Surprising Yourself
Halloween may prime us to be receptive to change and to be open to new things in the month of October. There is an element of surprise in many Halloween activities, and the decorations associated with the holiday have a ooo factor that shock us in one way or the other.
That’s a hypothesis at least. Maybe you find nothing about October to encourage you to be open to new things and surprising yourself. In that case, I encourage you to be open to new things. boo.
I had a moment of surprise recently. The October issue of Real Simple included mention of a tool, a derma roller, in their article “9 Secrets to Great Skin.” I’d never heard of a derma roller before, and when I started to look into it, it sounded bizarre. The tool pokes tiny holes in your skin and is supposed to help improve the look of your skin and let skincare chemicals be more effective.
Sound crazy? I thought so, too. Initial searches online seemed crazy, too, along the lines of the sort of thing I may see for the next fad diet, etc. And I don’t do diets. Them’s just nuts.
However, I saw an article with a NIH address, and the National Institutes of Health is a respected authority. So, I looked in their online repository and was surprised by what I found: derma rollers actually can be effective, especially for helping diminish certain kinds of scarring.
Sometimes, our initial thoughts about things turn out to be wrong. That can be a good thing. The biggest hurdle to surprising ourselves in this way, though, sometimes is that it’s hard to know to keep looking for evidence. I wanted the initial information about the derma roller to be true, but what I encountered at first make it seem unlikely. If I hadn’t wanted it to be true, maybe I would have laughed off the whole idea as total bunk.
This is a minor example focusing on a rather silly item, a beauty tool, but what other sorts of things are we not seeing in our daily lives because of initial bias? Do our kids actually like sports or music practice? Does our significant other actually like the “favorite” meal that is made at least once a month because there seems to be an obligation to do so?
Challenge yourself to consider “what if” for one item today. Consider the opposite perspective or argument, and see what happens. Maybe nothing changes, but learning to question our current perspective can lead to remarkable surprises.
For further reading:
Doddaballapur, Satish. “Microneedling with Dermaroller” 2009 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2918341/.
Imran, Majid. “Microneedling Therapy in Atrophic Facial Scars: an objective assessment.” 2009 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2840919/
