This morning I was reading about “cultivating indifference” and I had the thought… Hey man, just relax. And that thought really annoyed me.
Here is why I think it annoyed me.
When we sit in judgement of the things around us we are putting them into categories that might look something like “this is good” and “this is bad.” My health is ok, my workout was rushed, my car is dirty, my new bow is fun, getting ready for work is a pain in the neck… just writing this I can feel the emotional swing of those judgments. How on earth are we supposed to “relax” when we are constantly filtering everything into “good” and “bad” lists?
The stoic answer is to reserve this type of categorizing for virtues and vices and to let everything else fall into the indifferent category.
Great, now I have an idea of what I’m supposed to do but no real ideas for how to do it.
And that’s where I got annoyed.
My solution to this annoyance was to try and write about it as a form of exploration. For me this is a forcing function that helps me examine my thoughts and feelings, find gaps, maybe seek some more information and ultimately work towards a solution for my problem.
I found a few tools in Cognitive Behavior Therapy that might help.
- Thought Challenging – Judgements are thoughts and they can be challenged by listing the evidence supporting them and refuting them. Was my workout really terrible, it was better than no workout.
- Reframing – Take a neutral perspective and try on the thought. Instead of “my truck sucks because it’s dirty” I could think something factual and neutral like My truck has sand on the floor mats.
- The View from Above – This is actually a Stoicism practice. It is using the mental ritual of expanding out from the situation so that you can see more and more of the context surrounding it.
- The Continuum Trick – Instead of just assigning some form good or bad label, this technique asks you to assign a subjective numerical value to the judgement. My truck being dirty is only 10% bad… therefore the rest is either neutral or good.
There it is… a couple of ways you can reduce the emotional swing of passing judgements on everything. I’d be really interested to know if anyone else has some tricks or tools they would recommend trying?
