How to avoid a “my day is ruined” kind of day
You wake up late, spill coffee down your new trousers and hop in the car only to find that you’ve run out of petrol. “My day is ruined!” you boldly proclaim.
What has just been described sums up a well-established psychological bias known as overgeneralisation. This is a cognitive distortion that leads an individual to assume negative outcomes based on limited experience. In other words, over-generalisation falsely assumes you will “have a bad day” simply because something bad happened that morning.
We know how frustrating it can be when seemingly small inconveniences threaten to ruin the rest of the day. Often we become so annoyed and irritated by a small instance in the morning that it can impact the way that we go about the rest of the day. For instance, we may be more snappy with our friends or be less patient about things that would otherwise not bother us.
So what can we do about it?
As with any skill or habit, practice is key (just like your mother told you). Avoiding overgeneralisation can be helped by building self-awareness of the thought biases that we have. You can practise this by asking yourself objective questions like “Does the evidence available correlate with the conclusion that I have made?”. The idea here is to differentiate between conclusions based on emotions and those based on facts. Journaling has been shown to help practise this principle.
For example, we might conclude that after spilling coffee down our trousers we are a clumsy or careless person. However, if we take a step back and think about all the times that we drink coffee without dropping a single drop and that it is perfectly normal for a person to spill things from time to time, we might reconcile these ill-informed notions.
Does the evidence available correlate with the conclusion that I have made?
If I weren’t in a bad mood, would I be have the same reaction?
It is impossible to go about life without dropping things accidentally.
The emotional centres of our brains react many times faster than the logical and rational thought centres of the brain, so you should forgive yourself for initial knee-herk reactions to things that happen to us.
The key is to challenge these innate, instinctive biases by using logic and reason. The more that we do this, the more we remind ourselves that we are not at the whim of strong emotional reactions that would otherwise take control of our lives.
Exercising the neural pathway that uses logic in these sorts of scenarios is akin to building a muscle at the gym. The more we use it, the stronger it grows. Equally, we have to give it rest in order to gain the benefits of the exercise in the first instance. You wouldn't start a gym routine maxing out weights in the same way that you must start small and build your way up to practising.
Splitting up the day into new beginnings
Another great method for avoiding overgeneralisation is to mentally divide your day into small subsections. For example, you may split the day into waking up, getting to work, starting work, ending work and the evening.
By doing this, you can compartmentalize different sections of the day. Therefore, if something does not go as planned, you can mentally assign that to only a small portion of the day, as opposed to generalising it to the whole day. There are no hard and fast rules for this, do what works for you and try different methods to get there.
In conclusion…
Be aware of the cognitive bias of overgeneralisation, use logic to challenge emotional reactions and stop having a bad “day”! But above all, be kind to yourself and forgive yourself for having perfectly normal emotional reactions to things.
