The purpose of life is...

Well, report cards are done, I'm feeling more in charge of my teaching programs and my life, and I feel pretty good about my relationship with Nonsense these days. Since my major stressors are on the wane for the moment, I'm turning toward the more permanent deep-set stuff within me that often gets me down.

In Mind Over Mood, the authors talk about identifying "Core Beliefs". More ingrained than our "Automatic Thoughts" (the self-talk and flash images that spontaneously come up during our emotional reactions), Core Beliefs are absolutistic and generalistic ideas about ourselves, other people, and the way the world works that tend to govern the way we act and interact.





When I look at what I say to myself during emotional reactions, some themes keep recurring. Even though I'm able, upon examination, to find evidence to temporarily refute problem ideas in given situations, certain thoughts keep coming back and making me miserable. These include:

• If I don't meet everyone's needs or expectations, I've failed
• I'm missing some vital element of personality or brain chemistry everyone else has
• There's never really any progress, just endless, pointless cycles

So the next stage in my exploration of my emotional self is to examine these so-called core beliefs and see how true they are, and if not true, how to adjust them to something more plausible and manageable.


The first common automatic thought I've chosen to look at is along these lines in various situations:

• No matter what I do, everything comes back again. 
• I can never get ahead, never get anything finished. 
• Nothing is ever done, problems constantly recur, I can't make things better.

In the book, the first task is to figure out what the core belief is behind this thought, by asking questions like "What's so bad about that?" or "What does this say about me/others/the way the world works?" until you come up with an absolutistic, generalistic statement. This technique brought me: "You can't improve, so trying to is pointless."

If I keep going even further, I get: "Life is a pointless slog through time, at the mercy of external forces."

What does that mean about the world? "I have no power over my life (and therefore I can't actually accomplish anything)."

Is that my core belief? I don't know, but it's pretty deep. I can say this with some certainty because although it is almost diametrically opposed to my intellectual beliefs about making good choices and continually striving for improvement, I can also see that it colours my expectations in many areas. I'm often overwhelmed by an air of futility when small things don't go my way, or when I put effort into plans that take certain challenges into account and then those very challenges still get in the way. Makes it hard to put in the effort when you think it won't have any effect.

So the next step is to spend a few weeks looking for evidence to counter the core belief. Not sure how this is going to go, since I'm not sure whether or not I've actually arrived at a core belief yet. I need to come up with at least 25 pieces of evidence, big or small, that suggest that this belief that I have no power over my life might not be 100% true. My first piece of evidence:

1. I asked my doctor about medication, and taking it has helped me gain a better emotional balance.