A couple of weeks ago I was suddenly aware that I’ve been stuck for a while in negative thought patterns. I wasn’t sure when or how they started, but I realized they’d been around long enough to turn into brain ruts. Did you know that when your brain does something enough times in a row that it starts becoming entrenched? The brain is just looking to create the most efficient superhighway for the transmission of information by prioritizing commonly used pathways. The problem with this, however, is that it can become determinant. One day, if you’re lucky, you wake up to yourself and realize ‘I haven’t always been this person. I don’t want to do this anymore’ and you change your ways.
At some point, I went down a negative neural pathway in my brain. My brain made a note of it, maybe put up a guide sign so that future hikers could find the new path. The guide sign was effective and more and more thoughts tromped down that path until it became a rut and the previous path towards positivity became fully grown over!
Having realized I’ve been wearing down this path for some time now, and that it’s absolutely not the person I used to know myself to be, I resolved to climb out of the rut. Trying to work one’s way out of a well-entrenched brain-rut is hard enough because the path is worn deep. But it’s made more difficult because the only way out is to consciously and sustainedly choose the positive path for a long period of time instead of the time-worn negative one. The new path is hard to find and feels woefully unfamiliar. The thoughts long to meander along the cleared and tended path that’s already so freely available. Instead I must consciously choose to reject the easy path and guide them towards the jungle instead. There was a path there once, I remember it, but all feels unfamiliar to me now. Like trying to work an atrophied muscle, it takes concentration, willpower, and effort to stick with it and resist the lazy way out.
It’s hard to monitor our own thinking all the time, so we don’t notice when we make these diversions. What starts as a small diversion into unfamiliar territory can grow to become a place where we build a home and take up residence. I’ll never know when I took my first step down the darker path, but since I can’t remember a time when I haven’t been afraid or anxious about something, I now realize I was a prime candidate for heading down this road at some point. Passivity also played a role, simply because I didn’t realize the toll that these last four years have taken on me. The fear-mongering used by my country’s leader (and his opponents) no doubt encouraged these ruts to form as I grew increasingly hopeless about the world around me.
But I’m awake, aware and active now. I see that I’ve been residing in negativity and hopelessness. I see the effects of my thought-habits and the effects on the rhetoric around me. I see how I’m not the only one who’s grown glum and despairing and now recognize similar behaviors in some of my friends. Like frogs in a pot come to boil wondering when someone turned on the heat - when did we all get cooked?
Empowered with this self-realization, I’ve been actively working on exercising my atrophied positivity muscles as I rebuild a path to hope and optimism. When I have a negative thought, I reframe it. I’m practicing counting my blessings as a spiritual weight-lifting discipline. When I can’t find my way out of hopelessness or discouragement, I’m seeking others who can share some perspective.
In a recent visit with a friend, she told me about a character in The Hunger Games (which I definitely have not read. I can’t stomach dystopian vibes, I do a fine enough job of creating dystopian worlds on my own with my rogue imagination) - but I’m told there’s a character who has been brainwashed to hate, mistrust, and kill Katniss (whom he once loved). As he’s working to overcome his brainwashing, he uses his relationship with her as a compass to help him navigate his thoughts and learn what and how to trust again.
“My brain is telling me _____, is that true?” The recovering brainwashed character asks these questions of Katniss just as I ask these questions of my friend. “My brain is telling me there’s no hope for the future, is that true?” I will keep asking these questions as part of my deconstruction of the negative brain ruts and my reconstruction of the positive path.
What about you? Are there areas of negativity or hopelessness that need your attention? How can you reframe those thoughts - even if you don’t feel the positivity yet - and start building a path towards feeling positivity again someday? Who is the trusted friend in your life who can help you see the light when all you see is darkness?