Every once in a while, life feels like it’s perfect. Everything you do, everything you say, everything in and out of your control seems to fall into place. There’s also the inverse: this dreadful feeling that everything is crashing around you and no matter how hard you try, you can’t catch a break, or at least you perceive that you can’t catch one. I call this “mental momentum.”
The term is pretty straightforward: you perceive your current moment in life as either moving toward something positive or feel like you’re slipping, losing control of everything around you. When the momentum is positive, it seems like you can do no wrong; you can take risks, push your luck, you feel like nothing can go wrong. When the momentum is negative, you feel like you’re stuck in the mud, with a constant dread that no amount of hard work or luck can pull you out.
What sets the direction of the mental momentum can be entirely random. A conversation, workout, assignment, or test can set the tone for a day, week, month or even year. This mental momentum is exacerbated by a society prioritizing instant gratification and wallowing. Companies, products and media are constantly trying to get us either hooked on dopamine or in mental anguish. It’s a constant ricochet between extremes and it’s mentally taxing.
When everything is good, you try to chain momentum together until you crash and burn. When momentum is negative, you continue to bury yourself in guilt, shame and self-destructive behavior. What we need and what I am trying to practice is something in the middle: acceptance.
When things are bad, I trust karma will swing back toward the middle, so I recognize what happens in the moment and then do what I can to get back on track. Mental momentum can always be redirected. If my momentum is bringing me somewhere negative, rather than let it wash over, I try to redirect it in whatever way I can. Your thoughts are like a river; if you change the direction of the riverbed, the water will follow. It means treating myself when I am down on my luck, reaching out when things are out of my control, or just verbalizing my feelings out loud.
The same applies to positive momentum. If something positive happens, rather than just blindly celebrating, I try to lay the groundwork for the performance to repeat, no matter how good or bad my momentum is the next time I do it. If I do well on a workout, then I need to sleep and eat well. If an assignment goes well, I can’t cheat my studying and stop trying.
More importantly, I try to avoid overindulging. I am always writing or talking about how I am doing to myself, and I can feel exactly where my momentum is going. Instant gratification makes you addicted to overstimulating yourself, and so you become addicted to preserving your momentum, good or bad. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is just sit down without distractions and think aloud.
Momentum is tricky to control, especially because it’s always moving. But if you let your mental momentum outpace you, you’ll just get dragged along for the ride. But momentum is something you can control. You can captain the ship and decide where you’re headed. More importantly, you can control when you need to stop, because that’s the best thing you can do sometimes. Not every thought needs to be followed to completion.
