Negative feedback spirals and how they eat your brain...
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...
Take your mind back!!
I really appreciate your blog. Negative thinking is such a vicious cycle. It is self defeating. I know i have wasted too much of my time with it and it has held me back from my greatest potential.
It happens to all of us. It is also really hard to see when we are the ones it is happening to. I've had some opportunities over the past few years to observe it in action in some family members. That's when I started thinking about how to beat it.
It is very much a challenge when it is happening to family especially your mate. My husband goes through cycles that can last for days. It feels like saying positive things don't help. He just rejects it. Thankfully for the most part the phases pass.
Yes it doesn't work for everyone. I'm getting gang attacked on another post someone wrote to in response to this one that has a very different tact. I haven't seen the particular tact the person is advocating work that well either.
I do think for the positive wording to work the person that is in the negative spiral needs to realize they are in the spiral and say positive things. Yet even this does not work for everyone.
The longer you are in the spiral the more difficult it seems to be.
In this day and age a lot of people just go to pharmaceuticals and I couldn't tell you anything about that.
Yet if the positive thing is to work it has to be your husband coming up with the positive things and saying them. Other people saying positive things might help with some people too, but it is easier for them to ignore you than it is their own voice.
I hope you and your husband find a solution to that. I am truly sorry to hear about that.
I am so please that you wrote on this subject @dwinblood. Negativity will be a block to your life if you do not accept the change and put yourself in. It is the downfall of the market where it never rises but always bows down and defeats a persons self esteem. It will take the dreams away. And will stop you from doing anything good towards yourself and the community. So don't let it work you and wear you out, instead work on it to not come closer to you and let positive work get you better results. An upvote for you.
I think you have a really good point about the echo chamber for someone’s woes and how that can be unhealthy, especially in this day and age where they can go to multiple social media echo chambers as you pointed out. But I think you underestimate the value of that human connection and empathy. It may lead to a person not addressing their problems in the healthiest or most honest ways, but I don’t think that contributes much, if at, all, to a negative spiral. From what I’ve seen, any kind of connection with a sympathetic person is better than isolation in preventing a downward spiral.
Sometimes a person really does just need someone to listen and to acknowledge what they are feeling. I have a friend who is clinically depressed and he has the opposite problem from the one you mention. Often when he tries to reach out to people they don’t respond or take days to respond, either because they think it isn’t a big deal or they are simply tired of the whining. If they do talk to him, they just tell him to cheer up or snap out of it or to stop blaming something/someone else for his problems. What he really needs is to talk to someone who gets that he feels really awful. They may be able to offer suggestions for how to look at it in a different way that could be helpful, but the time for that is often later, and as you mentioned, he himself may be the best person to come up with a different way of thinking about it. When he’s at his worst, he just needs someone to commiserate.
I’ve also had a couple of experiences with a different friend who was miserable about something but when I tried to help him see it from the other person’s perspective, and how he might also have wronged them, he told me, “I really just need you to be my friend right now.” Lesson learned.
Just like when you’ve just had an argument with someone, you know that there are things that it’s best to discuss later rather than in the heat of the moment, sometimes, “Yeah, that really sucks” is what’s going to help the person at that moment.
In my own experience, I’ve had people try to cheer me up by telling me about something in their life that really sucked, which is usually much less bad or else long resolved. Ultimately it just seems like they are taking any opportunity to talk about the suckiness of their own life and trivializing what I’m going through at that moment. When I feel bad, I don’t want to enter into a contest of woes. I just feel bad. And they’ve now made me feel worse by trivializing my feelings. “Yeah, that really sucks” is a better response, because it does really suck, or at least my feelings do at that moment.
Another thing about downward spirals I’ve seen is that isolation, or at least being alone with one’s thoughts, is more devastating than anything anyone can say that might be somewhat enabling. Downward spirals often happen because people are stuck in their heads too much with nothing and no one to bring them out of it. Even a “Yeah, that sucks,” gives them a vital connection to another human being that helps them feel validated and less alone.
About drugs: they can sometimes be used temporarily to arrest the spiral, and for some people they seem to be necessary permanently to take the edge off of what would otherwise be consuming negative thoughts and/or anxiety. From what I’ve seen, more harm has been done from people not going on drugs when early intervention would have prevented a long and dark spiral than from overmedicating. I used to have the completely opposite view, by the way, and think we were a massively overmedicated society when diet, exercise and things like yoga and meditation could bring most people into balance. That may still be true for most people (those things have a powerful effect on me), but some people definitely need the drugs to be happy and productive.
I totally agree that these negative thought patterns eat our brain’s capacity.
I can see your point there. The cases where I have seen it the person had plenty of social interactions around them that they could speak to. They seemed to go out of there way to seek out the people that would be "echo-chambers" for them.
NOTE: My example above is not a description of everyone. It won't work for everyone, but it has helped with a few people. There are so many different ways that people approach things. What I described is certainly only one situation.
Thanks for the very thorough reply by the way.
What I wrote wasn't meant necessarily as a refutation of what you wrote or as a criticism for it being non-comprehensive. It was just a thought-provoking post so I thought I'd add my one cent. Someday my input on Steemit will be worth two cents. I just know it!
Heheh... I didn't take it as criticism. You're golden. Even if it was criticism I am fine with that too when people are civil. :)
Your article really pegs negative thinking and how harmful it is. Thank you!
Great post with good practicle advice. UPVOTED!
I just wrote a post that deals with a specific excercise and how it can change the brain of Parkinson's patients. Maybe you could have a look at it.
http://steem.link/de3f9
Would love to. My Father In Law that lives with us (85) they thought has Parkinson's but has something similar. So I have some selfish reasons for looking at your article as well.
You have to take it back. Get yourself together.
You can't have it. It is mine.
Hi @dwinblood,
My response to your post is long so I thought I would make a post and just link it. I have a lot of questions and think it would show great character on your part if you checked out my response and made one back so your followers and myself can fully understand your position on this subject better.
https://steemit.com/responce/@skeptic/a-responce-to-negative-feedback-spirals-and-how-they-eat-your-brain
Thank you and look forward to hearing back from you.
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