Stop Overthinking Your Life

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The Joker, a DC Comics fictional villain, is an evil genius: unpredictable, always a step or two ahead of the good guys, seemingly unbeatable. Definitely not crazy. No, he is pure evil.

But we know Batman will win in the end…don’t we?

It’s kind of like how we know that Christ already broke the chains of sin and death; the battle is already won. But meanwhile the Joker has Gotham City tied in knots! We see evil all around us. Like the good folks of Gotham, we get discouraged. We turn against Batman and lose faith in our system of justice.

There is a psychological explanation for our discouragement.

As psychologist Roy Baumeist

Joker_(Alex_Ross)

er puts it, “bad is stronger than good.” He doesn’t mean that bad will win in the end. What he means is that bad thoughts, events, or feelings are stronger than good thoughts, events, or feelings.

We remember bad events more vividly than good ones, the mean things people say hurt us deeply and are difficult to overcome, negative emotions are stronger than positive ones, and bad reputations are easy to acquire (and difficult to shake).

This is why we tend to dwell on our mistakes and find it difficult to combat negative stereotypes.

If your parents called you lazy when you were a child, you might have a hard time shaking that opinion of yourself even as a hardworking adult.

The metaphysical battle between good and evil is being waged on a personal level, as we struggle each day to combat negativity and self-deprecating thoughts that threaten to send us into a minor funk—or even depression.

Ultimately good will prevail. But on a day-to-day level, if we are presented with an equal number of good thoughts (or emotions, or comments, or events) as bad ones, the bad will dominate.

I can still remember the time in fifth grade when Sister Julie Therese made fun of something I did, and everyone laughed. I can’t remember anything else about fifth grade.

Not only do we remember the bad or traumatic events more distinctly, we also react more quickly, and with greater intensity to bad things. In fact, the disproportionately strong reaction we have to something bad might have contributed to our evolutionary success, suggests Baumeister.

If I fail to appreciate the good, I am merely missing out on something. If I fail to react appropriately to a threat, however, I may not survive. So survival favors the stronger effect of bad things.

Are you overthinking it?

Overthinking

Some people are also temperamentally more sensitive to the bad. By temperament, they have a tendency to think too much, or to focus too much on the negative.

Hippocrates would call them melancholics. Dr. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema of Yale University calls them “ruminators.”

Their physiological makeup is such that they are more sensitive to stimuli, tend to react more intensely, have difficulty suppressing negative stimuli, and are inclined to mull over and dwell upon the past or the future.

Women tend to be ruminators. In fact, we think too much. We think about our appearance, our relationships, our work. Over-thinking can lead to anxiety and depression and serious physical problems.

Transform your negative thinking

But whether we are melancholic, a “ruminator,” or simply tend to focus on the negative, we can change our attitude. Affective neuroscience is studying the way the brain affects our emotions. It may be that we can retrain our brain to take different neural pathways. Just as exercise can transform our bodies, new ways of thinking can transform negative thinking.

Focusing on the negative can also be bad for your spiritual life. Father Frederick William Faber, whose powerful Spiritual Conferences were written in the 1800s, wrote about the hazards of dwelling on hurt feelings. Father Faber observes keenly the path many of us take under the rule of sensitiveness: we begin by imagining a slight or an offense, where none had been.

We exaggerate the offense, building an entire imaginary history on a completely innocent remark or action.

We place “monstrous significance” on a chance phrase, and then “brood about it for years…From being fanciful we pass to being suspicious…From being suspicious we pass to being umbrageous. We grow moody and bitter. We add sulkiness to our suspicions. There is no dealing with us.”

The true culprit may not be sensitivity (which is a good thing when not inordinately self-focused) but the dwelling upon hurt feelings, over-thinking and over-analyzing a careless remark or an odd glance, turning innocent incidents into serious misdeeds of enormous significance, becoming discouraged about problems instead of looking for solutions.

You gain confidence by practicing it

In the end, the power of bad can be defeated by the sheer quantity of good things in life, according to researchers. But we have to make a conscious effort to combat the bad thoughts with good ones.

Happy couples make at least five positive comments to every one negative criticism. Authoritative (rather than punitive) parenting helps children eventually become both disciplined and self-confident. Some people have been able to battle depression by retraining themselves to think in positive, constructive ways.

Father Faber would prescribe prayer, the sacraments, and supernatural confidence. We gain confidence by practicing it. Though we never relinquish our fight against evil (beginning with the evil we find in ourselves), we can place our trust in God and strive always to see the good in our neighbor.

And that is what confounded The Joker in the end.

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