Negativity: the thief of joy

My post last week addressed thoughts, the building blocks of our day-to-day lives. We have thoughts relating to our work, we think about goings-on in our personal lives, we mull over whatever is happening to the characters in the Netflix series we are currently binging… and as I stated in that same post, no thought is bland; each comes with a flavour. For the most part, thoughts are either positively or negatively spiked. The residue they leave upon us has us feeling a certain way in the immediate aftermath, sometimes for the rest of the day, or the week. Insofar as it is possible, we each need to make it our business to ensure that our positively seasoned thoughts leave a stronger imprint on us and our psyche than their negative counterparts.

For the purpose of this post, we will have to dwell a little bit on the concept of negativity in order to better understand it. A definition of negativity provided by Psychology Today denotes it as “a pessimistic attitude that always expects the worst” (Barron, 2016). At this point, I would like to note the difference between pre-empting possible problems (and as a result, coming up with a plan to deal with them), and simply banking on it all to come toppling down no matter what. Each of us struggles with negativity day in day out - we are not supposed to be happy about or agree with everything, after all - but getting stuck in regular negative spirals can seriously reduce the quality of our lives, to the point of becoming depressed.

Negative thoughts can be hard to pinpoint and interrogate since they often occur without our being fully aware (although talk therapy assists massively with this). Negative behaviours, however, happen before our very eyes. They are something in which we choose to engage, and they in turn can be the fuel for negative thought patterns. My hope is that, having addressed some examples of negative behaviour here, you will become more adept at spotting it in your own life, and, in time, reduce how often you engage.

1. Bitching. When I say bitching, I mean going absolutely tooth-and-nail for someone, be it their character, their actions, their appearance, anything. I did plenty of bitching when I was in secondary school and college, about anyone and everyone under the sun. No stone was left unturned. And in hindsight, I can honestly say that those years were, for me, probably the unhappiest of my life. Gnawing insecurities made me turn the lens outward and pick apart other people and their actions, because giving out about how stupid their hair looked or how dumb their laugh sounded was way easier than holding the mirror up to myself and my own flaws. In the last couple of years, I have tried to reduce how much I give out about other people, as any time I do, it is me who feels bad afterwards. I may tell myself in the moment that I 'needed to unload', but it doesn't fix what I dislike about that person, and the negative residue I mentioned in the intro is what ends up clinging to me in the aftermath like a layer of skin, as if every toxic word I uttered is etched on the surface. I promise you, watch your life improve the less you bitch.

2. Mindlessly complaining. “How are you? How’re things? Well, what’s the story? How’re you getting on?” Be honest with yourself. When you are asked passing questions like these, and it probably happens multiple times a day, do you respond with “ugh I'm SO stressed this week”, “awh things are cat, I just want this day to be over”, or “absolutely n’able, I’m wrecked”? While those things might be true, why give them air-time? ‘How are you’ and its variants are pleasantries, they are considered typically normal ways to engage with our fellow humans, and oftentimes the other person is not actually all that interested in the answer, so why make it negative? Instead of proclaiming you wish the day to end, see if you can come up with a reason, no matter how small, to be thankful it happened at all (more on gratitude in a later post). However, I use the word ‘mindless’ at the top of this point deliberately. There is a difference between moaning on autopilot and actually venting your feelings about something that matters to you. Having our grievances heard by those in our support circle is important for our mental health, so get them off your chest, but not to the person serving you at the checkout in Centra.

3. Not being present. This is without a doubt the biggest thief of joy, and it is a behaviour we often do not realise we are doing, not to mind understand that it is negative. While we all enjoy a mindless Instagram scroll to give our busy brains a break, what it can often do is make them busier again - the blue light and pixels, first of all, but also the social comparisons, the information overload, the presence of ads left, right and centre pressuring us to consume, consume, consume. When we put our phones down, look around us, take a deep breath, notice things in the environment, truly tap in to our senses… there is peace to be found at every turn. I will give you a moment from today, October 1st, as I write this. I stood by the halfway line in the field as my class played ‘Capture the Flag’. Old me, stuck in my negative spiral, would have been worrying about whether or not the children were following the rules to the letter, fretting about impending paperwork, stressing about all the jobs I needed to have done by the end of the day, or replaying a conversation I had with a colleague the day before (‘what do you think he meant by this, why didn’t I say that’ etc.). Such behaviour would have, in that moment, robbed me of peace. However, new me, welcomer of peace, took a few seconds to stop and look towards the clear blue sky, breathe in the fresh air, tune in to the sun on my skin, really listen to my pupils’ cries of laughter all around me, and say to myself, “this is where I am meant to be”. Considering I had plans to emigrate to sunny Sydney in August, coming to such a conclusion while standing in Cork in the middle of a PE lesson wearing a raincoat was quite profound, and just thinking about it now makes me emotional, because it is a sign I am learning to focus on the here-and-now and the good in my life, instead of falling into old spirals that only give air-time to the bad.

I acknowledge that this list, and this post in general, is in no way exhaustive or all-encompassing. I want to keep things as digestible as I can here - spark some curiosity maybe and get you thinking to the point that you continue with some further reading and reflection yourself, on your terms. Negative behaviour is something in which we all engage, to some extent, but something we should also rightfully cull, if improving our quality of life is something in which we are invested.

Works Cited

Barron, Carrie. “Taking a Deeper Look at the ‘Negative Person.’” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 24 Nov. 2016, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-creativity-cure/201611/taking-deeper-look-the-negative-person.