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Hey everybody. Welcome today to the podcast. Thanks for joining me today. Sorry, my voice is a little funny today. I have a cold. But I am gonna start by telling you a story. When our youngest son Laz, was about eight, he had a unit in school where they talked about the dangers of smoking and they went over your increased risk for lung cancer and other health issues. Anyway, this, this unit had a big impact on Laz. Summer came and we decided that we wanted to go on a family road trip to Patagonia, and there were several different sites we wanted to see. We were in about the middle of our trip and we were going toward this mountain that we wanted to hike. We drove all day long and we finally get to the town that's closest to this hike, and we're looking for a hotel. We're pretty dismayed to find as we pull into town that the, that the town is just full of tourists, absolutely full. So we go into the first hotel and there's no vacancy. So we go to another bed and breakfast, no room. So we try another one. There's no rooms. We try this about four or five times. Finally, my husband goes in to check one last place. We're all just sitting in the car. He comes back, they don't have any rooms for us, and we're all just sitting there pretty dejected and tired. Because we'd been traveling all day. There's no other town close by. We can't go drive somewhere else to stay, and we just didn't know what we were gonna do. We're all tired and hungry and we just need a place to stay. And at this point, Laz, our youngest pipes up from the backseat and says, with complete childhood sincerity and innocence, he says, "well guys, look on the bright side. At least nobody in our family smokes." And of course we all burst out laughing and this little phrase has become a standard in our family. Anytime somebody's up against a problem that they don't know how to solve, it doesn't seem to have a solution, and it's really weighing on them, then we say,, look on the bright side, at least nobody in our family smokes. So what Laz was doing intuitively in this story is something that psychologists actually take really seriously as a strategy, and it's the strategy of negative comparison or imagining how things could be worse. Right? And there's a, a couple of different ways that you can do this, that psychologists talk about. You can either, when you have a negative life event, like the story that we just told, you can imagine how it might be worse and that can help you to deal with it better and regulate your negative emotions associated with it. And also, a lot of times we have a positive life event, but we get accustomed to this positive life event and it doesn't affect us in the same way that it used to. And so we can use negative comparison to help us to enjoy the positive things in our lives even more.
Psychologists call this the George Bailey effect, when you can compare what's happening to something that could be a lot worse and how it really affects our moods, both when we're having something negative happen or when we have something positive happen. It, it improves our moods in both instances.
So George Bailey, just to remind everybody, is the main character in that old Christmas movie It's a wonderful life. And remember when the movie opens, he's about to commit su suicide, right? He is on the brink of disaster because he's going through a crisis in his life, his financial situation is a total wreck. He's maybe even gonna have to go to jail because of his debts. And he figures that his family would be better off with just the life insurance that they would get from him dying. And so he's about to jump off this bridge and an angel shows up and starts to show him what the world would've been like if he had never been born. So anyway, by the end of the movie, he is so overjoyed when he is restored to his real life. And essentially nothing's changed yet in his real life, he still has all of these financial disasters in his life, he still might go to jail, but all of a sudden he is overjoyed at at the life that he has because he has been able to visualize how it might have been worse. Right? And then of course, a bunch of friends come and start dumping bucket loads of money on him. And so all of his problems are actually solved, but that isn't what made him happy, because he was actually happy before any of that money started coming in and before any of the problems had been solved, he was happy just from having this experience of negative visualization.
So this is the George Bailey effect, and I'm gonna just tell you a few stories about how I have tried to implement this type of George Bailey effect in my own life, both to regulate anxiety and negative emotions associated with negative events in my life, and also to augment the positive emotions that come from positive events in my life.
So starting first with the negative events. When our second son was about 13, he was riding his bike to school and he was going around this curve and a bus came up right behind him and going around the curve at the same time, and the bus was not giving him the space that it should have given him, and it ended up hitting him on his bike and threw him about 10 feet. Luckily, it didn't throw him into the direction of traffic, but it threw him off to the side of the road. I remember when we got the call that our son had been in an accident. We jump in the car, we raced to the scene, and we see all of these people standing around our son who is lying on the ground and I'm thinking, oh my goodness, he's dead. So I go up to him. I run up to him, stand over him, and I see that his eyes are open, he's conscious, he's not bleeding. He looks okay. And after, you know, about a minute or so, he wants to get up and go home and he, he stands up and brushes himself off and goes home. And we took him to the hospital. Nothing was broken. Some bruises and things, but really minor compared to what might have happened. And I remember taking a picture soon after this event and just, just to try and register how wonderful it was that he was alive. So this son is now in his mid twenties and it's, so, it's been about, you know, a good 12 years since that accident. And so his life has gone on since then. And as lives do, he's gone through a lot of adventures and some of these adventures have caused me a lot of anxiety. There have been different times when I've been really worried about him or anxious for him, or just wanting to make things be able to work out, but I couldn't make them work out and just feeling, feeling anxious and worried about him. Right? But at these times, I've found that it has been really helpful if I could go back to that moment when I ran up to him when he was lying on the ground. And what if he hadn't survived? What if he had died? He very, very easily could have died in that moment when the bus hit him and threw him 10 feet. He could have died, or he could have been maimed in some way. He could have been paraplegic, but he's not. He's healthy, he's alive. And so it helps me in those moments when I feel anxiety about different situations that he's facing, to remember that it's amazing that he's even alive to face these situations. And that helps me to feel less anxious and worried and despairing and, and just feel more grateful that he's alive, right?
So I think a lot of us can relate to different close calls that our loved ones or that we have gone through, right? That we can recall and just think about how it might have gone differently, right? Think of how we might not have survived. I've talked before on the podcast about how I had a, a brush with death when I had COVID and how I didn't know if I was gonna make it. At one point I didn't know if I was gonna survive. But I did and I recovered and here I am. And you know, in the world in the present day there are a lot of different things in the political scene, both in the US and and in Brazil and worldwide that uh, are cause for a lot of worry and anxiety for me at times. And sometimes I just feel really burdened and upset and overcome by just worry about anxiety about these things. But it helps me when I feel that to go back and visualize how it might be worse. What if I hadn't made it through my bout with Covid? What if I had died then, what if I wasn't healthy and well, what if I was still sick, right? I was sick for three years. I could still be sick now, but I'm not right? But most of all, it's just a miracle that I lived to see these things happening in the world, and I can, I can share the experience with the people that I love. I can offer support to people that I love, other people that are anxious and worried, which I wouldn't be able to do if I had passed away at that time. Right? Those are two negative visualizations that I do that help me to deal with anxieties and worries and things that, that upset me.
There's a documentary called One Strange Rock, which is really fantastic, and it takes the point of view of eight astronauts who have been out in space and had that really emotional experience of looking at the earth from far away, right? They've been out in space where they have all of this paraphernalia, technology that they have to use to keep themselves even alive out there, and they're looking down at this planet that just sustains life so beautifully, and they're seeing it from a distance, and the documentary goes through one by one, all these different really unique and amazing conditions that we have here on Earth that make life possible and that very well could not have happened. Right? Things like our atmosphere turning out just the way it did so that we have just the right amount of oxygen, the temperature on our planet, turning out just right for life to exist. The magnetic field that helps keep a lot of the really harmful rays of the sun out so that, so that life can exist on this planet. And it just goes through one by one all these different conditions that you know, I wasn't aware of before I watched this documentary. I just take for granted that we're alive here. But after watching it, you realize there's a lot of reasons why none of this would've happened. Why there would be no plants and no animals and no us on this earth if all of these things hadn't happened. So I think this documentary is a really great way to have that negative vis visualization of how it might've been worse, how we might never have come into existence. I remember having a similar experience once when I watched a documentary about conception, you know, the video footage of conception and a fetus growing and then being born. And when you start to realize all of the things that have to happen in order for conception to be successful, in order for a fetus to grow and a baby to be born, it makes you realize that, you know, it's amazing that any of us are ever born. Because there's so much against us that makes it so that we, it shouldn't happen. Right? And the more I learn about, about my body and how complex it is, right, and how many things have to be just right in order for me to be alive for one minute, it makes me realize that it is mind blowing that we are even alive at all. So just thinking about these things, how it can very easily happen that we never had existed or that we would not be alive right now can help switch that perspective and help you to feel less anxious.
Okay, so now for the second type of negative visualization. The first type was when you have a negative life event, how it can help you to think of how it might be worse. The second type is when you have a positive event, how to help you to enjoy that more. Because psychologists talk about how we have a lot of positives in our lives that at first we get really happy about them, right? That when you first get that job that you've been working so long for, or you, you first ha, you first get married, you first have a baby. Different things can happen in your life that you are really happy about, but then over time you get accustomed to them, you get adapted to them and they are just normal. And so you don't, they don't have that same impact that they had initially. That job, which initially made you euphoric, now you're just used to it. Now it's the day to day. Now it doesn't really make you that feel that happy anymore. Right? And psychologists call this hedonic adaptation. It's just that we get used to anything in our life, both negative and positive, and so it doesn't have the same emotional intensity that it used to have . So this is a little bit unfortunate because it's too bad when we can't enjoy the positives in our lives just because they become normal. We should be able to enjoy them even after we're used to them. One way that we can do that, that studies have shown is to really think about how, how blessed it is that we have this particular thing and how it could have been otherwise, how we could have not had it, or how it actually was otherwise before, right? How it was before we got this thing right? To just recollect and imagine those different things can help us.
One study that I looked at had people in, had people write about their romantic partner and write about how they could have never met. Imagine how it could have happened that they would not have met or would've not have gotten together. And then another group just simply had to write about how they got together and how they met. And they compared these two groups and the people that wrote about how it might not have happened had more positive emotions than those who just wrote about how it happened. So this is one way to unadapt to those positives in our lives and help them to seem surprising again and be able to feel that they might not have happened and that this is precious and that it's something that needs to be valued. Because it's not normal. It actually could easily not have happened.
So I wanted to bring this technique up for you because studies have also shown that people tend to not do this type of negative visualization because they don't think that it will make them feel any different. They don't actually think that it will improve their mood or help them regulate their negative emotions, but it really does. These studies show that it does. And so I wanted to make sure that you knew about that, that this type of negative vis visualization can help us to feel better when we have a negative life event and also to wake up our appreciation for the positive life events that we have.
So that's the strategy I wanted to leave you with today. And don't forget to stay tuned now for a kindness narrative, which will be quick and will help you with your weekly gratitude practice. Thanks.
This is a kindness narrative that was shared with me by a listener, by email. He wrote it down and sent it to me by email 'cause he didn't feel comfortable sending me an audio. And I want you to know that that is another way that you can share your kindness narrative.
Some of the kindest gestures I've received were during my most difficult and desperate moments. Once I overdid it on a bike ride and found myself on the far side of the mountain, feeling exhausted and unable to get home. In my desperation, I went into a small diner and waited just a minute for a few people to leave one of the tables. And seeing that they were leaving half eaten plates I quickly sat down and began eating the cold food that was to be discarded. When the lady came to buss the table, she asked what I was doing and I said something like, never mind me. I'll just be a minute. She must have been explaining to someone, her conundrum or maybe asking a manager for advice on how to get rid of me, but whatever happened, she returned quickly and said, here's a menu. I'll clear this table and you can order a proper hot meal. Mike there in the back is going to pay for you. He's a regular. So I had a nice midday break and a meal fitting of the Brazilian midday dinner tradition, and then I was able to pedal to the top of the mountain and roll the rest of the way home.
I really felt loved by strangers, and it's true that I put myself in that situation and I alone was responsible for my suffering, and I didn't deserve any kindness from strangers, and I even felt like I wasn't in a position to ask for the cold leftovers. Maybe I was kind of actually stealing that food.
Uh, but I felt such a sense of gratitude for the kindness that was extended to me precisely because it was so freely given and so clearly unearned. You know, it wasn't like Mike or anybody there was over a barrel, so to speak, for some favor I had extended to them. The most unearned kindness is so powerful .