When you hear a good joke, you don’t have to think about why it’s funny. You just laugh.
The same goes for a good feeling. When you’re happy, you don’t have to think it through, you just feel good.
What makes a joke funny is the same thing that makes a feeling happy: being specific.
Pretend we’re hanging out. If I’m like, “My dog just looked like he was saying something to me.” You would say, “Oh, well isn’t that amusing..”
But if I say, “I think my dog just mouthed the words ‘You-Don’t-Deserve-Me’...”, you might picture my cute dog catching on to the fact that we all know they are better than us, and you might smile.
Humans are storytellers, and specifics are our favorite medium. This applies to conversations with friends, novels you love, and the self-talk you have with your own brain.
It’s so easy to obsess about the negative things about ourselves, and the profoundly specific and exaggerated details our brain brings up, but it’s much harder to obsess about positive things. When we think about being positive, we try and trick our brains into believing huge generalities and we expect to feel better. But you can’t trick your brain. Specific positives are the most important part of the conversation we have with ourselves when we want to feel good.
Common Negative thoughts:
“½ of my cheek looks like it’s getting a major pimple and if this continues, my date tomorrow is going to be a disaster.”
“That one thing I said in the meeting at work today was the dumbest thing I ever said in my life.”
“The right side of my stomach looks like it’s muffin-topping my jeans more than the left side. Is that possible? Omg I’m disgusting.”
If you check out any #positivelife meme, female-targeted gift store, or any phrase-based decor that exists in the world, you’ll see sweeping positive generalizations that are lazily supposed to make us feel better. Your brain is a lot smarter than that, and that’s not the kinda shiz it wants.
Stuff we try and trick our brain with:
“You deserve happiness.”
“Life is tough, but so are you!”
While these things are absolutely true, they don’t really mean anything when we put them through our filter of specific positives. If your brain were to really believe any of these, they would need to be far more applicable to you — in particular.
Positive specifics:
“My friends and boyfriends talk about their problems for at least 5 hours a week. I listen and it helps them. That makes me such a caring and awesome person.”
“When I look at myself in the mirror, that small ray of sunshine coming into the window from the crisp fall air makes my eyes look so beautiful.”
“The deck that proves the solution to this problem was prepared by me, and Andy is going to be surprised and delighted. Therefore, I am going to kill it at this meeting.”
If only we could obsess about the positive things about ourselves the same way we obsess about the negatives. I think it’s possible, but it takes a little work — specific work.
Here’s your formula to cheat:
Try to ground yourself in something that actually happened.
If you’re worried about something right now, try and think of a similar past event that gave you a good feeling, play it back to yourself, and apply it to your current situation.
Take the event that happened and the positive result or conclusion, and then exaggerate the positive conclusion to a pattern that always happens into the future. (Because I did this great thing in this specific way, it means I am always an awesome person.)
We’re trained to be humble, so it’s helpful to put the focus on something else. In the example above, pressure shifts away from yourself, to the thing you did and how you mastered it.
In the sentence you craft, try and say things without the “to be”. Instead use “I am”, “I feel”.
The principle of extrapolation:
You would never say to a friend “ I expect you to be this way forever”, but we do it to ourselves. The dumb reptile part of your brain is trying to bring you down by focusing on the negative and trying to make you surviiiiiive. Remember to forgive yourself as often as possible!
All day long! You are awesome!
Check out goodnormal.com for more good advice!
