dear dani, #7: believing in better
Our reader/listener in this issue of Dear Dani struggles with changing some core beliefs that negatively impact the way she sees the world. How do you believe in better when chaos is all you have ever known your whole life?
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Dear Dani,
As an avid listener of therapy for takeout, I’m writing you this email because you are able to respond about mental health matters with genuine curiosity and care.
How do I sustain the faith that everything is going to be okay without detaching myself from the problems I currently need to face in order to overcome it? Things are seemingly fine when I start to make sense of what’s bothering me but when I get to act on solving said problem, I get shaken up and curse myself for not being able to seek help because I believe that in order for me to deserve such help, I need to do my part first.
Unfortunately, this miserable loop has taken a toll on my interpersonal relationships, mental health, and productivity.
Little Miss Chronic Quitter
dig deeper~
Dear Little Miss Chronic Quitter,
Thank you for your kind words and for trusting me enough to share this.
As I was preparing for another talk on burnout a couple months ago, I wanted to take a different route in sharing advice that could help students deal with burnout, or preferably, prevent it altogether. The problem with talking about the same topic over and over, besides this being a systemic cry for help, is that the resource person starts to feel desensitized to the information. To keep the lecture novel to me, I had to be more creative in my approach. Instead of simply listing down ways to cope, I grouped these suggestions into four categories in the hope of providing more structured change: feelings, beliefs, habits, and behaviors. This was inspired by a misremembered quote1 I’d read long ago, hung on my grandfather’s bedside, about how our feelings become our beliefs, which become our habits, eventually all these factors determining the person we become.
In all my lectures, my aim is to explain a particular concept in the simplest way possible, yet I could not find the words to define a belief, even if I could sort of picture in my head what it is that I wanted to say. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a belief is:
1 a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing
2 something that is accepted, considered to be true, or held as an opinion : something believed
3 conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence
Dr. Ralph Lewis mentions in his Psychology Today article2 that the beliefs we have are the product of our mind’s pattern recognition skills, an evolutionary trait that has helped us survive for eons. We recognize patterns existing in our milieu that ensure our successes, hoping that we can replicate it in other circumstances. We also take note of patterns that cause us harm, so that in the event it happens again, we are more prepared to deal with it. Such information is used to shape our worldview, influencing our decision making.
Beliefs that form and remain more steadfast than others are due to what we are constantly exposed to and what narrative we take from our experiences. It seems that the relationship between our beliefs and our experiences is cyclical: we experience life, identify a pattern when we behave a certain way and are exposed to a particular environment, then use this information to predict our circumstances so as to secure the most ideal future for ourselves. Because of our confirmation bias, that is our tendency to seek out stimuli that prove our existing theories right, we are more aware of when these patterns are fulfilled, contrary to when we are proven wrong.
For example: you believe that you cannot always be too happy, because then that means something bad is about to happen. You might have internalized this belief because of instances where bad things did happen after a moment of happiness, but you might also be seeing it from a more shortsighted perspective. Perhaps it is not so much that happiness is a transaction we have to pay for, but rather, we feel unhappy shortly after because we have already gotten used to this new level of happiness, and we return to our emotional baseline sooner than later.
With all that said, your mantra, ‘Everything will be OK’ is also a belief. This leads us to the question: how do we strengthen this belief? It is crucial to know first how we are able to reinforce a belief if we want to better understand how to sustain this later on. Using our pattern recognition skills, we have to seek out ways in which we can find more evidence to prove this new belief, that things will be OK. You have to start small and pay more attention to how life works in your favor. What small wins have you achieved today? Do not be so strict about defining wins here, because trying to limit them to the grand gesture alone leads to taking for granted all the little ways you have been trying. Give yourself some credit. The goal is to magnify how you have been taking care of yourself, how you have been trying despite everything. You become skilled at this after some practice, identifying the good in your life, which then gives you the fuel to take more risks and pursue bigger wins.
In the murky realm of self-help on the internet, leading ‘experts’ have done a stellar job at spreading detachment propaganda as the philosophy you have to master in helping yourself, many of them echoing the same kind of pitch that, if you have read any Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, shows a misunderstanding of stoicism or even Buddhism itself. At the height of my existential anxiety in my first year of working, I turned to stoicism for a while (a big cry for help btw) and even bought myself that book by Ryan Holiday3 that had one passage on stoicism for each day of the year. Since the pandemic began, I still have not gotten around to finishing it. But what I do recall is that Marcus Aurelius, one of stoicism’s proponents, often talked about detachment. Not detachment from our problems that the online stoics try to promote, but detachment from the outcome. Although I would argue that getting your mind off of your problems for a short while does help, it is not really about trying to forget them entirely. It’s about understanding that these problems exist because there were decisions made, whether by you or somebody else or a combination of other factors, that you now have to face. Hopefully there is knowledge to gain from the problem and not just pain.
Being well-versed in the problems you have not yet solved is only the first step to trusting that things will be OK, but you take more steps back when you give yourself all these prerequisites to fulfill before trying to ask others for support. It is also a bit ironic that you know you already have to seek help, but you get angry at yourself for not doing your part first. Isn’t staying stuck in a loop of self-loathing enough reason to consider that you already have done what you can, and that it is time to ask for help from others? You have to give yourself the chance to move forward even when your mind tells you that you do not deserve it just yet, because that’s how you challenge core beliefs that harm you, and that’s how you make space for the idea that everything really will be OK.
From Lao Tzu: “Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”
Lewis, R. (2018, October 7). What Actually Is a Belief? And Why Is It So Hard to Change?
Holiday, R. (2018, October 18). The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living.