How long can you sit alone with your thoughts? Imagine you are sitting in a room. There’s a chair you’re sitting on and a table. And a button. No phone, no paper, nothing else.
Just you and your thoughts. Oh, and the button. The button when pressed will send you an electric shock. Yes, it will hurt. You’ll be in that room for 15 minutes. What do you do? Do you press the button? Sit there in silence?
This was an experiment done in a bunch of college students. A surprising 67% of the men and 25% of the women decided to shock themselves instead of sitting there with their thoughts. We’ve talked before about how we could be our harshest critic. So these students could have been in a room alone with their worst enemies.
It’s no wonder that some of them would rather be shocked.
Our own worst enemy
When we are alone with our thoughts, we will often focus on what is going wrong in our lives or what we are anxious about. This focus on our negatives served us well as a survival mechanism in the past. If we tried something new and survived, we were lucky. We shouldn’t push our luck.
Now the stakes are lower. That fear before a speech serves us only briefly. It reminds us to prepare, but after that just acts as a hindrance. The feeling before it is still the same. Our body screams to not do it. We regret signing up to do it. This is despite how well we know it can help our career.
Or during the preparation, we sabotage ourselves. Not work on it to the best of our ability. We do this because even practicing for it, our brain tells us that it’s not safe. We should have taken the easier path.
