Sometimes it’s all in your head…

Give yourself the room/option to believe whatever you are experiencing has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the other person.

I am a classic “worrier.” I analyze everything in 100 different ways until I thoroughly convince myself of the worst-case scenario. It is a hard habit to break, and I am taking baby steps to rectify it. Just this past week, I talked myself into thinking that the reason I hadn’t heard from a contact of mine was because of something I did on a project we were working on together. It turns out nothing could have been further from the truth. They were just busy and got back to me eventually, and we were finally able to catch up over Zoom. It turns out the worst-case scenario that I was afraid of was an imaginary one.

These tendencies are not unique to me. Many of us suffer from these negative thinking patterns and imagine our circumstances worse than they are. It probably has to do with how we evolved as a species and our genetically hard-wired minds that prioritized survival over all else. We believe that everything we are seeing and observing has something to with us — our default setting. The question is — are we helpless at the hands of our default setting, or can we manage these tendencies and keep them in check? I wasn’t sure until I stumbled upon a commencement speech made by David Foster Wallace addressing the Kenyon College Class of 2005. In his remarks, he makes the case that no matter what situation we find ourselves in, we can choose how to think about it. He also goes onto say this:

“Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.”

You can listen to is his commencement address in its entirety here:

The good news is that we can do something about them once we are aware of these tendencies. We can actively choose to think differently and not go down a path of negative thinking. Give ourselves the room/option to believe whatever we are experiencing has nothing to do with us and everything to do with the other person. All we can do is ask and find out before jumping to conclusions.