Do Sweat the Small Stuff: How pretending we’re less petty than we are, keeps us petty
Hey friends, John here.
In 1996, Richard Carlson’s "Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff" became a publishing hit, eventually spending a hundred consecutive weeks on the New York Times Best Seller’s list.
It delivered pithy advice about how to reduce stress with section titles like “Ask Yourself the Question, ‘Will This Matter a Year from Now?’”, “Think of Your Problems as Potential Teachers” and “Don’t Interrupt Other Peoples Sentences.” With over twenty-six million copies sold, the book clearly struck a chord.
But what if the call to “not sweat the small stuff,” actually has the opposite effect.
What if consciously sweating the small stuff is exactly what we need to do to get over them?
Our Judgmental Minds
Our mind is often paranoid, judgmental, and defensive. Our mind’s ability to spin endless self-serving stories and create mountains of imagined bullshit is stunning, a testament to its power of creation.
And for many of us, one of its most powerful stories is that the small things shouldn’t matter, shouldn’t make us upset, and certainly shouldn’t be shared with others.
It’s your problem, so get over it.
Our cultural narratives of withholding are thick: men, keep a stiff upper lip; women, don’t be a hysterical bitch. These narratives can serve to keep us quiet and in line, and most importantly, hold us back from growing.
We tell ourselves we should be able to get over these daily micro-indignities and will ourselves to be a better, more evolved person.
But if you look closely at your life, you may discover that the small things actually do matter to our minds, for better or worse. That no matter how much we chalk them up to our conditioning or our childhood, or rationalize them away as unimportant, we make them important.
And it’s not by some magic flick of the wrist or by telling ourselves not to sweat it that these things become unimportant.
An eye roll from a lover.
An unreturned text message from a friend.
Dishes left in the sink.
The tone of a conversation.
The arrangement of pillows on a sofa.
The more we pretend that these things don’t matter to us, that they shouldn't matter, when the reality is that we make them matter, the more we live a pretend life.
And the more they stack and build.
Sweat the Small Stuff Out Loud
An alternative experimental antidote to getting over the small stuff in your life is to share your pettiness and judgmental mind out loud.
Try saying something like: "I notice I really make myself angry about ..... and I've been doing this for a long time."
When you notice and share your judgmental mind and clear the resentments as they arise, they build up less of a backlog. When not shared, what started as a tiny trigger increases, and eventually, you forget what the original trigger was and feel a giant bubble of unspecified anger.
Try telling your partner how concerned you are about the bedsheets being folded in a certain way. Or your friend that you were hurt when didn’t text you back. Tell them you didn’t want to share this with them because you didn’t think it was right or that it seems silly and then do it anyway.
Try telling them how attached you are to the world being your way. Play around with sharing the ways you want your home or apartment to be, how you want your partner and friends to behave, in order for you to feel totally comfortable and in control. Then you will know exactly the template of how you make yourself angry when the world doesn’t conform to your specific (unexpressed) demands.
Bring forward you secret mind into the daylight with a little humor. Your mind is as neurotic and controlling as mine!
Notice your body as you tell them. You’ll most likely feel an increase in sensations and then a decrease. That’s good. That’s movement and change. When your body changes, your thoughts change.
Stick with them until you are actually not sweating the small stuff.
Be as specific as possible and develop your ability to notice what was actually said or done that initiated the trigger. Catching yourself early and reporting what you notice as it occurs is the essence of moment-to-moment honesty and the essence of Radical Honesty.
The Problem With Hiding Our Sweat
Sweating is uncomfortable when we’re wearing a heavy jacket but feels good when we’re exercising. It’s the same with sharing our pettiness out loud.
In the first example, the heavy clothing is our performance, the way we pretend with others. When we’re triggered and we maintain our pretense, we sweat and it’s uncomfortable.
But when we’re exercising, sweating keeps us cool and allows us to keep expressing the movement of our body. Sharing allows us to move on and continue living, alive to each moment.
The problem with hiding our psychological sweat is that too often our unexpressed pettiness distances us from our partners and friends, turns into gossip, text ghosting, writing someone off, or silent resentments.
When not shared, we may say to ourselves that we are taking care of the other person, not burdening them, but more often than not, we’re protecting our image and performance, continuing to judge anyway, and maintaining an internal pose of superiority.
In attempting to pretend we don’t sweat the small stuff, our mind continues its goody two-shoes performance, and we remain isolated and trapped within imagined stories about other people’s imagined stories.
It’s Okay, We’re All Petty and Pretentious
There is such a strong social taboo against sharing our pettiness and pretentiousness out loud that we quickly forget that we’re all petty and pretentious. We all sweat the small stuff all the time. And sharing that we care so much (and get angry about) something that we tell ourselves should be small and insignificant is embarrassing, at least at first.
But as Brad Blanton says, “If you have never truly embarrassed yourself by what you had to say about yourself, you don’t know shit from Shinola about transformation.”
We Can’t Think Our Way Around It
We can’t think our way around our pettiness and pretension with maxims and pithy sayings. The mind is just too cunning for that.
But sharing it out loud with other people interrupts the frenetic mind, allows us to feel our experience more deeply, often one of embarrassment or shame, so that it can come and go. It’s a kind of community service that gives us all permission to drop our guard that is only really protecting a fearful and neurotic mind.
And this kind of uncomfortable sharing is how growth and learning happens, a learning about the sweaty small stuff that frequently opens us up to a deeper learning: that who we pretend to be, by withholding what is actually so for us, is not who we are.
Perhaps it’s time we got curious about our pettiness and all had a good sweat together.
John Rosania is a Senior Radical Honesty Trainer based in Los Angeles, CA and a cofounder of the Radical Honesty Institute. John offers honesty coaching for individual and couples and leads workshops throughout the United States.
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