#NPWSelfCurious: How Positive Thoughts and Actions can Help us During a Crisis — Part One
There is a glut of stuff flooding social media right now about being positive. We’ve given it some thought and decided to join that particular party with April’s blogs. We’re bringing you positivity, Self Curious style.
Expect to baseline your own expectations of what positivity can do for you, get out a magnifying glass to see what we really mean when we talk about thinking and reacting with a positive mindset and if being a positive person really is all it’s cracked up to be. Spoiler: it probably isn’t.
We know that the current situation here in the spring of 2020 is anything but easy. We also know that you might be screaming at your phone whenever you see a nice picture of flowers and rainbows with some trite quote about the storm always ending, or when you receive your eighth “hope you’re okay 😊” WhatsApp of the week. We know you are doing your best, even when that involves hitting snooze and pulling the covers over your head.
If you feel able, take a moment to do this self-reflection exercise:
When did you feel most okay today? This is relative, so that may not equate to feeling very okay at all right now. That is totally normal for now, in our bananas Coronavirus times. Can you remember other times in the last few days when you’ve felt most okay? If you can, write down or draw a doodle of what that felt or looked like to you. If you can’t, bring a pen to your hand, try and take a moment to bring that feeling of “more okay than when it really isn’t okay” to mind.
Now, identify an object, a taste, a person/character or a phrase that you can relate back to that moment. Maybe you enjoyed your morning porridge. Maybe one particular run-of-the-mill mug was the one you were drinking your tea out of when the sun shone through the window onto your face. Maybe one funny Friends meme actually did make you laugh. These are the tokens we need right now. Maybe set one of these images as your phone background, just for today, and see if it brings a smile or memory of things being that bit more okay.
Positivity is an intention to nudge us towards something better. If there is a crisis happening, that probably means we’re dealing with bad news. To also be striving for better is a confusing message to give ourselves, and actually might not be an approach that will work. Let’s also be clear: some of us were dealing with personal crises before this started. For the chronically ill, for carers, for those grieving or in the midst of seismic life shifts before COVID-19 hit, “positivity” messages already felt like a punch in the guts.
This month we will continue to look at how positive thoughts and actions can help us, but we’re doing it Self Curious style: with compassion, humility, and the knowledge that life is messy.
Brace for memes, folks. We’re going in.
