A Theory of Plus and Minus
Add a little something to your life
You have no doubt heard of “plus-days and minus-days”? We also talk about things that lead to gaining energy or spending energy. For instance, to determine if we are introverted or extraverted people.
I have been thinking a bit about a variety of these concepts. Boiled them down to individual tasks, events, activities.
Make your day
Let me start with a disclaimer. I have not invented anything new or amazing in psychology or stress management. These represent my thoughts that I would like to share with you. I hope that they will ring a bell or inspire you to your own thoughts.
The idea is that all the things we do either add something to our well-being and energy level — or subtract from them.
So, you can do plus-things and minus-things.
The sum of what you do during a day, a week, or a longer period will define your energy level. How well you feel and how much energy you have to offer others or put into new work.
What does it sum up to?
If you think along this line, you can try reflecting after a tough day — or a good day. What exactly during the day was plus and what was minus?
Try to consider the exact situation.
Notice that you may have had a minus experience from something today. But that very same experience could on other days have been a plus experience. The next step is then to dive a bit deeper and try to understand what was different.
Make sure to also consider all the plus experiences you had during the day. Would each of these experiences on other days instead have been minus experiences? Again, consider why, what was different?
An experience can be something that happens to you. With or without your active participation. Or it can be something you do. Whatever causes you to think or feel, or both.
It affects your happiness at the moment. Makes you feel safe, loved, appreciated, trusted, etc. — or, indeed, the opposite. So, we speak about feelings, emotions, and worries.
You can try listing these next to each other on a piece of paper — two columns, one for plus and one for minus. Then, at the end, sum up each of the columns.
You will then understand why you ended up feeling like you do, on this particular day.
Consider the elements
Purpose: To understand how to bring plus and minus into a reasonable balance in your life.
If you often end up with a negative number at the end of the day, you are on your way to burn out. To help prevent this, you must start saying no to some of the minus-things and/or adding some more plus-things.
You will definitely also need to reconsider what a proper way of life looks like!
For instance, procrastination can be seen as something else than what people often do. Most people describe it as something negative, but it may actually be the opposite! A sign that you have a low level of well-being that you must rebuild. And you know and understand that, deep within! You act upon it. Gain energy. And only then, you can move on with a task that you expect to cost you energy.
Also, a common idea is that of hard work being the way to success, and success being the key to happiness. This may lead to ignoring that some of the elements of the hard work are in fact draining you of energy. Allow yourself to do other things along the way that can replace that lost energy. Otherwise, you may get under the floor at some point.
Take the next step
It may be difficult to know the exact number of added plusses or removed minuses that you need each day or each week. But if you pay attention to what is plus and what is minus, you can arrange for each day to get more plus than minus in total. And then you are most likely on the right path.
Most people do feel the higher energy level when they have it. You too.
You can then share your energy with people around you. People who need a hand (or a shoulder). And start doing some of the bigger and more demanding tasks that are somehow waiting for “the right time”.
If this description sounds reasonable, you are ready to take the next step in the evolution of this idea.
Seeing each individual tree in the forest
What if “energy level” is not one thing, but in fact many things? That you can have several kinds of energy so that each of them can be “plussed” or “minused” by each thing you do.
I mentioned feeling safe, feeling trusted, feeling appreciated, and feeling loved. Together, all of these individual “trees” will be your forest of well-being.
You can make a list of the most important feelings for a person to feel well in general. You can also assess each of the daily experiences with each of these feelings. Was the experience a plus or a minus for each of the important feelings?
The consequence is the most important
There are several possible wins to hope and strive for:
Say no to a task your boss wants you to do
Because you know that saying yes will lead to several minuses and no plusses during a number of days. Saying no will lead to fewer minuses.
Watch that movie in the evening instead of doing the dishes
Because you are low on energy and need to gain some plusses.
Go out with your friends even though you have work to do
Because you need to gain some plusses on the “feeling appreciated”-account.
Give up on something altogether
Because it has too many minuses connected to it. You don’t know how to outweigh them with other things that give plusses.
Decide to quit your job and become unemployed
Because that will calculate up to a less drain of energy. Despite the many negative sides of unemployment.
Whatever you win — you win!
Behind the theory
The background for these thoughts is the many stories about people who
“Quit their job and never have been happier”
“Started going for a walk each afternoon and now feel full of energy”
Etc.
The success/survival dilemma
I trust that all people have an intuition in place for what is good for them and what is not. But we also have that idea given to us that we must sacrifice life in some areas to gain possibilities in others. Given with good intentions, no doubt, but very damaging.
This often leads to striving and struggling a whole life for reaching an impossible goal. And it may not even make us happy, even if we reach it.
My take is that sooner or later life is over. What good does it do for us to give up health and happiness during most of it? If only to conclude that “we tried, but we didn’t manage” to lift ourselves to a presumed higher level?
And most of the way, the minuses we accepted were not even capable of leading to any improvements in the long run. They were nothing but a result of us being enslaved by the prevailing way of life. Even to the extent that we stopped questioning why we were doing such things that drew the energy out of us.
Improving life
It is about time to decide on a way of life that adds energy and happiness. And this we can use to spread the same to everybody around us.
Does this sound like something you have heard before?
Hippies thought something like that, I guess. People engaged with mindfulness or yoga. And various other groups of people who try to find the delicate balance in life. Or even breaking out of the treadmill of working life or completely out of society.
I want, instead, to improve the general society, to allow for such a way of thinking. To make it generally acceptable for all of us to strive for making every day a plus-day.
And I want it to start inside each individual.
I literally have to do this every day. I call it energy budgeting, but it's quite a useful strategy to cope with, in my case, chronic pain. But we could all benefit from it!