I've been asked a few times about my thoughts on the Law of Attraction
and not to offend anybody but I have to be honest with you...
I don't believe in it. According to the Law of Attraction, positive
thoughts manifest positive outcomes and negative thoughts manifest
negative outcomes, which is a principle that I can generally get
behind but my issue is, you know, human beings.
We don't like generalities.
We always find a way to take a generality and take it to the extreme —to
the point where something like "positive psychology" becomes "toxic
positivity." Mental fortitude is not just about thinking positive and
happy thoughts.
It's not about "positive vibes only." Positive vibes is not how you
achieve mental health. Positive vibes is the RESULT of mental health.
But in order to get there, it requires, sometimes, a concerted effort
to align our perception of reality with what it actually is. The more I
advance into my mental health journey, the more apparent it becomes
that
the most consequential principles we can learn as individuals are the
ones that don't seem immediately intuitive to us. So in today's video,
I'm going to share with you one such contrarian principle that I apply
in my life on a regular basis.
This principle calls for occasional negative thinking as a means
of improving your mental fortitude and I'm talking about forcing
yourself to think negative thoughts in order to strengthen your mental
health.
This technique is called "negative visualization" and on the other side
of this transition,
We are going to get into what is, why you should practice it, and how
you can get started. Negative visualization is the practice of
imagining some of your worst fears coming to pass. And while it's not
the same thing as engaging and obsessive thinking or having an anxiety
attack,
it is similar in the sense that you are immersing yourself into a
scenario that hasn't happened yet or might never happen. The difference
between negative visualization and anxiety
is that any negative visualization you're practicing is
intentional. Nothing in your present scenario has prompted you to be
thinking this way, but you are doing it to sort of as a
reality check. So what are some examples of this? You could start small and
think about what it would be like to lose your keys. Imagine
yourself in that scenario and how it would put a dent to the rest of
your plans for the day.
Next, you can move a step up.
Imagine what it would be like to lose your job or your house or your
parents (heaven forbid).
If you feel like you are currently in a situation where you have next
to nothing to lose, imagine waking up in a war-torn region of the world
in which your most basic human rights aren't given. The point of this
practice is to remind yourself that no matter where in life
you currently are, things could always get worse and the things that we
assume to be fixtures in our lives
can change at a moment's notice.
Obviously keep yourself in check.
If you already have a huge anxiety problem, then maybe this kind of
practice isn't something you jump into two feet in... but if you can
first get
yourself to a place of calm, it can be beneficial to integrate negative
visualization into your life from time to time. I'm going to tell
you three reasons why you should consider doing this. Number one: it
lets you off the hedonic treadmill.
Have you ever noticed how short-lived the pleasure you get from
acquiring new things are achieving your goal seems to last? Hedonic
adaptation is the process by which our level of happiness reverts to
baseline in spite of any positive events that might have just occurred
to us.
This is a double-edged sword because while hedonic adaptation is
responsible for the fact that we cannot find lasting happiness from
getting what we want,
it also means that we don't usually stay in lasting despair from
getting what we don't want. Human beings have an amazing ability to
adapt but instead of recognizing this feature about ourselves for what
it really is, many of us instead would prefer to tell ourselves a
story.
The story is "I will be happy when..."
So we set new goals and go back to
the pursuit —more of what we want and less of what we don't want. That
is what an entire economy runs on, but there is a difference between
going after something because you feel like you need it for your
happiness and going after something because you genuinely value it.
This is a subtle but consequential difference and practicing negative
visualization is going to help you make that distinction. Number two:
negative visualization can lessen the emotional impact of negative
events to come. We call this building our "psychological immune system."
Imagine living your entire childhood in a perfectly sanitized
environment.
You're not allowed to play in the dirt,
you're not allowed to bring home pets, or eat chicken nuggets with your hands. What happens when you step into
the real world and you catch a virus for the first time?
you're probably going to get pulverized by that virus. A similar
principle applies to your psychological immune system.
If you only allow yourself to think happy thoughts and you're not
allowing yourself to acknowledge the possibility of any
undesirable circumstances happening to you, the moment those
circumstances come to pass, if you're going to feel blindsided. Speaking
from personal experience,
it's not the initial emotions of at the pain and distress a feeling
blindsided that hurt the most. It's when those emotions go away and you
are left with the lingering thought of "What if I had known?" "What if
I been more prepared?" "Would I have acted differently?" Last summer I
made a video talking about the death of my grandmother, which happened
over three years ago.
I was in such a different state of mind back then. I was
running a business,
I was completely self-interested,
I was completely unconscious.
I wasn't conscious about the things that were important things that
weren't because in my mind everything seemed important. The things
that were in front of me seemed important. While my grandmother
was just 30 minutes away,
that last year for life
I hardly spent any time with her.
And so when she passed away, there was an element of feeling blindsided
because, truly, it hadn't even crossed my mind
that something like that could happen.
Let me tell you. Fast forward three plus years, those deadlines that I
may or may not have made have zero impact on the life that I'm living
today.
Whereas I still think about my grandmother and the memories that we
could have made together. Which is why when it comes to the people who are in my life
currently, I force myself to think about what it would be like to lose
those people. And that enables me to get a sense of gratitude, which is our
third point: negative visualization helps you want the life that you
currently have.
We talked a lot about gratitude and I regret to even mention how
commercialized it has become because in that process of
commercialization, gratitude has kind of lost its meeting a little bit.
Study after study has shown that people who consistently practice
gratitude tend to have better overall physical health and are happier
and more optimistic. This study here from 2003 even suggests that college
students who experience positive emotions like
love and gratitude in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks
—these college students went on to become more resilient against
depression in the aftermath of 9-11. I used to keep a gratitude journal
every morning, but ever since I started incorporating negative
visualization into my meditation practice, I naturally dropped the
journaling practice that I was doing every morning.
This is not to say anything about keeping gratitude journals because I
still think it's a it's a really great habit to get into but I think,
for me, once I learned how to actually induce feelings of gratitude,
I naturally dropped the practice that simply allowed me
just think about what I was grateful for. Because, remember, gratitude
is ultimately a feeling. It's a construct that you can think about and
intellectualize, but it's also a feeling. And when you can experience it
as a feeling, that's when it can truly make an impact on your life.
So how do you learn to love the life that you currently have? First,
imagine what it would be like to lose the various aspects of your
life that
you take for granted. Once the visualization is over,
you will find that you will return to the things that are presently in
your life or the people who are presently in your life with a
newfound sense of gratitude.
This is such a rewarding feeling and I just hope that I've
communicated it well because we are now at the end of our video. We
talk a lot about mindfulness on this channel and the technique that
I just shared with you is actually borrowed from the philosophy of
Stoicism.
Unfortunately the Ancient Stoics...
we don't know what they would have thought about mindfulness for sure.
But from what I've gathered, so far, there doesn't seem to be a
contradiction in their philosophies.
The Stoics probably would have been huge fans of mindfulness meditation
if their philosophies could have intersected. Either way,
I'm saying to you now... whether it's from Stoicism or mindfulness... as a
principle, negative visualization is hugely beneficial and I hope that
the next time you meditate, you will carve out a couple minutes just to
think about the things that you take for granted and what it would be
like
lose them. Do this for a little bit every single day and see what
that does to your overall level of satisfaction in life.
Thank you guys so much for joining me for another video and I will see
you guys next week.