There’s nothing wrong with negative thinking!

Why on earth do we expect our brains to work perfectly? If you bang your knee on the corner of the bed it hurts like hell, swells up and a few days later a bruise spreads out. Your body responds to trauma, repetitive work and strange sudden movements.

When you’re reaching over all the junk in the cupboard under the stairs, trying to grab the hoover at the back, you’re not shocked when a pain shoots up your back (who is this ‘you’ guy? He sounds like a complete idiot). You know that your body has its limits; when you push past them, there are anatomical mechanisms like synapses that tell you you’re doing something stupid.

So why do we imagine that our brains are different? For some reason we expect our brains to be perfect. We believe our brains will survive the horrors that each has to absorb: the vile images and cruel injustices that everyone experiences, in their own individual way.

Anything construed crassly as ‘bad’ has to go. All good. It has to be all good, happy, positive, lovely-dovely stuff. Out with that bad negative thought. You don’t want that dreary darkness dragging you down, oh no. You’re in control of your brain, and you’re saying it all has to be good.

Get yourself a dose of Mindfulness. Be aware of who you are right now and appreciate your life as it happens. Fight the fear and pack a parachute. Load up your quiver with a fistful of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) arrows and let those babies fly as soon as you feel the slightest bit of anxiety bubbling up from your soul’s abyss.

Or not.

Maybe we’re trying to cure something that isn’t unwell. If it ain’t broke, don’t spend your children’s inheritance at the psychotherapist and the rest of your life on SSRIs that you don’t need.

This is not about depression. That’s another story. This is about you out there, battling with your own brain. You’re not depressed. You’re just trying to be a better person. They tell you to be mindful, aware, positive, appreciative: all good stuff, without question, but life isn’t like that.

More to the point, you’re not like that. Sure, part of you is at least a little of all those yummy things, and sometimes you’re zippeddy-pip with life and the universe. Sometimes you can go for months without losing a single sock in the laundry.

Yet there are periods when life all goes nasty, like a wet toothbrush falling into the cobwebs down there behind the sink, beyond where your cleaning powers go.

Oh goody. My toothbrush is full of other people’s cruddy putrid waste, several species of insect larvae and oh, splendid, a black bic biro top covered in hair.

Inside you want to scream and wail and give out to the Lord of the Dance, but hang on, you’re meant to be all calm and see it for what it is. It’s just a dirty toothbrush. A mere peccadillo in the universal order of things.

So how do you react? Can you react in a positive way?

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune