Alex was miserable and I was fed up with it. I told him to pick up his suffering and made him map it out so we knew what we were talking about.
When writing this article, I didn’t know where it would take me. I got inspired to write it after Alex had a day when he just couldn’t find his way out of a mental rut. We talked it through and focused on Outcalm, then decided to record our conversation. We did this to make sense of our conversation his spiralling thoughts.
During our conversation, I told Alex to pick up his damn suffering and map it out. I knew he caught on to that sentence from a Jordan Peterson binge he was on when we first met. I’m not kidding; he would listen to raging Jordan Peterson podcasts while showering.
While I don’t agree with many of Dr Peterson’s worldviews and ideals, I find his general approach to suffering to be productive. In a lecture, he famously demanded of his students to “Pick up your damn suffering and bear it, and try to be a good person, so you don’t make it worse”. The general idea is to be active about your suffering, something that also runs parallel with both stoic and Buddhist meditation.
Things just won’t get better if we do not do anything about them. In the conversation between Alex and myself, we found that a way to bear suffering productively is to create a map of your suffering – a canvas of misery.
The Pursuit of Outcalm: The Lifelong Quest to Outcalm Ourselves and Others
This website is devoted to defining, refining and exploring the concept of Outcalm. The future won’t be any calmer than the present, so we must actively live to Outcalm ourselves and others. But what if we find ourselves so miserable we cannot find even a sliver of calmness within ourselves? What if all we find in ourselves is self-loathing? Well, this is where you start. Suffering is inevitable – our brains are built to constantly move between pain and pleasure. It’s the only way in which motivation, drive and grit can develop. Now that we live in a world of abundance, we often tip the scale towards pain because we keep craving what is not there. For many people, suffering can feel like a heavy stone in their hearts, causing them to feel closed off, angry, or detached. Suffering can be minimized but only partially eliminated. The root cause of suffering is attachment, craving, aversion, and ignorance. So how do we pick up our suffering – how do we Outcalm? Answering this question is a lifelong quest for us. This is the reason philosophy, therapy, and in my eyes, even religion exist. We are all trying to deal with the load we are shouldering by looking to saints and sinners for guidance.
Buddha Was Right: Life is Suffering. But You Can Outcalm Your Way Through It, too.
It was nothing unique when Alex came to me in misery that day. I love him, and I do not say this to discount his suffering, but everyone suffers. As a matter of fact, the whole premise of Buddhism is built on the idea of suffering and how to deal with it. The average human life is laden with tragedy. Death, loss, health issues, loneliness, financial debt, betrayal, abuse, heartbreak, disappointment – you name it. What is unique is the relationship we establish with our suffering. Either we see suffering as something we are subject to or something we can influence. If we are victims, we remain passive. If we want to influence our circumstances – again, pick up our damn suffering – then we can take a more active role. We can Outcalm. To do so, the first step is to reframe our suffering. We need to rationalize our relationship to suffering and misery.
Create a Canvas of Misery: Apply this Outcalm Method to Organize Your Suffering
Suffering is the discomfort we experience when something we want to have happen fails to do so or when something we don’t want to have happen does regardless. Think of failing an exam or losing a loved one. We crave an outcome and desire a state of being. Once this state fails to materialize, we find ourselves miserable. Today’s digital companions offer us validation and distraction – while creating more cravings, aversions and misery. It is more important than ever to know how to Outcalm ourselves and pick up our suffering – but it’s a heavy burden when you don’t know where you are taking it. You need a map. A mind map is a way to organize your thoughts, and a map of misery is a way to organize your misery. This was precisely what I told Alex to do.
Here is how you create your own:
Take a blank piece of paper and a pen.
Set 15 minutes aside with no interruptions.
Write “Map of Misery” in the middle of the paper.
Write out all the misery you feel around the centre. Ask yourself, “What am I thinking right now?”. Write it down. Try to be specific with your negative thoughts. For example, instead of “I feel bad,” write “I feel guilty because I’ve forgotten to call my friend – again.”
Keep going till all the misery, suffering, and self-loathing you feel is translated into statements on your paper.
Identify any all-or-nothing thinking, catastrophizing, and jumping to conclusions.
Then organize your statements into: “Can influence” and “Cannot influence”. You may want to use two different coloured highlighters or markers for this. Isolate “Can influence”.
This exercise might feel silly, unnecessary or even counterproductive to begin with, but something illuminating happens when you transcribe negative thoughts and feelings of misery. Psychology professor Matthew Liberman discovered that when you transcribe a word to an emotion that generates fear (such as misery), you move brain activity to the part of the brain that governs rational thinking. In other words, when you label and organize your emotions, you can disrupt their raw intensity.
Who do we think we are to victimize ourselves to the extent we are?
It is essential to mention that the Map of Misery is not a way to rid yourself of misery but a way to understand where you stand in relation to it. Often, our thoughts, especially negative ones, are distorted and require this further investigation. We must demand ourselves to pick up our damn suffering because it’s not going anywhere. We need to become inquisitive observers of our misery. We must become aware of the full spectrum of suffering in front of us – investigate our misery in all its spectacular depth. Then we need to take a good look at our perception of the noise inside our heads.
What makes your misery unique?
Untangling the Knots: How Mapping Your Misery helped Alex
Most of Alex’s misery related to his wants and fears: all tangled like balls of yarn, knotted up and overwhelming. When he took the time to unravel the knots, one thought at a time, they became manageable. Once misery is deduced into thoughts and put on a piece of paper, that canvas of misery, its overwhelming nature and significance diminishes.
Those persistent fears and wants that remained loud he then shared with me. They were things he could influence, and as a matter of fact, we were already influencing them by speaking them out. As a life partner, my job is not to judge my partner’s misery or provide solutions. My job is to witness and offer support when appropriate.
The Map of Misery is an Outcalm tool because it offers a point of orientation to your or your partner’s mind. Sometimes the best way of Outcalming someone else is to witness them in Outcalming themselves.
If you and your partner find yourselves in a moment of misery, map it out – Outcalm yourselves. Move it from your mind onto the canvas. Pick up your damn suffering, and outcalm it – try to be a good person so you don’t make it worse.
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