Ok now. Just Stop.

I read an interesting article this morning that got me thinking.  You can read it yourself here.  The article talked about three ways people create stress in their own minds.

Negative self-talk about ourselves
Negative self talk about others and/or situations
Negative future fantasizing (aka worry or fear about the future)

I read that list and it was a light bulb moment for me.  As I have written about as recently as yesterday, I am the master of negative self-talk.  All you haters can say whatever the fuck you like about me and I promise you, I have said worse things about myself to myself.  I am only too happy to believe all the negative truths about myself and while I am in that downward slide I will create a few untruths in my mind to bring to the party.  Its ridiculous really.

I would go so far as to say most of us fit in one of the three categories in the list.  If I think about my friends and loved ones it is pretty easy to figure out which category they fit into fairly consistently.  We all have our own way of adding to our daily stress burdens, don't we?  That isn't to say while we might be pro at one category we don't dip our toes in another.  For example, first I often work myself up into a state about all my mistakes and failings and then I begin to worry about how those flaws will impact my relationships in the future.  See what I did there?  I started with now and extrapolated to the future ways I will fail.  Its a special talent of mine.

So how do we break out of the bad habit of negative self talk?  I am no expert by any means, that is for damn sure but I can tell you about an interesting experience I had last night.  It was late and I was not physically feeling very well and honestly someone I love was disappointing me.  I was beating myself up with all the reasons why his bad behavior was my fault when I just said to myself, OK enough.  Really?  Stop.  And I did.  It seems really stupid now in the light of day but in the middle of the night alone in my bedroom it felt like a revelation.  Just stop.

What does any of this have to do with Second Life, social media and virtual worlds?  Nothing specifically really, although I would say in our virtual lives we often only have partial information about what is going on in any interaction. I remember Botgirl wrote a wonderful series of posts a while back about a couple.  One person stopped showing up online and the other created a whole lot of drama about the relationship in her own mind trying to understand why her partner was missing.  In the end the missing person was offline due to a power outage that lasted a few days.  Certainly, having partial information as we do online gives us ample opportunity to spin drama in our heads about ourselves, other people and the future of our relationships.

And when I do that, I am going to try to remember to tell myself "just stop."  The truth of the situation is often far more mundane and less upsetting than the creative stories I spin in my mind.