As I’ve sat with hundreds of clients over the years, I’ve been stumped by one tendency that almost everyone shares:  we seem predisposed to think more negatively than positively in most situations. Whether we are “catastrophizing” our life situation,s or giving ourselves mental feedback that would scorch the ears of our enemies, our thinking is not always the most helpful or productive.

Perhaps Mark Twain summed it up best when he opined late in his life, “I am a very old man and have suffered a great many misfortunes, most of which never happened.”

Well, it turns out that Darwin’s theory of evolution could be to blame.  Our ancestors who realized there were dangers and actively worried about them were a lot more prepared when a stressful event happened.  Conversely, forgetting moments of pleasure was not correlated with living longer.  So, as a recent article in the Psychotherapy Networker put it, “We evolved with minds that are like Velcro for bad thoughts and Teflon for good ones.”

Pay attention: the next time someone gives you a compliment you will find twenty reasons to discount it.  But let a zinger come your way, and you might spend the rest of the day alternately arguing with it and believing it completely!

Those lucky dogs

Here’s how dogs handle it.  They get activated by a stressor, their arousal system reacts and then they reliably return to baseline shortly after the danger has passed.  I once saw a nature show about a wolf encountering a threat and tensing his entire body in response. When the danger passed, he let out an enormous shake, from nose to the tip of his tail, as a way to discharge the energy and go on with his day.  In contrast, we get stuck in the “on” position as we obsess about what happened, and what might be coming next.  If your dog is anything like mine, not only has he forgotten about the stressor, but he is already asleep!

There is hope

Stay tuned…in my next post, I give you some tips on how to outwit evolution and to copy that canine-like ability to roll with the punches without obsessing.

Gabeira holds the record for the biggest wave ever surfed by a woman, 45 feet (to get an idea of what she’s up against, check out her skill in these photos. Because of the danger inherent in the sport, being in the moment is paramount. But out of the water, Gabeira alludes to the fact that she struggles with what most of us do; how to manage overwhelming and distressing feelings without either pushing them away or criticizing ourselves for them. “When you’re scared and uncomfortable, you can allow yourself not to do anything but sit there and feel that sensation,” she says, “and you will go past it. The fear kind of mellows out, and what you’re left with is more confidence.” This skill is called mindfulness (www.mindfulness.com) and it means paying attention on purpose to the present moment, bringing acceptance and not judgment to whatever feelings you are experiencing. Mindfulness has been strongly linked to the reduction of anxiety and depression in clinical trials, promoting the idea that you can learn new habits that lead to a more centered and peaceful mood (if you are struggling with depression, check out this book about mindfulness which has lots of great research behind its effectiveness.

She also acknowledged that she used to “want to be everywhere at all times” which just made her feel more scattered. In modern life we all struggle with being spread too thin, allowing our attentions and efforts to be diluted by trying to do too much. Gabeira concluded, “now I realize that I just have to be ready for the biggest swells, as healthy and strong as possible for when the conditions are right.” Even if we never venture out into the big water, we can steal a little of her wisdom to live more peacefully here on land.

A young man in California, who was experiencing severe social anxiety, was treated at Stanford using a blend of mindfulness and cognitive-behavioral therapy and had a very successful outcome.   That in and of itself is wonderful, and a pretty common story.

But what really got me excited was the fact that the researchers were scanning his brain to see what was different after therapy was concluded.  What they found was that each respective treatment stimulated a different neural network.  Mindfulness appeared to stimulate a brain network in the posterior cortical region, an area that affects attention.  The brain learned to shift away from unhelpful distorted self perceptions that occur in social anxiety, like believing that everyone will laugh at you if you make a mistake.  Cognitive-behavioral therapy, however, caused the prefrontal cortex, which is the home of  logical thinking, to be more engaged in controlling reactions from the emotional part of our brain, the amygdala. 

I hope the future of therapy is that I will be able to show clients their brains,  and then help them actually see their weekly gains as they apply different therapies…can’t help but think that would be a pretty exciting motivator to keep working on feeling better, no matter what your issue!