Stressing over something? These 3 questions can help.
My father has a way of assuming the absolute worst in any situation, whether it’s real or imagined. Therapists call this pattern of thinking “catastrophizing.” One of my dad’s favorite expressions is “It’s your funeral.” When he visits, he conducts a thorough inspection of my home, which is followed by grim pronouncements. Last week, he emerged from my basement with a somber expression: “I guarantee you, it’s mold,” he said. “Get that inspected, pronto, or it’s your funeral.” I don’t envision my funeral quite as often as my father does — but when I’m stressed, my worries escalate, too. One method I use to corral my spiraling thoughts was developed by Martin Seligman, the director of the Penn Positive Psychology Center and a leading authority on happiness. He studies how people build resilience and has found that how we describe our hardships to ourselves can influence how we view them. In his decades of research, Dr. Seligman has developed a three-part framework people can use to interpret life’s challenges: permanence, pervasiveness and agency. I find it helpful to pose a question about each one when I’m feeling out of control. Is this problem permanent?Our brains are wired to focus on negative events more intensely than on positive ones, and they tend to linger in our minds longer. This can make a problem feel as if it’s here to stay — even if it isn’t. So when patients tell Dr. Seligman that they are anxious about something, he asks whether it is temporary. “Is it just this one situation? Is it going to hurt you only right now?” he asks. “Or is it going to last?’” Knowing that your problem has an end point can help you shift from a state of emergency to tolerance, even if it’s painful in the meantime, said Eric Zimmer, author of “How a Little Becomes a Lot.” Zimmer asks himself whether an issue will still bother him in five hours, five days or five weeks. If you determine that something will still worry you in five weeks, Zimmer said, then you can direct energy and resources toward dealing with it. Is this problem pervasive?Sometimes a misstep or a crisis can cause us to generalize, drawing sweeping conclusions from one event. An example, Dr. Seligman said, is telling yourself you’re unlovable after a breakup, as opposed to “‘I never should have hooked up with him to begin with.’” To harness your spiraling thoughts, Zimmer suggests asking yourself: Is this problem really affecting every single aspect of my life? What areas remain unaffected and positive? When we are in the midst of a difficult situation, “we can get so myopically focused that it looks enormous,” Zimmer said. Instead, he said, “zoom out and look at the whole picture.” Before he had his podcast, Zimmer started a solar energy business that eventually folded. At first, he told himself he was a failure. But when he asked himself if this problem was pervasive, he realized that he wasn’t a failure — it was his business that had failed. Where do I have agency with this problem?Dr. Seligman originally thought that personalization — the belief that negative events are all our fault — determined how a person viewed and weathered problems. But now he believes that agency, or the ability to take actions and make decisions that affect our lives, is a more important factor. After you have acknowledged an ordeal, Dr. Seligman said, you can ask yourself, “‘What can I plan to do about it?’” Pinpoint what is within your control — write it down if it helps — to figure out where you have agency, he said. For the most part, Dr. Seligman added, there is “almost always” something that you can find. When Zimmer is brainstorming solutions to an issue, he tries to see it as a puzzle instead of a problem, a concept he learned from the music producer Quincy Jones. “It allows me to think that in many cases, there is indeed a solution,” Zimmer said. “I just need to find it.” When it comes to my smelly basement, my dad has worn me down. I’m going to do what he suggests and call a mold guy: “Puzzle” solved. Like this email?
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