“I love talking with you Gail, it’s like you make my problems disappear.”
I can’t lie, that’s a great thing to hear. It makes me feel all lovely and warm. I know that I don’t really make people’s problems disappear though.
When you feel better most problems disappear of their own accord. Occasionally there’s something that you need to do, but most of the time problems are things that have been hanging around in our heads for a while. They come up when we’re not feeling so great. Mood-related problems.
You might have noticed it for yourself.
Have you seen that when you’re feeling stressed or upset, your mind fills with problems that need solving urgently, yet when your mood shifts to something more upbeat, those things don’t really bother you?
Where do those problems go?
Well, they pass on by. Like the thoughts we have that wonder where we’ll be living in 5 years time, or the worrying thoughts that cross our mind at times. They go. They’re likely to be part of a habitual train of thought that you have that comes up when you’re feeling stressed or upset.
Do you know what I mean? You’re feeling stressed out because of the school run and no one was ready and the washing up needs doing and it’s raining and you’re running late and the last thing you need is the car not to start….
One thing after another and your stress levels are through the roof.
Then you notice that the kid’s hair hasn’t been brushed, the packed lunches aren’t done and that school note that needed signing is nowhere to be seen. There’s no one helping you, you don’t have time to do it all, why can’t the kids just think for themselves for once, where the hell is your partner in all of this, you’re sick of doing it all and you’d be better off on your own.
You see, the same list of events could happen when you were in a good mood and you’d handle them like a pro. You might even laugh about it. You might make it all into a game for the kids. Being late probably wouldn’t be an issue as you’d know what had gone on, what was working against you. You’d deal with it.
It’s not our external circumstances that cause our moods, it’s our moods that change our experience of our external circumstances.
Trains of Thought
Trains of thought can be really interesting, unless you’re stuck on one. You can start to recognise them because they sound pretty much the same every time one is set off. They get to be familiar.
I have trains of thought related to relationships, money, work, all sorts of things. It’s lovely when I recognise them because then I don’t have to jump on that train because the stories that accompany them are generally unpleasant and they’re not true. So I can save myself a lot of stress and heartache by letting them go past.
Take this morning for instance. I’d decided not to take a job. I knew that it would be tiring for me and that would impact on everything else that I had going on.
My train of thought took me down a long route, through the lands of ‘this was your once chance’, down to the depths of ‘what’s wrong with you, you could have handled it, anyone else would have!’ and into the murky waters of ‘you could have helped and you didn’t’. These are remnants of my people-pleasing days. They make me feel like I have done something really bad and I don’t like it. But I knew that I’d made the right decision. Within a few minutes in rushed a whole load of different ideas, writing ideas, that were much better suited to me.
Knowing Better, Doing Differently
If I didn’t know better I could have really thought that there was something wrong with me, or I might have emailed them back and said that I’d changed my mind, or I likely would have felt really stressed out because I thought that my one chance had gone and I wouldn’t be able to find something else. But I know better. I know that these are old thoughts that are still kicking around. I can ignore them.
So, yes, problems seem to disappear when I talk to people and most of the time it’s because they weren’t problems in the first place. They’re part of a person’s habitual thinking and they naturally go once you start to feel differently.
I can see that, now the magic happens when you start to.
Photo by Rick Mason on Unsplash