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What's a useful mental model you've put into practice
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this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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My whole life is inversion thinking and I’m depressed 🙃
Right? Inversion thinking just sounds like a fancy way of saying anxiety.
Yeah I don’t have to consciously do it. I have to consciously think of the positives.
That's exactly what it is. Most people are hard wired to do this automatically.
The definition given is almost word for word the definition of an engineering mindset, regardless of field.
I'd say it's not a bad way to think about your life as well, as long as you limit the scope to things you realistically have the ability to impact and focus most of your energy on the actual problem solving.
I am getting so jaded with engineering these days. The engineering mindset seems to be to stifle all innovation and have endless meetings.
Maybe inverse thinking for you could be tempering all that with what might go right and leveraging that as a way to honor both the negative and positive capabillities of your mind.
You're telling me you couldn't literally just reverse whatever your pessimistic insights were as a thought experiment and find a way to take both into consideration to inform your final approch or strategy for whatever is at issue?
The best way I've come across to illustrate this is
The problem with anxiety and experiencing this inversion thinking is that it is a constant bombardment of everything that can go wrong. Combined with PTSD/CPTSD, the brain is in constant “danger mode”, looks for all kinds of dangers, not just the ones we have control over. It is a terrifying way to go through life. I’ve been in therapy for years and yes, countering with what can go right is one of the coping techniques, but it takes extreme effort. Constant effort over years and years to change these thinking patterns, to lessen the anxiety of what can go wrong to the point that it is actually useful again. Until then, the brain rapidly rejects thoughts of what can go right, because it is so strongly convinced that things will go wrong.
The goal is what you are saying, yes. But for a lot of us it takes completely rewiring our brains to escape the constant bombardment of thoughts of danger, to avoid the fear and anxiety. It isnt as easy as just flipping it around.
This is similar to the advice people give to depressed people about looking for positives in life, sure thats true and will help eventually, but there is so much more work that needs to be done when the brain is in a really bad place. It doesnt really help to say “just think of the bright side!”
I'm emphatically stating I had and still have all that, I frequently gloom/doom and think I'm going to fail massively and it rarely happens at all or even close to that extent. And then there's a little bit of relief which may be addictive.
Like, what I'm suggesting is for a time to write out all your doom and panic projections for whatever is at issue and literally reverse them and see if that can help leverage you out of that pattern once you've paid sufficient attention to the risk/that which comes most immediately and natural.
I'm not necessarily saying you have to immediately mentally rewire yet (thats a process), but simply turn whatever first comes up on its head and see where that takes you conceptually
Inversion thinking also works the other way around. If you see negatives most of the time (which is a strong suit by itself, but the pitfall is that you don't dare to take any risk), it can help to sometimes consciously think "What if it goes right?"
So invert it ;)
Seriously, its a good thing you can access that side of the thought process, you may just need to consciously do the opposite as a daily practice to even things out. I habitually assume the worst and I enjoy being proven wrong because it means it worked out well but I might not always get so lucky so im glad the other part's got me covered
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