When You Argue With Reality...
By Tana M. Mann Easton, Lead Efficiency Engineer
In recent weeks, I’ve been sharing sentences that help me waste less time sitting in unhelpful and unconscious thoughts and emotions. This week’s sentence is: “When you argue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time.”
I heard this quote for the first time when reading a book by Byron Katie, and my brain screamed that I really needed to pay attention to this sentence. There are definitely times in my life when I find myself in a difficult or inconvenient situation, and my thoughts immediately start to fight that reality. For example, something as innocuous as a traffic jam will sometimes set my brain into fighting mode. It will start thinking thoughts like, “Why am I in a traffic jam? This is the worst day ever! This throws my whole night off! I’m going to be late!” And even after I get out of the traffic jam, I am sometimes still mad. And then later, there might be instances of recounting the traffic jam in all its stressful details to my family or friends. So let’s say I was actually stuck in traffic for 15 minutes. In reality, those 15 minutes were the only minutes of my life that were devoted to that traffic jam. But if I ruminate over being stuck for the next 30 minutes and then tell the story to 2 people taking 5 minutes each, the 15 minute traffic jam has now taken up an extra 40 minutes of my time and energy! So really, reality is kinder than my thoughts because reality only inconvenienced me for 15 minutes, whereas my brain inconvenienced me for 40 additional minutes.
And did those extra 40 minutes of stressing about the traffic jam do anything to change the situation? Not at all! My worrying and stressing didn’t cause anything to clear faster. It just made my night far worse than if I had calmly accepted that traffic jams happen sometimes, that it will clear at some point, that I will explain what happened if I end up being late, and decided to enjoy my time in the car listening to an audiobook/podcast/the radio or simply being quiet and thinking for a few minutes.
“When you argue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time” has also helped me in more consequential situations in my life. Like when a loved one passes away or during a break-up or a job change. During difficult times, when my brain defaults to immediately arguing with what is happening, I remind myself that I’ll always lose if I argue with reality and it helps for me to move quicker to acceptance and dealing with the situation as is.
This one sentence has helped me save so much time. Instead of asking, “Why me?” It moves me to, “What now?” And that is a far more productive thought to have.
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Sincerely Yours,
Focus to Evolve Team