Why Positivity is a Choice

Below is an extract from my new book, Metamorphosis. It appears in Chapter 7, Perception is Reality. The context is that I believe we can completely reframe our current lives by upgrading the lenses through which we look at it. The chapter also addresses why we are incapable of perceiving our own lives objectively, and why gratitude is the other major lense through which we can upgrade our view of life.

There may be some of us who are naturally like Pollyanna, born optimists. I’m not one of those people and I’m pretty sure my daughter Tilly got the same memo. Her ‘what if’ questions are highly creative; that little girl can dream up a worst-case scenario out of absolutely nowhere. 

No, for me it is a conscious choice every day to face life with joy and optimism. Einstein, who appears to be the star of this chapter, said the following: 

The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.

I revisit this quote almost daily. I agree that this decision is absolutely critical in establishing how we perceive our reality. I also agree that it is indeed a decision, whether or not we make it consciously. 

How do you feel when you read this quote? Have you thought before about the fact that this decision is yours to make? Have you made this decision for yourself, and which side of the line did you fall on? Do you believe that the world is a cruel place where meaningless horrors befall good people or do you take the view, like Gabby Bernstein, that ‘the universe has your back’? 

Positivity is a Choice.

While we cannot control much of what happens in our life, we can choose the lens through which we look at life and this makes all the difference in the world. 

I have made a conscious choice to wake up every day and view my life from a place of optimism and joy. I have only gravitated to this decision over the last few years; before that, I didn’t even realise it was a decision I could make. I hadn’t been told that ‘to worry is to pray for what you do not want.’ I’d never heard the serenity prayer used by twelve-step programmes. I was a natural worrier and I worried about everything, within and beyond my control. 

The choice I’ve made is a really tough one. It’s tough because it goes against all my natural instincts. I have to swallow my terror constantly. I have to battle my demons every day. However, I have found that with each day, it gets easier and easier. This is because I’m making it habitual to be positive. I’m rewiring my neural networks and it’s working. I’m overwriting my instincts with my healthier emotional reactions and I’m finding it gradually more effortless to keep the wolves from the door.

Who are the wolves? For me they are anxiety and intrusive thoughts. I have suffered from both for decades, though they were at their most debilitating when I was between ten and thirteen years old. My guess is that the chemical upheaval of puberty was in many ways to blame, as the darkest time I’ve had since then was after the birth of my first child; postpartum being another classic period of hormonal hell. While biochemistry was in all likelihood the biggest driver of my suffering, the lack of understanding or coping mechanisms that I had at my disposal were huge compounding factors for me. 

I want to tell you a little about my intrusive thoughts because they help explain my unwavering commitment to optimism, joy, and my mental, emotional, and spiritual health. I define intrusive thoughts as those thoughts that won’t leave you alone despite the fact that they are precisely the opposite of what you want to think. 

When I was a pre-teen, I would torture myself with ‘what ifs.’ What if Mum has a car-crash on the way home from work and doesn’t make it back? What if I say something horrible to this person whom I love, to upset them? What if I throw myself out of the window? These thoughts never really went away, but after I gave birth to Paddy, they returned with a vengeance. What if he died of cot death? What if I accidentally left him on a bus? What if I left him on a bus on purpose? What if I’d accidentally put the covers too close to his little face and he suffocated in the night? 

To be very clear, I didn’t want to do any of these things. I didn’t want any of them to happen. But the power that we have to wreck our own lives and those around us is absolutely terrifying, and the power that the universe has to destroy our lives and those of our loved ones is equally unthinkable. When you don’t have the right coping mechanisms in place, this contradictory and sickening combination of utter helplessness and unwanted power is something that I know many of us struggle to handle. The tragedy has been that for so much of my life I’ve felt completely in the throes of these mysterious and unwelcome intruders.

A few years ago, I was reading a magazine and there was an article on a phenomenon called ‘intrusive thoughts.’ As I read it, I broke down in tears. Here were the demons that had haunted me for decades, named and shamed in black and white. Intrusive thoughts are a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This made sense to me as I have certainly manifested other signs of OCD in life. These include compulsive physical ticks as well as checking whether I’d left the cooker on, for example. I suspect I am not alone here. 

The article detailed examples of people far more tormented by intrusive thoughts than I was. One woman had stopped riding in the car with her partner because she was so afraid of her unwanted compulsion to reach over and turn the steering wheel, pulling them into the next lane of traffic on the motorway. I couldn’t believe that my demons had a name. I had found that the implications of the thoughts – namely the fear that I was mentally ill – had tortured me almost more than the thoughts themselves. But here was Grazia magazine calling them out, implying that they were common enough to warrant an article on them. 

When I told my husband that night about my revelation, and defined intrusive thoughts for him, he replied: ‘But everybody has those thoughts!’ This was both a remarkable lightbulb moment for me and a huge blow. All this time, I’d been thinking I was damaged and alone, and, all this time, I was neither. I was normal. It seemed to me that I could cope with the thoughts themselves, if I didn’t have to worry so much about their implications. 

Since I read that article, society has made huge strides in opening up about mental health. Journalist Bryony Gordon has spoken at length about her heartbreaking struggles with OCD, especially in the wake of new motherhood, and has done incredible work to provide a platform to others suffering. Most notably, she launched her Mad World podcast with an interview with Prince Harry to discuss the devastating mental impact that losing his mother has had on him. 

The real strides I have made have not come from dealing directly with my intrusive thoughts and anxiety. They’ve been as a result of my reading and the work I’ve done on myself over the last three years. By recalibrating my view of the world, by learning more about a type of spirituality that speaks to me, by building up an arsenal of incredible tools such as meditation, journaling, prayer, affirmations, mindfulness, self-love, and self-compassion, I’ve created a perspective on life that serves me and supports me. 

Now you can see why Einstein’s quote means so much to me. For almost three decades I felt like a victim of circumstance, and of the vagaries of my mind. I felt utterly at the whim of whatever the universe wanted to throw at me. Today I choose to believe that the universe is a friendly place, a kind place, and an environment in which I can thrive without looking over my shoulder constantly. 

I believe this both spiritually and intellectually. The beauty of the modern age is that so much scientific and spiritual theory can be reconciled through quantum physics. What we now know about energy sits easily with a belief in miracles, in synchronicity, and in the inter-connectedness of us all. We don’t have to choose between science and spirituality, as so many thinkers before us had to do. I include some suggestions of further reading that is informative but not offputtingly technical, online at https://healthywealthyandwiseuk.com/met/.

The way Einstein puts it, believing in a friendly universe is no bigger leap of faith than believing in a hostile universe. But the rewards of taking the former stance are incredible. These days, I am in possession of a framework that comforts and supports me, and allows me to go through my days without being held captive by anxiety. 

I realise that many of us cling to worry as a defence mechanism: if I expect the worst, then it will hurt less if it does happen. However, the worst case will hurt regardless, and meanwhile we’ve wasted huge swathes of time imprisoned in fearful fantasies for no good reason. In the UK, it’s a cliché that builders and scaffolders on a building site will yell out: ‘Cheer up love! It may never ‘appen!’ to any less-than-cheerful-looking passers-by. I think the builders may be onto something. 

Last night we were driving back to London from my in-laws’ in Kent. We’d had a late family lunch and, as it’s December at the time of writing this chapter, the night was drawing in very early. I’d given Chris the go-ahead to have a couple of drinks with his lunch on the basis that I would drive. I hate driving in the dark, especially on motorways. I find it disorientating and far harder than in good light. All afternoon, I could feel the anxiety rising up in me. I was tense before and during lunch, willing it to come to a close so we could get on the road. 

Five years ago, I would have spiralled further; my imagination would have run riot and imagined us all dying in a horrible car-crash as I misjudged a lane-change in the dark. Yesterday, I called on my resources. I breathed, I named the fear, and I focused on Einstein’s words. Statistically, the chances of us crashing were tiny. I am a careful and competent driver and I knew intellectually that I could get us home safely. I chose to seek refuge in the fact that this is a good universe which has my back, and that our ‘teams of light’ (which is the beautiful phrase that psychic medium Laura Lynne Jackson has for our deceased loved ones and guardian angels) were there to protect us. I stayed very present on the drive home and I even managed to relax enough to marvel at the spectacular sunset as we drove west (perhaps it was my team of light putting on a show of reassurance for me). And, do you know, I got us home safely. 

This, really, is how our perceptions can shape our reality. Our attitude to life, or our mindset, dictates so much of how our days pan out. Gabby Bernstein says in Super Attractor: 

I've come to believe that the only way out of that world of darkness is to choose to see the light as often as possible. Seeing the light is a practice, and it requires our willingness to suspend our disbelief.

The daily choice to believe in optimism, light, and joy, and to bathe myself in gratitude, pays me enormous dividends. The greatest of these dividends is my ability to enjoy my life and count my blessings. Without these tools, it’s entirely likely that I would be too busy worrying about the future to remember to wonder at the present. Our life is already amazing. We just have to notice it.