I knew two men who cultivated negativity in completely different ways. One was bitter. He dwelt on his own negativity and kept it burning away like a man keeping his pipe going. People tended to avoid him, though when he dropped his negativity he was quite an engaging individual, so much so that he seemed like somebody else.
The other was a man who took a generally pessimistic view. He assumed that whatever could go wrong would go wrong, and then some. But he seemed to find it all amusing, generally had a smile on his face and, I would say, enjoyed life as much as anybody else which, is to say, up to a point.
The first man, I think, resented his own negativity. It made him angry that things made him angry. The second man took a more philosophical approach. If things go wrong anyway, he seemed to believe, then there’s no need to make a drama about it.
I am, myself, a negative thinker by nature. I tend to work from a background assumption that, like a level in a video game, every day contains cunningly concealed trapdoors for me to fall through. You’d be surprised how often I’m right.
I used to feel bad about my negativity. I would spot books with names like You can't afford the luxury of a negative thought and slink past. I suspect I first became attracted to mindfulness decades ago because the Buddhists, who developed the practice, are a fairly pessimistic bunch – life is suffering, and all that.
Eventually I realised that, yes, there are negative things about my day, my week, my month, my year and my life, and that’s okay.
Sometimes the contents of my negativity might need attention. For instance, if a behaviour of mine is unreasonably affecting the wellbeing of someone else then I need to address it. But the mere fact of having had lots of negative hours in my life really doesn’t matter.
And, as soon as I realised that, and embraced the negativity, a lot of the burden fell away. This doesn’t mean that negativity is fun. I don’t wake up in the morning and say “Yippee! I have three things to be negative about today.” The load is lighter, that’s all. And I’m not afraid of it. I don’t see the fact that I’ve had negative days and hours (and hopefully will have many more of them) as something I need to go into mourning about.
Negativity is part of life, that’s all.
Sometimes negativity is telling us about something we need to address and we would do better to listen to it than to push it away.
Many a project has gone careening over a cliff because the person in charge rejected negativity about its design or prospects . And sometimes it’s just something you have to allow to pass in its own time like dark clouds overhead.
In a similar vein, I recently wrote a column about how certain people are nervous about happiness or even suspicious of it (Health + Family, December 8th).
I myself am not against happiness. I think it’s a fine thing so long as you don’t take it too seriously.
Still, I find it interesting that a very large-scale study in the UK found that whether you are happy or not has no effect on when you die. In other words, happiness in itself doesn’t make you live longer and unhappiness in itself doesn’t shorten your life.
The findings are based on a longitudinal study of 1.3 million women aged 50-69, contacted through the national breast screening programmes of England and Scotland.
There is something attractive about the idea that being happy improves your physical health but, according to the report in the Lancet, the study "shows no robust evidence that happiness itself reduces cardiac, cancer, or overall mortality".
So cultivate happiness, not because it’s going to make you live longer but because it feels better. And don’t obsess over it.
pomorain@yahoo.com Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His daily mindfulness reminder is free by email.