Of course, it must be taken note of the dangers that can ensue when you don’t take that advice and instead elect to swing back and forth from one extreme side of something to another. Take, for example, water—a necessity to be alive, an absolute need if you want to be healthy or functional. Water is incredibly healthy, has no calories, refreshes you, can help with weight loss, and has many other subtle but proven health benefits. So, someone trying to get more hydrated may dive head-first into their new fixation on drinking a lot of water. While this in and of itself doesn’t really cause a lot of problems, it can grow to be something that causes significant damage to your person.
Sure, everyone knows the dangers of not drinking enough water. When you’re dehydrated, your mouth begins to feel dry and you start to feel bad. You lack the sharp focus you may have had when you were hydrated, and all around you become much less productive than you would be if you were properly hydrated earlier that day. When that hydration peaks, it can be difficult to draw the line between what is simply being thirsty and what constitutes being rushed to the hospital and having to have an IV in your arm. When you become too dehydrated, your condition can worsen quickly, and very easily, often without you noticing. This is what happens to most people who suffer from sunstroke—they simply don’t know when to spot then they are now nearing the point where if they don’t want to suddenly faint, they have to drink water. Because they don’t quite know how to spot those signs, many of those who suffer from sunstroke become victims of that kind of thing and receive punishment for it. They live with the knowledge that by stubbornly ignoring someone’s advice, they put their health and potentially even their lives at risk.
On the flip side of that, there are many people who drink water compulsively. This may be to try to get rid of their oral fixation, sometimes even to quit smoking, or it can just be because that person happens to be on a new fixation with some kind of health or weight loss technique. While water is a good way to lose weight and lessen appetite, it often doesn’t give people who drink lots of it the satisfying effects they may crave. As I said, its effects are rather slow and rather subtle, when not matched with exercise and a change in eating habits by that person. At any rate, many people enjoy drinking water just for the mental and physical satisfaction of it. While that is healthy in its own action and for its own sake, some people go much too far with it. Obsessive people who may be hell bent on their new fixation can over hydrate, something that is equally as dangerous as being dangerously dehydrated. If you drink an incredible amount of water in a relatively short period of time, a time period disproportionate to the amount of water you intake, the level of sodium in your blood can plummet and can have very serious and even fatal effects on your body. The main cause of death from drinking too much water is just this, the condition of having incredibly low sodium in your body which is also referred to as “water intoxication”. Although it may sound a bit silly, water intoxication takes a notable number of lives each year. Currently, as well, there’s a push for younger people to drink more water, as the dark aesthetic of being depraved has faded from popularity and the proper picture of good skin and good health has come in to replace that aesthetic instead. This push could easily sway many young people to put themselves more at risk for this kind of condition, which can be incredibly dangerous to them and to their health. So, although you should still, of course, drink plenty of water each day, there’s something to be said about taking anything to the extreme, no matter what it is.
But, you might ask what about things that isn’t physical? Sure, you can have too much or too little food, too much or too little water, too much or too little sleep, exercise, sex, what have you. But, is there really something to be said about the risk of having too much love? Too much trust? Too much happiness?
The answer is, put simply, absolutely. While gauging what is and what isn’t too much or too little of something so abstract and fluid as love, trust, hope, joy, or sadness, we can say from personal experience within ourselves and with others that, yes, you can have too much or too little of something that metaphysical.
While again, it’s much harder to judge the scale for things that don’t have a physical manifestation of a physical basis; many people can actually die from sadness. The condition is actually heartstrings breaking down from strain to the heart, causing the heart itself to collapse in on itself and destroy the body from the inside out. While it is a physical reaction to something more abstract, that strain to the heart can be caused by intense emotion, namely despair. This would usually be something like heartbreak—no pun intended—like separation from a long-time partner, the death of a loved one, or something else equally as crushing to that person. That kind of sadness can destroy a person purely in the emotional sense, but it can actually also destroy them in the literal sense of fatality from that kind of sadness. Similarly, anger can also have this kind of effect on someone, given the context and the proper degree. Any kind of emotion, really, can have an effect like this on someone. It’s just something that poses a much more real danger to us as people than we may have previously thought. In much calmer terms, emotions and love can burn us out. Sure, those things definitely aren’t anything that causes death or similarly intense symptoms, but those results are nothing to disregard. Consider this, while dating someone new, the first few months are great. You feel so incredibly in love, like this person has got to be the one for you, your forever and always, the perfect match. You feel more strongly than you ever had before, and you’re bursting to scream to the world how much you love them, and they feel the exact same way. They want to show you off to everyone, and the two of you are joined at the hip. But, suddenly, and out of nowhere, that “spark” seems to just suddenly die. Suddenly the two of you are no longer as connected, it feels exhausting to be around them, you don’t go on random walks late at night anymore, no more of those cute and charming dates, and what you used to interpret as their cute quirks and eccentricities are now things that you can’t stand, things that get in the way of your already busy and exhausting schedule. You feel terrible, and so do they and neither of you have any clue why. You don’t think anything bad happened in your relationship to drag you apart from each other, but you don’t know how to explain this sudden “death” of what you may have thought was your love. So, what the hell happened to you two?
The harsh reality is, you weren’t even in love from the start—you were, however, incredibly infatuated with your partner. Many people would tell you that you fell out of love, but it actually more of the opposite. In reality, you’re beginning the first stage of actually loving someone, which requires you to step out of the first phase of a relationship, also often called the “Honeymoon Phase”. This phase has a lot of dopamine and other pleasure chemicals running around inside your brain at pretty much all times, and it’s exactly those chemicals, serotonin and dopamine and everything else that makes you feel so passionately for them. You don’t feel a genuine connection yet. However, you do feel incredibly in love with your and their ideal selves. Because you feel so passionately about those versions of you and your partner respectively, your brain just interprets that feeling as “true love”, instead of what it really is beneath the rose-colored glasses—infatuation which inevitably dies after a few months. The honeymoon stage of a relationship lasts anywhere from a few months to a year and a half, and after that, you feel that dreaded drop-off of feeling. You feel like you don’t love them anymore because you no longer have a constant stream of chemicals coursing through you. Now, however, you have the ruts in your mind from those chemicals. You have space in your mind where those feelings and those chemicals would run through you as they normally do, but the overload of them in the honeymoon phase has left the part of your brain that deals with your significant other fried. Your brain needs time to stabilize again, and until then you’ll feel as though the “spark” between the two of you has faded completely. This part of love almost never lasts quite as long as the other step that came be
fore, a few months. It depends on the person and how intense their honeymoon phase was for them and their significant other. A lot of couples don’t make it past that point, but the ones that do are rewarded with a relationship that is often endgame or at least is very long-term and hopefully fulfilling. After the dead spark phase, the “love” reignites in the form of the next phase, and the cycle begins again, renewed now that the infatuation has been replaced with a more real, deeper, truer love in the third and final phase of most endgame relationships—that phase in which you really learn more about each other, become best friends on top of your relationship, and become synced for real this time.
Although that’s a tangent, it shows that you can actually have too much love, as long as that love comes in the form of chemicals. We get tired of things we love if we do them too much. That’s why when a good song gets played way too much on the radio, even though it’s a great song, it gets killed. We hate it because it’s become annoying with how much we hear it against our will.
Too much of something, too little of something, too big or too small, the way we teach our children, the way we raise our children, the way we live as children. All of these things combine and collaborate to make what we know as the current epidemic of negative thinking. The way to stop lies in the hands of the people who created it, and the people who suffer because of it. If you want to give up on your negative thinking and becoming happier and healthier, that’s fine. But, I don’t think you would be planning on doing that if you were reading this far into a book about stopping just that bad habit. Just know that, no matter what, you have the power inside of you to do whatever you think is right. The power is in you, has always been inside you, and it will always be inside of you. What matters is whether or not you have a little faith in yourself and in the people who love you and support you. Those are the people you need the most, with the exception being yourself.
Chapter 9
What It Means to Be Positive
You have met people in your life who are insufferably happy. Nothing ever seems to be bothering them, everything just rolls off their back and into the puddles they splash in like a child. They seem so strangely positive and happy-go-lucky; it’s almost as if they’ve never received bad news in their whole lives. Not only is witnessing them move through life like every day is indescribably sunny kind of off-putting, but it might also make you a little concerned for their mental health. After all, you’ve probably more than learned that beneath a smile, is often someone very sad, very broken, and very scared. Keeping that façade up can be difficult, but some people manage to do it well and do it for a very long time before the cracks start to show. Perhaps, you might think to yourself, this is one of those people. They never show the chink in their metaphorical armor; they always help but never ask for it in return. I could go on and on forever about this hypothetical person because everyone’s met them. But, you’d be right—no one is truly that positive. If they are, that may actually be just as unhealthy as having habitually negative thinking.
What I mean by that is, simply put, that you have to have a balance in all points in your life. I’ve ragged on all different types of people for being just a bit too negative, not giving in their all, victimizing themselves, and doing countless other things that feel better in the moment but don’t actually resolve anything, but perhaps all of those things don’t even scratch the surface of what some people do that is even worse than thinking such terrible things about themselves and others. Like I said the last chapter, switching from one extreme to the next only causes mental shock; it sends you into a state of panic and leaves you not quite knowing what to do with yourself. Acting extremely is, in a strange way, something like a purely human trait. It's bizarre, it’s unhealthy, and it likely ends in disaster, but it’s a trait we all can’t seem to kick.
When you go through your life forcing yourself to be positive and happy constantly, or almost constantly, you’re working on destroying the reasonable part of yourself who is especially good at pointing out mistakes and flaws in things. The secret to a balance between being a scathing pessimist and having the unhealthy thoughts that have been put under the spotlight this entire time, and being a scathing optimist—someone who is so optimistic that it’s unhealthy and, in many cases, delusional—is being able to step back and analyze the faults in something but being satisfied when you make corrections.
Although it seems equally unhealthy try to disconnect yourself from your flaws every once and a while, just as long as you’re taking a deep, long look at them in a realistic, but critical sense. When we attach ourselves to criticism and take it as a personal slight, it hurts not just our feels, but it damages our performance as well. When we feel as though one person in our life hates us—even if they really don’t--then that same suspicion in marked all over everyone else in our lives, and we retreat into the safe space into our own head, where we can hide underneath all of that negative thinking and victimization until someone is willing to show that they care for us enough to dig us out of our mental canyon. When we actively decide not to take things personally, though, that accidentally hurtful remark can evolve into something much healthier, something more constructive than you yourself can harness to improve yourself, instead of letting the remark get you down and add power to your negative thinking. Nevertheless, we always like to think that somehow, we’ll have someone there to save us someday, from just about everything in the world, our knight in shining armor or just a friend or a mother to hold us and validate us and make us feel like we don‘t need to do anything, like it isn’t our fault at all.
The reality isn’t nearly that pretty, unfortunately—you have to be the one and only person to dig yourself out of your mental canyon. Although it can be scary to do so, we have to be our own knight in shining armor. We have to collectively discard the thought that someone is going to come to rescue you whenever we want, whenever we need them to. That kind of thinking is what renders us passive, submissive, and what helps to keep us in that prison of negative thoughts, which make us spiral farther and farther into our head. We go farther and farther into the obsession with not having to take initiative and go forward with the lives of our own accord. That’s, unfortunately, something much closer to the truth.
While no one really likes doing things all by themselves, people who have that kind of negative thinking are very rarely doing it because they want to. Most don’t want to think that way, but they feel that it’s just them following their “programming”, in a sense. Their entire life, or at least most of their childhood, has been filled with their parents or guardians defending them and assuring them that whatever mess they made, it’s not their responsibility and it isn’t their job to clean up for it. No, that responsibility at the time fell solely on them, that parent or guardian watching over the child. In reality, it’s not the child’s job to watch out for themselves, simply because no one else will. They have no idea how to actually take responsibility for their actions, and they don’t know how to take responsibility without making everyone turn against them for doing something bad in the first place. But, here’s another secret—what you do initially does nothing to define you as a person. The chances you get, the luck you have, doesn’t reflect on you really. However, what does reflect on you is how you react to the cards you’ve been dealt over the course of your life. If you choose to ignore the responsibility of what you’ve done, it reflects heavily that you’re someone afraid of responsibility, someone who probably can’t handle commitment, and a lot of other things that aren’t exactly great to have said about you. But, no matter what you had done wrong in the past if you bravely own up to it with courage, that reflects the exact opposite about you. Although you did do something wrong, sometimes that something is simply inexcusable for the position or for the job or whatever scenario it may have taken place in, it reflects well on you that you owned up to it and at least put forth an honest to goodness effort toward bettering yourself and bettering the situation you were placed
in. Not only does that take the courage inside you to take responsibility, but it also takes a lot of positive—or at least, realistic—thinking. When we leave high school as children to go off to whatever college we may have gotten accepted to, we also leave a life that has been structured for us our entire lives. Whether we admit it or not, whether we like it or not, we really start to miss that structure. It came from our parents, sure, and our least favorite teachers back then, but it was still structure, something that gave us some semblance of meaning, and that meant a lot to us at the time. We enjoyed not having to know exactly what to do. It’s comforting to just have to follow instructions all day long. Once we leave high school and go off to live on our own, we often leave our parents and our teachers behind, and we have to start making our own structure. That, in itself, can be mortifying. We as humans, although we might be very individualized and independent, inherently pack animals and don’t ever like having to be surrounded by people we find unfamiliar. We just don’t function like other animals, which travel alone and live alone and survive best just that way, alone. Although in the modern world of today, learning to live that way might actually turn out to be better for our collective health.
Master Your Thinking Page 6
