The Power of Perspective: A Kabocha Squash Story

My mom gave me two kabocha squashes. I’ve never cooked with them before so I hesitated to accept them.

I ended up making a Vietnamese soup that she used to make when I was little 🍲 (I followed this recipe if you’re curious).

Turns out, kabocha squash is not too hard to cook with!

In my mind, I made up all sorts of things about how hard it is to cook like first, it’s probably really hard to cut. Do I even have the strength to cut it? Then, once it’s cut, it probably takes hours of cooking for it to get soft.

Once I started cooking it, it was easier than I thought to cut. I just needed a butcher knife. Then, it was super quick to cook! ~10 minutes or less on a low simmer.

If my mom never gave me the squashes, I may never have bought it myself whenever I passed by it at the grocery store.

How many things in life do we do this to ourselves? We make things so much more troublesome in our minds than in reality.

For example, my patients often say after an in-clinic procedure that it was better than they thought it would be. They admit to making up an entire story in their minds about how terrible the procedure would be. They would be pleasantly surprised when it’s over.

Or, our partner asks us what time we’re going to sleep and we interpret it as them judging us for sleeping late. When in reality, our partner just wants to know if they should stay up and wait to go to bed together or fall asleep earlier.

So how do we overcome this thinking?

First, we must recognize that our worries are not reality. We are essentially making meaning out of reality. We’re making assumptions.

For example, if a stranger looks at us with an angry face, we make it mean that the stranger must not like us or we did something wrong. The truth is, we have no idea what’s going on with people unless we directly ask the person.

We then self-soothe. The ways we do this can be different for everyone. Deep breathing, meditation, movement, etc.

We then choose a different thought pattern. For the example above, we can tell ourselves that we have no idea what’s going on with that person and move on with our day.

Sometimes, I make meanings that aren’t contributing to my feelings of not enoughness.

Instead of the stranger not liking me, I make assumptions like, “Maybe he had a stroke so that’s why his face looks like that”, “Maybe his cat just died”, “Maybe he has severe chronic pain.” Basically, it doesn’t have to be about me and truthfully, 99.99% of the time, it’s likely not.

What about you? What is something that happened recently that turned out better than the stories your mind made up? Please feel free to share in the comments!