The Bright Side of Negative Thinking

At least since 1952, when Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking was published, Americans have been inundated with the notion that the path to success can be smoothed by accentuating the positive. In this cult of optimism, one must keep one’s eyes on the prize and not let negative waves interfere, and all forms of positive thinking are cast as inherently helpful.

Gabriele Oettingen wasn’t buying it. The psychology professor at New York University and the University of Hamburg spent more than 20 years testing her contention that “starry-eyed dreaming isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

As it turns out, dreamers are not often doers. Oettingen’s new book,Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation(Current), introduces a seemingly more realistic way of visualizing the future. If our wishful thinking is followed by an acute assessment of the obstacles that stand in the way of our dreams, achievement is far more likely, she contends. We spoke with Oettingen about her work and its practical applications.
Your studies have led you to conclude that positive thinking by itself does little to advance our goals. In fact, you believe it could be detrimental. How so?

My research has confirmed that merely thinking and dreaming about the future makes people less likely to achieve their goals. Just dreaming, detached from an awareness of reality, doesn’t cut it. It seems to let us fulfill our wishes in our minds, but actually it saps the
energy we need to perform the hard work of meeting the challenges we face in real life.
To think positively about the future is very pleasant. It’s a big temptation to think that doing it is the recipe for achieving success, instead of putting in the effort. In our minds, we’ve already reached a desired future, but there is a long way to go. [When people] pretend they are there, they will not prepare themselves for the obstacles and won’t get motivated to make the difficult climb. We might actually forgo realization of our dreams.
What were some of the results of your 20 years of research?

We found that students who fantasize about getting together with a romantic partner are less likely to get involved with that person. We found that with overweight women, the more they fantasized about losing weight in a program, the less weight they lost—over three months and over two years.

You’ve come up with an alternative approach that you say leads to more constructive results.

I call this method “mental contrasting.” It instructs us to dream our dreams, but then visualize the personal barriers that prevent us from achieving them. My studies show that when we perform such mental contrasting, we actually gain energy to take action. And when we go further and specify the actions we intend to take as obstacles arise, we energize ourselves even more.

Simply put, by adding a bit of realism to people’s positive imaginings of the future, mental contrasting enables them to become dreamers and doers. My work presents a single, surprising idea: The obstacles that we think most impede us from realizing our deepest wishes can actually hasten their fulfillment.

How is mental contrasting useful as a tool to achieve our wishes?

Positive fantasies are great for momentary pleasure, for exploring a possibility a person might have in the future by trying it out mentally. But they seduce people into thinking they are already there. When it comes to actually realizing that possibility, those wishes need to be complemented by a clear sense of reality.

You need to juxtapose those fantasies with the realities in you that stand in the way of achieving these wishes. If you also do that, you get the energy to overcome these obstacles.

If we combine a positive future with the obstacles of reality, then we get going. If we see the obstacles as insurmountable, we realize those wishes are not feasible, so we let them go. We become more selective in what we are going to pursue. Mental contrasting helps us get less overwhelmed with life.

What did your analysis of the blood pressure and brain images of study participants show?

In one study, we recruited 164 female college students to fantasize about wearing sleek, stylish high heels. We randomly divided them into two groups and had them fill out questionnaires on a computer. For three minutes, a message on the screen asked the women in both groups to imagine themselves all dressed up in high heels. They jotted down their thoughts and daydreams. After three minutes,one group was asked to generate more positive thoughts about wearing their heels; the other group was asked to generate negative thoughts.

Before we began, we took blood pressure readings of both groups. Systolic blood pressure is a cardiovascular measurement that reveals how energized or motivated a person is. The women who had fantasized positively showed lower systolic blood pressure. The second group showed no change in blood pressure. Positive fantasies relax us so much that it shows up in physiological tests. But when your objective is to make your wish a reality, the last thing you want to be is relaxed.

We also did work measuring brain responses to mental contrasting. It showed enhanced activity in sections of the brain responsible for willfulness and memory—much different patterns than when people were merely fantasizing about a desired future.

Some of your early work on motivation was rejected for publication. Why?

Reviewers claimed the arguments and results were too far-fetched, that my message was ridiculous. If you come up with data that goes against cultural postulates, it’s always difficult. People were reluctant to acknowledge my message. Some are still reluctant. But it was understandable. You can’t necessarily trust the results of just a few studies. So I spent the next 20 years conducting a number of rigorous, larger studies until my overall findings were supported.

The results were the same: Positive fantasies, wishes and dreams—detached from an assessment of past experience—didn’t translate into motivation. They translated into the opposite.

In your book, you take mental contrasting a step further with the introduction of a meditative practice you call WOOP: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. It is meant to help people reap the full benefits of mental contrasting.

Yes, WOOP has another step—the forging of explicit intentions about how to achieve a wish. If you break down the process by which people pursue wishes, you can distinguish two phases: an initial phase in which you weigh your options and decide to commit to a goal, and a second phase in which you plan how to take action to attain the wish.
There is a large amount of literature that shows this second phase is helpful in attaining goals. It doesn’t work if you don’t have a strong determination to implement your wishes. You must identify likely obstacles to your goal and approve behavior to overcome the obstacle.

This little exercise is a discovery into your wishes—what you really want, not what others want you to do. It will help you find out what you are passionate about and what holds you back.

If you’re a professional, you can use it to reach a new milestone in your career, improve your skills—whatever you can think of. It can be used to help with any kind of wish, short-term or long-term, big or small.

Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241484

5 Steps to Being More of an Optimist

Life is easier and generally more enjoyable if you're an optimist. Research shows that optimists enjoy many health and lifestyle benefits, including greater achievement, greater health, a sense of persistence toward goals, greater emotional health, increased longevity, and lower reactivity to stress. Because of this, optimists tend to be happier overall. Optimism is measured by your explanatory style, or how you define events. You're halfway there if you can learn to define positive events in the following three ways:

1. Positive events occurred because of something you did.
2. Positive events are a sign of more good things to come.
3. Positive events are evidence that good things will happen in other areas of your life.

You're all the way there if you can also think of negative events as:

1. not your fault
2. isolated occurrences that have no bearing on future events or other areas of your life

If you find yourself expecting the worst and selling yourself short a little too much of the time, you can always increase your tendency toward optimism. The following steps can get you there.

Analyze Your Thoughts, Giving Yourself Credit
When something positive happens in your life, stop to analyze your thought process for a moment. Are you giving yourself due credit for making it happen? Think of all the strengths you possess and ways you contributed, both directly and indirectly, to make this event occur. For example, if you aced a test, don’t just think of how great it is that you were prepared, but also think of how your intelligence and dedication played a role.

Think of How Your Strengths Can Bring Other Good Things
Think of other areas of your life that could be affected by this good event. Also, think of how the strengths you possess that caused this good thing to happen can also cause other positive events in your life. For example, what other good things can come from your intelligence, dedication, and ability to effectively prepare for tasks?

Think of Future Events That Can Also Happen
Imagine what future possibilities could be in store. Because you hold the key to your success, shouldn’t you expect to do well on future tests? Isn’t a successful career a natural result?

Minimize the Negative, When It's Realistic to Do So
When negative events occur, think of the extenuating circumstances that could have contributed to this happening. If you do poorly on an exam, for example, were you especially busy in the preceding week? Were you somewhat sleep deprived? What outside circumstances contributed to your failure? Keep in mind that this isn’t necessarily a reflection of personal weakness.

This doesn't mean that you should never recognize when you may need to change your behavior in the future or deny responsibility for mistakes — that's how we learn! It does mean, however, to focus more on the positive and don't let negative events kill your self-confidence.

Remember: Tomorrow Is Another Day
Also, remember that you’ll have endless opportunities to do better in the future. Think of your next potential success or other areas where you can excel.

Tips to Remember:

1. The key to optimism is to maximize your successes and minimize your failures.
2. It’s beneficial to look honestly at your shortcomings, so you can work on them, but focusing on your strengths can never hurt.
3. Keep in mind that the more you practice challenging your thought patterns, the more automatic it'll become. Don't expect major changes in thinking right away, but do expect them to become ingrained over time.
4. Always remember that virtually any failure can be a learning experience, and an important step toward your next success!
5. Practice positive affirmations. They really work!

Source: https://www.verywellmind.com/become-more-of-an-optimist-3144818

Notes from My Divorce: 5 Coping Strategies that Worked

The art of managing negative emotions

It’s ironic but true that knowing something intellectually—in my case, what research has discovered about managing negativity and fording a crisis—is very different from applying that knowledge in one’s life and translating it into action. So, despite writing about strategies to cope, my own mettle and facility were put to the test during a very protracted and stressful divorce. So, seen from a personal point of view and as a layperson, I thought I’d share what worked and what didn’t, and why. While inspired by divorce, broadly speaking these are difficulties common to most stressful situations.

Chief among the difficulties I had were 1) rumination: I found it nearly impossible to stop the loop in my head, even in the middle of the night; 2) managing negative emotion: While I was able not to sink in the main, I still had trouble with emotional flooding and feeling overwhelmed at moments; 3) staying balanced: The hardest part was being open to feelings of happiness; 4) looking to the future: setting interim goals as well as future ones was surprisingly difficult since I was devoting so much energy to keeping myself together; 5) making sense of the experience: I found this hard to do given the tenor of the divorce, the involvement and parrying of attorneys for both sides, and the length of time it all took (18 months or so!).

What follows are the problems and the strategies that I found worked for me, with some important caveats, and offered up as information, not advice.

1. Rumination: Inviting the “White Bears” in

The term “White Bears” was coined by Daniel Wegner for those repetitive and intrusive thoughts, the unfinished business of life, that the brain unconsciously searches for and result in that endless loop of rumination that preoccupies us during times of stress, sapping our emotional and cognitive energy. In my case, the White Bears were emblematic of my inability to control the outcome or even speed it along since the other side was disinclined to negotiate. I worried about everything, especially money. I tried all the techniques usually suggested such as assigning myself a worry time (an utter failure for me, given my personality) and discussing my worries with trusted friends. The latter approach defanged the White Bears for a limited time and then, within hours, they’d be back, growling in my head. Visualizing a happier time in my life and mentally recounting it, as suggested by other research, didn’t help me either; my inner Pollyanna had gone missing.

But what did help me was Wegner’s suggestion to invite the White Bears in. In my case, since my stress was a function of the divorce, imagining the worst possible outcome and all that it implied actually helped me stop ruminating. Once out in the open—and I actually wrote it out and charted all the implication of the worst scenario—it became something I could tackle and deal with, instead of just ruminating about it. I became less fearful once I saw what the worst resolution looked like on paper. (It’s worth saying that this divorce involved no children, and no long history together, so the worst case was largely about money. This strategy might be overwhelming to do without a therapist with a more complicated or emotionally fraught situation.) Even so, sitting down with the White Bears was more of a process than a magic bullet. Forcing myself to face my fears before bed helped to keep me asleep longer but it never shut down my brain completely.

2. Managing emotion: Reflective processing

I knew from the research that reliving a bad experience or a series of them—which I was doing on the daily—was absolutely the worst thing I could do, but at the same time, since a contentious divorce with a boatload of filings forced me to be actively engaged with past and present behaviors, I had trouble turning down the emotional volume. But what did work was consciously distancing myself from an incident and seeing it as though it had happened to someone else and focusing on why I felt and reacted as I did, as suggested by the work of Ethan Kross and his colleagues. This helped me get out of the fray emotionally by focusing on why I was feeling the way I was, instead of honing in on what I was feeling which makes you relive the moment. Asking why permits “cool” processing while focusing on what yields to “hot” processing and can open the door to even more rumination. Unlike distraction—yes, going to the flicks will help put your turmoil on hold for a bit but it’ll start up again the minute the lights come back on—this kind of reflection yields both more self-knowledge and allows you to better manage your feelings.

3. Staying balanced: Savouring

Generally speaking, things that make us happy, alas, stop making us happy after a while (it’s called “hedonic adaptation” or “the hedonic treadmill”) and I found it especially true when I was feeling so under fire. But the research on savoring—making the morning last, as Simon and Garfunkel put it—suggests that we are made happier by things that aren’t commonplace. So, yes, eating chocolate now and again as a treat will make you happier than it will when it’s an everyday thing. So I concentrated on being more apt to “savor” things that would make me happy—anticipating a visit with a friend or going to an art gallery, or buying something online and then waiting a time to open it. I got into the habit of parceling out my pleasures—spending real time anticipating them—which, counterintuitively, makes you happier. Did it help me? Yes.

4. Looking to the future: Abstract thinking

In a crisis, you’re much more focused on simply getting through than thinking about where you’re going next but, at the same time, looking forward does help to tamp down feelings of bitterness or hopelessness about where you find yourself. In a divorce or during a breakup, you’re much more likely to enumerate your former partner’s flaws than you are to make a list of what you want for your future. One observation I encountered in the research by Charles Carver and Michael Scheier struck a chord: that thinking about what you want in abstract terms opens up more possibilities for action than thinking concretely. So, if you miss companionship and sharing, instead of thinking concretely about an individual who might give you that (and how you might meet him or her), you think about companionship and sharing in abstract. That makes you realize that a sense of companionship can come from many situations: having lunch with a friend or striking up a conversation with a neighbor; calling someone you haven’t seen in a while and making plans to do something together; getting involved in a charity or doing volunteer work, or any other activity that includes a shared goal. I did find that this helped during the crisis, and is still helping as I emerge into a new phase of my life.

5. Making sense of the experience: Writing (or maybe not)

The work of James Pennebaker has shown that writing about experience as a coherent narrative can be a very effective therapeutic process, and it was in that spirit that I embarked on writing a memoir to help myself make sense of my marriage and divorce, And, of course, since I write for a living, I also thought I might be able to make some money too, amending the saying to “When life hands you lemons, sell lemonade.” Interestingly, many of my friends, including one who is a therapist, worried that writing about the marriage and its failure would only intensify my rumination and negative emotions and make me feel worse.

What I didn’t know is that there’s research that shows my friends were right, and that while generally writing is an effective tool for reducing negative emotion after a stressful situation, it may not be when you’ve experienced divorce. That’s what a study by David A.Sbarra found which had recently separated or divorced participants write about their experiences either in a stream-of-consciousness style which focused on their deepest emotions or write as a first or third-person narrator, exploring the breakdown of the marriage as a turning point in their lives and what they learned from it. The control group wrote about how they spent their time without recalling any emotion. Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, given the body of research that shows the benefits of writing, they found that in follow-ups, the participants who wrote in either style were emotionally worse off. Only the control group appeared to benefit from the act of writing (keep in mind that they were not writing about divorce); in fact, even those in the control group who reported themselves as high in rumination fared better. It may well be, as the researchers opine, that further studies may show that writing about something totally unrelated to divorce might work best if you are going through it or have recently.

So, if it’s a divorce you’re dealing with, writing may be a bad idea. I can’t quite tell whether it hurt or helped me emotionally but it was intellectually useful to me and gave me the sense that there was something in my life I had control over. But that may be just personal to me and how writing makes me feel.

Good luck to everyone! Managing negative emotion is admittedly tough stuff.

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/tech-support/201506/notes-my-divorce-5-coping-strategies-worked

4 Proven Ways to Overcome Adversity

Does it seem like every challenge that you experience becomes a big headache in your life?

No matter what adverse events you are currently experiencing, there is a purpose behind each one. For most of us, it’s difficult to imagine that losing a child or finding out that you have cancer is a blessing. I know from personal experience.

I was sexually molested and exploited at the age of 18. It took me a while to view it as a learning experience. The way in which you view adversity will either allow you to be set free from the heartache, confusion, guilt, and fear or allow you to be negatively affected in every aspect of your life.

After experiencing an adverse event, you will be at a crossroads. You can either view it as a blessing or allow your past to control the rest of your life.

Here are four proven ways to overcome adversity:

1. Surround yourself with positive people. Be selective with the people you surround yourself with. Indirectly they will affect your mood and your outlook. When you are in an emotional state of mind, it’s important to surround yourself with people who are supportive and encouraging.Human beings conform to those around them. Conformity is the change of behavior caused by another person or group of people. When experiencing adversity, it’s crucial in your development to surround yourself with people who are accepting of your flaws, mistakes, and imperfections. Overcoming adversity can be a challenge; when you have a supportive team helping you move forward, it’s much easier to accept yourself.

2. Write. There is something so peaceful in writing down your thoughts. However short or long your journal entries are, the process of writing down your emotions allows you to reflect.There are many benefits to writing:

• Allows for self-expression
• Helps give feedback about your life
• Allows you to better understand your current situation
• Allows you to think outside the box
• Makes you a better philosopher

Writing in a journal once a day can help in you overcome adversity. Whatever emotions, feelings or thoughts come to mind, jot it down. Years from now you’ll be able to reflect and see just how much you have developed.

3. Be in nature. Nature is very therapeutic. Living in a society where we are constantly moving around, we are disconnected from the beauty of nature. Whether it be walking in the park or gardening at home, taking the time to connect yourself with nature is a very healing process.There have been more than 100 research studies that have shown that outdoor activities reduce the level of stress. With adversity comes stress and frustration. Taking the time to be outside is a way for you to nurture your being and allow yourself to take a deep breath and relax. The sun and the air give you a sense of calmness during the face of adversity. Take about 10-20 minutes outside each day and find your stress level decreasing.

4. Start investing in yourself. There is no greater investment than the investment within your own personal development.Experiencing adversity is a great excuse for people not to take charge of their lives. We all face adversity in some way. What makes one individual succeed and another not is how they handle their adversity. Many of us allow challenges to defeat us. What we need to focus on is developing into a stronger and wiser individual because of the challenges. There is no better way to do so than developing your internal world.

Get yourself a library card and start reading self-help books. Take a look at the audio section and find yourself a few audio programs that you would like to listen to in the car. It’s about starting that momentum moving forward rather than backward.

Your adversity is a blessing in disguise. You may not think so at the moment, but it will eventually make you stronger and wiser.

Source: https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/03/30/4-proven-ways-to-overcome-adversity/