Every time I have a medical checkup for a health issue I expect the worst. Cancer, diabetes, liver or kidney damage, high blood pressure, you name it and I’ve though it was a possibility. A probability. Deep down I feel like I’ve earned the bad outcome by not being a teetotalling, vegan, runner who never sets foot in the sun and volunteers at the battered woman’s homeless refugee shelter. By not being the best possible version of myself all of the time I deserve to be punished. The results of the exam are usually perfectly fine.
Obviously, sometimes they aren’t: hello hysterectomy! But that’s life. My issue of preparing for the worst I place in the category of Catastrophizing but it could also be Jumping to Conclusions. Thinking things are bad without any definite evidence. Other forms of Jumping to Conclusions include mind-reading (assuming that people are reacting negatively to you) and fortune-telling (predicting that things will turn out badly). That’s the thing about twisted thinking, distorted thoughts, so many of the descriptors overlap.
Other forms of Twisted Thinking include when we criticize ourselves or other people with shoulda, coulda, wouldas. Labeling, which is a form of negative self-talk in which we belittle ourselves when we make a mistake by calling ourselves derogatory names. Blaming ourselves for things that are out of our control or seeing ourselves as the cause of some unhealthy external event that we are not, even cannot possibly be, responsible for. Overgeneralizing a negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. Reasoning based in negative emotion. If we feel stupid we must be stupid.
In another example from my life I went home in November and was hanging out with one of my cousins. We are both in our 40s and grew up together. She mentioned that her nails were growing. I look and her nails are amazing. So healthy and strong. Voice tinged with a touch of envy I exclaim, “Your nails look fabulous!”
She responds dismissively, almost defensively, “You’ve always been able to grow your nails.” True. But since I hit forty my nails I’ve got ridges and splitting and curling. They still grow, but it’s not a pretty sight and the splitting can be downright painful.
Meanwhile, her nails were strong and shiny and straight. This may be an example of the mental filter: dwelling on the negatives and ignoring and/or discounting the positives. It is the insistence that our accomplishments or positive qualities don’t count. She is focusing exclusively on the negatives of her past and how our perspective nails used to be while I am focusing only on the negative of the present, the current decrepit state of my nails. This could also be an example of Personalization, a distortion where we believe that everything others do or say is some kind of direct, personal (and usually negative) reaction to us. We take virtually everything personally, even when something is not meant in that way. Those of us who experience this kind of thinking may also compare ourselves to others, trying to determine where to place ourselves in the hierarchy.
The types of twisted thinking tend to overlap. This is in part because negative self-talk is at the root of a lot of twisted thinking. Connected to anxiety, panic, depression, and stress negative self-talk is a way we destroy ourselves from within. That shrill and dangerous inner voice leaves us feeling worthless and exhausted. This is something I will repeat a lot: When we negative self-talk we speak to ourselves in a way we would never speak to someone we love. We tend to be more likely to succumb to negative self-talk when we are under stress. Uncertainty causes stress. Human beings crave certainty. The physical manifestations of stress negatively affect our health. This why we love a pattern. Our brains hate the unknown, the unfamiliar. Patterns are predictable, controllable. Safe. Even before computers people looked for patterns, in the stats and in our behavior. Brains want to reduce information load by reducing uncertainty. Patterns mean predictability and predictability means not only being able to control the present but to control the future. Patterns make the unknowable known.
We humans are unique on earth (that we know of) in our ability to worry about the future. We know the future exists, but we don’t know what’s going to happen in it. Uncertainty causes our brains to freeze, not unlike a deer in headlights, because it doesn’t know what to do. Our brain doesn’t really care what decision we make. That’s the problem. There’s a biological urge to reduce uncertainty at almost any cost. Uncertainty is more stressful than knowing something bad is going to happen. The brain’s preference for reducing uncertainty coupled with limitations on how much information we can access to reduce that uncertainty means we will make mistakes. The more complex something is, the bigger the possible mistake.
In Catastrophe I talked about how the rush of negative emotion, the onslaught of stress, leaves me feeling too tense to deal with things. Instead I push them aside while still obsessing about them. After days, weeks, or even months of gut-wrenching dread, I finally crumple under the strain. Procrastination is often a result of overwhelming uncertainty on the part of a brain that is seeking to reduce uncertainty. The striatum, a deep part of the lizard brain structure is one of our main action centers. It pushes us towards rewards but also away from punishments, from things we, it, perceives as painful. Regardless of whether the possible news is good or bad uncertainty is painful. The brain preps us with a rush of dopamine activates which the striatum. This is because the striatum not only anticipates good and bad consequences; it predicts the odds. When it rates the odds at around 50% it kicks into high gear because more uncertainty equals more stress. This is because taking action is best when we don’t know what is going to happen.
If we know we are going to be late then we accept that it’s something we can’t change and when we are going to be on time we don’t even begin to worry about it. But when we just might make it we are praying at every red light and honking at every dawdling pedestrian. Now the striatum is flooded with dopamine and its working overtime to push the odds in our favor. The nervous system responds by releasing a flood of hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol, which activate the body energizing action-oriented muscles throughout our body for emergency action. Our heart pounds faster, muscles tighten, blood pressure rises, breath quickens, and senses become sharper. We stress.
Threat and safety detection are linked to the amygdala. The striatum, also known as the neostriatum or striate nucleus, is a motor and reward center. So, yep, we are deep into that lizard brain again. The volume of a person’s striatum seems to be strongly connected to a low intolerance for uncertainty with lower tolerance equaling a more voluminous striatum. Which takes us back to negative self-thoughts. Negative thoughts are automatic, meaning we cannot directly control them. They are involuntary feedback based on the beliefs we hold about ourselves. Not all automatic thoughts are negative but those of us disposed towards negative automatic thoughts rather than positive automatic thoughts suffer consequences that are, well, negative. Among other not so great things they lead us down the twisted pass of distorted thinking of Catastrophizing, Jumping to Conclusions, Overgeneralizing, Labeling, and so on.
When the people we love and admire, the people we trust to protect us and tell us the truth, put us down, we tend to internalize it. This is especially true when we are children. These small, seemingly insignificant, statements that can come from our teachers, parents, or peers build up over time and are the source for much of the crap that we tell ourselves. Schemas are stable and rigid beliefs about ourselves and our relationships with others. When we hear these damaging things from people we look up to we start to find evidence in statements other people make and build a schema based on that.
And, here’s the thing. It may be that these destructive statements don’t dominate the narrative of our interactions with these people. It could even be that the majority of the statements we hear about ourselves are positive. The problem is our brains aren’t focusing on the positive. Evolution has designed us to focus on the danger. That emphasis is why we get twenty five minutes of mayhem and five minutes of feel good with our nightly news. The Powers That Be know how to get our attention. Even when they have to go out of the state, or the country, to find the chaos. The danger is in the shadows, the future, in the things we can neither see nor control.
It is in not measuring up, not contributing enough, in putting ourselves at risk of being ostracized from the group. The danger lies in failure and uncertainty. Thus it’s the negative statements, the things we feel we need to fix, that we internalize and obsess about. Especially if we have issues with our lizard brains or are already under stress. Something that is comparatively normal is made much worse. These schemas, these beliefs about ourselves, form the glasses through which we look at the world. The good news is they are learned patterns of thinking which means they can be unlearned.
To deal with these stressful circumstances we develop defense mechanisms. These are subconscious shields we construct to avoid pain and suffering. At their best defense mechanisms act as coping strategies addressing anxiety or stress. They allow us to buy time and space to deal with a situation in a healthy way. These shields provide protection but, immature or unhealthy defenses at best provide only temporary relief and at worst can prove harmful to us and those who love us. When we fail to acknowledge unwanted emotions we open ourselves to potentially destructive defense mechanisms. This can cause strained relationships and the buttressing of low self-esteem or anxiety. Regrettably for the many of us with issues with our lizard brains, any situation that brings uncertainty triggers our defense mechanisms.
Defense mechanisms include things like displacement where, instead of showing our anger to a person whose power over us could get us in trouble, we focus on something less threatening. This can become a problem if instead of channeling our anger at our boss on, say, an inanimate object or by throwing ourselves onto our work we aim that anger at our subordinates. Or even our friends and family.
Worse it could become projection, the feeling that people tend to be callous or unpleasant to us. Projection can be particularly raw when it scrapes against our insecurities. When we are self-conscious about something we feel like the thing we are insecure about is a beacon calling all eyes to its attention. We become paranoid. These assumptions then reinforce negative self-talk and anxiety which only heighten our insecurities which breeds hostility toward others which causes us to receive hostility in return which only makes us more paranoid in a cycle that only causes more damage with each go around. This can lead to transference when, instead of being vulnerable and acknowledging feelings of pain and hurt feelings, we lash out.
Other unhealthy, if too common, defense mechanisms include things like passive aggression, suppression, denial, and repression. We generally see denial as a refusal to see the reality of bad situations. But it can also be the inability to see the good, in situations and in ourselves. Repression is a common reaction to trauma. Passive aggression is probably the most common because it is about power. When we find ourselves in a position in which, due to societal constraints or our place in the power hierarchy, we are unable to be assertive or express our righteous (to us, anyway) anger passive aggression allows for a way to vent with less risk. Being passive aggressive can be more expedient than confrontation and less vulnerable than assertiveness.
Negative defense mechanisms often come to play when we feel powerless, when we feel our voice is being silenced. Especially when we are in an emotionally challenging environment. This is particularly true in those of us who have a history of being teased or bullied without resolution. The use of negative defense mechanisms is a survival strategy to stop us from being victimizes again. Unfortunately the use negative defense mechanisms will inevitably cause our relationships to become confusing, destructive, and dysfunctional.
Fortunately there are mature, healthy, defenses we can learn. When we feel stressed or anxious we can sublimate these feeling by doing something we enjoy. Something constructive and/or creative like cooking, a hobby, or tackling a project that we’ve put off. If we know a situation will be challenging we can anticipate and plan for possible problems. Instead of focusing on our own trouble we can be altruistic and reach out to help others. Finding humor, even under stress or while grieving, can be very beneficial coping mechanism. Laughter triggers the release of endorphins, decreases stress hormones and increases immune cells and infection-fighting antibodies.
While pushing ourselves to be better is a good thing doing it by telling ourselves how awful we currently are is at best self-defeating. The stories we tell ourselves matter. That negative nagger isn’t harmless. It limits us and stops us from being the best possible version of ourselves. It makes us uneasy and uncomfortable in our humanity. Recognize the voice, name it, and flip it on its head. Instead of punishing ourselves for our very human failures we need to refocus on rewarding our victories. We can fight back against negative self-talk with the truth of our successes. The really cool part about be being human is though we can never be perfect (and who would want to be? Sounds boring!) we can always be better.
Here are a few helpful worksheets on challenging distorted thinking and negative thoughts.
Sources
https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/cognitive-distortions/#techniques-cognitive-distortions
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/04/uncertainty-stressful-research-neuroscience
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10996
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886902000910
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/neuronarrative/201604/why-we-hate-not-knowing-sure
https://psychcentral.com/news/2017/05/19/difficulty-dealing-with-uncertainty-may-have-biological-basis/120775.html?utm_content=bufferb0ea1&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
https://www.thecut.com/2017/06/a-biological-reason-some-people-cant-stand-uncertainty.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886902000910
https://neurosciencenews.com/uncertainty-three-chemicals-5521/
https://www.fastcompany.com/3062984/a-guide-to-uncertainty-for-people-who-hate-not-knowing
https://www.forbes.com/sites/entrepreneursorganization/2017/07/14/3-steps-to-overcome-your-negative-self-talk/#68791abb4195