On Lightening the Hell Up
Have a good summer, why don’t you.
Summer is here! Technically, it’s here next week, but San Diego is now consistently 7 degrees warmer than “winter” and school has shifted to summer camp, so thus: summer has begun.
What’s beautiful and intense about Southern California is the busyness of its social scene: There are always a plethora of interesting events going on at any time, on any given day. Not only is it easy to get lost in the illusion of social media, which is full of people out partying, or going to festivals, or lounging somewhere beautiful with 12-15 friends, it’s also very easy in SoCal to get lost in the pressure to “have fun in the sun” nearly every day of the week—because that’s what everyone genuinely seems to be doing.
So frankly, the arrival of summer brought me a heavy dose of anxiety about what I should be doing with my time. I spiraled into judgment, comparing my life to other lives; my plans to other, more seemingly exciting plans. I kept looking at what everyone else was doing and feeling like I’d already failed at the next three months. My inner dialogue went something like: “I should be doing more! Going to festivals, and bars every weekend! I should have more friends, and more unique hangouts and gatherings on the calendar. Why don’t I have that? Maybe I’m not doing enough for my social life, I’m so behind…”
What a pointless, one-sided conversation, as mental narration often is. How vain and entitled our minds make us out to be! I do know by now that when I find myself in this mental headspace of judgment and comparison, I have to get out of it as soon as possible. As annoying as it sounds, the best advice when you catch yourself having pointless, one-sided, bratty conversations in your mind is…to stop. Stop evaluating your life, stop judging yourself, stop comparing your life to others. Figure out how to stop, ideally with some compassion for yourself.
When you’re out of frantic anxiety, you can treat the problem more clearly. I’m proposing that the antidote to spiraling into comparison and judgment is to take a step back from your mental drama, and lighten the hell up.
How’s that for a summer mantra? Take a step back, lighten up.
What would it look like to lighten the hell up? For many of us, it means easing up on our own internal judgment; letting ourselves off the hook; accepting our lives and their limitations exactly as they exist, right now. Lightening up can be an invitation to notice when we’ve veered too negative, serious, or judgmental, and relax away from those impulses.
It’s normal to fall into negatively appraising ourselves and others: We all live with a mental negativity bias. Broadly, this means that our brains are more likely to pay closer attention to negative input than positive input. This has been found in research done on infants—socially and evolutionarily, we are wired to notice and respond to negative input so that we may adapt to avoid harm.1 Unscientifically speaking, this negativity bias (plus a whole host of other neurological and social factors) makes us really good at being mean to ourselves and evaluating how we stack up against others.
So, it’s ok if you find yourself feeling bad and critical when faced with people who seem to be having better summers than you—or are having a “better” anything, for that matter. Your brain is predisposed to variations of that attitude. This skew toward negativity is increased tenfold by social media, where we are able to compare ourselves to others’ curated highlights of their own lives all day long.
It’s only by taking a step back from our mental drama that we can see how judgmental and awful our minds can be, toward ourselves and others. Recognizing our bias toward negativity can help lift us out of it, and instead we give our attention to the positive, wonderful parts of our own lives. Guiding our attention to what we want to focus on is possibly the greatest act of agency we have. “Where attention goes, energy flows,” as so many great minds have said.2
Assuredly, there will be bad days of the summer ahead, and possibly terrible ones. We live in reality, after all. Even still, there’s a lot of enjoyment that can be experienced in between the cracks of everything you stress out about.
This summer, try to enjoy those long, light nights that offer reprieve from the brutal heat of day. Take advantage of whatever space you have that isn’t already filled, and clear out some extra space for emptiness. Change up your routine, lie by a body of water, and listen to something other than the sound of your smartphone. Be alone. Be with people who feed your spirit. Spend time doing what nourishes you from the inside out—don’t waste it in the land of judgment or comparison.
Lighten up a little, however that means to you. Let your mood brighten, your outlook on life soften, and allow the raw heat of summer to burn away what doesn’t actually matter. As
reminds us, take time to simply be. Here she is on that most transformative practice:“The single practice I find most helpful—and I prefer to call it an exploration rather than a practice—is simply taking time as often as it invites you to be silent and to do nothing other than simply being. You can be sitting down or lying down or walking, but if you’re walking, just walk (no phone, no music, no conversation, etc). And if you’re sitting, just sit. Give open attention to present experiencing, just as it is, however it is—hearing, seeing, feeling, sensing, awaring, breathing.
Thoughts will come and go, and when you notice the attention is absorbed in a train of thought, simply notice it and gently return to sensory experiencing.”
Whatever your summer has in store for you this year, lighten up about it. Enjoy yourself. Make time to simply be, here now. Here is a good place to be, after all.
Happy summer!
Maggie
Very good article about this, linked here.
Vaish A, Grossmann T, Woodward A. Not all emotions are created equal: the negativity bias in social-emotional development. Psychol Bull. 2008 May;134(3):383-403. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.134.3.383. PMID: 18444702; PMCID: PMC3652533.
There are a few people to whom this quote is credited: James Redfield, T. Harv Eker, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to name three.