Nature developed some fantastic mechanisms to ease our survival. They help us be focused on what is most important in that situation.

What nature didn’t do, however, is add a switch to these tools and mechanisms to turn them off, when the intention is to thrive.

What distinguishes thriving from survival is the need for safety. When thriving, there is a sense of being grounded and of being safe to pursue what one is pursuing. When there is a presence of anxiety, nature assumes that survival is at stake and focuses the person’s attention on reacting to the signal this anxiety sends.

Denial is one of the mechanisms that enable focus. It reduces the amount of available information by making it invisible to the mind.

When thriving, this mechanism isn’t available by itself. That is, almost all existing information can reach us without being filtered by denial. It easily creates overwhelm when trying to process all the information.

That’s where creative use of denial helps. The task is to develop a negative skill, that is to learn to select the type of information one pays attention to. It’s about being clear as to what one wants to ignore as much as what one actively seeks out.

Learning this negative skill is difficult.

It means going against the sense of failure when letting go of something one started to pay attention to or read. It means to be able to feel dumb when others are focused on the newest hype and wonder why you don’t know anything about it.

A soothing thought may be, that there is so much information around, that one can’t know it all.