If you are, by nature, a writer, then writing is often a way of putting shape to ideas. This is what I’m doing today: ‘scuse any rambling.
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I’ve been thinking recently that it would be nice to have 2FA (two factor authentication) on those random negative thoughts, feelings and memories, that seem to pop up just at the point where it would really be more useful to tap into the equal but opposite – positive – thought, feeling or memory.
I’d started a day a week or so back, feeling pretty good. I made a mental note of it and even a physical note in my sporadic ‘morning pages’. I recalled it again later in the morning: still feeling good.
At some point later in the day however, some really minor, random event occurred. I don’t even remember what now. But, like clockwork, a little negative sentiment bubbled to the surface. Unchecked, it started to bring a few friends along for company. A memory. A feeling about that memory. A reinforcing thought.
Before I knew it, I was on my way down that familiar spiral.
But this time I found myself one step back.
I knew I’d been feeling pretty good earlier. I’d even written it down. I knew that this event, small and unimportant as it was, was not, logically, enough to ‘ruin my day’.
And that got me thinking:
Wouldn’t it be good to have a gate to keep those unwanted negative thoughts in check?
Wouldn’t it be good if the default was the positive thought instead?
Now structuring my thinking and memories isn’t completely new to me. I’ve had a slightly dusty, wood panelled memory-access-bank held in my imagination for decades, staffed by a kindly but firm librarian-slash-evidence-handler type figure who digs up things I’ve long forgotten or helpfully archives things I’m pretty much done with.
(I have a ridiculously vivid imagination. I credit several teenage years’ worth of sickness-induced fevered delirium, just at a crucial neurodevelopment stage 🤔)
But today, I want something fast and almost automatic.
So here’s the premise:
If I apply the concept of 2FA to only negative thinking, can I make positive the default?
And if I can, what effects will that have on the quality of my everyday life?
Let’s find out
Assuming that I do not wish to become too obnoxiously Pollyanna-ish, and assuming that sometimes, negative thoughts are useful for protection (gut feelings, red flags and so on) and, further assuming that there may be occasions where I do actually want to examine some negative events (deliberate healing, life decisions etc.), I’ve come up with a structure that I hope will allow me to access the positive in a way that feels natural and instinctive, and puts the negative firmly into second place at minimum.
I’ve devised additional stages, where more or less intervention is required, depending on the scale and context of the negative event, memory, emotion, thought or feeling.
(This might also have the effect of downgrading some that aren’t really all that negative but that my lizard brain still likes to use as kindling for catastrophising.)
Each factor, at each stage, is a question designed to clarify the purpose and necessity of accessing the thought/feeling/memory.
(referred to from now on as TFM for brevity)
2FA
Factor 1: What outcome do you wish to achieve by accessing this TFM?
This will make me stop and consider not just the question, but whether I need to be accessing this TFM at all. I’ve put this in as Factor 1 because I’m hoping this will start to circumvent the habit more than anything.
Assuming there’s a reasonable reason or outcome to achieve, Factor 2 comes into play:
Factor 2: Is there an alternative neutral or positive TFM that could achieve or exceed the intended outcome?
The mind is a funny thing, it likes to find all the supporting evidence it can for anything that’s running through your head at any given time.
Having been stopped in its tracks by Factor 1, this Factor 2 question aims to redirect my mind-miners to go dig up positive TFMs from wherever they can find them. I suspect, at this early stage in the experiment, they might struggle a bit, at least until those long-forgotten, overgrown neural pathways to more positive TFMs are more well-worn.
But the mind is also a hardy thing and I don’t think the little mind-miners will struggle for long. I’m excited to see what surfaces and how it changes my everyday experience of my own life.
Bigger contexts = more stages
The 2 factor stage is for everyday, general thinking. Nothing major, just day to day stuff that passes through in the course of living, working, shopping, gardening and interacting with people in general.
These should only really need a quick ‘stop, look, listen, think’ interruption to get into a more positive mindset.
But bigger contexts need more stages. Complex relationships and/or situations need more nuance. Life changing events need to consider, and protect, mental health.
I haven’t worked out the individual factor questions yet (and even when I do, it’s likely I’ll keep them to myself) but these are the contexts I’m thinking of:
3 Factor: TFMs around family, long term friendships. Those relationships that play into how you think of yourself, in both positive and negative ways. Those people who – wittingly or unwittingly – have the power to lift you up or absolutely tank you with a glance or a word.
4 Factor: TFMs around life-changing or life-moulding events. For me, that might mean TFMs around a parent’s death, a significant break up (and the events leading to it), you get the gist.
5 Factor: Just bloody awful stuff that never should have happened. Let’s keep it at that.
Accentuate the positive
Note that, there are NO factor authentication gates for positive TFMs. None. At all. That’s deliberate.
I also think the mind is capable of taking a situation where there are both positive and negative factors, floating the positive and sinking the negative.
It certainly seems to be able to do it the other way around (think: most of the photos of me on my literal wedding day to the person I adore, where I can only seem to see how stupid I look).
There are a million happy memories of times I’ve spent with people who are no longer in my life, for whatever reason. There are hundreds of positive examples of things I’ve achieved in jobs I left, or in the service of goals I later abandoned.
I’d like to access those a lot more.
Eliminate the really negative
There are also certain people, events and other ephemera, whose related TFMs I never want to see the light of day. Ever. Again.
Not many. But enough.
These go into ‘the oubliette’.
Bye!
Notification settings
Returning to the ‘not wanting to be Pollyanna’ but recognising that some negative TFMs do have a protective function – again, gut instincts, red flags, any kind of potentially dangerous situation, etc.
If, in this context, I am treating the mind (parts of it at least) as a TFM access app, perhaps I can program it to ping me with notifications as and when appropriate, without automatically flinging a negative TFM into the forefront of my mind without warning.
At the very least, it might slow things down enough for some deliberate reasoning and assessment of a situation before reacting.
If it seems reasonable, I can open my TFM access app, move through however many stages of factor authentication the proposed negative TFM warrants, access the TFM and do with that whatever I wish.
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And this is about as far as I’ve got in my thinking right now 🤷♀️
Let’s give it a whirl.