The Anatomy of Positivity
As soon as I finish this article, I have to go to the bank. I can’t stand going to the bank. I feel like my financial knowledge is very lacking, and it’s almost always awkward to walk in there and hear nothing except the faint clicking of keyboards, and your own shoes squeaking on the floor. As much as I might be dreading the fact that I have to go, there’s no getting around the fact that it has to get done. This is where I’m confronted with a choice that we all face virtually every day of our lives… am I gonna allow myself to feel negative and sorry for myself, or focus on the bright side of this situation that I very much can’t avoid?
In many ways, one of the most influential factors in determining our quality of life is how our internal dialogue responds to those situations. Whether we like to admit it or not, everything that happens to us that we perceive as negative contains silver linings. Getting dumped is extremely difficult, but more often than not it leads to your increased long-term happiness. It sucks when one of your siblings moves farther away, but it has a tendency to make you appreciate the time you get to spend with them much more. Getting laid off is awful, but it can give you the freedom to find a more fulfilling work situation for yourself. These are generalizations, but the underlying truth remains constant. There’s good in everything, we just have to find it.
With that being said, simply “finding it” can require a good bit of mental gymnastics at times. Most of the time when we attempt to be more positive about a particular thing, all we’re really doing is trying our absolute best to pretend that it doesn’t exist. If we succeed in doing so (which we rarely do), we harbor a great risk of procrastination. This doesn’t get us anywhere, and slows down our lives in more ways than one. Instead, our best approach is to analyze the problem in a sequential format, and truly uncover the deeper reasons why our mind is trending towards glass half-empty. This happens in two phases, first by examining why our negative feelings are arising in the first place, and then shifting our focus towards the deeply rooted bright side of the situation. If we ask ourselves the questions below, we can give ourselves a fighting chance at cutting the roots off of our negativity, and flipping the script towards a healthier outlook.
Anatomy of Positivity Questionnaire
1. What past experiences are causing me to feel negative about this particular thing?
There’s always a reason why we feel the specific way in which we do. More often than not, that’s driven by the experiences we’ve had with this particular thing before. The first step towards rewiring the way we feel about something, is pinpointing exactly what it is that led us to arrive at this point. The more specific you can get, the better.
Fitness Example: “When I went to the gym last Tuesday, I became uncomfortable and drained, and was so sore the next two days that I could barely move.”
2. What emotions do I attach to those experiences?
When we have a negative attitude, it usually goes further than just “I feel bad” or “I don’t want to do this.” We sometimes tell ourselves that it doesn’t because we don’t want to look inward and shed light on the some of the less appealing parts of our personality, but doing so is crucial in allowing us to shift our perspective. There are a lot of different words that could come to mind for you, but some good examples would be “frustration”, “contempt”, “embarrassment”, “disgust”, or “helplessness”, just to name a few. Once we identify the experiences that might be causing us to feel this way, we can begin unpacking the emotions that arise within us when we think back to those times. It’s important to remember that our emotions don’t have to fit any type of narrative, whether that’s set by you, your circumstances, or other people in your life. How you feel is simply how you feel, and ignoring your emotions will only result in them coming out in different ways that you aren’t expecting. Once we’ve identified the primary emotions that we’re attaching to our past “negative” experiences, we can move on to the next step.
Fitness Example: “I felt weak, discouraged, and unknowledgeable compared to others around me while I was in the gym.”
3. Being 100% candid with myself, are those emotions real or perceived?
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality” - Seneca
This step is what can truly make or break us in how effective we are at flipping our thoughts into the realm of positivity. Our brains have a bad habit of telling us that some of the things we’ve experienced were much worse than they really were. When we really start to analyze our emotions, it quickly becomes clear that many of them are self-imposed. Comparison, self-judgement, and insecurity are cancerous to positive thinking. They weave themselves into our daily thought patterns, and prevent us from taking actions that we know will greatly benefit our lives. Simply acknowledging to ourselves that those thoughts aren’t rooted in reality has the potential to diminish them significantly. Our perceived emotions serve us no purpose, and being truthful with ourselves about their nature helps to build personal accountability, and begin shifting the needle towards positivity.
Fitness Example: “Although I felt discouraged, that was most likely just me being in my own head because I haven’t worked out in a long time.”
4. Outside of the emotions I might feel, what are the objective benefits of doing this particular thing?
Our final question allows us to detach from our previous train of thought, and add some much-needed context to it. Every action we take is driven to some degree by the benefits that it provides, although we rarely sit down and analyze them. As with the rest of these questions, you’ll get the most bang for your buck by getting as specific as possible. Instead of “I have to go to work to make money” use “going to work gives me the opportunity to provide a better and more comfortable life for the people that I love.” Think about it hard, and get to the emotions that lie under the surface of those benefits. If we do this correctly, it metaphorically ties a bow on our thinking process, and give us the last boost of practicality that we need to reverse our negative thinking.
Fitness Example: “If I go to the gym today, I’ll feel much more satisfied and energized for the rest of the day, and also be more self-confident for my big meeting at work tomorrow.”
There is no better place to apply this questionnaire than in relation to your weight loss habits, or any other training goals. Fitness is perhaps the best avenue that exists for practicing new ways of thinking, and fine-tuning them has a trickle-down effect into every other area of life. As irrelevant as it can sound at times, other things seem to get done with a lot less mental restistance once you’ve made fitness an integral part of your routine. Forging a habit of flipping your negative thoughts into positive ones is something that will serve you immensely in becoming healthier, as well as in everything else that you decide to apply it to. The good is always there, we just have to put in the work to discover it and use it to our advantage. Once we can successfully do that, we open up an entirely new world of possibilities for what we can achieve. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, it’s time for me to go to the bank.
