Dream or Dread?
“I have a new philosophy. I’m only going to dread one day at a time.”
Have you ever noticed that when you’re afraid of or dreading an event or confrontation, you rehearse it going negatively in your head many times beforehand? (Holiday dinner with crazy uncle Fred, for example!) You may not do this in every case, but I bet this pattern is familiar to you, because we all do it sometimes! Unfortunately, for numerous reasons, it’s not the best strategy if you want to set yourself up for success.
First, the emotional reasons. Imagining that the experience will go poorly, everything will fall apart, and you can’t win is likely to just fuel your dread of the event until you’re really miserable—not just about this, but about anything similar that happened in the past and that you’re afraid of recreating. This starts you rolling with a pervasive bad mood, which is likely to send you into a tailspin if anything else happens to annoy you; it may color your world through grunge-colored glasses so that it’s hard to enjoy the things that are genuinely good in your life. No one really wants to feel bad, but we create and exacerbate bad moods with our mental habits because we’re struggling with something we don’t see how to solve. Because we’re encountering things that are challenging. Because we’re used to treading subconscious grooves that we may not be aware are even there.
Physically, these unpleasant emotions create chemicals in your body—stress hormones and others—that cause a chain reaction, making it hard for you to do basic, necessary things (that the body can place on hold in an emergency) like digesting your food and thinking logically. Studies show that whether you’re a single cell or a human, you can’t be in defense mode and constructive/healing mode at the same time. Essentially, undue stress incapacitates you for everything but immediate self-preservation functions.
Which brings us to the mind. Brain science shows us that the more time you spend practicing something, the more robust your supporting neural pathways become. Your brain becomes habituated to doing that thing, so that’s it’s comfortable, easy, and likely in the future. It’s then a path of least resistance. This is helpful when what you’ve practiced is a positive skill or habit, but not so great when it’s your propensity to imagine and expect the worst. By the time the event you’ve been dreading happens, you’re primed to see and contribute to the worst result with your own expectations and actions. Even if it goes better than expected, you may come away from it with a sour taste in your mouth because of all the negative buildup and your tendency to be in the groove of those feelings you practiced so many times over before the scene ever unfolded.
Fortunately, this is just a bad habit that we tend to run without realizing we have a choice in the matter. We can choose to circumvent it and all of its dubious consequences with better choices, and achieve better results. First, we need to become determined to notice when we’re starting to project negative results. This may be challenging, but it gets easier with just a little practice. If you check in with yourself numerous times each day and become aware of your emotional states, chances are you’ll start to catch yourself rehearsing cycles of dread. You can remind yourself to do this in any number of ways, such as sticky notes, calendar reminders, phone alarms, etc. Eventually, you’ll catch yourself a lot faster and be able to arrest the pattern before it really takes hold, knowing that this worry won’t help you, and you need a better strategy.
You then have choices. The goal of meditation is often to rehearse a calm, neutral state so that it’s more natural to live without prejudgments, automatic emotional triggers, or preoccupations that block us from seeing what’s actually happening in each moment. You can shoot to come to each situation with a neutral, open, curious “beginner’s mind.” This is great for staying open to all of your creativity and capacity, and at the very least not making a challenging situation worse than it needs to be. Or, if you’re pretty good at keeping your cool already, you can shoot even higher and make your goal to actively improve your situation through intending the best possible experience for everyone, leading to the best long-term results for the world. When this is your intention, you may find yourself realizing as you rehearse that you need better skills and some help preparing for your challenge—but also feeling motivated to find what you need to grow into the person who can sail through the challenge with excellence rather than just skating by without disaster. Either of these choices is better than what you’re doing when you’re mindlessly worrying about the situation! Whichever you’re going to work with, you can then substitute imagining your upcoming challenge going easily and well using one of these two focuses.
These ideas may sound simple and relatively easy to implement, but they can be surprisingly tricky to habituate yourself to. There’s a lot that we do mentally on autopilot, so it really takes some effort to change your mental habits effectively in a global way. I encourage you to work on it anyway, because this effort pays better returns in the coin of happiness than most of the ways you could be spending your time. And, of course, when you find that you’re really stuck on a situation, don’t forget to Tap to reduce your fears, frustrations, and limited thinking around it. The mind can do a lot, but you can’t think yourself out of all your emotions and concerns. Sometimes you need direct intervention that aligns the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual parts of you in the face of difficulty. When you use all the tools you have and stick with it, you’ll find that you make progress, and over time, you gain confidence that you can handle more challenging situations, which reduces your overall stress.