It's NOT Always Sunny In Philadelphia
So here is life's umbrella...
I gotta be honest, I’ve never actually watched the show but the subject line felt too good to pass up on!
The gloomy weather outside this morning is relevant, today we’re talking about seasons.
Seasons of life.
In order to understand why this is important we need to understand the human proclivity for negativity.
Negativity bias says that negative things have a greater effect on your psychological state than positive things, even when the intensity is equal. The sadness of losing $20 feels worse than the happiness of finding $20.
Negativity bias exists because 100 generations ago the world was much harsher.
Think of it this way:
The trade-off of being 2% more alive from discovering cave berries and being 100% more dead from discovering a bear in a cave are very different. This caused our brains to prioritize anything that could be marginally negative as more important than anything that is positive.
And, because the people who over-indexed for negativity didn’t meet any bears and were able to reproduce, their genes carried on that encoding.
You probably don’t have to think about bears anymore. But, we’re still left with that programing from thousands of years of genetics.
How does this apply to life’s seasonality?
If you look at a regular week, you’re more likely to be wrapped up in something negative than a prolonged positive experience.
Also, you likely have a hard time stepping back and taking the 30,000 foot view of your life.
This means that day-to-day in hard seasons you feel as though you’re drowning and it will last forever.
Most people only live their life in the day-to-day.
The important thing to realize during this time is that nothing in your life is going to stay the same forever. Seasons.
During hard seasons, take 10 minutes a day and remind yourself that your hardship is temporary.
Your girlfriend breaks up with you… eventually you’ll have a new girlfriend.
The baby is awake every 2 hours and you can’t sleep… it will grow out of that.
You’re losing sleep over exams… They’ll be done next week.
You miss your friends in a new city… You will have more new friends soon.
Your job isn’t paying as much as you want… You won’t have it for 30 years.
Everyone has different versions of what this might look like but the easiest way for me is a small daily gratitude journal prompt. This doesn’t work as an instant fix, but it works because it requires you to be more aware of the good throughout your day.
Likewise, during good seasons, take as much time as you can to “be where your feet are.”
This too shall pass…