Here’s the deal, your brain doesn’t care if you are happy. It cares if you are safe. The whole job of the human brain is to make sure the bear doesn’t eat you and the berries aren’t poisonous. It actually does.not.care. if you enjoy your proverbial hike or not. The brain is a highly efficient but very cruel mistress.
When things aren’t going well, and let’s be honest, that happens pretty often, the brain’s job is to find everything that might be dangerous and target those things like a heat seeking missile. The brain is so good at this job that it finds the hard things and just really freaking never lets go. The result is that we stay alive, but we suffer.
Wait! Can I opt out of the suffering? Yes, of course, but it involves hacking your brain to make it think about things differently. The technical term for this is cognitive re-appraisal which just means making your brain take a different thinking route. It’s like when the map says you can save ten minutes and avoid the wreck on the highway and you say, yes please. Let’s stick with this metaphor for a minute: when you avoid the shutdown traffic on the highway, you also avoid the emotional escalation that goes with it. You don’t have to get angry and rage-y and cagey because you re-routed and took a route with less misery.
This is exactly what happens in the brain when we don’t just do the thing the brain tells us and we take a more intelligent, informed route.
When dealing with really hard things, like chronic illness or cancer, the ability to reframe things saves us from the emotional escalation that leads to fighting, frustration, anxiety, and anger.
To optimize your relationship during chronic illness, there are three easy tools to reframe your thoughts and take the road less rage-y
How do they feel? This tool involves the psychological skills of perspective-taking, which means looking at things from another point of view besides your own. It helps you to reframe the problem and, if you are using it with a partner, it prevents conflict. Ideally, before you start to feel really emotional, you can stop and ask yourself (or each other) how does this person view this scenario, how does that person view this scenario, or how does my partner view this scenario.
For us, we will usually pause and go through an exercise of saying how we think the other one is experiencing this particular moment. It gives us a great perspective and remind our brains that there is more than one way to experience this moment in time.
First thought, second thought. This tool is the psychological skill of challenging interpretations by allowing the space for your brain to have more than its very first thought and actively acknowledging that first thoughts may be liars.
The way you play this game is by acknowledging your first thought—let’s say, your first thought is that you have to do everything, and no one ever helps you. Acknowledging your first thought, allows you to separate from that thought and determine if it’s a thought that actually helps you. If its not a thought that benefits you, you are free and clear to form a second thought. After all, who doesn’t’ want to think about things that benefit them? The second thought allows you to think about what’s most important in this particular moment and how you want to respond to it in a way that you can feel good about.
Find the good. This is a reframing tool that is useful in cognitive re-appraisal. Our first response is often negative and doesn’t feel good. Find the good allows you to lead your brain to think about the good in the situation. If you are lost, you get to learn about a new area. If you are sick, you get to slow down and focus on catching up on your reading. If you are alone, you get to work on your personal growth.
Prove It. Challenging assumptions is a vital skill in cognitive re-appraisal. Basically, we feel something big and we will believe anything, even made up things to validate our big feelings. Lots of times though, those things are grounded in reality. Everyone doesn’t actually hate us. Our boss is not out to get us. Our partner isn’t just like their mother. Those are things we feel, but they aren’t things we can prove.
Playing the ‘Prove it” game allows you to guide your brain to places where you are making assumptions and challenges those assumptions. Remember what happens when you assume, and instead, only let your brain focus on things that can be validated and helpful to you.
Remember, these are brain hacks, which means your brain isn’t naturally going to do these things. Your brain will want to do the things that it feels like protects you best, but these are not likely to feel comfortable or benefit you in the moment or in life. Instead of struggling, try these things when life gets hardest.
