Mental Threading
"Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right." -Henry Ford
Like most aphorisms, Henry Ford's quotation is revealing and makes sense at a cursory glance, but when left completely on its own and analyzed thoroughly, it is incomplete. It doesn't really matter how driven I am to make everyone in the world interested in reading the crap I'm writing in this blog...not everyone in the world will take an interest in my own personal thoughts that I'm spewing for my own personal reasons. I'm okay with that. If one or two people read these posts, that's okay. Given reasonably small and attainable goals, perhaps chained together sequentially, I can take Henry Ford's advice to heart a little easier.
But what Ford was really alluding to in the quote above is the power of positive thinking. This alone has probably been the focal point of the overwhelming majority of self-help books you'll find crammed onto the shelves at your local Borders: think positive and you'll be successful. Tony Robbins doesn't need to work at a desk job just because people need this reassurance to give them hope. Figure out how to package that idea and sell it to the masses, and you won't need to, either.
The one package in this self-help area that has caught on like wildfire over the past few years is called The Secret. This wonderful and insightful gem is ready to instruct you on all of the things that you're doing completely wrong in your life and is prepared to help you think your way into success. Frank N' Furter's advice in the Rocky Horror Picture Show was "Don't Dream It, Be It". The Secret has taken this idea and refactored it into "If You Dream It, You'll End Up Being It...Somehow". This piece of slime even managed to find its way into the Oprah book club, into the homes of millions, thereby putting its author into a home undoubtedly worth millions.
I don't have a problem with the idea. Really. If this simple concept, applied to people's lives, helps them in some way, and doesn't do any damage, then cool. We all need something to get us out of bed in the morning. The only thing I dislike about The Secret is that its base principle has been dubbed the "law of attraction". Semantically, this places it right alongside the "law of gravity". It's purporting itself as science, which it isn't. There's nothing scientific or peer-reviewed or anything-that's-been-tested-by-boring-guys-in-white-coats-in-labs-that-play-with-test-tubes-all-day about it. This is actually a pretty important distinction to make.
But what about positive thinking? Surely there must be something to it since people shell outs wads of cash to learn more about how to effectively think positively. As it turns out, there is quite a lot to it. Ford may have just been trying to sound deep and attribute his own success to the power of his mind (instead of luck), but intuitively, he was touching upon a very real concept. How we approach a problem, and how we regard ourselves while we're tackling the issue, plays a very key role in the eventual outcome.
One of my co-workers was once getting down on himself because he was having trouble writing some code, and as he sat there disparaging himself, someone else piped up and said, "Hey, careful what you're sitting there thinking about. You're writing all of that negativity to your mental hard drive, and that stuff sticks around." That maybe kind of a dorky thing to say, but it happens to be very true.
There are a lot of psychiatric disorders on the books...like, a lot. Just try dropping a copy of the DSM-IV on your foot sometime and you'll know that the complexity of the human mind, combined with the myriad errors that can occur in complex systems, is a force to be reckoned with. And if you ask a pharmeceutical rep about it, they'll also tell you it's one hell of a cash cow. The latter is probably the reason that a lot of people are quite cynical about the whole profession, and like most stereotypes, there's probably a small amount of truth in it. Some psychiatrists just prescribe pills to try and help people solve their problems without really getting to the heart of the matter.
For most major psychiatric conditions on the books that I've ever heard of, like disassociative personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, or depression, there is a form of treatment known as cognitive -behavioral therapy. The key component of this treatment lies in the first word: it's our cognitions that affect us, and can determine just how mentally healthy we are. Cognitive therapy is designed to identify patterns in our thinking that may be flawed, and are causing or contributing to the patient's mental illness. It can take years to undo the damage caused by these patterns in our thinking and replace them with patterns that we can cope with.
This is pretty easy for me to believe. I was listening to a person talk once about the reasons why conspiracy theories take hold in people's mind so easily. According to him, we all tell stories in our heads. We weave little bits of narrative about our jobs, our lives, the people around us, all in an effort to make sense of the stuff we encounter day in and day out. We're trying to create order out of chaos with these stories in our head, and sometimes, a conspiracy theory makes perfect sense to one person, so they tell another person, who it also makes sense to. The whole thing snowballs and pretty soon we've got a big snowball of whackjobs on the Internet telling everyone that 9/11 was an inside job, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Those stories in our head sure are important. And we're the ones who are weaving them. To a large extent, we do have control over our own sense of well-being and happiness. If your boss is treating you like shit at work, and you say, "Well, damn, I must deserve this, because I suck", eventually, your brain's going to just start following that pattern easily. It will become the path of least resistance, and it's the path your mind will start taking all the time, and you will feel bummed out about things, besides just work, because you keep reaffirming to yourself the simple fact that you suck.
The best advice I've ever heard is that when you find your mind going down these roads, stop whatever train of thought you're on (us software guys might call them "mental threads") and turn it around. Tell yourself a happier story in which everything isn't your fault, or things are better than you're making them out to be. It sounds like advice from a high school guidance counselor, and when you say it like that, it sounds pretty silly, but don't worry...if you take this approach, nobody but you needs to know. And I won't tell anyone, especially if you buy my new self-help book, available for a limited time directly to the left of wherever Dr. Phil McGraw's crap is sold.
Like most aphorisms, Henry Ford's quotation is revealing and makes sense at a cursory glance, but when left completely on its own and analyzed thoroughly, it is incomplete. It doesn't really matter how driven I am to make everyone in the world interested in reading the crap I'm writing in this blog...not everyone in the world will take an interest in my own personal thoughts that I'm spewing for my own personal reasons. I'm okay with that. If one or two people read these posts, that's okay. Given reasonably small and attainable goals, perhaps chained together sequentially, I can take Henry Ford's advice to heart a little easier.
But what Ford was really alluding to in the quote above is the power of positive thinking. This alone has probably been the focal point of the overwhelming majority of self-help books you'll find crammed onto the shelves at your local Borders: think positive and you'll be successful. Tony Robbins doesn't need to work at a desk job just because people need this reassurance to give them hope. Figure out how to package that idea and sell it to the masses, and you won't need to, either.
The one package in this self-help area that has caught on like wildfire over the past few years is called The Secret. This wonderful and insightful gem is ready to instruct you on all of the things that you're doing completely wrong in your life and is prepared to help you think your way into success. Frank N' Furter's advice in the Rocky Horror Picture Show was "Don't Dream It, Be It". The Secret has taken this idea and refactored it into "If You Dream It, You'll End Up Being It...Somehow". This piece of slime even managed to find its way into the Oprah book club, into the homes of millions, thereby putting its author into a home undoubtedly worth millions.
I don't have a problem with the idea. Really. If this simple concept, applied to people's lives, helps them in some way, and doesn't do any damage, then cool. We all need something to get us out of bed in the morning. The only thing I dislike about The Secret is that its base principle has been dubbed the "law of attraction". Semantically, this places it right alongside the "law of gravity". It's purporting itself as science, which it isn't. There's nothing scientific or peer-reviewed or anything-that's-been-tested-by-boring-guys-in-white-coats-in-labs-that-play-with-test-tubes-all-day about it. This is actually a pretty important distinction to make.
But what about positive thinking? Surely there must be something to it since people shell outs wads of cash to learn more about how to effectively think positively. As it turns out, there is quite a lot to it. Ford may have just been trying to sound deep and attribute his own success to the power of his mind (instead of luck), but intuitively, he was touching upon a very real concept. How we approach a problem, and how we regard ourselves while we're tackling the issue, plays a very key role in the eventual outcome.
One of my co-workers was once getting down on himself because he was having trouble writing some code, and as he sat there disparaging himself, someone else piped up and said, "Hey, careful what you're sitting there thinking about. You're writing all of that negativity to your mental hard drive, and that stuff sticks around." That maybe kind of a dorky thing to say, but it happens to be very true.
There are a lot of psychiatric disorders on the books...like, a lot. Just try dropping a copy of the DSM-IV on your foot sometime and you'll know that the complexity of the human mind, combined with the myriad errors that can occur in complex systems, is a force to be reckoned with. And if you ask a pharmeceutical rep about it, they'll also tell you it's one hell of a cash cow. The latter is probably the reason that a lot of people are quite cynical about the whole profession, and like most stereotypes, there's probably a small amount of truth in it. Some psychiatrists just prescribe pills to try and help people solve their problems without really getting to the heart of the matter.
For most major psychiatric conditions on the books that I've ever heard of, like disassociative personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, or depression, there is a form of treatment known as cognitive -behavioral therapy. The key component of this treatment lies in the first word: it's our cognitions that affect us, and can determine just how mentally healthy we are. Cognitive therapy is designed to identify patterns in our thinking that may be flawed, and are causing or contributing to the patient's mental illness. It can take years to undo the damage caused by these patterns in our thinking and replace them with patterns that we can cope with.
This is pretty easy for me to believe. I was listening to a person talk once about the reasons why conspiracy theories take hold in people's mind so easily. According to him, we all tell stories in our heads. We weave little bits of narrative about our jobs, our lives, the people around us, all in an effort to make sense of the stuff we encounter day in and day out. We're trying to create order out of chaos with these stories in our head, and sometimes, a conspiracy theory makes perfect sense to one person, so they tell another person, who it also makes sense to. The whole thing snowballs and pretty soon we've got a big snowball of whackjobs on the Internet telling everyone that 9/11 was an inside job, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Those stories in our head sure are important. And we're the ones who are weaving them. To a large extent, we do have control over our own sense of well-being and happiness. If your boss is treating you like shit at work, and you say, "Well, damn, I must deserve this, because I suck", eventually, your brain's going to just start following that pattern easily. It will become the path of least resistance, and it's the path your mind will start taking all the time, and you will feel bummed out about things, besides just work, because you keep reaffirming to yourself the simple fact that you suck.
The best advice I've ever heard is that when you find your mind going down these roads, stop whatever train of thought you're on (us software guys might call them "mental threads") and turn it around. Tell yourself a happier story in which everything isn't your fault, or things are better than you're making them out to be. It sounds like advice from a high school guidance counselor, and when you say it like that, it sounds pretty silly, but don't worry...if you take this approach, nobody but you needs to know. And I won't tell anyone, especially if you buy my new self-help book, available for a limited time directly to the left of wherever Dr. Phil McGraw's crap is sold.