What’s The Right Balance?

We’ve written before about positivity the pitfalls and perils of toxic positivity:

How To Get Your Brain On A More Positive Track (Without Toxic Positivity)

…as well as the benefits that can be found from selectively opting out of complaining:

A Bone To Pick… Up And Then Put Back Where We Found It

So… What place, if any, does negativity usefully have in our lives?

Carrot and Stick

We tend to think of “carrot and stick” motivation being extrinsic, i.e. there is some authority figure offering is reward and/or punishment, in response to our reactions.

In those cases when it really is extrinsic, the “stick” can still work for most people, by the way! At least in the short term.

Because in the long term, people are more likely to rebel against a “stick” that they consider unjust, and/or enter a state of learned helplessness, per “I’ll never be good enough to satisfy this person” and give up trying to please them.

But what about when you have your own carrot and stick? What about when it comes to, for example, your own management of your own healthy practices?

Here it becomes a little different—and more effective. We’ll get to that, but first, bear with us for a touch more about extrinsic motivation, because here be science:

We will generally be swayed more easily by negative feelings than positive ones.

For example, a study was conducted as part of a blood donation drive, and:

• Group A was told that their donation could save a life
• Group B was told that their donation could prevent a death

The negative wording given to group B boosted donations severalfold:

Read the paper: Life or Death Decisions: Framing the Call for Help

We have, by the way, noticed a similar trend—when it comes to subject lines in our newsletters. We continually change things up to see if trends change (and also to avoid becoming boring), but as a rule, the response we get from subscribers is typically greater when a subject line is phrased negatively, e.g. “how to avoid this bad thing” rather than “how to have this good thing”.

How we can all apply this as individuals?

When we want to make a health change (or keep up a healthy practice we already have)…

• it’s good to note the benefits of that change/practice!
• it’s even better to note the negative consequences of not doing it

For example, if you want to overcome an addiction, you will do better for your self-reminders to be about the bad consequences of using, more than the good consequences of abstinence.

See also: How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol

This goes even just for things like diet and exercise! Things like diet and exercise can seem much more low-stakes than substance abuse, but at the end of the day, they can add healthy years onto our lives, or take them off.

Because of this, it’s good to take time to remember, when you don’t feel like exercising or do feel like ordering that triple cheeseburger with fries, the bad outcomes that you are planning to avoid with good diet and exercise.

Imagine yourself going in for that quadruple bypass surgery, asking yourself whether the unhealthy lifestyle was worth it. Double down on the emotions; imagine your loved ones grieving your premature death.

Oof, that was hard-hitting

It was, but it’s effective—if you choose to do it. We’re not the boss of you! Either way, we’ll continue to send the same good health advice and tips and research and whatnot every day, with the same (usually!) cheery tone.

One last thing…

While it’s good to note the negative, in order to avoid the things that lead to it, it’s not so good to dwell on the negative.

So if you get caught in negative thought spirals or the like, it’s still good to get yourself out of those.

If you need a little help with that sometimes, check out these:

• How To Manage Chronic Stress
• How To Set Anxiety Aside
• The Off-Button For Your Brain

Take care!

Lucid Dreaming: Methods & Uses

We’ve written about dreaming more generally before:

How Useful Are Our Dreams?

Today we’re going to be talking more about a subject we’ve only touched on previously: lucid dreaming

What it is: lucid dreaming is the practice of being mentally awake while dreaming, with awareness that it is a dream, and control over the dream.

Why is it useful? Beyond simply being fun, it can banish nightmares, it can improve one’s relationship with sleep (always something to look forward to, and sleep doesn’t feel like a waste of time at all!), and it can allow for exploring a lot of things that can’t easily be explored otherwise—which can be quite therapeutic.

How to do it

There are various ways to induce lucid dreaming, but the most common and “entry-level” method is called Mnemonic-Induced Lucid Dreaming (MILD).

MILD involves having some means of remembering what one has forgotten, i.e., that one is dreaming. To break it down further, first we’ll need to learn how to perform a reality check. Again, there are many of these, but one of the simplest is to ask yourself:

How did I get here?

• If you can retrace your steps with relative ease and the story of how you got here does not sound too much like a dream sequence, you are probably not dreaming.
• If you are dreaming, however, chances are that nothing actually led to where you are now; you just appeared here.

Other reality checks include checking whether books, clocks, and/or lightswitches work as they should—all are notorious for often being broken in dreams; books have gibberish or missing or repeated text; clocks do not tell the correct time and often do not even tell a time that could be real (e.g: 07:72), and lightswitches may turn a light on/off without actually changing the level of illumination in the room.

Now, a reality check is only useful if you actually perform it, so this is where MILD comes in.

You need to make a habit of doing a reality check frequently. Whenever you remember, it’s a good time to do a reality check, but you should also try tying it to something. Many people use a red light, because then they can also use a timed red light during the night to subconsciously cue them that they are dreaming. But it could be as simple as “whenever I go to the bathroom, I do a reality check”.

With this in mind, a fun method that has extra benefits is to try to use a magical power, such as psychokinesis. If (while fully awake) whenever you go to pick up some object you imagine it just wooshing magically to meet your hand halfway, then at some point you’ll instinctively do that while dreaming, and it’ll stand a good chance of working—and thus cluing you in that you are dreaming.

How to stay lucid

When you awaken within a dream (i.e. become lucid), there’s a good chance of one of two things happening quickly:

• you forget again
• you wake up

So when you realize you are dreaming, do two things at once:

• verbally repeat to yourself “I am dreaming now”. This will help stretch your awareness from one second to the next.
• look at your hands, and touch things, especially the floor and/or walls. This will help to ground you within the dream.

Things to do while lucid

Flying is a good fun entry-level activity; it’s very common to initially find it difficult though, and only be able to lift up very slightly before gently falling down, or things like that. A good tip is: instead of trying to move yourself, you stay still and move the dream around you, as though you are rotating a 3D model (because guess what: you are).

Confronting your nightmares and/or general fears is a good thing for many. Think, while you’re still awake during the day, about what you would do about the source/trigger of your fear if you had magical powers. Whatever you choose, keep it consistent for now, because this is about habit-forming.

Example: let’s say there’s a person from your past who appears in your nightmares. Let’s say your chosen magic would be “I would cause the ground to open up, swallow them, and close again behind them”. Vividly imagine that whenever they come to mind while you are awake, and when you encounter them next in a nightmare, you’ll remember to do exactly that, and it’ll work.

Learning about your own subconscious is a more advanced activity, but once you’re used to lucid dreaming, you can remember that everything in there is an internal projection of your own mind, so you can literally talk to parts of your subconscious, including past versions of yourself, or singular parts of your greater-whole personality, as per IFS:

Take Care Of Your “Unwanted” Parts Too!

Want to know more?

You might like to read:

Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life – by Dr. Stephen LaBerge

Enjoy!