ANTS! Beware!
What They Are:
1) Insidious armies of Automatic Negative Thoughts that can swarm all over your day and ruin your perfectly good picnic;
2) Evil little wizards that capture you with their hypnotic negative spells.
What They Do:
Ants follow well-established trails inside your mind. In her wonderful book, Happy for No Reason, Marci Shimoff says that we each think about 60,000 thoughts every day. Of those, a whopping 95% are the same thoughts you had yesterday and the day before and the day before. And even more startling, 80% –or roughly 48,000–are negative!
According to positivity expert Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, the tipping point, where you launch onto an upward spiral of experiencing increasing positivity, comes when reach a positivity ration of 3:1. That is, you enjoy three positive experiences for every negative experience.
Because we experience such a preponderance of negative thoughts, one of the best ways to begin pumping up our positivity ratios is by allowing fewer ants to tromp across our minds.
See, the goal of the ants is to gobble all the goodies, and to carry you off into their tunnel of darkness, into a landscape of anxiety, hopelessness, anger and fear that leads nowhere but to depression and despair.
Yipes! Who needs that?! Bring on the Ant Tamers! Let’s teach these buggers to dance!
Ant Taming 101
The first step to taming the ants is to notice you’re in their hypnotic trance. You can tell by how glum you’re feeling. Dull, down, anxious, tense, hopeless, maybe even nauseated. As soon as you consciously notice it, congratulate yourself. Noticing is the first step to taking control.
The second step is to decide that you will take control. So you pull on your Inner Ant-Tamer boots, face the swarm, and cracking your whip loudly, issue your command: “Stop!” You’re in authority now, and you freeze them right in their tracks.
Quickly, while they’re all freeze-dried and motionless from the shock of your taking charge, scoop them up, put them in an ant cage and set them aside. Before you can work with them effectively, you need to fully claim your ant tamer role, to shake off the residue from their spell and to accept that you are now in control. Then, while they’re in their cage, you can grab your manual of ant taming strategies and get to work.
Clearing the Trance and Claiming Control
Face it, confronting an ant swarm can be a little daunting. You’re not sure how long your command to stop will freeze them, or whether the cage will hold. Maybe some of them escaped and will set the others free. These lingering feelings of doubt and anxiety are the trance residue. The way to shake it off is to get fully grounded in the present.
(You can find a quick trick here that will wake you up and put you instantly in the present. Go ahead and try it right now and you’ll see its surprising power for giving you a quick, clear space smack dab in the middle of the present moment. Then come back and keep reading.)
See? You can control your mind. As monstrous as they may seem when they’re swarming, ants are nothing but thoughts after all. And you can always choose to think a different, more positive thought.
Sometimes stopping the ants in their tracks – releasing your attention from their hypnotic spell – can seem like a daunting task. In later articles here we’ll focus on release techniques specifically. But for now, put the ant-tamers below to work for you. They’re proven strategies and with practice they’ll work better and better and better for you.
The Strategies
We’ll look at two of the major ant-taming strategies today and tackle more later on. Put these to work the next time ants threaten to overwhelm your picnic.
Strategy One: The Interrogation Squad
Try unleashing a team of fact finders to do a reality check on the story the ants are telling. Dispute their statements. Call them into question. For every statement they make, call in an impartial expert and ask, “Is this really true?”
Is it true that . . .
She doesn’t love me?
I’ll never make it?
I always screw up?
My boss is a jerk?
Diets never work?
I’m a fake?
Make the ants show factual evidence for their claims—with an emphasis on facts.
Propose alternative explanations for the scenarios they present. Ask your impartial witness what other ways you could look at events? What could you change that would move things onto a different course? How likely is the worst case scenario? What good does it do me to look at it this way? What if I didn’t buy this story? What if I chose to believe something else?
The point is to show the ants that you’re not going to take their arguments at face value any more. The facts they present aren’t the only facts of the case, and you are going to be on the outlook for different explanations from now on.
Strategy Two: Diversionary Techniques
Sometimes the ants swarm in so furiously and in such numbers that you can’t round them all up to put in the cage. That’s when you switch to diversionary techniques. In other words, you relocate your picnic.
When you find that you keep repeating the same arguments in your head, or replaying the same disturbing mental movie, it’s time to find a new picnic spot—somewhere that you can enjoy some goodies in peace. Do something that takes your attention off your troubles:
- Get Active – Go for a walk, a jog, a swim, a bike ride. Go to the gym. Haul out your trampoline. Cut the grass. Rake the yard. Wash the car. Put on some music and dance. Do some yoga or Tai C’hi.
- Play with Your Toys – Get out your favorite hobby. Break out your crayons, your guitar, your hammer and saw. Organize your collection. Build something. Do puzzles. Crochet. Finish putting that model together. Bake a pan of cookies. Repot a flower. Pull some weeds.
- Clean Something – Organize a drawer. Clear off your desk. Clean your toaster. Fix a bike tire. Tackle a corner of the garage. Mop the floor. Scrub the tub. Delete old emails. Do your nails. Wash a window.
- Call in an Ant-Buster Friend – Connect with somebody whose company you enjoy and see what they’re up to. How are the kids? How did that date turn out? How are your vacation plans shaping up? How’s your project coming along?
The point is to keep yourself from thinking too much about your unresolved troubles. (Choose healthy diversions, though. Steer clear of violent or depressing TV, or over-eating, or deciding you need a couple beers or a handful of drugs.)
Once you have lifted your negative mood, you’ll be in a better frame of mind to dispute the ants with a fresh state of mind and address your problems with new strengths.
Your Turn
Do you have a favorite ant-taming strategy of your own? What do you do when the the ants start marching in?
Susan
Off the top of my head, I can’t add any NEW techniques or skills to this conversation. Once again, you have been most thorough in your presentation, covering just about everything that needs to be covered.
What I CAN do is vouch for the validity of your suggestions as I use them regularly with consistently good results.
My little 6-year-old and I like to go for nature walks in the woods early in the morning just before she catches the bus for school. Even though we live in a big city (Toronto), we are fortunate to live next to some parks and wooded areas. Of course, there are lots of little creatures in the woods, including a myriad of bugs, spiders and ANTS.
The first day we did our nature walk, my little one was concerned – OK, she freaked out – over all the creepy, crawly things. I bent down to her level and asked her to pick the one critter that scared her the most. She picked a spider which was busily spinning a beautiful silk thread, shining in the early morning light that was filtering through the leaves and branches. I then asked her, “Who is BIGGER… you or the spider?”
We used our memories and imaginations to talk about all the ‘Giant’ stories we had read… how everyone was more afraid of the Giant. I told her, “YOU are the giant in this enchanted forest. And all these creatures are in YOUR kingdom.”
Well, that put a whole new spin (pardon the spider pun) on the entire situation.
Now my little one regularly picks up caterpillars and other various critters, much to the disgust and fright of her tiny classmates. She laughs and says, “Hey, I’M the giant here… they are in MY kingdom.” Magically, some of her friends will come and start petting the fuzzy little caterpillar or look on in wonderment at my little one’s ‘subject’.
This analogy, being the Giant MASTER works fine for each individual thought. But as you said, sometimes the ants swarm.
MOVE! MOVE AWAY! GO SOMEPLACE ELSE… FAST!
That absolutely works for me. My little one and I create all kinds of imaginary scenarios during our morning walk. One of our favorites is being in the woods just at dusk. We have a special tree that has a knot-hole. We found a stick that perfectly fits into that knot-hole… it’s our KEY that turns all the loose branches and twigs lying on the ground into BONES that come to LIFE when the sun goes down.
Mind you, we make up all these stories first thing in the morning. Because she goes to bed so early on school nights, we have yet to actually go into the forest in the evening just as the sun is going down to see if those bones really do come to life! Even still, one of the MOST IMPORTANT PARTS of our story is that we have already planned our ESCAPE ROUTE… just in case, you know!
So whether the ANTS are swarming your picnic… or the BONES have come to life and are chasing you… it is wise to plan your escape route NOW while you are still in control of the situation. And if, someday, you find yourself being swarmed or chased… RUN!
Sandra, thanks for making and sharing this site. There is so much value here!
All the best from Toronto,
Russ
What wonderful stories! Thanks so much, Russ, for sharing these precious gems with us.
Susan and Russ – great tool and beautiful, empowering story! Thank you both!!
Thanks, Cristina. I have read Russ’ story several times now–just because it gives leaves me with such a big, wide grin. I’m tickled that you liked it, too.
Pingback: Making Ants Dance, Part II: Breathe Your Troubles Away