We are trained from childhood (and I suspect we are hard-wired for) looking at the negatives, the worst-case scenarios, what’s not working. This is very useful when you are in a situation, like walking in an unknown cave, where you first have to make sure that there is no prior occupant that could attack you. It’s also very useful when you are faced with a problem you need to fix, or when making contingency plans “just in case”.


However, most of the time we look at negatives such as “the boss looked at me weird today, is he angry? Is it because I made a mistake somewhere? Where? I can’t find any mistake, yet there has to be something wrong. Is he planning on firing me?” or “Mary didn’t talk to me today, I’m sure she now hates me, but why? What did I do? Maybe it was this time when I asked Ann to take care of the bake sale instead of her. Yes, it must be it… Mary really hates me now!”


I’m sure I don’t need to go on, you are very familiar with this type of internal dialog, and you have probably found more than once that something that looked dramatic actually had a very innocent answer, such as the reason the boss looked at you in a weird way was because he was thinking of a thorny accounting issue and your eyes happened to meet just at that moment.


The problem wit this type of thinking is that it doesn’t do anything for you, and it actually hinders your productivity. Yes, the way you think affects your productivity: every time you go into this type of unproductive negative thought pattern, your stress level increases sharply, and here is some of what happens when it does:


• Your breathing becomes rapid and shallow


• Your blood flow is redirected from non-essential areas of the body to the areas that will help fight or flight, i.e. the heart, the limbs.


• One of the areas blood flow is redirected away from is the neo-cortex, i.e. your thinking brain


• As a result, you think more slowly, less clearly, hence work more slowly and make more mistakes


And that doesn’t even take into account the fact that you are spending time on the issue as well, with no intention of going to the person to ask them whether your feeling is correct or not.


The good news is, we can train ourselves to stop doing this. It takes a little time, but it’s a very effective time management tool (did I mention that my version of time management is managing, reducing and eliminating everything that affects your use of time in a negative, unproductive way?)


So every time you find yourself going into unproductive negative thinking, stop yourself in your tracks, and redirect your thoughts to something more positive, such as “well, my boss may have been thinking about something having nothing to do with me when our eyes happened to meet”, or “maybe Mary is just not feeling well today”. It may or may not be the truth – future will tell – but it sure helps you go on with your day without angst or stress.