The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Life is never just one thing. Take today for example. I slept in, fixed a fancy homemade coconut latte, and sat down to work in my fuzzy clean slippers. (The Good)

The sleep in was sponsored by a persistent ringing in my left ear, and a growing wave of nausea spawned by the relentless sensory irritant. (The Bad)

If I let myself, I could dive off the cliff of “how bad is it, is it going to get worse, will I ever get my life back from this hyperacusis and the tinnitus that complicates it?” (The Ugly)

But for you it’s probably the same. Some things worked for you today…maybe you’re in reasonably good health, have meaningful tasks on your list, and at least one person who cares about you being okay. (The Good)

Some things are hard in your life right now. Someone ignored or treated you poorly, too many things to do cause a stress reaction, and you’re not sure how things will pan out at work, in a relationship, or in our world as a whole. (The Bad)

Whatever your cliff of (The Ugly) is, that’s where your choice lives. You don’t get to choose The Bad. It chooses you. Feelings of fear, insecurity, discouragement and uncertainty arrive. Circumstances of pressure, loss, and demands of life materialize around you. They’re not just figments of your imagination to be discredited. But just because The Bad exists, it doesn’t mean we have to run with them to experience The Ugly of misery, doubt, and ruminative demoralization.

But don’t worry, this blog is not a demand that you “buck up” and “think positive.” Instead, it’s an invitation to use one of the coolest attributes of the human brain: Competitive Selection.

🧠 Competitive Selection: Various experiments suggest a limit of around four things that can be held in the mind simultaneously. (Ethan Kross, Chatter, 28.) This means that choosing to turn attention to some things pulls attention away from others. This process is called competitive selection because different inputs compete for our attention and, by winning, block each other out ( Eric I. Knudsen, “Fundamental Components of Attention,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 30 (April 2007): 57–78.).

Your brain can only focus on so many things at a time. Some days, this number may feel like zero. 🤣 But even deeper, below the conscious level of “focus on my work,” your brain has a sort of bandwidth restriction that means donating your attention to one thing steals it from other things.

That’s because the gear your brain has to get into to focus is managed by the “central executive” of your brain.

🛑 When we task our central executive with an activity or decision, competitive selection blocks out some of what we feel in our body or notice in our environment and blocks us from thinking about other tasks. In the same way, if we are “distracted” from our focused task, it is because some other target has won the competition for our attention and stolen it from the task at hand. …we can’t live enjoyable lives by waiting for bad situations to go away. Instead of changing environments, let’s look at how competitive selection can change our experience right now.

It’s overly simplistic to say “focus on the good, ignore the bad, and you won’t get sucked into the ugly.” But if we work with the power of competitive selection, we leverage the real, physiological truth that choosing to focus on one thing helps the other things to fade from our awareness.

Some days, we need to unpack and deal with the bad. We need to analyze how bad it is and make a plan that prevents bad from turning into worse. We need to resolve the causes of the bad as much as we can, and learn from the bad so that our souls and lives get richer with wisdom.

But when we’re overwhelmed, in pain, or discouraged, we’re wisest to allow ourselves to notice and savor the good things. To let them capture us by our limited attention, and to let new good things grow in our lives.