Psychological Contradiction: Thinking of Bad Things Makes You Happier
Yeah, it's contradictory, but calm down there that we explain. If for some reason you think you are missing a little happiness in your life, we have a kind of bizarre solution: no thinking about flower gardens and little angels playing harp in the sky; nothing to imagine sipping wine on some Parisian lawn or being BFF from Beyonce. Instead, think of the bad things that could happen to you.
The paradoxical idea of being happy thinking of sad things has to do with a study developed 20 years ago when a group of severely depressed patients who were really pessimistic about the treatments they were undergoing underwent a collective therapy program. eight weeks in Vancouver, Canada.
Everybody on the couch
Conducting the sessions was psychologist Randy J. Paterson who, realizing that the program was not going as expected, had an insight, and instead of asking her patients how they could improve, she decided to ask them to say how. could get worse.
It was this change of view, according to Paterson, that made the sessions flow more naturally and people begin to become more participatory, greatly increasing the effectiveness of the therapeutic process.
Focusing on what can make us unhappy works in two different ways: First, it helps us create a real map that can happen. After all, when we focus on things that would make us happy, we often find ourselves facing more abstract and distant goals. to be achieved, especially if we think about issues like having more money, traveling the world, conquering the person of our dreams, etc. This, of course, depresses us.
Everything is a matter of perspective
On the other hand, if we think about what would make us less happy, we considered possibilities such as little sleep, eating bad things, fighting with friends. From this reasoning comes the conclusion: If all of this can bring unhappiness, perhaps sleeping more, eating better, and visiting friends might do just the opposite - and these are tangible and easy-to-do things.
"If you can isolate the things you do that would make you feel worse, such as continuing behavior that doesn't help you, then you can also isolate the things that will make you feel better, " the psychologist explained.
Another way suggested by Paterson is to see how things could really be worse - it's that old maxim, "there's nothing so bad it can't get worse" - it's like a different way of practicing gratitude, which is something that also makes us happy. When we realize that everything could be much worse, we are happier with what we have at the moment. Do you think this tactic would work for you?
