Trying to hide or suppress emotions does not work. To avoid behaving like the character of the story, making a storm in a teacup, we must act on three levels: emotional, rational, and behavioral.ġ. We only note events that confirm our negative view of the facts, discarding the rest. We make a storm in a teacup, transforming a small problem into a drama.ĥ. We think that the pain, anguish and suffering we experience for a living event will never pass.Ĥ. Let negativity attack us, so we end up seeing the whole world in gray.ģ. We focus exclusively on the loss and we are unable to see the chances that we still have in our favor.Ģ. We act as the character of the story every time that:ġ. Five signals that we are losing the perspective But if we are unable to turn the page fast, we can fall into our own trap and condemn ourselves to the unhappiness that we are trying to avoid by immersing ourselves in a vicious circle of rumination. To worsen things, it has also been noted that negative events are more resilient in memory than good ones.Įverything seems to indicate that our tendency to focus on what is negative is due to the fact that we try to collect as much details as possible about what happened to avoid suffering again in the future. Participants won or lost the same amount of money, but the anguish caused by the loss was much greater than the joy that accompanied the win. This is clearly demonstrated by an experiment conducted at Carnegie Mellon University. In addition, bad impressions and negative stereotypes are formed faster and are more resistant to change than good ones. Negative emotions, painful events and unpleasant comments, have a greater impact than good ones. As a general rule, we think more to unpleasant events than to happy ones. Negative emotions usually involve deeper thought, so the information is usually processed more in-depth regard to situations that generate positive experiences. Indeed, it has been seen that our brain processes the positive and negative information relatively differently. Some people assume adversity from a more positive perspective, but most focus more on the negative events and remind them more in detail. In other words: we make a storm in a teacup. And, as a result, we turn into the architects of our true misfortune, maximizing a problem that could have been very small compared to what it became. Though this story may seem unlikely, even close to madness, the fact is that we often behave like the man of the story. With this idea in his mind, obsessed with the death of one of his cows and thinking that nothing would ever be like before, he led the rest of the cattle to the cliff, to death. He always thought: Why did it have to happen to me? What is the meaning of having all these other cows? – Then he thought, – What a disaster! My flock is incomplete -.Īs the days passed, he began to overlook the rest of the cows. In the evening, when the man counted his livestock, he realized that a cow was missing. 'I have never seen that happen once,' he said.However, one day a group of hungry wolves attacked one of the cows and devoured it. She will also use a strainer.'Īnd for those who believe proper tea drinking means sticking your pinky out, Harrold cleared this up, too. He added: 'I am sure the Queen enjoys her Assam or her Earl Grey the traditional way, made with tea leaves in a teapot and poured into a fine bone china teacup. 'If the spoon touches the sides it makes a clinging sound and we don't want that at the afternoon tea table.' It's a pretty straightforward process, but avoiding a circular motion when stirring could be a hard habit to break.Įxplaining his preferred method to Business Insider, Harrold said: 'If we stir in a circular motion we can create a storm in a tea cup and see the tea coming over the sides which we should never allow. Harrold tells viewers to stir 'back and forth' after pouring the tea from the pot, adding 'never use a circular motion and never touch the sides'.įinally, he recommends sipping rather than slurping when it comes to enjoying a brew.

Create a storm in a teacup