What are you giving permanent space in your head?
A cluttered wardrobe rarely happens overnight.
Negativity bias helps explain why one difficult moment can take up far more mental space than several good ones.
One jumper. One pair of trousers. One thing you bought in the sale and have not worn since 2017.
Eventually, you cannot see the things you actually like.
I sometimes wonder if our minds work in a similar way.
A criticism goes in. An embarrassing moment goes in. A thoughtless comment gets carefully stored for twenty years.
Humans naturally pay a lot of attention to negative information. That tendency can be useful, but it can also mean the difficult moments get far more mental shelf space than the good ones.
I like to imagine three shelves.
Release: What am I repeatedly revisiting that no longer needs this much space?
Learn: Is there something useful I genuinely want to take from a difficult experience?
Keep: What was good today that I might otherwise forget?
The last shelf matters.
We can be very quick to dismiss compliments, nice conversations, strong walks, a beautiful sky or ten minutes of complete contentment.
So try collecting them deliberately.
For seven days, write down three specific good moments every evening.
Not ‘nice walk’.
‘The sun came through the trees and for thirty seconds I felt completely happy.’
Your mind is valuable real estate.
The difficult things are part of the collection.
One reason I deliberately collect joy in everyday life is to balance the pull of self limiting beliefs; neither means pretending difficult things did not happen.
They do not have to be the entire collection.
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