If You Don’t Want To Suffer, Stop Guessing

Cognitive psychology teaches us that our state of mind depends on the perspective we have of what happens. 

In the scientific literature we can find numerous examples of uneducational and erroneous schools of thought, which people support regardless of the lack of logic and usefulness and, above all, without considering the suffering they cause.

In this article we will focus on one of the more extensive dysfunctional thoughts: arbitrary inference or error of the soothsayer. Let’s see an example:

“Carla started working for an important company  in her city. It’s the job he’s always dreamed of, but he’s not totally comfortable with it. She believes that her colleagues can’t stand her  and that they speak ill of her behind her back.

A few days ago, she realized that two of her  colleagues were whispering in a corner and laughing out loud  and she realized that they looked down at her from time to time. Carla is thinking about quitting her dream job because it is unbearable for people to talk badly about her. If others speak ill of her, the boss could come and fire her!

Let’s stop the story for a moment… what is our protagonist doing? Evidently, he is drawing hasty conclusions of a concrete fact that he cannot prove  in any way.

He thinks his colleagues are talking behind his back, because he saw two people talking and laughing; is this logical? Is the fact that two people talking and laughing in a corner proof enough to believe that they are criticizing you? 

But they are looking at it! So what then? Surely they do it because she too is watching them while they laugh, convinced that they are criticizing her.

Carla is hurting herself by thinking this way. She is self-inducing tremendous anxiety and has come to the point of making a bad decision,  thanks to her wrong way of looking at things. She is creating the typical paradoxical effect that is so common in psychology: she is so afraid that she will be criticized and that she will lose her job, that she will allow it to really be like that and ultimately really lose it. 

This story, with this logic-less way of thinking, is much more common than we think. People have a tendency to protect themselves, to protect their ego and to draw early conclusions  from isolated facts. We tend to distort reality and this obviously generates wrong and disproportionate emotions.

It is very important to learn to think well

Thinking well does not mean being optimistic, nor positive, nor does it mean having to see the world all pink, this would be even worse! We would fool ourselves and end up taking a beating.

To be more rational and realistic, Carla should be more scientific and stop and contemplate all possible alternatives,  which could mean considering a conversation between two people.

It could be that, looking back on something funny that happened in the workplace, the two colleagues were making jokes or talking about anything else that had nothing to do with our protagonist. It is true that there is also the option that they are speaking ill of Carla, but  we cannot allow our impulses to keep us from contemplating other options.

Firstly, because it would be neither logical nor rational to pretend to guess other people’s thoughts,  we are not soothsayers! And secondly, because even if our option were real, it wouldn’t be as bad as we see it. What’s terrible about a criticism? It can be annoying and unpleasant, but never make a fuss about it (even if that’s another topic already).

Stop self-generating this absurd tension. You are not soothsayers, you must learn to give weight to the real data and not to get carried away by your own unfounded interpretations,  which have no value and which cannot be proved. Relax and move on!