Contents
If you hate Christmas, you have a psychological talent that you do not know
Psychology
The strategic use of personal strengths allows you to feel more authentic and enjoy more of what you live and the activities that are carried out
If you are reading this article but you do it with some qualms, because you think that we are going to try to convince you to stop hating Christmas, do not worry because that is not the objective. In fact, you will most likely experience a certain satiety every time someone says things to you like «Why don’t you like Christmas? If it is a beautiful date and it is the ideal time to see people you do not usually see often or to do something nice for others… ». But you are not convinced because you do not think that it is a beautiful date but an invention of the shopping centers so that we spend money, nor do you think that it is an opportunity to see someone you have not seen in a long time. And in part you are right because, as the director and founder of the European Institute of Positive Psychology argues, Christmas has a large consumer component and also makes us feel obliged to be kind and pleasant when in reality we do not feel like it.
Most likely, according to the expert, you are one of those people who is especially good at analyzing and spot the dark side of things. “Have you ever wondered why it is easy for you to analyze things and not take them for granted?” He asks. The reason is, according to Dafne Cataluña, is that you have a psychological strength that in positive psychology is called «Analysis». “This strength characterizes those people who take their time before acting, who evaluate the information and who generate critical thinking,” he clarifies.
This ability It can be useful when you consider, for example, a major change in your life, as you are able to analyze the pros and cons in detail, study the effects in the medium and long term and take the step only when the objective data tell you which it is the best decision.
But it is also true, as the psychologist warns, that another of the effects of this analytical capacity is that sometimes it is difficult to fully enjoy things from simplicity, since the usual thing is that you tend to give three and a half laps to everything that passes through your head.
How to make the best of Christmas
What would happen if you did not let yourself be carried away by consumerist impulse Not for the “good roll” but you manage to find the formula to personally benefit from this time of year? The founder of the European Institute for Positive Psychology believes that you may be able to make the best of Christmas “for yourself” if you combine your psychological strength, “analysis”, with another strength, “curiosity.”
To achieve this combination, the expert proposes asking yourself what this season can have that is attractive to you and what you can do on these dates so that you feel that they have been productive. The challenge is to analyze, yes, but with the aim of finding options that allow you to obtain a Christmas result with which you feel identified.
And to achieve this, the key lies, according to Dafne Cataluña, in knowing that in order to effectively combine the strengths of analysis and curiosity, one must not get carried away by the bias of «confirmation». This bias, as he explains, is a shortcut that the brain takes to save the time we spend thinking about some things, so that we tend to look for, interpret and remember the information that confirms our own. starting hypothesis. And so that we understand it in the context we are talking about, he gives an example: «If my starting hypothesis is that people at Christmas are more kind in a forced way, my brain will look for all the details that it finds that corroborate what I think, of So I do not leave room to perceive other details that are contrary to this hypothesis.
And now is where comes the “field work” and the exercise that the expert proposes to get the most out of Christmas. The first thing we must do is “hunt down the bias” because although we often do it automatically, it is possible to analyze what kind of phrases we usually say to ourselves when we confirm our hypothesis. For example, when faced with the phrase “look what a forced smile the clerk has because it is Christmas”, the psychologist advises paying attention to the details to analyze with the open mind what has led you to think that and thus generate other possible hypotheses that explain it. Thus, in the case of the clerk’s smile, there are other evaluations such as: “it may be because he wants to like me”, or “he may be tired and want to be nice” or even “he may have been forced to always attend with a smile ».
As Dafne Cataluña affirms, this process can help you because contemplating different possibilities in the face of those details that you usually interpret in a negative way, will help you to be more objective, more creative and will also help you not get carried away by the confirmation bias.
Finally, the expert ensures that the strategic use of personal strengths helps to be more effective, more creative and to set objectives in a more realistic way, in addition to helping people feel more authentic and enjoy more of what they do.