The Power of Negative Thinking

Negative thinking prevents you from doing stupid things. Overly optimistic people might create more problems for them, thinking they would succeed, rather than go back and think about their real possibilities at the moment.

The trick of thinking about the worst possible scenario worked for me, when I had problems with social anxiety in high school.

I hate to talk about this but it might be worthwhile... avoiding negative emotions led me to depression and anxiety.

About a year ago I started noticing that my life, while looking wonderful from the outside, was anything but. It was the subtle things -- eating pizza every night for a month, playing video games to pass the time, looking for excuses to avoid "living." Summer was just finishing up and one of my favorite pastimes - swimming, was only sought out 2, maybe 3 times that year. Far from par.

Emotions seemed mundane, thoughts were rarely provoking, and my opinions of the world became overly moot. I was getting stuck in the drudgery and monotony. Movies blended together. My driving habits were developing patterns. Green light, green light, red. Yield. Lather, rinse, repeat...

I was becoming more distant with my wife. Her presence was something I rarely cared for. Trying to connect on an emotional level was becoming increasingly difficult. When her days would usually be interesting and we could talk for hours about something as basic as an inkpen, it was difficult to stay focus for more than 5 minutes on largest of issues. I was frustrating with myself, my brain and especially my actions. While I was never abusive, I was distant, and I was distancing myself from her. She could be traumatized and I wouldn't be there. Her life became hard to understand, hard to relate to. And I was clueless.

Once I started picking up that life wasn't the same, my instincts started kicking in. It was fight or flight with my mind. This isn't something easily overcomed. For the longest time my only logical approach to alleviation was a frontal lobotomy. But that's not really practical. Or realistic. So there has to be something else, right?

A lot of us have an inner desires to "fix things." Pipes leak and we replace 'em. A/C goes out and recharge it. Pants get ripped? Patch it. But what do we do when WE are the problem? When our minds are the problem. And what do we do when we can't be "fixed?"

Negative emotions are healthy. Sadness, fear, hate, anger -- they're all emotions we tend to label as negative. It's society that associates negative == bad. But instead of fighting everything, we should learn to accept that these exist. They have always existed and will always exist. We can't flip a switch and all the hate in the world will be gone. Instead we should appreciate the Eastern (religion) approach to it -- keep everything in moderation. Happiness, sadness, everything. Keep it equal and don't try to fight it.

We also shouldn't go out looking for specific emotions. That'll only upset us when it doesn't reach our expectations. Instead we should put ourselves into situations where certain emotions naturally occur. Then we can observe them at face value and embrace them with our true self.

We had an interesting experience at the start of the year where people were being "encouraged" by the project managers not to be negative on the project. It felt like being part of the Chinese Cultural Revolution where everyone was getting over excited but with a foreboding sense of dread hanging in the background. Myself and a few others continued to list cautions (normally I'm the optimistic one - but this had gone past my limit) but were ignored and treated as naysayers. It resulted in us putting a country live on a production system without having completed regression testing for existing countries, done any negative testing, or having done any testing with security and workflow configured in a production like way. The next couple of months were absolute hell, and only now are we beginning to recover from it. That said, to get the system stable everyone went out of their way, working overtime/weekends without break or compensation to keep the project on track (and losing one of the team from the project due to stress), which allowed the project managers to say "see, putting you under pressure meant you got it to work", without seeing the chaos they'd caused. People should be encouraged to do realistic thinking - aim for the optimistic, don't say no before you try something (so long as it's not clearly suicidal), but when you know things are going wrong take time to reflect and reassess your situation.

There's a lot of truth in this article, and it reminds me on what Tom DeMarco writes in this book "Waltzing With Bears" (ISBN 9780932633606):

DeMarco argues that having detailed, quantified information about your risks enables you to make more courageous decisions. But in order to be able to quantify your risks, your company's culture must allow for critical and "negative" thinking.

Otherwise, you won't be able to perform even the first basic step: identifying your risks. Without having properly identified all your risks, quantifying those becomes a farce, and essentially boils down to missing one or two elephants in the room.