The Opposite of Paranoia Has a Name (And I Think You Need It)

I love words. “Shenanigans” is a good one. "Cacophony” is one I use a lot lately. Admittedly, I went to a liberal arts college, and my niche in medicine is very humanities-based, so that’s probably not a surprise. Still, it takes a really remarkable new word for me to notice.

The word I learned? Pronoia. Pronoia is a state of mind in which you believe others are conspiring to help you. It is the opposite of “paranoia.” How amazing is that?! Can you even believe how good it would feel to believe people are actively working to help you out? Face it, there are a lot of days it’d be huge for my mental state just to believe people were acting neutrally, let alone not trying to make my life difficult. 

Humans are deeply egocentric at baseline, and I’m not saying that as a negatively judgy thing. It’s just a fact. We can only truly know our own experience in the world. Even if somebody tells us what they’re experiencing, we have to take their word for it. Maybe they’re telling us the truth, or maybe they’re telling us as well as they can because they can’t put what they’re going through into words. Or maybe they’re trying to protect us. Or maybe they’re just lying. To save face or to put us at a disadvantage, who knows? As someone with several very close friends who considers herself on the upper end of the empath spectrum, I think I know what people are thinking and feeling all the time. And these people, who I love and respect and spend a ton of time with, surprise me constantly with how wrong I’ve gotten it. You’d think I would stop trying. Alas…

Of course we're thinking about ourselves all the time, because “myself” is the only thing I can be completely sure of. Whenever I make a misstep like saying something with absolute confidence that is blatantly incorrect (or making a literal misstep like tripping on a flat floor), I remind myself that nobody is thinking of me half as much as we're thinking about themselves, or a quarter as much, or an eighth as much. Most of the time when I see somebody misspeak or trip, I don’t think badly about them; I turn it right back to my egocentric self and think, “I’m really glad that wasn’t me.” I have had legitimate training on how to listen and communicate well, and I still spend entire conversations thinking about what I’m going to say next instead of listening to the other person speak. We like to be sure of ourselves; it’s a security blanket, especially in medicine. 

Living in this egocentric world, coupled with our evolutionarily preserved negativity bias, means we are always going to think that everybody's out to get us. One of my favorite sayings is, "It's not paranoia if they're actually out to get you." Is that dark? Yes. Has it gotten me this far? Yes. Do I really believe it every single time I say it? Probably not, but it’s a little like preparing for the worst while hoping for the best. Expect that the universe is plotting against me, and if it doesn’t work out that way, I can be pleasantly surprised. 

If I really took a second to look at things rationally, though, I would have just as much evidence that people are pulling for me as I would that they’re plotting my downfall. As I write this, I can immediately think of dozens of people who put serious effort into my success. And the number of people who actively hindered my success? I honestly can’t think of a single solitary one. The worst of them just didn’t help as much as the helpers did. 

This is not a call to practice toxic positivity. Toxic positivity doesn't work because it means focusing on glittery platitudes our brains don’t really believe (and then we get to beat ourselves up when the platitudes don’t work because we weren’t “positive enough”). But what if we tried giving equal airtime to “everybody’s out to get me” and “everybody’s working to help me”? They’re both just thoughts, strings of words our minds have put together without any real, hard data backing them up. If thoughts aren’t facts (and they usually aren’t), and one makes me feel lousy and victimized, and the other makes me feel supported or even loved? Why wouldn’t I choose the latter? And when I focus on a thought I need evidence for, my brain finds it like a well-trained Labrador. Try it: if everybody in your orbit were conspiring to help you, what would you find? Who would you be?