Four Limiting Thinking Habits of an Unhappy Mind

Spare yourself this burden during the holiday season.

Have you ever felt unhappy without being able to pinpoint what is it that you’re fretting about?

That’s what I’ve been experiencing recently. The whole holiday buzz, together with my recent decision to move to Edinburgh, are giving me a lot of anxiety and take my peace of mind away.

But what happened when I tried to identify what is it exactly that makes me feel so uneasy and unhappy about my life? I couldn’t point to anything concrete. Objectively speaking, my life has never been better.

I’m pursuing my writing more seriously than ever — and slowly but steadily, it’s taking off. I’m about to finish a mindfulness course and build my blog. I’m moving to my favourite city in the world.

The longer I look at unhappiness, the more I realize it isn’t the effect of my circumstances. Rather, it is an inevitable consequence of certain ways of thinking. And I don’t just mean singular, one-off thoughts that make me less than content.

Rather, it’s about the mental habits human mind is prone to. Just like the habits we exercise in the physical world, the mental ones, too, shape us over time.

That being said, below are four habits of the mind I have noticed that undermine my happiness. I hope reading them can can help you to identify yours so that you don’t let them get in your way during the holiday season.

Let’s cut ourselves, and our minds, some slack.

1. Leaving the Present Moment

As humans, we owe a lot of our advantage as a species to this feature of our minds. Thinking outside the present moment is what allows us to imagine, plan and draw lessons from past experiences.

But when this becomes a habit, it subtracts from our happiness — and quite significantly. That’s because true satisfaction can only be found in the present moment.

But what good does it do if we’re not there to experience it?

Recently, I’ve been repeatedly catching myself adrift in the past or future. Because I have big hopes and dreams as a writer, I started inhabiting these dreams more than the present. I became lost in the fantasy without appreciating what’s right in front of me.

This happened a lot when I’d go on a walk in the forest or spend time with friends. Instead of enjoying their company, my mind went somewhere else. Over time, it became a habit — and only now I’m starting to see how much it hurt me.

To enjoy the holiday time, try to commit to being fully present — even if only for a few moments each day. It doesn’t have to take a lot of effort and planning. Instead, just recognize that there’s something to savour in each moment, and the only time to appreciate it is when it happens.

Whenever you remember to, gently direct your focus to what’s in front of you. Maybe you’ll discover that it’s easier to be present than remain in the illusory place called we call “time.”

2. Judging Yourself and Others

Judgment is an undermining mental habit which, for a very long time, I pretended I didn’t have. Of course, I still judged myself and people around me — I just did it unconsciously. And because I wasn’t aware of what my mind was doing, I was even more prone to the harmful effects of this habit.

These days, I’m finally seeing that the way my mind judges everything and everyone is almost impossible to escape. As much as I’m fond of the “being free of judgment” ideal, I’m definitely not there yet. But does it mean that I have to be a slave to my judgments?

Not at all. To not be directed by judgement, I don’t have to stop it from happening. It’s enough just to become aware of what my mind is doing.

A good trigger that indicates I may be judging either myself or others is discomfort related to other people. Whenever I’m in the middle of a conversation, and I suddenly feel uneasy, I ask myself: What’s causing these particular feelings?

Very often, that cause is judgment. If I judge myself, I may feel inferior in relation to the other person, or even downright embarrassed of myself. If I judge my companion, my mind starts looking for arguments to prove that I’m somehow “better” than them.

This holiday season, I want to invite you to simply notice your judging mind as it does its job. Don’t be ashamed of it or pretend it isn’t happening. We all judge ourselves and others, all the time.

But the people who can catch themselves as they do it seem to be much happier than those who don’t.

3. Highlighting Bad Events in Your Life

As I said, my life has never been better than now. On top of that, I’m aware that compared to some 90% of the people on this planet, I’m in a super privileged position. I can do pretty much anything I want with my life.

And yet? My mind still finds a way to worry as it highlights my failures, shortcomings and self-doubt.

The first step towards stopping this mental habit from undermining your happiness is to realize that this is an evolutionary and formerly useful quality of the human mind. Psychologists call it the negativity bias, which evolved as a way to protect us from danger.

Back in the cavemen days, evolution didn’t care about our happiness. The main concern was survival — and being sensitive to dangers and inconveniences was useful for that purpose.

Today, zeroing in on negativity rarely serves us. Whenever you notice your mind doing that, you can use one powerful antidote that’s available to us all.

Gratitude.

The holiday season is a good time to notice that even if your life isn’t perfect — it is good enough. And yet, if you’re reading this, chances are you have a roof over your head, a warm bed and enough to put on the Christmas table. If additionally there’s a handful of people you can find comfort with, then you can consider yourself pretty lucky.

Or maybe, you can find gratitude in something else completely. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you can use it to counterbalance the negativity bias your mind is so fond of.

4. Rushing Through Every Activity

Rushing through unpleasantness and mundane chores is a tricky habit of the mind. Often, there’s a superficial logic to it. We tell ourselves that the faster we do that which we don’t like, the sooner we’ll get to savouring the pleasant part of our day.

But dividing activities into pleasant and unpleasant — or those worth savouring and those you rush through — rarely works that way. In my experience, a mind used to hurrying will continue to hurry, regardless of the task. Whenever I try to cook a meal fast and then enjoy it in peace — I can’t. That’s because the hurried cooking inevitably translates into hurried eating.

The more you get your mind used to rushing, the more it will rush. It’s hard to speed the mind up and then slow it down at will. By trying to do exactly that, I brought myself a great deal of anxiety, together with the constant impression of living on borrowed time.

Here again, the holidays are a good time to exercise a different mental habit: Taking your time regardless of what you do. Because the world around you is also slowing its pace, it may be easier to realize that life isn’t meant to be rushed through.

After all, what kind of life is it if you don’t have the time to stop and enjoy the little things?

Pick One Habit and Observe it During the Holidays

All these mental habits may seem like a lot to work on. We’re all prone to leaving the present, judging ourselves and others, focusing on negativity and hurrying through our lives.

These tendencies often feel like they’re beyond our control. But the point here isn’t to start beating yourself up for what your mind does. Nor is it to change all of these things at once.

When trying to improve ourselves becomes another chore, we’re likely to turn personal growth into a subtle form of self-aggression. That’s not the point of this post. I don’t want you to take all those mental habits above and start “changing them.”

I believe that with self-improvement in particular, we need to know how to cut ourselves some slack. To be easy on ourselves for not being easy on ourselves. To stop treating personal growth exclusively as “work” — and start viewing it as an “exploration.”

To do that, it’s more than enough if you pick just one mental habit mentioned in this post and gently monitor it throughout the holidays. Don’t try to change it, minimize it, or control it. Just become aware of it in a relaxed fashion.

Bringing it to your awareness may be a much better Christmas gift than actively trying to improve it. For once, look at yourself as someone who’s already perfect and complete. All that remains is to get to know this person better — instead of insisting that they should be better.

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