Day Two: Your Thoughts Matter

Let's talk about the concept of pre-suffering. I had never heard this term until one of my coworkers identified it as the way I was feeling. If pre-suffering was an Olympic sport, let's just say I would be successful beyond my wildest dreams. The way I understand it, pre-suffering is when you feel all the negative emotion and worry associated with an event well before the event has even happened. And there's no guarantee the event will ever happen. An example (I have many): Before starting a weekend of call at our community hospital I have trouble sleeping. All day Friday I am filled with a vague sense of melancholy. I find myself glancing at the clock, mentally counting down the hours until the admissions flood in and my pager calls out it's disgustingly cheerful jingle. I brood over how tired I'll be on Monday and wonder if I'll get any sleep at all at night. Want to know what makes matters even worse? I not only do this right before a call weekend but also whenever I look ahead at the schedule and visualize how many weekends of call I have coming up. I know, get over it right? Right.

I tend to look ahead and try to prepare myself for the worst possible outcome of everything just so I'm not caught off guard. The effect of this is that I spend an enormous amount of time and emotional energy worrying about things that might never happen. And even if they did happen, what did I change by worrying about them? So I might not get any sleep tonight on call and I will feel like crap. But, I don't feel like crap right now. In fact, it's a beautiful warm afternoon and I just took my dog on a long walk through the park. I have a comfortable house and am planning a delicious dinner of spaghetti with Italian sausage and whole wheat bread. I'm looking forward to going on a road trip with my dear husband next weekend and seeing old friends at a wedding. Aaaaannnnnd I have an appointment with a "life coach" next week. So we have that little bit of randomness to anticipate.

Do you see what I did? I redirected my thoughts away from my useless pre-suffering and focused on the here and now. I focused on the good parts of my life. The things that are actually happening. So simple yet so difficult to achieve on an hourly basis. Earl Nightingale, known as the "Dean of Personal Development", said "the mind moves in the direction of our currently dominant thoughts". Practice channeling your thoughts and see if this makes a difference in your attitude. Or in your life. Then you'll be on your way to a happier and more successful career and life on day two of the journey: Your Thoughts Matter.