Something I’ve realized over the past several months is how negative I am. I believed that I was just a realist, that the glass wasn’t half full or half empty, it was just a glass of water. However, the more I freewrite, the more I realize how negative my subconscious has become. The glass is not just half empty, but also the cup isn’t squeaky clean, there’s no ice, and wtf, I didn’t even want water anyways! This cup has ruined my life! Okay, that’s a bit dramatic, but you get the point.

Now that I’ve recognized this in my life, ironically, trying not to be negative actually makes me more negative! When I have a negative thought, I get upset at myself for being negative, and feeling upset just brings about more negative emotions, which cycles into a downward spiral.

This seems similar to the idea that to be happy, you don’t try to be happy. Mark Manson wrote an entire article titled Stop Trying to be Happy about this.

It seems that to not be negative, or to think positive, we have to stop trying to be positive. Personally, I find this to be extremely difficult, especially when I’m subconsciously thinking negative thoughts. I don’t think anyone has total control over their subconscious.

However, as the Stoics like to say, we should only concern ourselves over the things we have control over. While we cannot control what our subconscious thinks, we can control our reactions to our thoughts.

This brings me to two things I’ve started to do to have better reactions to my thoughts, specifically for the negative thoughts. I believe that these practices will help me not necessarily be more positive, but react better to my negative emotions. Over time, my controlled reactions will help shift my negative subconscious to a more neutral stance.

I want to be clear that the expectation of these practices is not that negative thoughts will disappear. The expectation is that I will learn to recognize when I’m having a negative thought and have controlled reactions to them.

Negative Visualization

Okay. What is this doing here. How can the practice of visualizing the worst case scenarios be on a list of things to do to not be negative? Hear me out.

Yes, this requires us to think about negative things and what could go wrong. However, this doesn’t make us a negative person. The Negative Visualization technique is all about imagining the worst case scenario and coming up with a way around this scenario. (This technique deserves its own article, and the Daily Stoic happened to have one!)

What this does is actually prepare us mentally for things to go wrong. Because in the real world, not everything goes perfectly. There will be bumps on the road, and the negative visualization practice prepares us mentally for these bumps. It helps us manage expectations. If and when something bad occurs, we will have a controlled reaction because we’ve already envisioned something like this occuring. It will help you keep calm in the face of strain and that’s a huge step when learning to shift our mindset.

Gratitude

Ugh. Being grateful. Yes, we all know that this is an important practice in life. We should always be thankful for what we have, have a fucking grateful journal, meditate on it, blah blah.

I actually hate being told to be grateful. It induces an immediate “ugh” and eye roll whenever I come across this.

So I slightly adjusted this practice. I stopped trying to be grateful all the time. Instead, I’ve only been grateful if I complain. I came across this while listening to Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism, and Tim Ferris. He followed this practice of saying something you are grateful for whenever you complain. For me, this has done a couple things:

1. It made me conscious of how often I actually complain.
2. Gave me a trigger to actually practice being grateful.

I knew I complained a lot, but wow, I had no idea how often I complained until I consciously started to look out for my complaining. And because I now had a trigger to practice gratitude, I found myself actually being grateful. It’s still difficult to practice this, especially when the trigger is something negative. However, I believe that as I forge this new connection, my brain will slowly start to adjust itself and start to subconsciously think about gratefulness whenever I complain.

By combining preparing for a worst case scenario, managing our expectations, and being consciously aware of when our minds shift to complaining, we can start to reprogram our subconscious to be a little less negative. And as long as we’re a little less negative today than yesterday, then that’s a win for our future selves.

Our mind totally thinks so. We’ve evolved to think that losses loom larger than gains. “The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.” (Loc 5431)

The paper “Bad Is Stronger Than Good” states “bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones.” (Loc 5444)

We are primed to pay more attention to the bad things versus the good things. In the early days of human history, this seems to make sense. The caveman who paid more attention to dangers lived longer.

Is this why some of us could be focused much more on the negatives of life? Our instincts say to avoid losses, keep an eye out for dangers. Due to that, some of us may start to see only the negatives in life to avoid them and easily dismiss any of the positives.

Even when we do see positives, it doesn’t impact our minds as much as a negative event. A single negative event could ruin an overall great day, but a single positive event can’t uplift an overall bad day. How could we make a mental switch to this behavior? Is this why many people work on being grateful? As a gentle reminder that in our day to days, there will always be bad, but there will always be good.

We could also set a good reference point for goals to empower our positive selves. “The aversion to the failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than the desire to exceed it.” (Loc 5460) With the right goal and reference point setting, we could reach our goals because of our aversion to fail versus actually exceeding the goal.

“Loss aversion refers to the relative strength of two motives: we are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains. A reference point is sometimes the status quo, but it can also be a goal in the future: not achieving a goal is a loss, exceeding the goal is a gain.” (Loc 5460)

We should set our days so that we could achieve and maybe exceed our goals, to feel that we’re gaining something everyday.

When it comes to golf, golfers are much more accurate when putting for par versus for birdie. Economists Devin Pope and Maurice Schweitzer use loss aversion theory to explain that players were more successful when putting for par than for a birdie. Players tried harder when putting for par because missing par would be a loss. However, missing a birdie putt is a forgone gain, and not actually a loss (assuming they make par). Would there be a way to switch our mindset to concentrate on every swing? Even a single stroke saved is a huge difference in the pro golf world.

Is there a way we could apply this type of thinking to our day to day?

I’ve heard this phrase “questions are the answer” several times over my life. The most recent was from Anthony Robbins’ Awaken The Giant Within. In fact, the title of chapter 8 is exactly this article’s title.

I write about this today because a good portion of my freewrites are questions. I guess I just have tons of questions for myself. The big ones are centered around “what are you doing with your life.” While this seems like the right question to ask, I found from reading Robbins that this isn’t actually the right question. The right version of a question should push your mind for next steps.

Remember from Thinking, Fast and Slow, that our minds are making up the simplest answers possible. So if we’re stuck in a rut, and we ask ourselves questions like “what are you doing with your life” or “why can’t you do anything”, our minds will come up with an answer that best fits our story. “We’re not doing anything with our lives, James. Duh. Next question please.” “I’m tired and burnt out from years of chasing a corporate dream that I realized is just running in a hamster wheel.” Sweet, these are totally helpful!

It’s hard to show sarcasm through just writing, but I hope everyone got that.

The answers we get will entirely depend on the questions we ask. So if we ask questions that make us ponder what could be next, we then start to inject ourselves with some motion.

By reshaping our “what am I doing with my life” questions to “what could I be doing with my life”, our minds start to think about the possibilities of this question. “Why can’t you do anything” could reshape to “how could you do something” to get our minds to start, as they say, thinking outside the box.

The questions we ask should nudge our minds to give us actionable answers. Answers that give us some new direction or insight. But it won’t work like this right away.

I’ve only tried to reshape my questions for a few days now, and in all honesty, it feels the same. The answers have been the same. My mind tells me “I know this trick now and it won’t work on me.” And it’s totally right. We shouldn’t expect the answers to change immediately. I expect this will take time to change my thinking.

The important thing is that it’s a small step, a small investment into a different future. A future where I’ll be asking “what else could I be doing with my life?” A future that I will have created.

So what questions are you asking yourself and how could it be reshaped to drive you towards a future you want? Take that first step, and start by asking your questions, just reshaped in a tiny way.

We make decisions all day long. We decide what to wear, decide what to eat, decide when or how to go to work (or maybe not to go to work), the list goes on. Decisions (or making a choice, I will switch often between the two) are an every day part of life.

I believed that making the right decision was the most important. Obviously, making the wrong choice is not what anyone wants to do and would be the worst case scenario. We should always expect to make the right decision. We should plan as much as possible to make sure it’s the correct path. If the outcome is wrong, then our decision was wrong. So we should focus on always making the right decision, right?

This is the wrong thing to focus on.

I believe that over time, people who focus too much on making the right decision versus making a decision lose confidence in themselves. With making the right decision, the focus and judgement comes from the outcome.

However, we at some point all succumb to a decision (right or wrong) leading to a poor outcome. And those who focus only on the final outcome will suffer for feeling like they made a poor decision, even if the decision was correct! We planned for everything, we tell ourselves. How can this have gone wrong, we ask ourselves.

I welcome lady luck to the stage.

Whether we like it or not, luck is a big part of the outcome of a decision. Our minds are not set up to be able to know and plan for every scenario that could occur in a decision. Our subconscious simplifies our understanding of the world to help us have a sense of prediction and control over our future.

So it’s unrealistic to expect ourselves to know everything that could possibly occur, especially the unknown unknowns. However, if an “unlucky” event derails our decision, we blame ourselves for making a poor choice, even if that choice was the correct path. If a decision leads to success, we give ourselves very little credit since it was obviously the correct decision.

For many of us, we forget our success cases and remember only the bad. After enough poor outcomes, we start to lose confidence in our decision making. This leads to a fear of making decisions and all of a sudden, each decision we do make has more weight. When inevitably, one of those decisions leads to a poor outcome, our fear and doubt in ourselves increases. This cycle feeds on itself and gets stronger.

What we must do, is to shift our focus to the decision making process, and not the outcome. This does three things:

1. We release ourselves from luck.
2. We gain a better sense of control.
3. We allow ourselves to make more decisions.

Our decision making process is something we can control. The outcome, because luck is involved, is out of our hands. And the more decisions we make, the more outcomes we have. The more outcomes we receive, the more we can learn and adjust our process.

And this means that the worst case scenario isn’t actually a bad outcome. The worst case is the act of not making a decision, because then it leads to not learning anything.

Whether right or wrong, there is power in making a decision. So go out, make decisions, and adapt.

It’s easy to track physical gains. You can measure distance ran, time elapsed, repetitions, weight lifted, how much you weigh, how much you ate. The list can go on.

For mental gains, there isn’t much. I suppose you could measure amount you read, meditated, length of time focused without distractions, … and I’m not sure what else. Even if you track this (which I tried) it doesn’t seem too insightful. It’s nothing compared to being able to know that 1 year ago, I was able to lift X, and now I can lift X + Y. I began to think that there wasn’t a great way to measure mental fitness.

Until a thought popped up during my run. I’ve been training for a marathon and it has not been easy. I’ve been running between 5 and 6 kilometers for 5 days a week with a random longer run (<10 K). Today happened to be a longer run day and I was aiming for 12K. I hit a wall right around the 10K mark and I kept telling myself that I could get up to 12K. You can do it, you can do it.

It reminded me of work outs aiming for X sets with Y reps. On the last set of the last few reps, is when you’re close to your limit and pushing yourself. It’s here I found that we’re using not just our physical muscles, but also our mental muscle to push our bodies to finish the set.

This is the link between the physical and mental. It’s that voice in your head telling yourself to get to the end and your body, albeit screaming at you to stop, continues to go.

This is the work out for the brain muscle, will power, self-control, whatever you want to call it. The most gains, physically or mentally, happen when you are under the most strain. It’s when things are uncomfortable that our mind and body can learn and grow.

I have an Apple Watch and try to close my rings + get 10K steps every day. It’s easy to track these physical things. For mental reps, we should aim to push ourselves past the strain once a day. Training for the mind, I suppose. And the best part is, it’s now part of the physical exercise routine. Whenever you want to give in during your physical work out, flex your mental muscle, and fight through to the finish. That’s a rep and win for the mind.

Continue doing this and expand it to other parts of your life. For me, I’m trying to write everyday and it has been a struggle. Everyday is a fight. Every time my mind says no, but I push through and finish a day, I just exercised my brain muscle. As we apply this to more scenarios in our day to day, we strengthen our minds and start to upgrade ourselves in ways that our subconscious fought against. I think of it as reprogramming our subconscious to accept new beliefs. It’s how we’ll get comfortable being uncomfortable and learn that strain, whether physical or mental, is where the gains are.