Say you’re a senior member of your team at work. You’re 12 minutes late to the weekly staff Zoom. Once you’ve “joined audio,” the first thing you hear is your old friend’s voice. “There you are! So glad you could fit us in.” You laugh and explain the disastrous traffic, difficult drop-off at your kids’ school, or whatever it was that messed up your morning. The moment passes and the conversation moves on. You turn to the job at hand, focused and ready to go.
But what if you’re a junior staffer, still feeling your way. Same thing happens: You’re 12 minutes late to the weekly staff Zoom. Once you’ve “joined audio,” the first thing you hear is the boss’s voice. “There you are! So glad you could fit us in.” A few colleagues chuckle. You consider making excuses—about traffic, drop-off, whatever it was—but the moment passes, and the conversation moves on.
Your mind doesn’t, though. It’s still ruminating. Was that snark in my boss’s voice? Were they talking about me before I logged on? Do I fit in here? Am I any good at this job? You might not be fully aware of these questions. Your mind works quickly on multiple tracks at the same time. And those questions are nasty; they threaten your sense of belonging, your worth, and your value, at least at work. So you try to push them away, to suppress them. But they’re still there. And once they’ve been triggered, it might feel like the evidence keeps pouring in.
Someone makes an inside joke in the chat. You don’t get it. I don’t belong here. Someone rolls their eyes while you’re talking. They don’t respect me. The boss ignores you for the rest of the meeting. No one sees me. Again, these thoughts may not be fully conscious. But there’s no mistaking the fact that your motivation to get back to work has waned by the time you log off. What was it you were supposed to look into?
Was that snark in my boss’s voice? Were they talking about me before I logged on? Do I fit in here? Am I any good at this job?
Next thing you know, you’re idly messing around online when a text comes in from the person who rolled their eyes. “You okay? You seemed out of it at the meeting.” You ignore it. But your mind doesn’t. It’s busy composing possible replies. The full spectrum from passive-aggressive to career imperiling. Eventually you pick up your phone. What will you text back?
This is how self-defeating spirals start and how they gather speed. Let’s break down the moving parts:
- A circumstance places a big question on the table—about identity, belonging, or adequacy: You’re new at work. You want to succeed and belong, but you wonder . . . That question looms, latent and inactive, but present.
- A “bad” thing happens: Your boss is a little snarky.
- That question gets triggered: You read the room for answers, drawing negative inferences from ambiguous evidence. You’re distracted from the task at hand. Your pessimistic hypothesis becomes more entrenched.
- You act on that pessimistic hypothesis, making matters worse.
Maybe you send that colleague a snarky text back. And what do you know: When you see them a few days later, they’re cold to you.
Now you aren’t talking. Maybe you flub that assignment your boss gave you, and they lose confidence in you. Fast-forward a year and you’re at a new job. Tensions are emerging with the new coworkers. Or are they? How will this story end? Do you have any control over it?
When a core question is unsettled, it functions like a lens through which you see the world.
Yes, you do. We all do. Negative spirals or feedback loops like these aren’t inevitable. In fact, there are small things we can do both for ourselves and for others to nip them in the bud—and prevent catastrophic outcomes months and years into the future. Better yet, there are ways we can launch positive spirals—dramatically increasing our chances of future happiness, success, and flourishing. The very same processes can either propel us upward or pull us down.
To understand how all this is possible, let’s get more precise about sequences like 1–4 above. There are three key concepts at play: “core questions” (number 1), meaning making or “construal” (numbers 2 and 3), and “calcification” (number 4). Think of these as “the three Cs” of spirals—whether positive or negative.
Core questions. There are the fundamental questions all of us face, at one time or another. For example: Who am I? Do I belong? Am I enough? I think of these questions as “defining” because they help define you and your life: your sense of self, what relationships you’ll have, and whether you’ll be able to do and be the things you aspire to. There might be long stretches when you don’t think about a given question much because it’s settled for you then. But at critical junctures specific questions flare up, unsettle and preoccupy you. Then they begin to shape what you see and how you act.
Construal. It’s natural to think that we have an unfiltered view of the world. That light hits your eyes and you just see what’s out there. But it’s more that we read the world, interpret it, drawing inferences based on what’s already in our heads. We pick up on themes that seem relevant or important to us, not noticing or screening out other details.
A friend once told me of an ingenious class demonstration that helped her begin to understand this process. A professor split the class in two and then spoke to the first half alone, telling them of his love for travel and a recent trip to Libya. Next, he spoke to the second half about shopping and how hard it was to find the right size shoe. Last, he brought the class together and said a single word. He asked the students to write it down. Students in the first group wrote, “Tripoli.” Those in the second wrote, “Triple E.”
Construal is like a kind of focus. As you look out at the social scene, what snaps to attention? If you’re anything like me, one of the most powerful guides is whatever could pose a risk to you, could threaten you. If you’re walking through a forest where a tiger is said to prowl, you might hear that tiger in every rustle of leaves, see it in every sway of reeds. But in the social world, we don’t all face the same threats. That’s why when you’re new at work and nervous about your place you might hear snark in your boss’s voice, but not if it’s your old friend.
When a core question is unsettled for a person, it functions like a lens through which you see the world. We seek answers that can help us resolve that question. Is it true? we ask. Are my doubts and fears well founded? Then, if a “bad” thing happens, it can seem like proof of your negative hypothesis. We aren’t neutral observers on the lookout for evidence one way or the other. We’re in the grip of confirmation bias, attuned to evidence that corroborates our preconceived theory, even if it’s the tiniest thing.
Calcification. Calcification happens when our negative thoughts and feelings get entrenched—often as a consequence of our own actions. You have a bad date and think, Am I unlovable? Will I be alone forever? Pretty soon your next date isn’t going well either. Rinse and repeat long enough, and you’re stuck in a romantic rut.
When you start to look, you can see spirals everywhere. You fail an important math test. You think you can’t succeed, and stop going to class. You feel sick from a treatment designed to help you overcome an illness. You think it means your illness is especially strong and resistant and so avoid treatment. You have a fight with your kids. You think you’re a “bad parent,” and then yell at them even more the next time. This is self-sabotage, and one step at a time it costs us our achievements, our health, our relationships, and our well-being.
Spiraling up
Yet if our struggles arise, in part, from the inferences we draw, we have an opportunity. In my work, my colleagues and I identify early moments where people could go one way or the other. By understanding the questions that come up at critical junctures, we can offer people better ways to think through challenges—ways that can help them spiral up, instead of down.
That’s what we call “wise” interventions: graceful ways to offer people good answers to the questions that define our lives. It sure can seem like magic that 21 minutes could improve marriage a year later; that a one-page letter could keep kids out of jail; that a string of postcards could cut suicide rates by half over two years; or that an hour-long reflection on belonging in the first year of college could improve life satisfaction and career success a decade later. But this—this is ordinary magic.
Negative spirals or feedback loops aren’t inevitable. There are things we can do both for ourselves and for others to nip them in the bud.
In my first year of college, I was biking back through campus one lovely fall day when I saw a large group of fellow students gathered enthusiastically around a truck from the California burger chain In-N-Out. Maybe they craved a taste of home. But in Michigan, where I was from, there are no In-N-Outs. I’d never heard of it. Feeling excluded from the burger party, I biked off in a huff to eat my lunch in the dining hall alone. I remember thinking, I’m not standing in line for a burger!
What was my problem?
As an 18-year-old, I certainly didn’t want to think of myself as feeling that I did not belong in college. And I definitely didn’t want to think that an In-N-Out truck could trigger that feeling. How ridiculous that would be. Who thinks they don’t belong because of a burger truck?
It was ridiculous. After my brother experienced a particularly mysterious romantic disaster, it’s something we christened a “tifbit”—tiny fact, big theory. Of course not knowing about In-N-Out didn’t mean I didn’t belong in college. But that’s the point. For looking back now, I know the truth is I was homesick. I felt so far from home and all the people I knew and loved. So I wondered, Will I make friends in California? Will I fit in? Seeing all those classmates crowded together, eager to get lunch from a place I’d never even heard of, just triggered those anxieties.
With wisdom and kindness and a little distance, we can laugh at ourselves in situations like these. But we should pay attention. For beneath every tifbit is a real question, and it’s almost always a reasonable one. Big responses to small experiences can help us see what lies beneath the surface. For a tifbit is never just a tiny fact. It’s a clue to the bigger questions that define our lives.
With a little prompt, I could have known that almost everyone feels homesick at first in college, that we’re all in some sense far from home, even the kids from California, that everyone was trying to find new communities. Maybe then I would have joined the line at the In-N-Out truck. I could have asked someone to tell me what In-N-Out was. Why do they love it? What is “animal style”?
I’m sure they would have been glad to share. I know I would have had a better lunch. And maybe I would have made a friend, too.
Excerpted from Ordinary Magic copyright © 2025 by Gregory M. Walton. Used by permission of Harmony Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.