Remember That Red Pandas Exist
Remember That Red Pandas Exist
This is my take on the famous song, ‘Days Like This’. When it’s not always easy, red pandas exist. What do I mean? Allow me to explain.
We get bogged down. Hyper-focused. Fixated. And we tend to do this with negative things. We have an in built negativity bias. As we evolved we needed it, because good things were fine, but bad things could kill us. In our modern world, most of the negative things we in the Western World encounter probably won’t kill us. Rather, they cause stress, anxiety, negative emotion. And we fixate on these things. If we get a thousand compliments and one complaint, the one complaint will haunt us for days on end.
We fixate on the negative aspects of live. we make ourselves think that life is mostly negative, that the world is mostly bad, that the future is mostly terrifying. There is no proof for this outside of our biases. We can’t help ourselves, and it’s not our fault. This is the way our brains are wired. So we have to make a work around. we have to rewire ourselves manually in order to not take life too seriously or too negatively.
I think about red pandas to do this. the sheer fact that they exist makes me smile. There’s incredibly unlikely, but they’re here. Whenever I find myself focusing on negative things that don’t actually matter in the grand scheme of the universe, I think about red pandas. Because most of what we fuss and worry over is nonsense. How others feel about us, work, celebrities, twitter, gossip – none of it matters, really. it only matters because we allow it to. We get so caught up in distractions that we forget what’s really important. I often find myself worrying about how my writing career is going (the negative) rather than focusing on the sheer unlikelihood that I even have a writing career (the positive).
So, when I find myself straying into a negativity bias I use this trick. I think about red pandas. This trick mightn’t work for you. Maybe red pandas aren’t for you, so use something else – the people you love, the memories you cherish. Use them. Utilize the positivity in your life to hack your mind. You don’t have to focus on the negative. Our brains do it be default, but you can choose to focus on other things.
Life is too short to be taken seriously. I’ll be saying that until the final curtain.
