This day truly sucks! I can't believe that happened. I must tell you all about it. Then hopefully you are a good friend and blindly agree with me.
EDIT: Some people thought the lines above are truly how I feel. I was writing as the way I have heard others speak and the rest of this document is intended as a discussion I have had with them before. It has seemed to help some. To be clear. This is not me making a cry for help on the internet.
I am no psyschologist. I am simply a person that can make observations, ask questions, and form hypothesis. This post is based around a hypothesis I currently operate under. I share it because it has been helpful to some people I have shared it with verbally.
Negative Feedback Spiral
Something that really upsets you and gets you down happens in your life. You go over in your head how it happened, and why it happened and it truly does not feel fair. You try to sleep, you try to move onto other things, but you keep getting drawn back into how life sucks at the moment. Why are you not being treated fairly?
It eats at you and eats at you. You eventually encounter a friend and it seems more often than not people respond to a distraught friend by agreeing with them and trying to comfort them. "I'm so sorry that happened, that truly sucks." You then wander off.
My life sucks, and now I have friends corroborating how much my life sucks. I need to go onto facebook, steemit, reddit, twitter and talk to people about how my life sucks. In these places you'll have a lot of people that do not know the circumstances or have all the information relating to what caused your life to suck other than the parts you choose to share with them. They will become an "Echo-chamber" for your woes.
This spiral can be dangerous, and could result in you making decisions for the wrong reason, and it can even lead to suicide.
I have seen many people get caught in these spirals. Often they are focused on one aspect of an event and do not truly look at the situation from a broader perspective. You've likely heard the saying "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence".
So what can you do?
Try to teach yourself to recognize when you are slipping into one of these Negative Feedback Spirals.
If you can teach yourself to notice them, then you are in a position to defeat them.
Here are a few things I recommend doing:
- Look for the silver lining. Is there anything you can say out loud that was good that happened around this event?
- If you can't find anything positive to say about this event. Find something positive to say about anything, and say it out loud. Do this many times if need be.
Why?
If you are exercising your mind to find positive things to say it is too busy to continue the negative spiral. If you deprive yourself of the deadly negative spiral long enough it gets easier and easier to break loose from it's deadly grasp.
One thing you can ask yourself early on that might help is simply this. "Is this one of those grass is always greener on the other side of the fence moments?" If it is and you know it that might be all you need to confirm with yourself to break free from it's grasp. If it does not seem to be such a situation then the bullet points I mentioned above might help.
These types of spirals do truly eat our brains capacity...
Life (if you want to call it that) can begin to revolve around these negative spirals. It truly consumes a lot of your thought that could be put to so many better uses. So in a sense it is eating your mind...