Good weather, a successful project at work, lunch with friends... It's one of those days where everything goes perfectly.
Everything, apart from the small annoyance that occurred at the end of the afternoon.
Despite all the positive things around, our perception of the day is getting darker.
“A single event can suddenly seem to represent both your past and your future,” describes Julie Smith, star clinical psychologist and author of the international bestseller
Why Did No One Told Me About This Before?
(1).
This is what she calls the “domino mindset”.
She details it in a video published on March 14 on Instagram.
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Domino spirit
Every day, the successes and positive events that we experience during the day pile up in our brain like dominoes, until they build a tower, illustrates the clinical psychologist, filming herself behind a stack of colored rectangles.
Being on time for a meeting or remembering a friend's birthday... These little details help to inflate a feeling of satisfaction and joy.
Then, a simple thing goes wrong and our internal dialogue takes a completely different turn: "everything is going wrong for me", "I don't know why I'm going to such trouble"... "In our mind, this is what What's happening: the whole tower of dominoes collapses, declares the psychologist, dropping the stack in front of her.
You instantly cancel out everything positive from the day.”
If the psychologist calls this mechanism “the domino mind”, in psychology, it has another name: “excessive generalization”.
Dr Julie Smith explains: “It's about taking a single event and using it to judge past events or to predict the future.
We then draw conclusions which are not necessarily justified by the event which has just occurred.
Cognitive bias
This brain mechanism can cause a series of suffering, warns the specialist.
“Have you noticed the feeling of defeat, despair and the temptation to give up that this brings you?”, she asks her 1.9 million subscribers.
Also read: Anticipatory anxiety: why do some people always fear the worst?
While it is impossible to prevent this cognitive bias from occurring, we can at least remove its power “by simply noticing these thoughts and labeling them for what they are: biased,” concludes the clinical psychologist.
(1)
Why didn't anyone tell me about it before?,
by Dr. Julie Smith, Leduc editions, 352 pages, €19.90.