Putting The Abs Into Absurdity

We’ve talked before about the health benefits of a broadly positive outlook on life:

Optimism Seriously Increases Longevity!

…and we’re very serious about it, but that’s about optimistic life views in general, and today we’re about not just keeping good humor in questionable circumstances, but actively finding good humor in the those moments—even when the moments in question might not be generally described as good!

After all, laughter really can be the best medicine, for example:

The effect of laughter yoga exercises on anxiety and sleep quality in patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease

From the roots

First a quick recap on de-toothing the psychological aspect of threats, no matter how menacing they may be:

Hello, Emotions: Time For Radical Acceptance!

…which we can then take a step further:

What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

Choose your frame

Do you remember when that hacker hacked and publicized the US Federal no-fly list, after already hacking a nationwide cloud-based security camera company, getting access to more than 150,000 companies’ and private individuals’ security cameras, amongst various other cyber crimes, mostly various kinds of fraud and data theft?

Imagine how she (age 21) must have felt, when being indicted. What do you suppose this hacker had to say for itself under such circumstances?

❝congress is investigating now 🙂

but i stay silly :3 ❞

~ maia arson crimew

…the latter half of which, usually rendered “but I stay silly” or “but we stay silly” has since entered popular Gen-Z parlance, usually after expressing some negative thing, often in a state of powerlessness.

Which is an important life skill if powerlessness is something that is often likely.

It’s important for many Gen-Zs with negligible life prospects economically; it’s equally important for 60-somethings getting cancer diagnoses (statistically the most likely decade to find out one has cancer, by the way), and many other kinds of people younger, older, and in between.

Because at the end of the day, we all start powerless and we all end powerless.

Learned helplessness (two kinds)

In psychology, “learned helplessness” occurs when a person or creature gives up after learning that all and any attempts to resist a Bad Thing™ fail, perhaps even badly. A lab rat may just shut down and sit there getting electroshocked, for example. A person subjected to abuse may stop trying to improve their situation, and just go with the path of least resistance.

But, there’s another kind, wherein someone in a position of absolute powerlessness not only makes their peace with that, but also, decides that the one thing the outside world can’t control, is how they take it. Like the hacker we mentioned earlier.

Sometimes the gallows humor is even more literal, laughing at one’s own impending death. Not as a matter of bravado, but genuinely seeing the funny side.

But how?

Unfortunately, fortunately

The trick here is to “find a silver lining” that is nowhere near enough to compensate for the bad thing—and it may even be worse! But that’s fine:

“Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to do the dishes before leaving for my vacation. Fortunately, I also forgot to turn the oven off, so the house burning down covered up my messy kitchen”

Writer’s personal less drastic example: today I set my espresso machine to press me an espresso; it doesn’t have an auto-off and I got distracted and it overflowed everywhere; my immediate reaction was “Oh! I have been blessed with an abundance of coffee!”

This kind of silly little thing, on a daily basis, builds a very solid habit for life that allows one to see the funny side in even the most absurd situations, even matters of life and death (can confirm: been there enough times personally—so far so good, still alive to find the remembered absurdity silly).

The point is not to genuinely value the “silver lining”, because half the time it isn’t even one, really, and it is useless to pretend, in seriousness.

But to pretend in silliness? Now we’re onto something, and the real benefit is in the laughs we had along the way.

Because those worst moments? Are probably when we need it the most, so it’s good to get some practice in!

Want more ways to find the funny and make it a life habit?

We reviewed a good book recently:

The Humor Habit: Rewire Your Brain To Stress Less, Laugh More, And Achieve More’er – by Paul Osincup

Stay silly!

When knowing what to do isn’t the problem

Often, we know what we need to do. Sometimes, knowing isn’t the problem!

The topic today is going to be a technique used by therapeutic service providers to help people to enact positive changes in their lives.

While this is a necessarily dialectic practice (i.e., it involves a back-and-forth dialogue), it’s still perfectly possible to do it alone, and that’s what we’ll be focussing on in this main feature.

What is Motivational Interviewing?

❝Motivational interviewing (MI) is a technique that has been specifically developed to help motivate ambivalent patients to change their behavior.❞

Read in full: Motivational Interviewing: An Evidence-Based Approach for Use in Medical Practice

It’s mostly used for such things as helping people reduce or eliminate substance abuse, or manage their weight, or exercise more, things like that.

However, it can be employed for any endeavour that requires motivation and sustained willpower to carry it through.

Three Phases

Motivational Interviewing traditionally has three phases:

1. Exploring and understanding the issue at hand
2. Guiding and deciding importance and goals
3. Choosing and setting an action plan

In self-practice, maybe you can already know and understand what it is that you want/need to change.

If not, consider asking yourself such questions as:

• What does a good day look like? What does a bad day look like?
• If things are not good now, when were they good? What changed?
• If everything were perfect now, what would that look like? How would you know?

Once you have a clear idea of where you want to be, the next thing to know is: how much do you want it? And how confident are you in attaining it?

This is a critical process:

• Give your answers numerically on a scale from 0 to 10
• Whatever your score, ask yourself why it’s not lower. For example, if you scored your motivation 4 and your confidence 2, what factors made your motivation not a lower number? What factors made your confidence not a lower number?
• In the unlikely event that you gave yourself a 0, ask whether you can really afford to scrap the goal. If you can’t, find something, anything, to bring it to at least a 1.
• After you’ve done that, then you can ask yourself the more obvious question of why your numbers aren’t higher. This will help you identify barriers to overcome.

Now you’re ready to choose what to focus on and how to do it. Don’t bite off more than you can chew; it’s fine to start low and work up. You should revisit this regularly, just like you would if you had a counsellor helping you.

Some things to ask yourself at this stage of the motivational self-interviewing:

• What’s a good SMART goal to get you started?
• What could stop you from achieving your goal?
  • How could you overcome that challenge?
  • What is your backup plan, if you have to scale back your goal for some reason?

A conceptual example: if your goal is to stick to a whole foods Mediterranean diet, but you are attending a wedding next week, then now is the time to decide in advance 1) what personal lines-in-the-sand you will or will not draw 2) what secondary, backup plan you will make to not go too far off track.

The same example in practice: wedding menus often offer meat/fish/vegetarian options, so you might choose the fish or vegetarian, and as for sugar and alcohol, you might limit yourself to “a small slice of wedding cake only; coffee/cheese option instead of dessert”, and “alcohol only for toasts”.

Giving yourself the permission well in advance for small (clearly defined and boundaried!) diversions from the plan, will stop you from falling into the trap of “well, since today’s a cheat-day now…”

Secret fourth stage

The secret here is to keep going back and reassessing at regular intervals. Set your own calendar; you might want to start out weekly and then move to monthly when you’re more strongly on-track.

For this reason, it’s good to keep a journal with your notes from your self-interview sessions, the scores you gave yourself, the goals and plans you set, etc.

When conducting your regular review, be sure to examine what worked for you, and what didn’t (and why). That way, you can practice trial-and-improvement as you go.

Want to learn more?

We only have so much room here, but there are lots of resources out there.

Here’s a high-quality page that:

• explains motivational interviewing in more depth than we have room for here
• offers a lot of free downloadable resource packs and the like

Check it out: Motivational Interviewing Theory & Resources

Enjoy!