Life is Hard, Then You Die — And Other Lies I’ve Believed
Break free of the negativity spiral with these 3 steps
“It is no more possible to make life easy than it is to grow a herb of immortality.” Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition
I remember a time I believed life should be problem-free, oy vey. And when I bumped — more like crashed — into hard, my parents were ill-equipped to help me navigate it well. Blaming them doesn’t make sense, we only know what we know at the time. My growth from my experiences led me to become more emotionally agile, which is now a gift I can pass on to my kids.
And while I have learned the value of falling and failing, and rising more resilient again, and again, there is a small part of me that still wants to live in the ‘should-ness’ of a problem-free life.
I am diligent about doing the work of bringing my irrational beliefs to the surface of my consciousness, as the brilliant Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung once said,
“Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Honestly, I still find myself falling back into the ‘should-ness’ of problem-free living, but I have found the secret to not getting stuck there. And that secret is reminding myself of our innate negativity bias as humans.
Also read: Learning from Life’s Unpredictability
Training Your Brain Away from the Negative
We know through research that us humans naturally focus on the negative, in the psychology world, it’s referred to as the negativity bias. From a survival standpoint, if you didn’t think about threats, you might not survive to see another day.
My negativity spiral often looks like dread, ‘life is hard and then you die’ sort of talk. What might that be for you? Does one of the below lies sound familiar?
This pain will never go away.
I am not good/smart/pretty enough.
My life will never be good again.
These untruths aren’t fun and make us feel like dirt.
And here is the beautiful truth, knowing this natural tendency exists is how we begin to train our brain away from the negativity spirals.
But how?
We find the answer from pioneers in somatic psychology, Janina Fisher and Pat Ogden:
“neuroplastic change requires the conscious inhibition of old responses, coupled with intentional repetition of new, more adaptive responses.”
We purposefully seek goodness, beauty, love, really anything that brings you a spark of joy! In this way, we are combating the negativity bias by redirecting the traffic of our brain.
And as Janina and Pat said, to make change it has to be intentionally repeated.
Less of a Quick Drive-by and more of a Slow Stroll
Know this, any level of noticing the good in your life, in a circumstance, in your surroundings, or something about your body, is never wasted. However, to get the most neuroplastic bang for your brain buck, it is ideal to linger and be with the experience.
Even more powerful, embody your experience. Feel the feels, see the sights, hear the sounds, smell the aromas.
According to psychologist Rick Hanson Ph.D, we can hardwire in this goodness, by spending at least 20 to 30 seconds focusing on the positive feeling, giving your whole mind-body system a chance to absorb it.
3 Steps to Practice Wiring in Good
- Take a few full and smooth breaths to center and settle your whole mind-body system. Using your breath to calm your mind helps you unwind from the monkey mind and become more grounded in the present moment and more open up to seeing the good.
- Ask, what brings you a sense of feeling joyful, connected, creative, compassionate, awake, and living into your True Self — open-hearted, expansive, settled. It could be a person, place, image, memory, song, dancing, or even the clouds in the sky.
- Embody the experience. Breathe it into your heart, your soul. Feel what it feels like to linger in that place of goodness for just half a minute. Absorb the goodness to your bones.
Do I still occasionally fall into the negativity spiral of old beliefs or get lost in the “life is hard and then you die” lies; yes. I dare say we all do. Our stories will always have hard and will often not be easy or problem-free.
Thankfully this world, our lives, our bodies, and our experiences also hold beauty. And it’s intentionally and repeatedly absorbing this beauty that moves us toward a more joy-filled life.
As the Spanish painter Juan de Pareja once said,
“Beauty exists in the most unexpected places, if only we have the eyes to see”
What beauty are you choosing to absorb today? Leave it in the comments, I am listening!
