Three Concepts From Psychology That Will Change Your Dating Mindset
Maybe these will be helpful to someone? I've trained myself to be optimistic.
I am not a psychology major, but I am the kind of person who jumped at the opportunity to do a lot of research for a client on limiting beliefs and mindset while volunteering at a yoga retreat in Australia a few years back. I’ve read or familiarized myself with all the classic self-help books, from Think and Grow Rich to Learned Optimism. And while a lot of self-help talk is just talk, a lot of these concepts come from legitimate studies surrounding how we think, process information, and shape the world around us.
Mindset helped me find my person, and shifting my mindset has been crucial as I embark in the next big journey of finding an agent/publisher for my book. If you find that your mindset surrounding dating, or embarking on any challenge, is not a positive one, might I introduce you to some concepts in psychology that can help you shift things, with the help of social sciences.
Misattribution of Arousal
Is it chemistry, or are you just anxious?
This is a more valid question than I think people realize. Our bodies display a variety of strong emotions in the same way. I shake when I’m confronting someone, but it’s not out of fear. I smile when I hear bad news, but it’s not out of joy. My heart pounds when I’ve had too much coffee. I’m sure you have similar reactions that feel like they don’t match with the “right” emotion.
For decades, physical reactions and emotions have been a “chicken or the egg” debacle. Do we feel excited because we notice ourselves shaking, or do we start shaking because we’re excited? Do we think we like someone because our heart is pounding, or was our heart pounding for other reasons? The answer isn’t clear, and in many cases, we’ve found that we “get things wrong.” Hence, misattribution of arousal.
In 1974, Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron conducted an experiment with 85 men. (Straight? Gay? Who knows.) They asked the men to cross a high-suspension bridge and then answer a series of questions. When the interview was conducted by a man, not much happened. When the interview was conducted by a woman, these guys were more likely to mistake their body’s reaction to the bridge for horniness and were more likely to ask the woman out after the experiment was over.
Does this mean you should go to a haunted house for a first date? Maybe. Does this mean that sometimes we mistake nervousness, anxiety, or other emotions for those butterflies we’re supposed to feel when we meet someone? Absolutely.
What this has taught me is that our assumptions about everything, including our own physical reactions, could be changed if you have a certain mindset.
Reticular Activating System
Look at all of the things within your line of sight right now. Consider all of the noises happening around you. Smells, tastes, the feeling of every part of your body against everything it’s making contact with. We can’t take everything in all at once always. It’s just impossible. So what do we do?
Well, we have already been relying on our reticular activating system to make those choices for us. Essentially, this is the filter in which our brains latch onto things. It’s why we all of a sudden hear about a movie and then see it everywhere. It’s why we hear our names in a crowded room. (This is also called the “cocktail party effect.”) And it’s why manifestation works. Kind of.
In F the Fairy Tale, Damona Hoffman mentions this concept when taking about vision boards:
“I believe vision boards work for more than esoteric reasons. They stimulate your reticular activating system, the filters in your brain that help you know what’s important to pay attention to and what can be ignored. This enables you to notice the people and choices that are in alignment with your relationship goals, and having ongoing contact with those visuals makes you more likely to recognize the traits you desire when you see them out in the world.”
Manifestation, intention-setting, vision boards…they all train your brain to see opportunities that may have been passing you by in the past. For years, I pitched to magazines and volunteered at festivals, and I find that my eyes still go straight to the “Submit” and “Volunteer” links on websites, even when I’m not looking for those opportunities. If you’re looking for a relationship, that means you can train your brain to see opportunities like singles’ nights, speed dating events, or talking to friends who have a friend who have a friend who might be perfect for you.
You can train your brain to see the path to where you want to go.
Learned Optimism
Martin Seligman is the founder of Positive Psychology and the author of Learned Optimism. I’m a very optimistic person so it shouldn’t be a surprise that this was a life-changing book for me. Right from the get-go, this opened my mind to how we train ourselves to see a path forward (or not).
The pivotal experiment in this book involves dogs and electric shocks. Essentially, some dogs were given shocks at random and they could not control when they received the shocks. Other dogs were given shocks but could cross a threshold to make the shocks stop. In other words, these dogs had more control. As the experiment went on, the dogs who weren’t in control just stopped trying to make their situation better, even when there was a clear way to make the shocks stop. The dogs only had to take a few steps to end the treatment, but they were hopeless.
We can learn hopelessness and we can learn optimism. That’s what this book is all about.
Obviously, there are many things out of our control. But sometimes, we let that mindset prevent us from even trying to take control and move forward. Achieving your goals? Re-downloading that dating app? Eh, it’s worth a try. Believing that it’s worth a try? Eh, that’s worth a try, too.
Mindset shifts feel cheesy. You have to let go of doubts and feelings and a little bit of pride when you decide to lean into optimism. But if there’s anything I have learned about optimism and pessimism, is that it leads you exactly where you’ve trained yourself to believe you’re going.