Reality Resilience Serenity Mindfulness
RESILIENCE 1st
Coping with reality utilising our full capacity usually results to us continously gaining even further strength to return to normal rather faster after having to bend. This is resilience; simply explained.-mmt/ October 27, 2020
“Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared, and more acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can’t persuade himself to believe are good.”
A psychologist explains why “positive thinking” is terrible advice
Have you ever been told to just “think positive” and your problems will go away?
Or that to achieve your goals, all you have to visualize them with positive intent?
Does it really help us live better lives?
Why positive thinking might be bad advice
In an interview with the Verge, psychologist Tasha Eurich says that one of the most common causes of unhappiness is deluding ourselves by avoiding reality.
Specifically, she says that just embracing the brighter side of life causes us to lose self-awareness, which is the real cause of unhappiness:
“When we delude ourselves from seeing true reality, we tend to be less happy, less successful and equally importantly, the people around them tend to view them pretty negatively.”
“People who see themselves clearly are more forgiving and they’re gentle and compassionate toward both themselves and others. People who are self-aware are higher in empathy and perspective-taking. It kind of does make sense because part of truly being self-aware is understanding how you come across to other people and the impact you have on them. And to be able to do that you kind of have to put yourself in their shoes.”
Sigmund Freud described it best.
He said there was an “unconscious mind”, with certain thoughts and feelings and emotions we don’t have access to consciously.
When thinking of the unconscious mind, it can use to compare the mind to an iceberg.
Everything above the water is conscious awareness while everything below is unconscious.
Consider how the iceberg would look. Only a small portion of the iceberg is actually visible above water. What you cannot see from the surface is a large amount of ice that makes up the majority of the iceberg, deep below in the water.
Our conscious awareness is simply the “tip of the iceberg”. The rest is simply below the surface.
This may not be able to be accessed consciously, but it can still influence our behavior. A primary assumption of the Freudian theory is that the unconscious mind influences behavior to a greater degree than people suspect.
You ask me: Am I against positive philosophy? Yes, because I am also against negative philosophy.
I have to be against both because both choose only half the fact, and both try to ignore the other half.
And remember: a half-truth is far more dangerous than a whole lie, because the whole lie will be discovered by you sooner or later. How long can it remain undiscovered by you? A lie, of course, is a lie; it is just a palace made of playing cards — a little breeze and the whole palace disappears.
But the half-truth is dangerous. You may never discover it, you may continue to think it is the whole truth. So the real problem is not the whole lie, the real problem is the half-truth pretending to be the whole truth; and that is what these positivist people are doing.
The negative ideas of your mind have to be released, not repressed by positive ideas. You have to create a consciousness which is neither positive nor negative. That will be the pure consciousness.
In that pure consciousness, you will live the most natural and blissful life…
You don’t like a person, you don’t like many things; you don’t like yourself, you don’t like the situation you are in. All this garbage goes on collecting in the unconscious, and on the surface a hypocrite is born, who says, “I love everybody, love is the key to blissfulness.” But you don’t see any bliss in that person’s life. He is holding the whole of hell within himself.
He can deceive others, and if he goes on deceiving long enough, he can deceive himself too. But it won’t be a change. It is simply wasting life — which is immensely valuable because you cannot get it back.
Positive thinking is simply the philosophy of hypocrisy — to give it the right name. When you are feeling like crying, it teaches you to sing. You can manage if you try, but those repressed tears will come out at some point, in some situation. There is a limitation to repression. And the song that you were singing was absolutely meaningless; you were not feeling it, it was not born out of your heart.
The question then becomes: How can we learn to accept our emotions?
Here’s an exercise adapted from a workbook developed by Dr. Steven Hayes at the University of Nevada.
Step one: Identify the emotion
If you have more than one emotion, just pick one. If you don’t know what the emotion is, sit for a moment and pay attention to your physical sensations and thoughts. Give it a name and write it down on a piece of paper.
Step two: Give it some space
Close your eyes and imagine putting that emotion three meters in front of you. You’re going to put it outside of yourself and observe it.
Step three: Now that the emotion is outside of you, close your eyes and answer the following questions:
If your emotion had a size, what size would it be? If your emotion had a shape, what shape would it be? If your emotion had a color, what color would it be?
Once you’ve answered these questions, imagine putting the emotion out in front of you with the size, shape, and color. Just observe it and acknowledge it for what it is. When you’re ready, you can let the emotion return to its original place inside you.
Step four: Reflection
Once you’ve completed the exercise, you can take a moment to reflect on what you’ve noticed. Did you notice a change in your emotion when you got a little distance from it? Did the emotion feel different in some way once the exercise was finished?
This exercise may seem weird, but it has helped many people understand their emotions and learn to be more accepting of them.
Acceptance and understanding your emotions will help you make your life better.
Almost nobody is self-aware, says psychologist Tasha Eurich in her new book Insight. So many of us are obsessed with “knowing ourselves” and spend hours contemplating who we are and how we appear to others. But few truly know either our own desires and goals (what she calls “internal self-awareness”) or how others see us (or “external self-awareness.”)
Psychological resilience is the ability to mentally or emotionally cope with a crisis or to return to pre-crisis status quickly. Resilience exists when the person uses “mental processes and behaviors in promoting personal assets and protecting self from the potential negative effects of stressors”.
Key Points
Resilience is the ability to bounce back when things don’t go as planned. There are three main elements that resilient people possess. These are challenge, commitment, and control. You can develop resilience in several ways. First, take care to exercise regularly and get enough sleep, so that you can control stress more easily. The stronger you feel physically and emotionally, the easier it is for you to overcome challenges.
Focus on thinking positively, and try to learn from the mistakes you make. Build strong relationships with colleagues and friends, so that you have a support network to fall back on. Also, set specific and achievable personal goals that match your values, and work on building your self-confidence.
../To be continued-mmt-October 27, 2020-Çeşme