I like the idea of reminding myself specifically of how I have made even the smallest improvements to my personal failings, because they are very easy to ignore or forget about. In my experience, change typically happens very slowly and imperceptibly, with bursts of insight and more visible change that occasionally break through. In fact, I realize that I need to remind my kids of this too— focus on pointing out what they are doing right, out loud and often.
Another thought: a fellow therapist recommends another form of gratitude journaling that he calls “beautiful moments.” I’ve found that reflecting on moments of beauty from my week helps balance out the doom and gloom that we hear about and read about with the 24/7 news cycle. For example, we have a bird’s nest on the Christmas wreath still hanging on our door, with gorgeous blue eggs that have just hatched into fuzzy little baby birds. This small miracle happens countless times the world over but is never reported on. Can we really say that there are more ugly moments than beautiful moments occurring every single day? And the more beautiful moments I recall, the more balanced my perspective becomes. The little things, whether in personal development, or parenting, or day-to-day living, really do matter, much more than we give them credit for.
1. Yes, exactly! My original title for this post was "self-efficacy journaling", but the writing process led me to this more general thesis. There are several ways to brand it and different ways may be more intuitive and helpful to different people.
2. Beyond the moments themselves, I think the ability to enjoy beautiful moments is a profound form of mental health that we can be grateful for every day. In health we tend to enjoy life naturally, but death comes for us all... and on the way there we all fall apart in different ways (Oliver Sacks was good at documenting the intellectually fascinating and sometimes amusing neurological ones).
May we all enjoy that form of health to the end, and may we be granted the strength to endure and continue serving one another, whatever comes.
Interesting idea. I might try it for alleviating negative thought patterns, e.g. catastrophism.
Besides the 'toxic positivity' thing, gratitude journaling sometimes augments my baseline anxiety. It's an unintended effect, but my mind can follow the path of 'yes, see how good you have it -- and you're about to lose it all' haha. But I have to admit that I never really stuck with the practice to really evaluate it.
My wife has helped me push back against catastrophism-type anxiety by asking "if it happened, would it really be so bad? wouldn't you adapt?"
You can approach that question from both a theoretical angle (if the bad thing happened, I would do this, and I can imagine it going okay) and an empirical one (when bad things happened in the past, I adapted and it was okay).
The empirical approach is precisely targeted gratitude journaling applied to the catastrophism anxiety itself. I'm not sure what the theoretical one would be called.
Yeah, someone told me exactly this once, and was indeed a good suggestion!
From my POV, though, there are two classes of situations. The first class is comprised of things that, in fact, would not be that bad. I don't know, maybe losing one's job, failing a presentation, embarrassing oneself, and so on. The second class, though, has events that would be *that* bad. I'm thinking more of terminal diseases or, to quote something that causes a considerable distress to me nowadays, some form of AI doom. I know even in cases such as these, one could see some kind of bright side (e.g. terminal diagnosis > I'll enjoy the life that I still have), but honestly it is hard for me to utter 'well, I and everyone I love will die in a single event in the next few years, but that's not *that* bad'. I've been reading a bit on ACT lately because it seems that it should be a bit more helpful for this kind of situation.
Interesting! Personally the big terrible risks that I can't do anything about don't bother me much. What I tend to struggle with is a harsh internal sense combining anxiety and self-disgust. It seems to be telling me that I should be doing more to help make things better, but I don't know how, or I don't want to do what seems necessary, and that's pathetic. If I have a triumph, especially on a Friday, I get a little respite, but then on Monday it's time to work again and the feeling comes back. It's like I have this really intense hedonic treadmill around self-efficacy.
I like the idea of reminding myself specifically of how I have made even the smallest improvements to my personal failings, because they are very easy to ignore or forget about. In my experience, change typically happens very slowly and imperceptibly, with bursts of insight and more visible change that occasionally break through. In fact, I realize that I need to remind my kids of this too— focus on pointing out what they are doing right, out loud and often.
Another thought: a fellow therapist recommends another form of gratitude journaling that he calls “beautiful moments.” I’ve found that reflecting on moments of beauty from my week helps balance out the doom and gloom that we hear about and read about with the 24/7 news cycle. For example, we have a bird’s nest on the Christmas wreath still hanging on our door, with gorgeous blue eggs that have just hatched into fuzzy little baby birds. This small miracle happens countless times the world over but is never reported on. Can we really say that there are more ugly moments than beautiful moments occurring every single day? And the more beautiful moments I recall, the more balanced my perspective becomes. The little things, whether in personal development, or parenting, or day-to-day living, really do matter, much more than we give them credit for.
1. Yes, exactly! My original title for this post was "self-efficacy journaling", but the writing process led me to this more general thesis. There are several ways to brand it and different ways may be more intuitive and helpful to different people.
2. Beyond the moments themselves, I think the ability to enjoy beautiful moments is a profound form of mental health that we can be grateful for every day. In health we tend to enjoy life naturally, but death comes for us all... and on the way there we all fall apart in different ways (Oliver Sacks was good at documenting the intellectually fascinating and sometimes amusing neurological ones).
May we all enjoy that form of health to the end, and may we be granted the strength to endure and continue serving one another, whatever comes.
Interesting idea. I might try it for alleviating negative thought patterns, e.g. catastrophism.
Besides the 'toxic positivity' thing, gratitude journaling sometimes augments my baseline anxiety. It's an unintended effect, but my mind can follow the path of 'yes, see how good you have it -- and you're about to lose it all' haha. But I have to admit that I never really stuck with the practice to really evaluate it.
My wife has helped me push back against catastrophism-type anxiety by asking "if it happened, would it really be so bad? wouldn't you adapt?"
You can approach that question from both a theoretical angle (if the bad thing happened, I would do this, and I can imagine it going okay) and an empirical one (when bad things happened in the past, I adapted and it was okay).
The empirical approach is precisely targeted gratitude journaling applied to the catastrophism anxiety itself. I'm not sure what the theoretical one would be called.
Yeah, someone told me exactly this once, and was indeed a good suggestion!
From my POV, though, there are two classes of situations. The first class is comprised of things that, in fact, would not be that bad. I don't know, maybe losing one's job, failing a presentation, embarrassing oneself, and so on. The second class, though, has events that would be *that* bad. I'm thinking more of terminal diseases or, to quote something that causes a considerable distress to me nowadays, some form of AI doom. I know even in cases such as these, one could see some kind of bright side (e.g. terminal diagnosis > I'll enjoy the life that I still have), but honestly it is hard for me to utter 'well, I and everyone I love will die in a single event in the next few years, but that's not *that* bad'. I've been reading a bit on ACT lately because it seems that it should be a bit more helpful for this kind of situation.
Interesting! Personally the big terrible risks that I can't do anything about don't bother me much. What I tend to struggle with is a harsh internal sense combining anxiety and self-disgust. It seems to be telling me that I should be doing more to help make things better, but I don't know how, or I don't want to do what seems necessary, and that's pathetic. If I have a triumph, especially on a Friday, I get a little respite, but then on Monday it's time to work again and the feeling comes back. It's like I have this really intense hedonic treadmill around self-efficacy.