A Friendly Reminder…

Failing is good for you…now.

Let me paint you the picture. I’m lying on my bed watching the last episode of my binge-spree of Schitt’s Creek and I look over at all the shit piled on my desk..haven’t done any of it. A slow guilt starts climbing over me and pulling me deep into my blanket fort until I find, you guessed it, another show to binge. It was The Witcher, which was amazing, but that’s not the point.

All too often, we see possibilities and instead of choosing the unknown we choose nothing. Maybe it’s just me, but the fear of failing is something that has always fascinated me and I have always wondered why it happens. So let’s start at the beginning.

Why Fight or Flight Mattered

Some biology for you. When we were all cave people living our best lives, our bodies did some pretty remarkable things. Let’s say you’re a cave person walking around, gathering berries and enjoying nature. And then you stop. Something smells wrong…you hear a branch crack and you turn to see a giant bear. You have two options, run for your f*cking life or stand your ground and possibly get a meal out of it. Let’s say you run and you somehow climb a tree and get away from the beast. You stay up there for a few hours before coming down and booking it back to your tribe.

Your body then holds onto that horribly scary encounter in your memory bank so that you don’t go back to that area again or so you are better equipped next time you encounter something similar. We are fully designed to hold those bad or scary memories more easily than happy, chill memories of us hanging out with the family by the lake, to save our lives. If our cave people ancestors only retained happy memories instead of sad/scary…none of us would be here.

Negativity Saves us

How does this apply to us you may be asking?

WELL. This means that on a biological and psychological level, we instinctively remember negative emotions for life saving purposes. That was great when we would be able to remember where to avoid stepping into the den of a thousand snakes, but has different affects now.

Research has shown that emotions, such as sadness or fear trigger memories, which normally help us lead safer lives. With negativity bias, we are more likely to believe bad news to be true, be motivated to do something to avoid a bad situation than obtain a good one and are more likely to learn from negative encounters. Today, we are much more aware, creating a much larger pool of negative encounters to choose from. The news, negative comments online, movies, music, driving. It all just feeds into us and creates a large bank of stored information.

When we are constantly being bombarded with negative stimuli and then experience something like failure or other negative situations, it can become too overwhelming. It can feel like you’re in a rock bottom with nothing to climb out with. But, knowing our biology can be a small ladder that helps us out.

It’s Okay to Fail Now

I’m not saying that we have to avoid negativity and only be happy hippies running around with flowers. I’m hoping that this insight into how we are wired can help us identify the negativity we are willing to put ourselves through.

Happy memories are great. I would love to have them all the time, but I also want to grow and to grow is to learn. Being in that uncomfortable place, going through hard times or experiencing what we think is a failure offers lessons and helps up understand more so that we are better equipped for the future.

We don’t want to go through those negative emotions and are exposed to it on a regular basis through other stimuli so we naturally procrastinate or avoid just to save face. But, if we start limiting the external stimuli and allowing the “negative” to come from the lessons we want to have, we can better handle that uncomfortable unknown.

When we let go of our natural tendency to avoid failure, we open up to lessons and creativity that lead us down our paths of finding even greater victories.

Next time, we will look at tips to dealing with failure and how we can start changing our mindset from thinking that life happens to us to thinking that life happens for us.