Take two minutes to let go, express gratitude
What do you want to confess?
When I was a kid I remember watching that clichéd Catholic confession chamber scene from the movies. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” the mobster says, on bended knee, behind the metal lattice. “I robbed Two-Faced Tony at the deli and cut him out of the family.”
I didn’t grow up Catholic, yet it always seemed interesting to me that confession was a religious practice.
I looked into it and found that it’s not just Catholicism either. The act of confessing is an integral part of many world religions from Catholicism to Islam to Judaism to Mormonism to Buddhism.
Over the ages of our species coming into its own, across different geographies, different times, different backgrounds, we were somehow all wise enough to include a little emotional geyser of confession as part of how we lived and worshipped together. Why? Well, it seems to me if we can process and articulate a worry subconsciously swimming in the seas of our brains . . . we actually pull them out of our minds.
We extricate them. We eradicate them. The worries get pulled out of the wet dirt below and suddenly sit like shrivelly little worms on the hot sidewalk in front of us where, under the hot glare of the day, we just know they won’t last.
The thing is today we’re living in an increasingly secular society. Many of us are living without a confession chamber. I think that’s why we’ve seen the rise of websites such as PostSecret.com, an incredible project where Frank Warren collects, curates, and posts anonymous artistic confessions created on postcards mailed to him. What’s this little confession project turned out? A nearly billion-hit website, six New York Times bestsellers and a top-ranked TED Talk. Plus the postcard confessions themselves rove around galleries around the world and live at the Smithsonian.
We want to confess. We need to confess. We have to confess. We have a shared desire to pull out and process things we’re worrying about instead of letting them sit deep inside and fester.
I found a fascinating study that helps confirm this thinking called “Don’t look back in anger!” published in Science magazine back in 2012. No, it’s not written by Noel Gallagher. The study is by Stefanie Brassen, Matthias Gamer, Jan Peters, Sebastian Gluth and Christian Buchel.
These researchers show that minimizing regrets as we age creates greater contentment and happiness. When we accept ourselves it’s no surprise we are happier.
The research shows holding regrets causes us to take more aggressive and risky behaviours in the future. The most healthy and happy people notice issues they’re holding onto in their lives . . . and then choose to let them go.
I know I lived with stress and anxieties for a long time.
So more recently I’ve taken what I’ve learned about the power of confession together with positive psychology research and developed a simple twominute exercise for myself that helps me win the day every day.
I call it “Two Minute Mornings” and it helps me prime my brain for positivity all day. To do it I write out three quick sentences for myself: I will let go of . . . This is what we’ve been talking about. A confession. An anxiety. Here’s where I’ll write about my balding head, flabby stomach, the jealousy I feel about something or the disappointment in my stom- ach when I get a book proposal rejected. I am grateful for . . . Professors Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough showed that if you write down five gratitudes a week you’re measurably happier and even physically healthier over a 10-week period. Since I know the more specific the gratitudes the better I’ll avoid writing down things like “friends, family, job” and go for things like “Finding a new coffee shop with Wi-Fi and plugs,” “When an old friend from high school called to say hi” or “Ordering less at a restaurant when I know I’m getting at least half a kid’s meal.” I will focus on . . . The last thing I’ll write each morning is a little list of precisely three things I’ll do each day. That’s it! Just three. It forces me to chisel a short list of things I will do from the giant block of things I could do. Why? Because it helps prevent revisiting your could-do list all day. See, that causes decision fatigue as decision-making energy uses a complex part of the brain and we’re all wasting energy anytime we’re unfocused. As Roy Baumeister and John Tierney say in their book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Hu- man Strength, “Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rust-proof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy.”
I use the daily focus to write down three small goals I want to achieve that day like “Write a chapter for my new book, call Erin about tour, and play tennis with Alec.” It feels great crossing them off and satisfying to close the day on a high.
And that’s really it! A simple two-minute exercise: I will let go of . . . I am grateful for . . . I will focus on ... I put this together into a new journal called Two-Minute Mornings. For me, I like looking back on the anxieties I was holding onto because it gives me a chance to reflect and see how I’ve moved through difficult thoughts.
But you could just write it on a cue card.
My point is we have around 1,000 waking minutes a day so it makes sense to take two of them to make the other 998 better.
Good luck. Neil Pasricha is the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Awesome and The Happiness Equation. His new journal Two-Minute Mornings contains his exact two-minute practice for starting each day. His bi-weekly column helps us live a good life.