Helpful principles for making supportive, reasonable, sustainable, and enlightened resolutions that can energize you rather than add to your stress:
- Instead of beating yourself up for what you do wrong and want to change, acknowledge yourself for what you’re doing right, and want to keep doing.
- Do more of the things you love, if they are things that will support you in amplifying your joy, your life force, and your health. You’re more likely to keep doing them.
- When there’s a choice of what to do, choose what truly supports you, what we have evolved to benefit from. Choose what’s natural.
- Look for things and activities that can fortify you and supply you with more resources to help you deal with the stresses of life and the world.
Pickle juice, or what it is you are marinating in
Sondra Ray, a mentor of ours used to say “what you marinate in, you become.” What she meant was that if you spend your time being anxious about crime, say, you become more and more aware and attuned to all the potentially dangerous opportunities for you to be victimized. When in doubt, you interpret iffy situations as being probably dangerous.
On the other hand, if you focus your attention of things you can be grateful for, you are more likely to view the world as supportive and beneficent, and you might find yourself interpreting the same ambiguous situations as indications of impending good things.
In either case, the type of thoughts, images, and emotions you marinate in, your “pickle juice,” determines the psychic state you live in and the kind of life you live.
What would you like to marinate in?
Many people spend lots of time on the internet, and end up marinating in whatever comes up in their feeds. What they see is dictated by impersonal algorithms from social media sites. Lots end up falling into rabbit holes of unsubstantiated nonsense, because the tech companies don’t necessarily care about truth or ethics, just about monetizing our eyeballs.
One of the major problems of the internet is that there are few filters, so that the ravings of deranged cranks, disguised sales pitches, and real information from reputable sources show up side by side with equal billing. Much of what shows up for us online is curated to match our preexisting biases, so to get complete information, we have to be diligent.
Thoughts can be different because brains are different
Interestingly enough, studies have shown that there are differences in brain function between people who are politically conservative and those who are politically liberal.
People who identify as politically conservative are more likely to show heightened arousal in an area of the brain called the amygdala when they are exposed to novel situations, and this type of neural activity is associated with a stress response and feelings of anxiety. People who are politically liberal tend to have less of that type of stress response when they are exposed to the same situations. The brain responses are measurably different.
Thus, liberal types feel that conservatives are irrationally fearful about changes in our society and overly protective of the status quo, while conservatives can’t understand why liberals don’t perceive all the things that are threatening our way of life.
Your online feeds as well as the media sources you choose send you the kind of stories that will reinforce your biases, and ultimately, increase the polarities in our society.
It’s a vicious cycle
What you marinate in, you become. So the more you marinate in the thoughts engendered by media that reinforce stressful images and worldviews, the more hyper-vigilant your amygdala gets, and the more you tend to choose media and social circles that reinforce your values. Conversely, the more you marinate in more positive and less stress-inducing thoughts and media images, the more relaxed your nervous system gets, and the more you tend to select media and social interaction that reinforces your values.
The more this process happens, the more the two groups diverge, and tend exist in their own worlds, without much dialog. Each faction tends to increasingly view the other one as unrealistic and unworthy of interaction. Communication diminishes and anger grows.
Is there hope?
A wonderful book, that I mentioned in a previous email, is Behave, by Robert Sapolsky. Sapolsky is a neuroscience professor at Stanford and a MacArthur genius grant recipient. One of his ideas is that the more we look for things we can identify with other people and other ideas, see them as similar to us and our humanity, the more we will include them as part of our concept of “ourselves,” and the less apprehensive we will be about them.
What can we do?
Think about what you would like to become, and consciously marinate in the media “pickle juice” that will help you to reinforce what you want to exemplify and expand. To break the vicious cycle of stress and distrust in the world, seek commonalities, not differences.
Resolve to choose your pickle juice wisely,
so you marinate more and more in the things you’d like to amplify in your life
