A belief that is woven into the fabric of my personality is that a healthy individual is always challenging his own and others’ assumptions with kindness and curiosity.
The world is an incredibly complex place – simple in nature, but complex in the way the mind has constructed it. The world is perceived through the lens of the individual perceiving it – which means there are as many versions of the world as there are viewers.
I am deeply passionate about understanding the world from as many perspectives as possible. It takes a true warrior to open her mind to the potential that her viewpoint might be “wrong.” To allow the possibility that an idea she holds so deeply that it feels like it’s become a part of her, might not be true.
This is why I love entertaining counter points of view.
Maintaining an open mind to all perspectives only enriches my understanding of a given subject, serves to keep my mind challenging my own assumptions, and often strengthens my resolve in my own beliefs.
As a challenger of norms, I appreciate when someone has the courage to come out with a counter perspective.
I think it’s important here to clarify the difference between a healthy skeptic and a cynic. A healthy skeptic challenges from a kind and curious place with the intent to seek the truth. A cynic challenges from a bitter, pessimistic place and gets pleasure from undermining someone else’s work or point of view. I’m an advocate of the healthy skeptic.
Stephen Briers, author of Psychobabble, is one such healthy skeptic. Briers challenges a lot of the claims found in popular psychology and self-help books.
I’ll share some of his arguments with you here and offer my perspectives, as they relate to the power of thought.
A Challenge to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT aims to eliminate difficulties by changing patterns of thinking or behavior. It maintains that feelings and behavior are caused by our thoughts.
Counter #1: What about phobias?
Briers challenges the assumption behind CBT by offering a counter scenario of arachnophobia in which the feeling appears to precede the thought. He argues that when a person with arachnophobia sees a tarantula, they’re filled with panic far before the word “tarantula” enters their brain.
This is a great and tricky example, because the response is near-instantaneous. But I’ll offer a counter-perspective.
The visual sighting of a spider was still filtered through a belief (aka deeply ingrained thought or mental activity) that spiders are terrifying, which produced an instantaneous response of fear. This instantaneous response is commonly referred to as “fight or flight,” which goes down in the “irrational” part of the brain, the amygdala, to provide the body with a surge of adrenaline to fight or flee from imminent danger.
Thankfully, the amygdala is designed to be faster than the “rational” prefrontal cortex (where our conscious thinking happens) just in case there’s actual danger. It doesn’t realize that the spider isn’t actually going to kill you. Well, maybe. That’s for the prefrontal cortex to decide.
This “irrational” phobia is a pre-programmed remnant of our ancestors’ fear of these arachnids, which developed over millennia as a survival mechanism. Many spiders are poisonous and can kill humans. I am very grateful to my ancestors for developing this fear response!
Further evidence that the fear response to spiders is a thought is the fact that, through exposure therapy and (ironically) CBT, people with this phobia can be “cured” by reprogramming their brains with new thoughts. They do this by using the prefrontal cortex to ration that spiders are not inherently terrifying.
Counter #2: What about mental images?
Briers further challenges CBT by suggesting that the brain sometimes works in abstract images, not always in propositions that take the form of words.
He offers an example in the feeling of desperation, which, instead of stemming from the subject’s thought, “I’m helpless,” could have come from the fleeting image in the subject’s mind of themselves with no hands.
Another great point.
For me, this argument comes down to semantics and what the definition of a “thought” is. According to dictionary.com, a thought is “the product of mental activity.” Nowhere in any definition of the word “thought” is the word “word.” Thoughts can take any form of mental activity – images, ideas, subconscious automatic processes, and words. Thus, thoughts include abstract images.
I’m very careful with my definitions. Definitions are so important.
Words are just utterances – physical movement of air through the vocal cords – that a group of people have assigned meaning to. Meaning that is interpreted differently by each individual. This makes definitions so important. Definitions are what standardize meaning.
It’s important to make the mental distinction between the word and the thing itself.
This is a simple but profound teaching of the ancient Chinese text, the Tao Te Ching. The Tao teaches that the name for something is not the same as the thing itself. I love how Shakespeare put it.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Shakespeare
Counter #3: What if there are just too many thoughts to handle?
Briers’ final challenge to CBT is that uprooting one negative or irrational thought isn’t as simple as it sounds due to the complexity of the human mind. The human mind is a network of thoughts; uprooting and challenging one could mean uprooting and challenging thousands. A daunting task.
My answer to that is, exactly! Yes! The human mind is incredibly complex and we do have a network of thoughts that seem insurmountable. That’s all the more reason to get in there and start cleaning it up!
A Challenge to Positive Thinking
I was particularly grateful for Briers’ challenge to positive thinking. The positive thinkers certainly aren’t going to do it.
Counter #4: Positive thinking can make people feel worse.
Totally true.
Briers offers a study that demonstrates that for people with low self-esteem, mantras such as, “I’m a lovable person” actually made them feel worse. The researchers believed that these counterintuitive results were due to the fact that the participants didn’t actually believe the mantras. So these positive thoughts only brought up stronger counter-beliefs.
This serves as evidence that belief is everything! It also points to the importance of being gentle with yourself and setting attainable expectations. For the person who has had thought, “I’m worthless” hundreds of times a day for hundreds of days, “I’m a lovable person” is probably a stretch. Find an adjacent or neutral thought, such as, “I am a person.” Then work towards the positive thoughts when and only when the negative ones have been fully processed.
Let’s be real with ourselves. It can be a very slow and – literally – painful process to change a belief. But it can be done!
Counter #5: People in a bad mood are less prone to mental errors.
I love this.
In his book, Psychobabble, Briers references a study in which researchers used movies to uplift or dampen participants’ spirits. Participants were then asked to complete several mental tasks. In this particular study, subjects with dampened spirits were better focused, less gullible, and made fewer mistakes.
This result actually doesn’t surprise me too much. In my own experience, I’ve noticed that when I’m in a bad mood – which for me usually means I’m angry – I’m much better able to focus. Anger flushes out any thought that isn’t anger-related and enables me to narrow in on the task at hand.
I sometimes love when I get mad about something because when I’m mad, I’m determined. And when I’m determined, I’m unstoppable. I endearingly call this my “bulldozer mode.” I joke with my husband that bulldozer has one mode: bulldoze. Yes, this mode is slightly aggressive.
However, I have also noticed that negative emotions in myself tend to be myopic.
It’s like that fear response that provides a surge of adrenaline and potentially life-saving burst of energy to fight or flee danger. Negative emotion narrows the mind in on whatever it is that’s causing the negative emotion – so we can get rid of it. It’s designed to be near-sighted and narrow-minded.
This can be a good thing, in the short-term.
I’d like to suggest a more sustainable emotion that provides equal ability to focus and doesn’t lend itself to gullibility or mistakes. That emotion is clarity. Dare I claim that this is my all-time favorite emotion?
Clarity eliminates the “try” that plagues so many positive thought-seekers. Seeking and not having positive thoughts can lead to mind-spinning and beating up on ourselves. This achieves nothing but mental exhaustion and confusion.
Clarity is the antidote to confusion. I highly recommend first seeking thoughts that elicit the emotion of clarity, then go from there. Clarity expands that near-sighted, narrow-minded view and enables sight in all directions. With a clear mind, focus becomes effortless.
And best of all, your bullshit meter is still on and working. Which brings us to the next topic.
Counter #6: Denial can be dangerous.
The final challenge from Briers’ book that I will present you with is that positive thinking can be dangerous, if overdone, because it leads to denial.
This concept can best be described by the Pollyanna syndrome, named after the novel Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter. A Pollyanna is essentially “an excessively or blindly optimistic person.” Briers is warning against blind optimism to one’s own detriment.
I 100% agree with this.
This might sound terrible, but I’ve never liked “nice” people. Nice has always felt fake and naive to me, like they have on blinders to only see the good. Nice people aim to please. It’s not genuine. Pollyanna syndrome takes optimism to an extreme, out of genuine and into denial.
I’m an advocate of “eyes wide open.” An openness to all perspectives. A willingness to see the good and the bad. It doesn’t mean you have to focus on the bad, just be aware of it.
Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.
Mark Twain
You tell ‘em, Twain.
I think of myself as an optimistic realist. I let myself see a situation for what it is, entertain various ways I can choose to respond, and then consciously choose a (hopefully) positive response.
The world as we know it only exists because of contrast. We know hot because there is a cold. We know up because there is a down. We know fear because safety and security are available to us.
Positive thinking, to me, is not about avoiding the negative. It’s about accepting and embracing both the positive and negative in the world so that we may make a choice.
Thank you, Stephen Briers, for your healthy skepticism. It has deepened my understanding of what it means for thoughts to create feelings, it has enabled me to challenge my own assumptions, and it has strengthened my resolve in my own beliefs.
I always love a good challenge.