Crunch Time

The Need for Stillness

I believe one of the major needs of our day is contemplation. The ability to be still in the world, seeking solace in the midst of an overly noisy world.  The latin word for "leisure" is "schola".  It is the root word for "school" and "scholarship".  It is leisure not in the sense of loafing around on a hammock with an umbrella drink. It is leisure in the sense of having unencumbered time to explore a topic deeply.  When I ask teachers if they feel their classroom is a place of leisure, an environment of schola, they immediately state in no uncertain terms; ABSOLUTELY NOT! 

We must take time to be still.

The following video by Sherry Turkle, a clinical psychologist and director of the M.I.T. initiative on Technology and Self, argues that quiet time is key to adolescent development.

Cognitive Distortions

I focus on four competencies to help people effectively navigate life's accelerating changes:

• Vibrant Imagination
• Robust Collaboration
• Potent Communication
• Persistent Adaptation

In this post I want to focus on Persistent Adaptation and the awareness of cognitive distortions. These are inaccurate thoughts or ideas which maintain negative thinking and help to maintain negative emotions. I'll admit that I default into one or more of these distortions more often than I'd like.

Eliminating these distortions and negative thought can improve mood and discourage maladies such as depression and chronic anxiety. Being aware of these distortions is a powerful first step to persistently adapt to discontinuous change and its discontents. Take a look and see if any of them are getting in your way.

1. All-or-nothing thinking: You see things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

2. Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

3. Mental filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water.

4. Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or other. You maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

5. Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.

• Mind reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you and don't bother to check it out.

• The Fortune Teller Error: You anticipate that things will turn out badly and feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.

6. Magnification (catastrophizing) or minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else's achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow's imperfections). This is also called the "binocular trick."

7. Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."

8. Should statements: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn'ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. "Musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

9. Labeling and mislabeling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: "I'm a loser." When someone else's behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him, "He's a damn louse." Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

10. Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible.

From: Burns, David D., MD. 1989. The Feeling Good Handbook. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc.