessions I delivered had a similar theme—one that unites us all, regardless of the type of work we do, our preference for physical activity, or our adult beverage of choice.
But just what is this great unifier?
Stress, of course.
In today’s world, it’s rare not to be overstretched and overwhelmed. Everyone is managing multiple layers, from work, to family, to finances, to the busy hustle and bustle where there’s always the push to do more, be more, achieve more.
The sessions focused on using mindset shifts to mitigate the impact of chronic stress on overall health and happiness. I introduced participants to a series of mindset tools to help them refocus their mental energy on the things within their control—namely their thoughts and perceptions of how things are.
The reality is that it’s almost impossible to reduce stressful factors in our lives, but we can influence the way in which we interpret and then respond to those factors.
The concept of controlling one’s mindset around stress is a novel perspective for many people. But because mindset is the lens through which we see and perceive everything, it’s an enormously powerful tool.
Humans tend to default to a negative mindset and because of that, it’s more cognitively comfortable to dwell on what’s not working in our lives than to give proportional attention to the awesomeness that also exists. Those negative thought pathways are evolutionarily programmed and they run deep.
The tendency to focus on the tiny bits of crap rather than the huge glittering piles of good is called the negativity bias and it’s a real thing.
Despite my work in the mindset field for more than two years, my own mindset can still drift towards negativity if I’m not mindful of it.
Take my sessions for example. Providing what I hoped was a life changing perspective and set of tools, as well as helping the audience feel seen and understood were incredibly important goals. I had spent weeks preparing the content, the slides, and the overall delivery, which included sharing my own deeply personal story of how chronic stress and burnout shaped my life. To put it mildly, I had a lot of skin in the game.
And because of this, I had a sneaking suspicion that my brain was going to go into overdrive trying to sabotage any and all success by coming up with a stream of unkind comments about how the sessions went. The negativity bias would be in full effect.
And sure enough, a lot of thoughts surfaced about where things didn’t go quite right or how I should have done X, Y, and Z. My brain really wanted to focus on the negatives and BLATANTLY DISMISS the overwhelmingly positive response I received by the people who attended.
But because I was prepared for this slew of automatic negative thoughts that floated to the surface without invitation, I chose to approach them with curiosity and dig deep to challenge their validity. Instead of getting mad at myself for the thoughts, I approached it all with humour.
Thank you, sneaky brain. That was a good one! I’d laugh to myself and then, using the principle that you can’t control your first thought but you can control your second, I deliberately reflected on what went well to overcome the negativity.
With this approach, I moved past the unhelpful thoughts and avoided spiraling into a place where I felt shame and embarrassment for not delivering a “perfect” session to either audience.
In the past, letting these thoughts flow without conscious examination gave them the energy to multiply and take hold, sending me into a dark mood for days or even weeks.
Where does the negativity bias show up in your life?
Try this example on. Maybe you’ve been working on getting to the gym for an hour five days a week. This week you met your goal but on the fifth day which was Friday, you were really tired and cut your workout short by half an hour.
Did your sneaky brain isolate the 30 minutes that you missed and inflate it to become the only measure of your gym goal?
The objective reality is that you hit your goal of getting to the gym five times and put in a total of four and a half hours of workout time. But what your brain focuses on is that lost half hour. The 10% where you “failed”.
And the result, if allowed to spiral unchecked, is that your brain magnifies the feelings of failure. Suddenly, you feel so bad about your gym progress that you throw all your hard work out the window by turning to food to soothe your feelings of disappointment.
Then you feel so crappy the next morning that you don’t go for the walk you had planned and you lay in front of the TV for the day.
Come Monday, you’re feeling emotionally exhausted and physically bloated from inactivity, the wrong foods, and your defeatist self-talk that you cringe at the thought of putting your workout wear on and drumming up the energy to hit the gym. It takes you weeks to get back to your workout routine, which by then feels extra hard.
Has something like this ever happened to you? If so, it’s frightening to realize how the negativity bias can have such profound, forward reaching implications.
In that original moment, the other option could have been to acknowledge the unhelpful thought about cutting your workout short AND THEN counteract it by looking for what DID go well with your gym goals.
⭐Five times to the gym this week—check!
⭐Feeling accomplished, strong, and empowered—check!
⭐Showed up for yourself even when you were exhausted—check!
The point here is that you have a unique opportunity every day to question your mindset and examine the thoughts that set you up to feel like a million bucks…or crush you beyond belief.
Just as I was finishing writing this, I came across this great prompt from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits that fit so well. It read:
"When you drink water from a cup, it becomes part of you. When water falls on you like rain, it evaporates a few minutes later.
Similarly, thoughts can be consumed or dismissed. Is this thought nourishing? Is this feeling something you should drink? Or is it more like getting caught in the rain?
You'll always feel the rain, but you don't have to drink the rain. You can let the thought pass and in a few moments the sun will return. You don't have to claim everything you feel."
This is the power of mindset. You have the power to choose the thoughts that you absorb and internalize, making them part of who you are. You also have the power to let others wash over you and move on like a passing storm.
What thoughts will you choose to define you?
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