If You Don’t Want To Suffer, Stop Playing Fortune Teller
Cognitive psychology has taught us that depending on how we think about what happens to us, this is how we will feel emotionally. Thus, sometimes we act like a fortune teller, but we make wrong predictions.
In the scientific literature we can find numerous examples of maladaptive and erroneous thinking patterns that people maintain despite their lack of logic and usefulness and above all, despite the suffering they cause them.
In this article we are going to focus on one of the most widespread dysfunctional thoughts: arbitrary inference or fortune teller’s error .
An example of a fortune teller’s mistake
Carla has started working in an important company in her city. It is the job of your dreams but you are not entirely comfortable. She believes that her colleagues do not swallow her and that they speak ill of her behind her back.
The other day she observed how two companions whispered in a corner and laughed out loud and she noticed that they were glancing at her from time to time. Carla is thinking of quitting her dream job because it is unbearable for people to talk bad about her! If they talk badly, she can get to the boss and they could fire her!
Let’s stop the story for a moment … what is our protagonist doing? Obviously, you are jumping to conclusions from a specific fact that you cannot validate or prove in any way.
She thinks that her classmates speak ill of her because she has seen two people talk and laugh, is this logical? Is the fact that two people are talking and laughing in a corner enough to believe that they are criticizing you?
But they are looking at her sideways! And that? They probably do it because she is also looking at them while laughing thinking that they are criticizing her.
The consequences of wrong thinking
Carla is hurting herself by thinking that way. You are causing tremendous anxiety and you are about to make a wrong decision because of that way of looking at things.
The typical paradoxical effect so usual in psychology is being created: from so much fear of being criticized and losing her job, it is she herself who is going to take the step of leaving it and, ultimately, losing her job.
This story, with this illogical way of thinking, is more usual than we think. People have a tendency to look at our navel, to protect our ego tooth and nail, and to draw early conclusions from isolated events. We tend to distort reality and this generates erroneous and disproportionate emotions.
The importance of stopping being a fortune teller and thinking well
Thinking properly does not mean being optimistic, positive or seeing the world in a rosy color, that would be worse! We would be fooling ourselves and in the end we would hit the “bump” anyway.
To think properly is to learn to see life with the lenses of our glasses clean. It is to perceive the world as it is, without distorting reality, without creating stories that only exist in our minds.
To be more rational and realistic, Carla should be more scientific and stop to contemplate all the possible alternatives that that hilarious conversation between two people could mean. It could be that they were remembering something funny, that they were telling jokes or talking about things that have nothing to do with our protagonist.
It is true that there is also the option that they are speaking ill of Carla, but we cannot let our impulses not allow us to contemplate other options. First of all, because it would not be logical or rational to pretend to guess other people’s thinking, we are not fortune tellers!
And secondly, because even if our option were the one that corresponds to reality, it would not be as terrible as we usually evaluate it. What’s so terrible about a review? It can be annoying, unpleasant … but never something to do a drama! Although this is another matter.
Therefore, stop self-generating so much absurd tension. You are not a fortune teller. You have to learn to stick to the real data and not get carried away by your own unfounded interpretations, those are not valid until they are proven. In the meantime, relax and live what you have ahead.
