Sam Gentle.com

Reverse mantra

I've never really liked the idea of mantras. At least as I've always seen them used, a mantra is something that you repeat to convince yourself of its truth. So you would get up each morning and say "I'm going to have a great day today". Of course, what happens if you don't have a great day is kind of undefined. Do you just keep saying it? I certainly see the value in repetition as a tool; if we work off associations, then repetition is a way to build a strong association. I just disagree with trying to use that mechanism to make yourself think something is true.

On the other hand, I can certainly see the value in a mantra as a tool for focusing attention. If you have a tendency to feel anxious in social situations, it could be useful to have a mantra like "what's the worst that could happen? and is that realistic?" to encourage you to pinpoint irrational fears. It's less about convincing yourself that something is true, and more about using the mantra as a tag for a thinking process you'd like to make a habit.

Another way that mantras could be useful is to avoid doing certain things without thinking about them. If you're trying to go for a run each morning, but you keep waking up and going on the internet instead, you could try saying "I'm going to go running this morning" when you wake up. It's a mantra, but you say it at about the time you'll be making the decision and it forces you to actually make the decision. So you might not go running, but you won't not go running by accident.

More generally, I think of these as reverse mantras: something you repeat to yourself, not to convince yourself that it's true, but to check if it's true. "I'm going to have a great day today" can't be a reverse mantra because you don't know if it's true when you say it, but "I'm having a great day today" would be a fine reverse mantra. The trick is that you don't say it to trick yourself into thinking your day is great, but rather as a warning sign: if you say it and your day is actually mediocre, you'll feel cognitive dissonance and take notice.

Whether or not you do anything about it is, of course, outside of the scope of the mantra.