Shift the Sadness of Losing Summer

Source: VyacheslavLn/ Pixabay

It got dark earlier yesterday where I live, and I was struck by that "summer's over" feeling.

Once a bad feeling turns on, our brain easily creates a cascade of bad feeling. One little loss or disappointment sends electricity down a neural pathway to your cortisol, and that pathway is linked to your lifetime of past cortisol experiences. This makes it easy for your brain to see bad signs in the world around you. Like a gazelle who smells a lion, our brain is designed to find external evidence of threat once the internal threat signal is triggered. You can easily end up in a bad loop, where more evidence triggers more cortisol and more searching for evidence.

Anything can get the ball rolling. Maybe you felt a sense of loss when the iPhone 7 fell short of your expectations. Maybe you're triggered by politics. Whatever gets you started, it's easy to end up thinking the world is going to hell in a handbasket. These negative perceptions feel absolutely true thanks to the conspiracy between your evidence-generating intellect and your urgency-generating neurochemistry. It's hard to believe you've created the world's downhill spiral in your neurons.

You can end up with the hell-in-a-handbasket feeling a lot. But you can also learn a simple tool to stop it: you can build a positivity pathway in your brain. The negativity pathway is so big thanks to cortisol that the electricity in your brain will go there unless you give it a new place to flow.

The electricity in your brain flows like water in a storm, finding the paths of least resistance. Cortisol carves huge pathways because that's how it does its job – you do not have to touch a hot stove twice because your brain built a big path the first time. So you will only see a world of threats and obstacles unless you build up your positive pathways as well. Simply spend one minute focusing on positives three times a day, for 45 days.

You may be thinking that there aren't enough positives around you to do this.

You may think there couldn't be any good things you've missed.

You may be think it's not objective to explicitly look for positives.

But your negative circuits are not objective. We need to build positive circuits to take in the good that is already there. Of course you have reason to mourn the loss of summer. But you could be living in a place where it gets dark at 3:30 in winter and doesn't get light til 10 the morning. People survived and thrived in such places even before electricity. They rushed out into the cold to find firewood to prevent freezing at night. They had good reason to mourn the loss of summer. And yet they found enough good in the world around them to keep going.

You probably live with an abundance of sunlight and warmth compared to Eskimos, but that doesn't make you happy. Our brain takes what it has for granted and focuses on the next unmet need. If you saw a photo of Eskimos, you would probably see a happiness that you don't have, because we've wired ourselves to equate the urban life with stress. Once you wire your brain to believe this, you will keep finding evidence to fit. But you can re-wire yourself to enjoy what you have instead of mourning the imagined utopia that you don't have.

When I noticed the sun setting earlier, I quicly looked for a positive side to the end of summer. New episodes of Big Bang Theory! It's trivial, but I a tiny positive is enough to stop me from cascading into negativity.

There's lots more on how to do this in my new book, The Science of Positivity: Stop Negative Thought Patterns by Changing Your Brain Chemistry.

Source: LBreuning/ Adams Media