Rainbow Colored Glasses

I heard an analogy once about men and women and how, generally speaking, we handle challenges differently.  It described men as being like a one bedroom – what goes on in the kitchen is not happening in the living room or the bedroom.  Men can separate the different parts of their life – for example, not think about the problems in their home life when they are at work.  For women, it’s different – when something is happening in the kitchen, we can’t separate it from the bedroom or the living room.  When our home life is a mess, we tend to see our work life as starting to crumble, and then we feel like we have no money and hate all of our clothes #lastweekanyone.

While there are obviously exceptions to this analogy, hearing this brought to the surface what I had felt subconsciously when facing problems:  I will perceive them as big or small, life ending or trivial based on how I feel the moment prior.  Take for example crushing it at work – if I go into that workday feeling shameful, then doing a great job at work won’t matter as shame will somehow tell me that I’m still not good enough.  If I go into the day feeling well rested and ready to take on the day, then I will continue that mood after getting praised for something I did.  Rather than wearing glass half full, rose-colored glasses, I wear rainbow colored glasses.

I think everyone needs a little ROYGBIV in his or her life, but I’ve realized that some colors in the rainbow need to be contained.  We need to process our negative emotions when they happen and not allow them to bleed into everything else.  Seeing things from a blue, depressed perspective because we’re feeling blue about something else is actually a form a self-sabotage.  We limit ourselves in that moment (albeit maybe subconsciously) to expecting the worst and thereby actually project that onto our path.  Our mind tries to figure out where we are going as we go so when we’re thinking negatively, we’re telling our mind to go to that place.

The good news is glasses are glasses so you can take them off whenever you want (yep, mind blown). The trick is to recognize when you tend to put them on.  For me, that means classifying emotions into those that I can easily recognize (like irrational anger) and those that creep up (deep seeded fears). The ones that are more conscious I process in the moment and isolate them to whatever brought them about.  For the creeper emotions, because they tend to be emotions that play a much more fundamental role in my life, I remind myself of their presence throughout my day and ask myself how they might be impacting me.  By breaking up which emotions need more or less attention, my glasses are starting to look a little more like Google glasses: clear, maybe ugly and just taking in all the information as it comes.