Is everyone’s mind this negative?

I’ve been extra vigilant — lately — to call out my mind for any of its ‘jerk-like’ behaviour. You know, not letting it get away with anything, and getting clear on exactly what page it’s on (in the encyclopaedia of Neurotic Mind Shenanigans) SO WE CAN BOTH JUST GET ALONG.

To celebrate Brain Awareness Week, earlier this month, I want to shed some light on this, well-meaning (but mostly negative), judging machine that is our mind because, at one point or another, you’ve probably asked yourself whether you are a lone ranger in this respect or just like the rest of us. I’m going to answer for the majority here and say; YES, IT’S NORMAL and yes, MOST PEOPLE’S BRAINS ARE JUST AS JUDGEY AND NEGATIVE AS YOURS IS. Sorry, you’re not that special.

Let me to tell you a story:

I was at the supermarket the other day and as I came to the self-serve checkout, I thought it best to check my account balance and make sure I did actually have some money to pay for all of my things. I stalled the checkout process for a minute and quickly logged in to my online banking through my phone. While I waited for the page to load I did a quick estimation of what I’d spent that day and therefore how much I should have left. The figure I came to was grossly over-estimated because when I logged in, I saw a ‘balance’ of -$98.00. Yep. That’s a ‘minus’ sign.

F@ck.

It never ceases to amaze me how I still, to this day, fail to keep track of exactly which bills come out of my account, on which day. It’s just like a free-for-all in there, it seems. But, as usual, after scrolling through my transaction history, I conceded: “Ah, yes… I did really spend that much”

I was pissed at myself now. For having to, once again, dip into my savings and take money back to pay for my groceries. It wasn’t like I didn’t have the money to buy my food (it aint all that bad) but it’d be nice if occasionally I could keep the money in my savings account for, you know, actual savings… not Nutella and BBQ chickens.

What’s more; later that day, I visited my Dad at our family home where I was surprised with a bunch of accumulating mail. Dad was watching me from afar as I picked, disinterested, through it, calling out: “Remember, your car registration and insurance is all due. That’s probably them”.

Fucking perfect.

My mind chimed in: “You dipshit. You forgot again, didn’t you?”

There, inside those three innocent looking envelopes lay almost $2,000 worth of bills, all of which were due in three weeks and, you guessed it, I wasn’t prepared in the slightest.

Its becoming a yearly ritual that must (surely) be coming to an end soon.

You’re brilliant at adulting, Rebecca. Just brilliant — my mind said

In the next fifteen minutes, I had already imagined a (heavily catastrophised) vision of my future, along with a, rather extreme, game plan. First of all, it told me: “No more Atlantic salmon for dinner this week, it’ll be rice cakes and tuna until further notice” then, I made a mental note to cancel the naturopath and the PT session I had booked in for the following week.

Next I moved on to my long term job as a legal secretary: “Nup, scratch that. You need more money, we’re going to look for a new job. Something in the City”

I berated myself thinking: “I just don’t understand how you could forget again, Rebecca? You did this last year. What will your fiancé think of you?”

On and on it went.

It wasn’t even being helpful. It was just negative.

We can thank evolution for that — and something called the Negativity Bias (I’ll get to that in a minute). See, the brain loves drama. It likes you to be in a constant state of worry. It enjoys it. It’s job is to analyze, judge and process information. Without doing all those things it ceases to be useful and ‘safely exist’. Tuck that up your sleeve for next time.

The mind evolved to be used by us humans as a ‘dont-get-killed’ device, back in ‘caveman’ days when threat lured around every corner, like a bear, or an attack from an invading tribe. Dr Rick Hanson says:

“To keep our ancestors alive, Mother Nature evolved a brain that routinely tricked them into making three mistakes: overestimating threats, underestimating opportunities, and underestimating resources (for dealing with threats and fulfilling opportunities). This is a great way to pass on gene copies, but a lousy way to promote quality of life.”

As you can guess, our ancestors with the most anxious of minds — the ones with the tendency to expect the worst — are the ones who, more often than not, survived, to pass on their genes to us.
 Cheers, you worry-warts.

Hence the overreaction to all these bills (and every other situation that your mind cant help but make a mountain out of a molehill). It’s what it’s programmed to do. On top of this, The Negativity Bias says that in any given day, we could experience five positive things that happen to us and one negative thing, but our brain will actually steamroll over the positive things — labelling them ‘not important’ in favour of the negative thing.

Even if it is just a work colleague pulling you up on your carelessly hemmed (probably stapled) work skirt.

So how do you survive? Minus the worry-induced stomach ulcers?

When you know how your mind works, you can pre-empt its reactions to things and learn not to take your thoughts so seriously. You can also train your brain to actually be more positive.

Truthfully, about 85% of the stuff we worry about never actually ends up coming true (like my car being repossessed or my fiancé leaving me because of my poor money management) and, even when our worries do become a reality, 80% of us would say we handled the situation better than we thought we would!

It helps if you personify your mind (you know, give it a name or associate it with a funny character) to remind you to not take everything it says so seriously. My favourite is the character “Fear” in that kids movie “Inside Out” but — officially — I’ve named mine “Nance” (as in Negative Nancy). It’s step one to disidentifying from your mind — and that’s key if you want to worry less and laugh more.

A way to counteract this tendency to be negative is to start to train your brain for positivity and gratitude — more or less it just involves repetition. Scientists are saying the we can actually rewire our brains — they talk about it in this quick, easy video on neuroplasticity.

I wrote another article, Three Surprising Things That Boost Your Mood — over here, when you’re ready.

Back to my story — fast forward three weeks, those damn bills were due and, you know what? No car repossession, not one bill was left unpaid. I aced it because — I had to. I managed to pay for one bill entirely, I paid 6 months worth of another, and the last bill, I resolved to pay monthly. Remember that statistic I quoted earlier about worry? 85% of the shit we worry about never actually ends up happening? Yep. Relevant.

Brain awareness week is the global campaign increasing public awareness of the progress and benefits of brain research — I strongly encourage you all to invest in the study of your brain and how your mind works!

X Bec

(Originally posted on Femmeheroine.com)