Wiki Lurks

A-ha! I’ve found the article I alluded to in my last post. It was: 10 Virtually Instant Ways to Improve Your Life. What a fantastic title – the concept that with a few minor, virtually unnoticable tweaks, you become rich, beautiful, successful and able to eat chocolate til it oozes out of your ears without putting on an ounce. Of course reality isn’t like that, and in fact this list isn’t the usual, stop smoking, eat healthily, get some exercise, marry a goat blah blah blah of other lists. It is subtly different; it’s not about what you do, but about how you think. Of course one can argue with the premise that one can change one’s thoughts in an instant. Nothing is that simple, apart from instant mash. Anyway, I reproduce it here.

1. Stop jumping to conclusions. There are two common ways this habit increases people’s difficulties. First, they assume that they know what is going to happen, so they stop paying attention and act on their assumption instead. Human beings are lousy fortune-tellers. Most of what they assume is wrong. That makes the action wrong too. The second aspect of this habit is playing the mind-reader and assuming you know why people do what they do or what they’re thinking. Wrong again, big time. More relationships are destroyed by this particular kind of stupidity than by any other.
2. Don’t dramatize. Lots of people inflate small setbacks into life-threatening catastrophes and react accordingly. This habit makes mountains out of molehills and gives people anxieties that either don’t exist or are so insignificant they aren’t worth worrying about anyway. Why do they do it? Who knows? Maybe to make themselves feel and seem more important. Whatever the reason, it’s silly as well as destructive.
3. Don’t invent rules. A huge proportion of those “oughts” and “shoulds” that you carry around are most likely needless. All that they do for you is make you feel nervous or guilty. What’s the point? When you use these imaginary rules on yourself, you clog your mind with petty restrictions and childish orders. And when you try to impose them on others, you make yourself into a bully, a boring nag, or a self-righteous bigot.
4. Avoid stereotyping or labeling people or situations. The words you use can trip you up. Negative and critical language produces the same flavor of thinking. Forcing things into pre-set categories hides their real meaning and limits your thinking to no purpose. See what’s there. Don’t label. You’ll be surprised at what you find.
5. Quit being a perfectionist. Life isn’t all or nothing, black or white. Many times, good enough means exactly what it says. Search for the perfect job and you’ll likely never find it. Meanwhile, all the others will look worse than they are. Try for the perfect relationship and you’ll probably spend your life alone. Perfectionism is a mental sickness that will destroy all your pleasure and send you in search of what can never be attained.
6. Don’t over-generalize. One or two setbacks are not a sign of permanent failure. The odd triumph doesn’t turn you into a genius. A single event—good or bad—or even two or three don’t always point to a lasting trend. Usually things are just what they are, nothing more.
7. Don’t take things so personally. Most people, even your friends and colleagues, aren’t talking about you, thinking about you, or concerned with you at all for 99% of the time. The majority of folk in your organization or neighborhood have probably never heard of you and don’t especially want to. The ups and downs of life, the warmth and coldness of others, aren’t personal at all. Pretending that they are will only make you more miserable than is needed.
8. Don’t assume your emotions are trustworthy. How you feel isn’t always a good indicator of how things are. Just because you feel it, that doesn’t make it true. Sometimes that emotion comes from nothing more profound than being tired, hungry, annoyed, or about to get a head-cold. The future won’t change because you feel bad—nor because you feel great. Feelings may be true, but they aren’t the truth.
9. Don’t let life get you down. Keep practicing being optimistic. If you expect bad things in your life and work, you’ll always find them. A negative mind-set is like looking at the world through distorting, grimy lenses. You spot every blemish and overlook or discount everything else. It’s amazing what isn’t there until you start to look for it. Of course, if you decide to look for signs of positive things, you’ll find those too.
10. Don’t hang on to the past. This is my most important suggestion of all: let go and move on. Most of the anger, frustration, misery, and despair in this world come from people clinging to past hurts and problems. The more you turn them over in your mind, the worse you’ll feel and the bigger they’ll look. Don’t try to fight misery. Let go and move on. Do that and you’ve removed just about all its power to hurt you.

This is a fantastic list! Apart from the last one – I remain unconvinced that when karma is taking its time to even the score, a helping hand might not go amiss, but nevertheless. But there at No. 8 is the one that stuck in my mind: Don’t assume your emotions are trustworthy. It even gives a few benign, non-contraversial examples: hungry, tired, annoyed. To which, I might add, pre-menstrual. What? I’m a woman, I’m allowed to say it. Look down & check your underpants – if they’re lumpy, you are not.

Are mental habits easier to change than physical ones? Phobics would say not, Paul McKenna would disagree. But both physical and mental habits improve with attention and effort. These are worthy ones to attempt.

The way it's going

Ok, so I’m not there yet. But it won’t be long at this rate. New Year, new efforts, time to make those pointless resolutions. “Pointless?” – the Pollyannas gasp in horror. Yes – pointless. How many people have changed their life as a result of a drunken promise to themselves as they downed the bubbly at midnight on 1/1/xx. Have you?

Massive change requires revolution, and well, us British aren’t that keen on revolutions. We tried it, once. Back in 1649 after a little local unpleasantness, we installed the 17th century equivalent of a teetotal personal trainer as ruler of the country, demoting the fun-loving, hard-living king, and sending him to the big charity shop in the sky. But we kept a spare in the back of the wardrobe, just in case, and in 1660 we dragged out the heir and reinstalled him. Revolutions aren’t us.

But change is possible. We the people now apparently have a say in the running of the country – well, thank God at least the latest Prince Charles doesn’t. There’s plenty of research that New Year resolutions don’t work as this article from the Guardian attests. The linked white paper on how much money people waste promising themselves they will go to the gym is particularly amusing. So I’m not stupid enough to do that.

But the fact remains, I am unemployed and planning far too much of my day around Jeremy Kyle. This must stop. Incrementally. But the repeat of this morning’s episode that I slept through is on in half an hour…

That’s what this blog was nearly called. Why? Because I hate Pollyannas – those bloody cheerful types that say “Oh well, look on the bright side..” and blether something about making lemonade out of lemons. Ridiculous, as they are usually the types that make a career out of dodging fruit and veg. Fat and happy? Yeah right.  Lemons go in gin, and you drink gin when you’re pissed off. Everyone knows that – especially me. I’m not a Pollyanna, I’m a realist. Some call me a corrupt, cynical pessimist, but that’s because they are not realists, they are fools.

Nevertheless, life is what you make it, and you can’t escape from yourself, not alive. So skipping the motorway bridge alternative as messy and traumatic for Yorkie munchers, I have decided to investigate the possibility of changing my mental attitude. To understand that, you need to know a bit about me first, and what has driven me to this point. Long, naval-gazing posts about my childhood can wait. The nub of the matter is that for the last 6 months of 2010, I have been unemployed.

It was redundancy, from an industry that is moribund and unlikely to improve. I work in Strategy – therefore this outcome was not unexpected. In fact, it was eagerly anticipated. I travelled for a bit, came home and looked forward to a bit of quality leisure time… which is where it all started to go wrong. It’s not as easy as it looks, you know.