We’ve been looking for misery in the internal cinema, and so far, we have found it by focusing our attention on the past and future screens. The movie screen of the present also offers strategies for lowering our mood. The first of these involves carefully selecting which parts of the screen to watch and ignoring the rest.
Let’s try it out. In your home at this moment, many things are true:
The carpet in the front hall has a pleasing pattern.
There is an electricity bill, as yet unpaid, on the sideboard.
The laundry has mostly been done and put away.
The bookcase was dusted recently.
The yogurt you purchased yesterday has already got mold on it.
The warm sun is coming in through the window.
The cat has thrown up on your bed.
You own a microwave oven that can heat food in minutes.
How do you feel?
The human mind is simply not capable of paying attention to everything at once. At best, you can shift your focus from one to another. Even then, you don’t give them all equal time. There are some facts that attract your attention frequently (There’s a scary stack of papers on the counter!) and others that never cross your mind (The furnace is completely reliable). If there are good things about your home that you never consider, they will have no real impact on your mood. If, on the other hand, you focus your mind entirely on the unpaid bill, the spotty yogurt, and the cat vomit, they alone will determine your emotional tone.
The human brain developed, in large part, as a problem-solving organ. It has a bias to look for the things that are wrong rather than those that are right. Evolution, then, is clearly on the side of the miserable.
Your emotions are governed not by the circumstances of your life, but by the circumstances to which you pay attention. In order to become more miserable, give in to your natural tendencies, and direct your attention exclusively to the problem areas of your life:
Think only of the colleague who is annoyed with you, not the others who are impressed.
Dwell on the part of your job that you still don’t understand; ignore the areas you have
Friends may occasionally tell you not to worry, saying that there’s nothing wrong. You can safely ignore them. You have a multifaceted life. There is always something wrong, and there always will be.
It is enough to emphasize the negatives. Don’t bother trying to blot out the positives. To do that, you’d have to inventory and acknowledge them, then push them aside. This brings them to mind, if only briefly, which runs the risk that they might momentarily lodge there and lift your spirits. If you find it difficult to focus exclusively on the negative, you can give yourself the odd break by examining the neutral, the ho-hum minutiae of daily existence. Oh, look, the light is off in the kitchen. It’s Tuesday today. The cat’s name is Snuggles.
You can do more. Certain negatives, like cat vomit on your sheets, effortlessly push you in an unhappy direction. Your interpretation practically writes itself. But you can focus on the meaning and significance of the event to maximize the effect.
In cognitive therapy, we often conduct an exercise called the “Downward Arrow” to detect the form of a person’s negative thinking. This involves starting with the event and the emotion it evokes, then digging about for the interpretation the person has imposed on it. Once we have the interpretation, we invite the person to assume it is correct. “And what would happen next?” we ask.
“And what would the worst thing about that be? And what would that mean?”
You can do this yourself—in fact, to at least some extent, you probably already do. Write down one of your negatives. Then run away with it and marry it in Vegas:
I’m going to have to launder those sheets again.
And I don’t have time before I leave for work.
And it’ll be late when I get home.
So I won’t get enough sleep.
And I’ll look like an idiot at that department meeting tomorrow.
And pretty soon they’ll fire me.
I’ll never get another job without a reference.
And I’ll have to move back in with my aging parents.
They have an incontinent dog.
On no account should you strive for balance. At least the cat got the sheets this time and not my toothbrush. He’s done this before; he’ll do it again. He’s probably fine. And I have a spare set of sheets, so I can clean these later. I’m okay. Now let’s get to work. Instead, you must stick to the
negative.
By indulging in your innate tendency to catastrophize, your emotions can be governed not by the already discouraging sight of cat vomit, but by the prospect of slinking back to Mom and Dad. And probably coming home to a dead cat.