Your Well-Being May Depend on How You Deal with the Small Stuff

You have a long list of important and time-sensitive things to do. When rearranging your papers, you accidentally spill coffee all over them. You have an essential meeting to commute to in your car, and as soon as you get on the freeway, there’s a big pile-up which will delay you for an unknown period of time.

Does your mind immediately go to negative thoughts until you are able to reengage in your planned agenda? Do you notice if you carry a negative mood into subsequent events, or are you able to “wipe clean” the negative thoughts?

New research may provide some clues to what happens in our brains.

University of Miami researcher Nikki Puccetti and her colleagues have published a new study in the Journal of Neuroscience which found that how a person’s brain evaluates getting negative stimuli may influence their long-term psychological well-being.

“One way to think about it is the longer your brain holds on to a negative event or stimuli, the unhappier you report being,” Puccetti said, “Basically, we found that the persistence of a person’s brain in holding on to a negative stimulus is what predicts more negative and less positive daily emotional experiences. That predicts how well they think they’re doing in their life.”

“It may be that for individuals with greater amygdala persistence, negative moments may become amplified or prolonged by imbuing unrelated moments that follow with a negative appraisal,” the authors speculate. “This brain-behavior link between left amygdala persistence and daily affect can inform our understanding of more enduring, long-term well-being evaluations.”

Less activity in the amygdala following adverse events daily can predict having a more positive frame of mind the researchers argue. This in turn can produce a lasting state of p psychological well-being. “Thus, day-to-day experiences of positive affect comprise a promising intermediate step that links individual differences in neural dynamics to complex judgments of psychological well-being,” the authors conclude.

Co-author of the study Aaron Heller says: “The majority of human neuroscience research looks at how intensely the brain reacts to negative stimuli, not how long the brain holds on to a stimulus,’’ He added: “We looked at the spillover — how the emotional coloring of an event spills over to other things that happen. Understanding the biological mechanisms is critically important to understanding the differences in brain function, daily emotions, and well-being.”

Their research could explain, Puccetti said, “why some people might let a dropped cup of coffee ruin their day, while others wouldn’t give it another thought after cleaning the mess up.”

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

“Don’t sweat the small stuff” is an idiomatic figure of speech, indicating a state of worry causing physical manifestations. It means that there’s no point to worrying about small daily things that go wrong in life. The expression implies that we should focus on the important things in life.

Richard Carlson, author of Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff (… And It’s All Small Stuff), which has sold over 25 million copies since the original was published in 1997shows you how to minimize the small things in life and stop fretting about them. In thoughtful and insightful language, Carlson reveals ways to calm down amid your incredibly hurried, stress-filled life. You can learn to put things in perspective by making the small daily changes he suggests, including advice such as “Think of your problems as potential teachers”; “Remember that when you die, your ‘In’ box won’t be empty”; and “Do one thing at a time.” It would be best to try to live in the present moment. You can write down your most stubborn positions and see if you can soften them, learn to trust your intuitions and live each day as if it might be your last. Carlson suggests ways to be more caring, calm and peaceful, and become less stressed by not sweating the small stuff. Here’s some other advice about not sweating the small stuff, including:

• Your life isn’t an emergency. Stop treating every day like a fireman rushing to a fire or trying to please people all the time. Instead, try to make yourself bored on purpose. Don’t do anything for a couple of hours or even days. Shut off your laptop and smartphone for a day. The world won’t end.
• Give others a break when they least deserve it. That’s when they need it the most. It’ll make both of you happier.
• You don’t win a marathon by sprinting. Think of life as a marathon. You wouldn’t be sprinting for the entire race. Don’t buy into the myth that successful people always work hard and never relax.
• You won’t be able to empty your bucket list. We all have a checklist or bucket list of projects, goals and dreams. Carlson says it’s self-deception to think the list will ever be complete or the bucket empty. We keep adding. There will always be things you can never complete or accomplish in life. You can’t have it all. Everyone dies someday. That includes you. And in that limited time, you can only do so much.

So, the key takeaway from the research and Carlson’s advice is that if you experience a temporary negative event, allowing it to contaminate the rest of your day can be an unconscious automatic impulse we must counteract. Carlson says, “Whenever we hold on to anger, we turn ‘small stuff’ into really ‘big stuff’ in our minds. We start to believe that our positions are more important than our happiness. They are not.”