Where our experience of life (the good, the bad and the ugly) is really coming from
Where it seems our experience comes from
We’ve all been conditioned to think our experience, our happiness or misery comes from the things outside us – our situation in life, our health, our finances, our relationships. So when all is going well – we feel great.
But we also take it for granted that when difficulties strike, inevitably, we feel bad. The car breaks down, we feel stressed, our bank balance is low, we start to feel anxious, we’ve had an argument with our partner so we feel angry.
But this isn’t actually how life works.
The truth is that our emotions and experiences of life are never the direct result of what happens to us. These situations never directly cause happiness or unhappiness. And however crazy this might sound initially, feelings aren’t a result of the world and life events, but a reaction to our thoughts about these situations.
Testing where your own experience comes from
You can test this yourself because some days, you’ll find, for example, your child’s cheeky comment charming, the next day, it will irritate you. Same situation, different outcome feelings. Or sometimes conflict at work will make you feel stressed and overwhelmed and on other days, you’ll just breeze through it, taking it all in your stride.
If something happened to you that led to a specific set of feelings, your emotions would remain constant from day to day but they don’t do they? Because the same situation on a different day is likely to trigger very different thoughts about what’s happening and the implications for you.
Take another example. Standing waiting in a queue. One person may view this as a highly irritating interruption to their day. Another may be glad of the chance to stop, slow down and enjoy the pause. Again, there is no one pre-set emotional response that we can have to this scenario.
So what impact does this understanding have on our experience of life and more specifically midlife?
It means that what midlife means to us is less a reflection of what’s out there as some objective reality of how the world views this time of life and more a reflection of our thoughts about it.
What we need to understand about thoughts
There are some very important principles we need to understand about thoughts.
Firstly, we can’t control our thoughts, it’s an impossibility. If you think about it, you really have no idea what next thought is going to come into your mind. There’s no way we can predict whether it will be the type of repetitive thought we’ve had before or whether it will be something new, fresh and completely original and unexpected.
Most of our thoughts are habitual and mundane but every so often we experience a new thought that jolts us with it’s creativity or originality.
Secondly, we need to understand that thoughts are not some grand objective truth. They are simply, at best, a working hypothesis that at times may be useful in helping us predict the future and at others times, they’re not worth paying attention to.
We don’t have to give them the starring role in our life. They are just thoughts that come and go and the less attention and importance we give to them, the quieter our mind becomes.
My own midlife experience
So let me share how this can make a difference with an example. Coming across this awareness has been huge for me in my own experience of what my might be described as a mini midlife crisis.
When I hit my late forties, I felt miserable for a few years convinced that my life was on a slide downhill. There were so many things that I still wanted to experience and I felt convinced that it was all too late for me. To be honest, I felt bitter, resentful, fed up.
But when I discovered how to view my thoughts from this different perspective, I realized the mood lows I’d experienced were simply due to believing thoughts that had little basis in reality, they were simply made up.
But these thoughts were never the truth.
When I finally understood how my feelings were due to believing my faulty, inaccurate thinking, it was a huge step forward. In fact, in hindsight it was obvious that I was making huge assumptions. I was generating stories about what was and wasn’t factually correct about this time of life. Some of that was based in reality but a large majority was simply what I was making up about midlife.
I realised the feelings these thoughts generate, come and go. Thoughts about my age, the menopause, midlife, drift in and out of my mind. Some days they were focused around the new opportunities that I could see surrounding me. Other days, my mind was crowded by preoccupations about what was being taken away (smooth skin, youthful looks).
Of course I still have days when I still worry about drooping and sagging body bits and regret past opportunities but I know these thoughts and feelings will pass. And if it's a useful thought such as needing to take more exercise or eat less chocolate, I take action without overthinking or analysing.