Peak and Pit
In response to COVID-19 the ‘Live Up’ COVID COMMUNITY was set up to support our communities with practical wellbeing resources that can be used for these extraordinary circumstances of social distancing, community lockdown and quarantine. This article is about ‘Taking Notice’ one of the 5 Ways of Wellbeing.
Peak and Pit
This was a family ‘bubble’ challenge that we have been doing during dinner most nights. We each share our peak of the day, our pit of the day and how we overcome it.
Firstly, the peak is about noticing the good things that happen in our days even if they are small and don’t seem significant. We have an ‘inbuilt’ negativity bias where our brains are wired to notice the negative stimuli, because back in the day from an evolutionary perspective if we didn’t notice the negative things then we wouldn’t survive (e.g. if you didn’t notice the tiger you would be eaten)! What this means for our brain is negative things tend to be ‘sticky’ in our thoughts like ‘velcro’ compared with positive things which are like ‘teflon’ where they slip away. Deliberately focusing on the ‘peaks’ of everyday helps make the positive things that happen more sticky. So build up your emotional bank account by noticing the ‘good stuff’ and celebrate it. The research shows you need at least 3-6 good things to outweigh negative things depending on the context your in.
By acknowledging a ‘pit’ of the day we understand that life is full of ups and downs. We have the strength within ourselves to handle it and ‘bounce back’. If we celebrate our ‘bounce backs’ we are literally wiring resilience into our brain. We are reinforcing our personal narrative that we can handle setbacks.
So how did it go? It was easy, fun and everyone was happy to be involved. We have done this challenge before but not during a COVID scenario. It was empowering as we acknowledge that life isn’t ‘rainbows and sugar-coated butterflies’ at the moment. We had robust discussions about how we couldn’t control the COVID pandemic, but we could control our own actions in relation to it. By just focusing on what we did have control over we felt more empowered and felt a sense of certainty in a very uncertain situation.
So I guess at the moment all we can do is just take day by day and try to focus on what’s good. When we get knocked down, get back up, brush ourselves off, pat ourselves on the back, put one foot in front of the other and carry on. This COVID thing is going to be a marathon not a sprint where we will need every ounce of our endurance to get us through.
“It’s not how many times you get knocked down, it’s how many times you get back up!”