Reversing the Question
Lately, my mood has been trending negative. I’ve spent more and more time in stress, exhaustion, overwhelm. Did you ever notice that? How a bad mood feeds on itself and compounds and all of a sudden, you realize you’ve been living in a funk for a week?
There’s no shortage of advice out there for emotional ruts, especially now as wellness and self-help appear to be reaching their apotheoses. “Go to an exercise class.” “Meditate!” “Buy this crystal!!” Look, I’m not knocking any of these strategies: I’ve tried them all (and many, many more), and some of them are in the daily rotation.
However–this is where I’m going to start sounding like an infomercial, but stick with me–what if I told you that you can expend ALMOST NO EFFORT and still shift your mood from bad to glad. I’m serious. You can do this anywhere, anytime, and it takes two seconds or less.
It’s called “reversing the question.”
I learned about reversing the question in an episode of the podcast Armchair Expert featuring Yale psychologist on cognition, Dr. Woo-Kyoung Ahn, author of Thinking 101, which explores the biases in our thinking and how we can address them. Ahn says, and I’m paraphrasing here, that we’re feeling some kind of way–unhappy, let’s say–our tendency is to find proof and justification of our unhappiness everywhere. It’s a kind of confirmation bias. Like, if I’m having a bad day and I’m expecting a package that doesn’t arrive, it becomes a cosmic message. OF COURSE the package didn’t arrive; the world is against me!
Reversing the question pushes back against this tendency by instructing your brain to seek evidence of the OPPOSITE emotion. So, if you’re feeling unhappy, ask yourself “how happy am I?” If you’re lonely, ask yourself “how loved am I?” The results are truly staggering.
Try it right now!! I’ll wait.
My experience with reversing the question has been an almost immediate parting of the clouds, like a lightswitch turning on in my brain. It’s magical thinking, for sure, and I don’t expect it to solve my problems per se, but sometimes a bad mood is just a bad mood. The less time I have to spend shooing it out of my day, the better.