Dr. Maya Shankar

It turns out when Ingrid was a little kid, her mom had cautioned her about sharing her family stories because she was worried that Ingrid might receive discrimination or prejudice or maybe the threat of violence, right, from people who didn't understand.

And

Ingrid had overinterpreted that message to be a sign that maybe there was something wrong with her family.

And so each of us can look at our beliefs and ask ourselves, like a scientist, how did I actually arrive at this belief?

Would the people I trust endorse this belief?

What evidence and theory would convince me to change my mind?

Is there data out there that would actually contradict my current belief and make me want to update it, right?

So we need to be curious and to treat the beliefs we carry and our values as almost hypotheses that we should be continually testing.

One thing I found to be really helpful to do, whether you're in the throes of change or outside of a change, is what's called a self-affirmation exercise.

I had an experience with this actually after the second miscarriage where we had just found out we had lost the twins and my husband came into our bedroom and I was just beside myself with grief.

And he's a software engineer, so he didn't know he was engaging me in a self-affirmation exercise.

But he looked at me and he said,

Mai, which is his pet name for me, he was like, why don't we just say a couple of things that we're grateful for?

And I remember being like, no.

Mary, you bring toxic positivity into this bedroom.

You take your Instagram self-help stuff into that corner over there.

I'm staying here under the covers feeling sorry for myself, okay?

So I was not having it, Hala.

And after such a jarring day where we had seen heartbeats on the ultrasound and then we'd gotten this horrible news hours later, I was in no mood to reflect on what I was grateful for, okay?

But he wore me down.