Expert Tips on Changing an Unhelpful Belief
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If only rebooting your mindset was as easy as restarting your laptop. As part of a collection on shifting perspectives, writers share the struggles, revelations, and joys they experienced as they began to see themselves and the world around them from a different point of view—and experts weigh in with advice on how you can change your perspective on just about anything.
A Breath of Fresh Air
Shaking a deep belief can be tough, even when we're positive that it isn't serving us well. To actively change your point of view, Laurie Santos, Professor of Psychology at Yale University and host of the Happiness Lab podcast suggests these three steps.
Stop and Take Stock
“Psychologists refer to the hot-cold empathy gap,” Santos says. “If you’re in a hot state, you’re really emotional—hungry or pissed off, or scared—it can be really hard to do a mindset shift.”
Inhale, Exhale
In order to regain a cooler mood, “take a deep breath,” says Santos. “It activates your vagus nerve which turns off your fight or flight system.”
Ask the Right Questions
When you have the emotional wherewithal to think through your situation, follow a series of queries author Byron Katie developed called “The Work”:
Is this really true?
Can I absolutely know for certain, with no doubt at all that this is true?
How do I react when I believe this thing?
And Who would I be without believing that thought?
“Let’s say the perspective you want to change is I hate my body, it’s terrible,” says Santos. “You insist, “Yes! But the second question forces you to acknowledge that there is a world in which you can think of this differently,” says Santos, “You may stop and be like, Well, I guess it’s not all terrible. My heart works pretty well. Then, you may realize, if I believe my body sucks, I don’t treat it well. If I didn’t believe that thought, I might treat my body better.”
In short, says Santos, “the Work is a process of interrogating our expectations. Often, we find out that they are outdated or wrong, or they’re expectations for Instagram models, but not for me who is a 40-something podcaster and busy professor.” Once you realize your perspective isn’t serving you anymore, it’s much easier to take another breath and let it go.
What just happened?
When the world shifts beneath you and your mindset needs to catch up, follow the advice of these experts, from philosophers to psychologists.
Know change is inevitable
A professor of philosophy at Yale and author of the book Transformative Experiences, L.A. Paul warns, “as you undergo these [shifts], they rearrange you mentally; the things you care about change in ways you can’t predict. Uncertainty is just part of living; we should embrace it.”
Don’t just react, reflect
“The main thing that I’ve learned from decades of exploration of Buddhist meditation and psychotherapy is that we can’t really change what’s happening to us or even what we’re feeling, but we have some control over how we relate to our experience,” says psychiatrist Mark Epstein, author of the Zen of Therapy. “To see your reactions rather than being taken over by them, freeing you from the exclusive identification with whatever you see to be wrong with you, that’s the main move, whether you do it through meditation, psychotherapy, or religious practice. The capacity to be self-reflective is inherent in humans; we can all do it.”
Say your name
In his book Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It, psychologist Ethan Kross offers a quick fix to help you see complicated situations in a new light. In neuroscientific studies in his lab, when researchers monitored subject’s brain activity while showing them disturbing photographs, they found that the participants who asked themselves, “What is Jennifer feeling?” rather than “What am I feeling?” showed much less emotional activity in their brain—and that it took a single second for their emotional activity to downshift. “The linguistic shift of talking to yourself in the third person disarms your defenses, putting you into a slightly more objective mode,” he explains. “This tool, which we call ‘distanced self-talk,’ helps people to step back and take broader stock of the situation, which is where the solutions often lie.”
Practice gratitude
Maya Shankar, the host of the podcast "A Slight Change of Plans," explains, “cognitive science teaches us that we can fall prey to what’s called the focusing illusion, where we overweight the relative value of the thing we’re currently focused on.” To counteract that, when she and her husband lost identical twin girls to a miscarriage with their beloved surrogate, they made a gratitude list, even though, “I was hurting and it was the last thing I wanted to do,” she says. “The idea is not to devalue any given thing you care about, but to remember that there is a vast array of things that bring you happiness. Reflecting on that list allowed me to reorient my perspective so that I could appreciate just how multidimensional my life really is.”
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