For a long time, I was very good at scanning for threats. Too good. Someone in my life had a habit of casually scattering landmines behind them, and failing to tell me about them. 

It meant I spent years scanning for things that might come out of nowhere and knock me for a loop. A few times, it meant I clocked a threat before it blew up in my face. More often, I felt like a paranoid freak right up until the thing I was paranoid about actually happened. And the fact that I called it didn’t make it suck any less.

So mostly what this meant is that I trained my attention to filter for potential bad stuff. What you seek, you find. If you’re looking for problems, you’ll find them like a magnet finds iron filings no matter how small. Blessings don’t usually smack you in the face and force you to notice them. 

You may have guessed that this didn’t do amazing things for my overall mental health. 

There’s a recent X-Men comic where Destiny, a character who can literally see all possible futures gets called on the carpet for not warning others of danger. And a villain, of all people, points out to her that she’s so concerned with her lover Mystique’s safety, she unconsciously gravitates to visions where Mystique dies. She created a blind spot for herself that prevented her from noticing a thousand possible happy endings. And that hyperfocus didn’t help her avoid a lot of obvious bad stuff. 

I don’t want to be Destiny. But that means I have to break my current habit of attention, and create a new one. What you seek, you find, and I’d rather seek joy than terror and grief. 

HSPs and folks with ADHD are great at absorbing information and pattern recognition, but it’s often indiscriminate and unconscious. We can easily get stuck sorting for only unhelpful information and recognizing only the scary patterns. 

It takes effort to intentionally process the abundance of data we absorb in a helpful way that reinforces mental wellbeing instead of undermining it.

But it also takes a certain level of self-awareness to realize you have a problem that is skewing your perspective negatively, instead of just accepting that skew as “objective reality.” 

That level of self-awareness is tough if you’re stuck in survival mode. Which is where the skew generally keeps you. It’s a self-sustaining cycle. Your negative bias keeps you stressed and scared, and being stressed and scared keeps you from noticing the bias – or anything outside it. 

I don’t have a solution, other than treating others with respect, compassion, empathy, and taking care of my side of the street. (People from my faith tradition might note that this sounds suspiciously like something our Founder said. More than once. One might even say, something fundamental. But I digress…)

As far as the “taking care of my side of the street” thing goes, some things that help: 

• Gratitude journaling 
• Cognitive behavioral therapy, specifically identifying thinking errors
• Constructive Living (specifically, naikan reflection)
• The spiritual practice* of the Ignatian examen

* I’m sure other faiths have similar practices, but I can only comfortably speak to the one I know. That’s the nearest tool I personally have to hand – YMMV.