Many people experience negative thought spirals or feedback loops. The triggers for these spirals can be minor, but they can lead to major self-doubts and questioning our sense of belonging, skills, or value.
If we understand how these negative spirals begin, we can try to stop them in ourselves and in others, said Greg Walton, professor of psychology at Stanford University and author of the Book “Ordinary Magic: The Science of How We Can Achieve Big Change with Small Acts.”
6 questions with Greg Walton
What’s going on in the brain during a negative feedback loop?
“ I think the first thing is that you’re walking into a situation in which you’re asking a question, and it might be a question about, ‘Am I going to fit in this job? Or are people going to respect me? Are they going to value me? Am I going to be able to do this job well?’ And that question is kind of sitting in the back of your mind, and it almost functions like a lens through which you look at experiences. So if you have your boss make a snarky remark, you might think maybe that means, ‘They don’t want me here.’”
And then sometimes, it gets much bigger than it actually is. Is that what you mean?
“Yeah. It gets bigger in a couple of ways. One is it gets bigger in your head. You are asking a question like, ‘Do they even want me here?’ And then there’s some ambiguous event, like your boss is a little snarky, and then you think, ‘They don’t want me here.’
“And that’s the first kind of bigger, and then the second kind of bigger is that it kind of comes out of that psychological system just inside of you, and it comes into the world. So it starts to affect how you interact, how you engage with coworkers, how maybe you engage with that boss, your actual ability to perform well on the job, and that’s now become a matter of kind of objective reality.”
Do these spirals happen more often in certain moments in life?
“I think it’s really helpful to think about how they come up at times. One of the things that’s really important is that they often begin with a question, and often that question is a reasonable one.
“So you’re new at a job, you really want to belong there, but maybe you have some reason to wonder whether you’ll in fact belong there, whether in fact people will be glad that you’re there, will give you the support that you need to do the work that you want to do. And it’s at those moments, for example, in transitions or when your identity is at risk in some way, that the questions are most potent, and then your experience of negative events can be largest.”
How can one take that moment and shift into a positive moment?
“So one of the words that I really like is ‘tifbit,’ a tiny fact, big theory, and this word comes about from a story my brother told me many years ago. He was living in New York. He was dating a woman. The relationship seemed to be going pretty well, and then they have this breakup event, and the woman is explaining why she can’t be with him, why they can never be. And by way of explaining, she says, ‘Do you remember that time we went to Macy’s?’ And he remembers a completely uneventful trip to Macy’s. And she said, ‘Well, I had to tell you to tuck your shirt in. I can’t be with you.’ And my brother and I laughed at this. Like, what was it that the untucked shirt meant? How did that define for her, like, who he was and who she was and why they could never be together?
“We never found the answer to that question, but I think it’s a really revealing story, and I don’t want to tell it by way of sort of making fun of the woman, but rather by way of helping all of us notice these situations where we have a really big meaning in response to a small event.
“So a tifbit is a tiny fact that you have a big theory about. So your boss has some offhand remark that’s a little snarky, and suddenly you think, ‘they don’t want me here.’ And when you have that thought, if you can observe it and notice it, you can start to learn, what are the questions that are driving your experience of that setting? Where might those questions come from, and what might be a better way to think about that?”
Much of what you write about is fostering confidence and belonging, which is where what you call ordinary magic moments come in these small interventions that can deliver lasting positive change. What do you mean by that?
“I think one of the things that’s really important for me as a researcher, you’re describing the positive, but is also to understand the negative. To understand why it is that we have these creeping self-doubts, why we’re worried in situations that we’re not enough, that we can’t do it, that maybe a romantic partner doesn’t love us. And then to understand those experiences as real, but not necessarily as true and diagnostic or determinative of our outcomes. To understand those feelings as normal and as things that can get better with time, and sometimes as having silver linings, sometimes that have opportunities with them.
“When you can do that kind of mind shift in a workplace situation, in a school situation, in a relationship with a romantic partner, you can start to interact with other people in ways that build the world that you hope to live in. Build the relationships you hope to live in. Build the work world, build the school world.
Are there things that others can do from the outside to talk to people who may spiral and put it into the right context that, in the long run, can be positive?
“Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of the doubts that we have are doubts that we ultimately work through best with each other and in relationship and in partnership. So the boss, for example, who is able to share maybe their own feelings of non-belonging at first in the workplace, maybe their own missteps along the way to becoming a leader, their missteps along the way in, in building particular kinds of technical skills, for example, that other people might worry about in sharing those kinds of processes. We make it normal to go through those processes and to build those capacities. And then a person who’s younger than them, who’s on their own journey, is able to see that for themselves. It’s kind of a role model of one that recognizes the doubts, but also doesn’t allow them to take over it and determine your experience, so to recognize them, but to grow nonetheless.”
This interview has been edited for clarity.
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Julia Corcoran produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Allison Hagan adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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