Erica Browne Grivas
What can we do when life upsets us? Take time to notice how often you are upset during the day. You’ll likely see that usually it’s because life upended your expectations. Therapist and author Christine Hassler calls this an “expectation hangover” – the frustration and internal pushback we experience in disappointment. It might be something small, like the café is out of your favorite coffee, or something more challenging.
Some of the ways we respond include getting annoyed or angry, complaining, or spending time trying to fix the situation, i.e., force today’s round peg into your square vision.
That doesn’t usually go well. Let’s say you misplace your keys, spending precious minutes locating them, all the while saying to yourself, “I can’t believe this is happening, I’m going to be late, I can just hear my boss’ reaction, etc.” before running out the door in a huff. That’s when you forget your laptop or slam your finger in the car door. “That’s just my luck,” you mutter as you drive off. At work you tell co-workers, “You won’t believe the day I’ve had,” rehashing all the ways that life has done you wrong today.
The brain is constantly seeking efficiencies to help us streamline the millions of functions and thoughts in day. Both the reticular activating system, which notices patterns, and the amygdala (the fear processing center) latch on to what you notice. If you are telling yourself — whether verbally, silently or somatically through body signals like tension — that life is a struggle, your brain will help you notice more correlating information. The amygdala, with a negative bias meant to keep you safe, lights up when you think fearful thoughts or predict chaos and catastrophe.
In the car keys scenario above you are doing both, creating a feedback loop that keeps you in a very bad mood while paying more attention to things that reinforce that mood – a coworker you don’t get along with, the weather, and so on.
My youngest sister in New York City is a high school teacher – an award-winning one, at an alternative school for teenagers and young adults who weren’t served by the conventional system. Her students’ lives come with lots of challenges. Her coffee mug reads, “Keep Calm and Pretend it’s On the Lesson Plan.” I think this may be the answer to handling life’s curve balls. Predicting them is unlikely, obliterating them is impossible, so let’s roll with them with as much grace as we can muster.
The number of potential annoyances, disappointments or mental derailments we can experience is infinite. The Buddha’s famous saying, “Life is suffering,” sounded depressing and fatalist the first time I heard it. Who wants suffering to be the meaning of life? I’m no expert about Buddhism, but I think he meant that suffering is as much a part of life as breathing.
The world is a dynamic system, always changing, and humans are always looking for preferences to help game the system and make it “just right.” We love routines, comfort, predictability – they feel safe, calming, and they enable us to more efficiently explore creativity and learning. Ironically, the learning creates new preferences, we become habituated to that learned system, and so it goes.
Sometimes with the perspective of time, we see our challenges have helped us, led us to places we’d never imagined. You’ve probably heard someone say on a meme or podcast that they learned to say, “life isn’t happening to me, it’s happening for me.”
That’s not always easy to do as frustration builds in your chest. It may feel performative at first, like an affirmation. Big challenges usually come with learnings. Little challenges, less so. It’s possible that somehow that challenge would have helped you somehow - maybe leaving five minutes late you avoided an accident on your route, or your favorite sandwich would have had bad lettuce on it. We can’t always know if the challenge will prove to be helpful later. But try saying things to yourself like, “It’s going to be fine,” “I’ve got this,” or “This won’t matter to me in five years.”
That can short-circuit the negative feedback loop in the moment – which is a miracle not to be underestimate. At the very least it feels better than continuing the negativity. That alone can improve your day – and maybe that of all the people you meet too.