Affective Forecasting

I’m trying to not use the word always and use the words sometimes and maybe. Our minds use a thing called affective forecasting to predict the outcome of certain events. We will almost always predict negatively, and we will almost always predict wrong. Using words like sometimes and maybe helps retrain our brains. Today after finishing errands, my body screaming, “I’m on fire,” all three of my dogs ran out of the gate and into oncoming traffic. I’m yelling at all of them to come back, which is useless with one of them because he’s deaf and one of them because he n-e-e-e-ver listens. The man who almost hits them got out of the car to help me - the kindness of strangers. I grabbed the deaf dog, my 14 year old dachshund, who is heavier than he looks.

The man went for my three year old Labradoodle. As I saw it happening, I wanted to scream n-o-o-o, as if in one of those cartoons where you see the words coming out. It was too late though. The Labradoodle is aggressive to strange men. I started apologizing profusely, the Labradoodle isn’t listening, the man is still trying to wrangle the dog, saying "it’s fine, it’s fine," while my 12 year old yellow lab had enough and just took off down the road. If I had predicted the outcome of this event I would have forcasted a terrible ending. But we wrangled the Labradoodle quickly inside my yard with no damage to the kindly stranger. The yellow lab came sauntering back like nothing happened, and the kindly stranger gave one of his kind waves as he was leaving.

Thankfully, my negative affective forecasting had stressed me significantly, while the outcome wasn't significant!

Troublesome Labradoodle and Venerable Labrador

Letting Go

I read somewhere that there are people who are unable to relax when they are passengers in a car. They sit attentively watching out the window. Why? Because they think they can control the outcome of whether or not they get in an accident by watching. I thought, ‘WOW’ this is me. Once it was brought to my attention I realized how crazy it was and was able to actually relax while in the car. Maybe that was one of my first steps in the process of letting go. It seems to me that the more we hold on to the more pain we suffer. So today is your day to let go and relax on your ride of life.

It's A New Day

We can build resiliency by changing how we process negative events. Yesterday I had several unreturned texts. All day it kept running through my mind, "I hope I didn’t say anything to hurt or offend these people." My mind woke up this morning ruminating on this more. Should I ask them, should send another text, do I text too much? Then just like that a sledgehammer came down and hit me on the head. Wham! To be resilient, when you wake up in the morning, realize you're starting a new day and let go of yesterday.

I live my life the best I can trying to spread kindness in the world, trying to harm no one and maybe help the world and spread a little joy, so if I made a mistake it wasn’t on purpose. So yesterday is gone like it never happened, all my yesterdays. What a bright new morning it was to start with a clean slate.