Projections Damage Your Health

As this is ‘Mental Health Awareness Week’, my ‘staying afloat’ tool this week is about how projections can damage our mental health. I would like the words ‘What if’ to be banned from the English language.  We can terrify ourselves with vivid imaginations of what might happen, usually involving doom and gloom. Endless internal ‘what if’ chatter becomes a fear trap:

What if this doesn’t work out?

What if I end up on my own?

What if I hate the next house we move to?

What if the day goes horribly wrong?

The suggestion seems to be that you will not be able to cope/survive if these things happen. Worries and fears can alter perceptions until you lose all sense of reality, twisting difficult situations into nightmares. My suggestion is that you try using the ‘What if’ projections in a different way by flipping the coin, creating the opposite, to counteract the disaster thoughts:

What if this works out OK?

What if we live well together for another 20-plus years?

What if I love living in our next home?

What if the day goes well?

Doing this can act as a reminder that the only control you have over the future is to plan your intention, rather than focus on potential outcomes that may or may not happen. This can be gently reassuring that your best hope is every bit as likely to occur as your worst fear. So why waste precious life energy fearing the worst that might happen?

This poem by Samuel Coleridge sums up the more positive aspect of ‘What if’:

“What if you slept
 And what if in your sleep you dreamed
 And what if in your dream you went to heaven
 And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
 And what if when you awoke
 You had that flower in your hand
 Ah, what then?”

I’ve been through a period recently when my projections have been harbingers of doom. Thinking of things that could go wrong and wondering how I’d cope.

My friend missed our regular phone call. She is always reliable and there were no messages from her. As she had a stroke some time ago, I imagined her dead from another stroke and felt helpless and disturbed. Needless to say, she was fine and just had an urgent call to answer. She was in touch with me half an hour later. 

At such times I have to reign myself in and do the ‘What If’ exercise above, imagining the possibility of a positive outcome rather than projecting disaster. This stops me wasting precious energy in worry and stress. I am reminded that things can work out OK and I come back to the present.

I wrote this poem as a reminder to myself that projections can damage my health if I allow my mind to fantasise about what could go wrong in any situation. Instead, I can allow myself to just let things unfold without wild imaginations of doom:

AGAINST THE ODDS.  

Sometimes –
the rain stops for the ceremony.
The last bus waits for the latecomer.
The train arrives early
and the roads are clear
for the urgent appointment.

Sometimes
people turn away from conflict.
Youngsters offer support to those older.
Receiving becomes a pleasure, not a weakness.
And the ‘best laid schemes
of mice and men’ go well.

Sometimes
we reach through our isolation
to find comfort in each other.
We remember that a simple hug or smile
can warm the human heart.
And we connect because we care.

And with these sometimes
just maybe
a world can emerge:
where difference is welcome
and the unusual
becomes the norm.

where all of us,
can claim our place
and things do not always
turn from bad to worse,

where these things happen
against the odds.