TRAP #5 - ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 69.
Hello, friends. How are you? Settling into the new school year, senior teen get increasingly stressed about how to juggle school and all of the other things they have going on in their lives. Maybe gearing up for college visits or college applications, looking forward to fall break or parent's weekend when you might get to see your child at school.
Life at any time of the year can be beautiful, but also a lot. I'm in that moment right now, sinking into the beauty of having my son home for an extra weekend because he came home to see a music festival, seeing my younger son really taking school seriously now that he's a junior and he's got the memo that it really matters. I can see the beauty of all of it.
And also, I'm totally overwhelmed with all of the things I'm juggling right now. I was actually thinking of taking a break from the series on mindset traps to talk to you about managing overwhelm. And then I realized, ah, no, I'm falling into a mindset trap myself.
And this is a perfect opportunity to not only coach myself through it, but to share with you the process of how I do this. So first, let me introduce the mindset trap of the day. As you might know by now, I've been exploring common mindset traps and really applying these traps to our lives as moms with teens and college kids.
So far, I've covered confirmation bias, catastrophizing, validation seeking, and the comparison trap. Today, I want to dive into all or nothing thinking. That's so fun.
Before I set this up, I want to say that I feel so incredibly lucky to be doing this work and to have the opportunity to work with such incredible women who see in themselves a potential for more. More joy, more peace, more trust in themselves, an expansion of the possibilities for their lives. I want to share a testimonial I just received from a dear client of mine named Erin.
She went through Mom 2.0 with me, and this is what she had to say about the program. There is absolutely no way to adequately express how grateful I am for Jennifer, The Small Jar, and the entire coaching process. I found The Small Jar because I was looking for a way to deal with all of the feelings associated with an impending emptiness.
In the beginning, I just wanted her to give me the answers to stop what I perceived as the vortex of negative emotions and worry. After the 10 weeks, however, I'm blown away by the depth and results of Mom 2.0. If you would have told me at the start how I would feel today about the process, my skeptical mind, a mind I now know so much more about, would have said not possible. I was wrong.
Little did I know the Mom 2.0 program would go way beyond the surface of what I was wanting to the depths of where I needed it the most. Jennifer opened a window for me to step out of the vortex and create space in my life for so many possibilities, including joy, strength, and purpose. The sense of freedom I have from not being controlled by life's circumstances, and the emotions of raising teenagers is hard to describe.
You may just have to experience it yourself. I want to send a thank you to Erin for her kind words, and to all of my clients for their trust in me and this process. As I said before, it takes a brave soul to stand up for yourself and believe that you're worthy of something more in your life.
But here's the amazing thing about the work I do and the results I see my clients achieve again and again. More often than not, what they discover is not necessarily a life full of rainbows and unicorns. What they find is a life where they're so much more capable of embracing the beauty and the perfection of their lives, while also trusting themselves to be able to handle the parts that are not as perfect and beautiful.
The 50-50. It sounds kind of meh until you experience it, and then, as Erin so beautifully expressed, you're able to step out of the vortex of negative emotion and create space in your life for so many possibilities. That word possibility, a thing that may happen or be the case, the state or fact of being likely or possible, a thing that may be chosen or done out of several possible alternatives.
This word that seems so full of power, possibility, it actually just means something that can be chosen. And yet, at this stage of our lives, so many of us feel like life is happening to us, and that possibilities are closed off to us rather than wide open. As I reflected on Erin's beautiful testimonial, and also, as I mentioned, find myself struggling to juggle my own emotional vortex in this moment, I thought it would be a perfect time to explore the mindset trap of all-or-nothing thinking.
So what is this? All-or-nothing thinking is a mindset trap where we can view situations in extremes. For example, we think things are entirely good or entirely bad with no middle ground. Now, you can imagine why this type of thinking isn't always helpful, but as with other mindset traps, I actually think it's more important to recognize why our brains engage in this type of thinking in the first place.
Because again, as with the other traps, it's perfectly normal that our brains do this. I love thinking about our brains as separate from us. With my clients, I often like to think about our primitive, unsupervised brains like toddlers with a knife, wielding a powerful tool but very dangerous if unsupervised.
So why do our brains think that all-or-nothing thinking is actually helping us? Well, remember the motivational triad. Our brains are motivated to help us stay safe, seek pleasure, and be as efficient as possible. So on this last point, all-or-nothing thinking is actually quite a bit more simple and efficient.
Thinking in extremes actually in many ways simplifies complex situations because it assumes there are only two choices, one good and one bad. It's much easier for our brains to evaluate clear and straightforward choices rather than having to evaluate hundreds or millions of discrete possibilities. The reality of life is that it's uncertain.
The choices we're faced with can be complex and ambiguous. But black and white thinking actually can make our brains feel safer and more comfortable because it feels as if the choices are certain, even if the outcome isn't. Think about it this way.
It can feel like it's a relief to know that even if one of the choices is terrible or unrealistic or overly critical, the brain finds these limited choices and gains a temporary illusion of control and certainty. And here's what I found with so many of my clients and again have also seen in myself so many times with my boys. When we envision a terrible outcome and our brains become convinced that this one outcome is terrible and the other possible outcome we perceive is better or the goal that we want to achieve, then we go into fixed mode.
If we really wanted to explore the hundreds of terrible outcomes that are possible for our children, our brains could go there. But there's some comfort in letting go of all those other possibilities and focusing on the one that our brain decides is perhaps the most likely right now. Or for whatever reason, our brains decide this is the negative outcome we want to avoid.
And so now we know what the danger looks like and we start working backwards in our minds to try to avoid that possibility in whatever way we can. So if the worst case terrible outcome we think is our child will fail a class and then they won't get into college, well, we start focusing on tutors or changing classes or blaming teachers. If we perceive that our kids are at risk of being depressed because they don't have a group of friends, then we might try to build up their self-esteem or encourage them to get out there and meet new people.
If we think our kids aren't going to be competitive in the college process and therefore won't get into their top college choice, then we're going to try to encourage them to become more competitive. As I'm saying these things, you might be thinking there's nothing wrong with me getting my kid tutors or helping them build up their self-esteem or encouraging them to go after their dreams. And you're absolutely right.
We get to help and support our kids in any way we think will be helpful and supportive. It's not necessarily the actions that are the problem. The problem comes from the energy with which we take these actions.
So for example, if our all-or-nothing mind is envisioning that our child might not get into college or at least have disappointing college outcomes, or if we feel they'll be depressed or anxious if something happens, then we're likely to be feeling anxious and an urge to change or control the situation so those worst-case possibilities don't happen. And look, it's so interesting to consider that our brains are focusing on this one terrible outcome when there are an infinite number of possibilities that exist, both perfect, beautiful possibilities and other terrible or at least not great possibilities. But our brains find comfort in focusing on just one and trying to fix that outcome.
And honestly, think about how little control you actually have to avert that one outcome. And meanwhile, we're not giving any air time to all of the other possibilities. It's interesting too to see how all of these mindset traps actually can reinforce each other.
Remember confirmation bias and how our brain has a tendency to find evidence to support what we already believe. And while it's at it, it focuses on the So if we're convinced that one particular negative outcome is a real possibility, we're going to be constantly looking for and quite likely finding evidence to support this fear. All or nothing thinking can also help us because our brains can perceive that it's motivating to focus on the most positive or perfect outcome.
We can think that setting the bar unrealistically high might trick us into working harder. How many times have you set out to lose 10 or 20 pounds in a month or tried to get your to-do list checked off a hundred percent, which almost never happens? Or with your kids, maybe you've mentally assumed straight A's and SATs over 1400 are the only acceptable outcomes. When we see our kids or other people engaging in hard things, we often can equate this behavior with passion or commitment.
We think of these people as dedicated. They're striving for excellence. We can often be jealous because we wish we were more like the kind of person who could be this dedicated.
We might wish our own kids were more like this type of person. I'm all for big goals and frankly have done my own work on achieving impossible things. If it's something that you really want, yes, sometimes those goals can be motivating because it gives you something to work toward.
But there can be a fine line between working hard to achieve a goal in a way that's sustainable and alternatively working in a way that just beats you up in the meantime. For example, going on starvation diets or working hundred-hour weeks. It's just not something you can sustain realistically over the long term.
And by the way, how you get there is how you stay there. If your kid is overwhelmed and supported by tutors and hates every minute of the experience of getting into a competitive college, they're going to have to continue that grueling effort once they're there. Same with weight loss, same with anything.
How you get there is how you'll stay there. So can big goals be motivating? Yes, sometimes. But then we have to ask ourselves, is it necessary to go to extremes to achieve these goals? Only if you're willing to keep that pace up.
Again, all or nothing. We can use all or nothing thinking in so many different contexts. How we evaluate choices and make decisions.
The way we develop expectations of ourselves and others. The way we compare ourselves to others and evaluate whether we fit in or not based on judgments we make about what's acceptable and what isn't. It's in the way we evaluate everything in our lives.
This is good, that's bad. And this type of thinking isn't in and of itself necessarily bad. You can even think of it as our brain's way of making sense of everything it has to account for in our lives.
Did you know our brains process 11 million bits of information every second? 11 million. But are conscious minds that part of our brain that actually supervises the subconscious brain? This active, call it adult, part of our brain can actually only handle 40 to 50 bits of information per second. That means 99.999% of what our brains process is unconscious.
Given all of this, is it any wonder that our minds try to simplify these choices so that we're not overwhelmed with the magnitude of data that our brains are processing at any given moment? You can think about the process of coaching as learning how to supervise your mind. I'd even like to think that it empowers us to more effectively process that data that our conscious minds can handle because we're deciding on purpose, with intention, how we're going to approach the data we receive. So all this to say that our brains engage in all or nothing thinking, and it makes perfect sense.
But as you can imagine, this mindset trap has consequences in terms of our mental well-being, our self-perception, the way we engage with our relationships, and the way we try to solve problems. When we engage in all or nothing thinking, we can make sweeping and absolute judgments about situations, other people, or even ourselves. We can quite literally think that if something we don't want happens with our kids, that there will be terrible catastrophic consequences.
As we talked about in the episode on catastrophizing, going to these worst-case scenarios is in part motivated by our brain's desire to keep us safe. But also, remember, it's easier to focus on that one possible terrible outcome because then we think we can do everything in our power to avert it. How interesting is it to consider that we're trying so hard to avoid the pain of this absolute terrible outcome, while not seeing that this terrible outcome is only one possibility among many, many others, including those that involve something amazing happening.
And there's even that outcome where that thing that you don't want happens, and everything actually turns out okay. Often as moms, we can be convinced that one terrible outcome is likely because our child has had this problem in the past. They've had panic attacks or suffered from depression.
Maybe they haven't handled certain situations well in the past. And so we can overgeneralize to assume that these past negative experiences make it more likely that the negative outcome will happen in the future. So we can focus on the negative.
And then on the flip side, we can focus on the extreme positive outcome, that possibly unrealistic but perfect scenario. And as I said before, it can be motivating to set high goals. But what if that high standard isn't met? When we engage in all-or-nothing thinking, we can assume that anything less than that extreme best case equals failure.
In today's world of college admissions, when college acceptance rates are in the low teens or single digits, and even the kids we perceive to be superstars aren't getting into their top choices, does this equate to failure? Is this binary outcome where the odds are literally stacked against our kids? Is this truly the way we want them to measure their self-worth? How many kids are selling themselves short because as a society, we've somehow bought into this concept that these few schools with ivy on their walls are the ideal standard? And if you can't meet it, why bother? Have you ever noticed that you compare your kids to others? Have you found yourself thinking, I wish she was just a bit more social, that she tried a little harder in school? I wish she opened up more, or I wish she told me a little less. Look, our minds judge. If you're beating yourself up about that, go back to last week's episode on the mindset trap of comparison.
We all judge each other, and yes, we all judge our kids. It's normal, my friends. But here's the aspect of it I'd like to invite you to look into for yourself.
What is the all-or-nothing thinking attached to the judgments you have for them? Where does your mind go if they don't do that thing that you wish they would do? I wish he was just a bit more social. Where your mind goes might be that it's a problem he's not social, and he's going to be lonely and depressed without a group of friends around him, that he's going to feel left out and never find his people. All-or-nothing.
When I think I wish she tried a little harder in school, the fact that she doesn't means that she won't get into a good college. She won't get a great job. Life's going to be hard for her.
When I think I wished he opened up a bit more, the implication here is that there's something wrong that he won't tell me about. I wish she told me a little less. Well, now I knew too much.
I'm now thinking about everything that's wrong, and my mind is going down into a rabbit hole of worry. We don't often ask ourselves what that worst-case scenario is, or alternatively, what that high bar we're setting is. What are those binary choices that you're wavering between, and why is the middle ground so terrible? Think about how much anxiety, frustration, and disappointment we're setting ourselves up for when we don't supervise this tendency of our brains to simplify the alternative outcomes to a point where we're quite literally convinced that they are the only possibilities that exist.
Extreme success or extreme failure. This time last year, I was in total despair. Something was going on with my son, and I was convinced that it was going to end with me losing him.
I was quite literally living in wait for the absolute worst-case scenario. I got a lot of coaching. Honestly, I also got on anti-anxiety meds.
I wouldn't wish that situation on anyone. During that time, I remember going on a journey of letting go, and I realized I had absolutely no control over the situation. I tried, and I'd failed.
And in my absolute failure came to peace with the reality that the only thing I had left in my power to do was love my son. But I also found that I couldn't let go of what seemed like the real possibility of me losing him. So I made peace with it.
I didn't want it, but I had no control over it. And by making peace with it, what I realized was, if what he wanted was for me to let him go, that was a gift I could give him, and that I would love him no matter what. I was living in worst-case scenario and realized that I was holding on so tight to the fear of a possibility that actually hadn't happened yet, that I was already living it.
I was already experiencing the pain of it and not appreciating the reality of my life, which was my son was still with me. He hadn't left. All of this was in my head.
My all-or-nothing thinking was so coloring my reality that I couldn't see any other possibilities, including the possibility that my son was living through an incredibly challenging situation that ended up making him so much stronger, and he didn't need me to save him. Now that we can talk openly about what he experienced, I see the situation through his eyes, and I can't believe how much I discounted his strength. How is your all-or-nothing thinking discounting your child's strength, maybe also discounting your own? Look, we fear the worst-case scenario because we don't want to have to live through the pain we think we'll experience when we get there.
But is the reality really ever what we think it will be when we get there? How can we even know? How many twists and turns has your life taken, the challenges you've lived through, and everything has turned out okay or exactly as it was meant to? How do you know that? Because that's the way it turned out. Even those challenges that you've experienced, do you look back on them and give yourself credit for having found the strength to have gotten to the other side of it? Or are you focusing on how much you've struggled and how terrible it was, bringing the pain of that past into your current moment, assuming that means you won't be able to handle future challenges? We can view every aspect of our lives with this black and white thinking, good or bad, success or failure, perfect or terrible. We set the bar so high for the perfect, and we perceive anything else as failure.
We focus on the terrible and don't allow ourselves to imagine how many other scenarios there are that might be even just a little bit better than we imagine. We can never truly know how all of this will turn out, this story. So the question is, can we live in all of our lives, the good, the bad, the boring, the just okay, the uninteresting, the inspiring? Can we look at all of it with fresh eyes and consider that all of it has something to teach us, that all of it is open to interpretation, and that, my friend, is in your power.
As my dear client Erin shared, step out of the vortex of negative emotion and create space in your life for so many possibilities, an infinite array of possibilities that you can direct, that you can learn how to create. The circumstances of your life do not create your emotional experience. It's all simply in your mind.
That doesn't mean you should force yourself to think happy thoughts so you can be happy all the time, but it is an invitation to consider whether or not you're looking at your life through black and white glasses, not fully appreciating the depth and the richness of all of the colors of the human experience. Love and grief, joy and loss, pride and disappointment, all of it beautiful, available to you, an infinite number of possibilities. You have the power to create it, my friend.
This is exactly what I teach in MOM 2.0. As Erin said, you might just have to experience it yourself.
Until next time, friends.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, MOM 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
