I’ve been thinking a lot about how reductive my thinking can be at times and how I actively try to work against it. It’s a knee jerk reaction to feel definitive about something one way or the other. A few years back, I saw a therapist and she pointed out I might be exhibiting perfectionist tendencies. This was quite a shock to me because I’ve never considered myself to fall anywhere close to a perfectionist. In fact, my life at that point felt very messy and nothing I was doing felt close to striving for perfection. Perhaps a blindspot in my knowledge around the topic, but over the course of several months she explained to me in detail what perfectionist tendencies look like and it revealed how wrong I was about the definition of a perfectionist.
One of the main takeaways from our time together was the idea of “all or nothing” thinking. She detected in stories I told her or feelings I was having about a person, situation, etc. that I would immediately reduce the person or experience to one of two camps. I left little room for any nuance or gray area. She asked me to imagine an encounter with someone and instead of saying it went well or poorly, to imagine a middle which indicated it was fine and neither good nor bad. Then, she said to imagine mid-points on both sides that say it was not good but not bad/horrible and the same for good but not great/fantastic. By adding these points on the imaginary rating scale in my head, I started to realize how reductive I had been in my thinking or analysis of things I was experiencing.
It feels like the default or lazy thing to do. I can tie this into a thought I had yesterday which was: I hate rating things at all. I can come to a conclusion on whether or not I liked a meal, or a movie but I don’t want to take the extra steps in assigning it a certain rating from 1-10 or 3 stars, etc. This way of thinking kind of sends my brain into a temporary overload and I begin to malfunction. Honestly, I don’t care that much about how good something was anymore but rather if I liked it or not overall. For this reason, I don’t like sharing recommendations with people for restaurants, movies or music hardly anymore. If I do share something with someone, I always slap the big disclaimer on it that I enjoyed it, but that’s all I can really say. The most I can do is refer back to that scale in my head and check-in when necessary to evaluate my feelings on a topic.
When my mind feels bogged down or foggy, I feel myself drift back into this line of thinking—a state of categorizing things as simply good or bad. My brain, on a bad day, feels like an overloaded mail room sorting envelopes into bins. I wonder why that is? Decision fatigue has always plagued me and perhaps making a decision about how I feel about something is all in the same. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I want to fight against that habit and keep allowing room for context, nuance and the opportunity to be surprised.
Maybe I’m just rambling, I don’t know.