AMA #3: How to Escape Intrusive Negative Thoughts

You cannot stop intrusive thoughts from arriving. What you can change is what happens next. In this AMA I take questions on how to stop getting hooked by negative thoughts, and how the Stoic view of judgment gives you a way out that does not rely on forcing the thought away.

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Hello and welcome to the Ask Me Anything issue three. I have some fantastic questions to share with you here, and I always love answering these. Gets me thinking and allows me to just riff and improvise and see what comes up to the surface, which I think is a really good exercise to think out loud, to grapple with a question in public is a beautiful thing, and I think that we could all benefit from doing that more. And just some housekeeping to get out of the way. In a couple of months, I'm going to be running a six-week live cohort of the six stoic tactics to escape negative thoughts. I've sent out a survey that I'll also include a link to in the show notes to this premium episode. If you could give me some of your thoughts, thank you if you've already filled out the survey. And if you haven't, please do. It will give me some ideas for ways to improve the bonuses and the general course curriculum. In today's AMA, we are going to be talking about negative thoughts, mastering our emotions, travel, and ambition. So let's get into it. So the first question is how do you deal with recurring negative thoughts about the past that seem to just appear from nowhere? So there's a couple of things that come to mind here. The first thing is the Nietzsche quote, when we are tired, we are attacked by ideas that we conquered long ago. So the first thing is if we are experiencing these random, quote unquote, random and negative thoughts from the past, what is our basic psychological health like right now? Are we well slept? How is our diet? Do we have support from friends? What is the trigger in the environment that is bringing these thoughts up? And so you could see the thoughts more as a symptom than as the cause of the problem. Even though we can actually address the thoughts if there is no cause, another way is just asking that question. You know, so if we are underslept, if something is off with our biology, if there's some stress that we're experiencing that we're not dealing with, maybe that is the thing that is surfacing these ideas that we conquered long ago. Our resilience level is low in general. On top of that, I really like the idea that if we still feel a strong emotion about a memory that is more than 18 months old, that is a sign that the memory is unprocessed. So you could see from a biological perspective, the main purpose of memory is to protect us in the present and in the future. And when we get traumatized by something, it's almost as if the experience is not integrated into who we are, and we don't believe that we'll be able to handle it with more equanimity and strength in the future, and so we just get triggered by this pain, this fear that we experienced in the past. Let's take the idea of someone who was bullied. So let's say you were bullied when you were 14 years old, you learned to be cynical and mistrustful of other people, you learn to have a high guard, you got the global belief that other people were just generally not nice and they were capable of cruelty. And so you started walking around with this posture of a victim, this posture of someone who could be attacked at any time. Maybe you overcompensated by taking up martial arts, looking tougher, put an exterior shell that is there to signal, do not pick on me. But inside you still feel like you could be picked on. You haven't integrated the idea that you can handle bullies socially. You can set boundaries. And so you go through life, and every time someone comes along and they act a little bit like the bully that you met in school, you throw up this intense panic response almost as if you are 14 again, and all of the physiological reactions are the same as when you were 14. That is the trauma alerting you. It's saying, we're still here. We're still here. Be afraid. There is danger right now, there is danger. When we've integrated the memory and we've processed the trauma, ideally we've learned new skills, new social skills as well, that prove to our unconscious mind, the deepest parts of ourselves, that if we were to encounter a bully again in the future, we would be able to deal with it. We could use assertiveness, we could use a calm voice, whatever the case is, we could deal with that in a way that was very different from when we were 14. And part of trauma healing is getting that insight, getting that cognitive understanding that we have sufficiently changed to minimize the likelihood of the trauma repeating itself. So, coming back to the question about negative recurring thoughts from the past, do you need to prove to yourself that you have adapted? And is there a part of yourself that's getting triggered that was traumatized long ago? And if that's the case, you might want to look into trauma healing. A book like The Body Keeps the Score is a fantastic read on trauma healing that covers a wide spectrum of interventions. You have different approaches, you have kind of the calming side, which which would include things like yoga, maybe certain types of calming, martial arts, meditation, and then you have the processing element of trauma, which could be expressive writing and different types of therapy like EMDR therapy or interpersonal family systems therapy or even MDMA assisted psychotherapy. There are lots of different interventions. I am a big fan of expressive writing because it's free, it's safe, it's legal, you can do it anytime, and it's very effective. So I say all this to contextualize the origins of the thoughts, but now let's talk about how do we deal with the thoughts. So the first thing is you don't want to try and stop the current. You don't want to try and push them away. That creates this internal strife, and it's very difficult to deal with because then your mind turns into a sort of a war zone. So there are a couple of different ways to combat negative thoughts, but the first one is embracing them is a great starting point. In cognitive behavioral therapy, you call this the acceptance paradox. It's this idea that when you accept something, paradoxically, it tends to disappear on its own. It's almost like when you welcome a difficult emotion. The emotion just goes naturally, but when you fight against it or engage with it, it grows stronger. Think about the last time that you were angry, right? Like, think about the last time that someone annoyed you. Now, when this happens to me, typically I get annoyed, and then I get annoyed that the other person made me annoyed. And so I'm trying to not be annoyed, and the fact that I can't stop myself from being annoyed makes me more annoyed. And emotions have this interesting double layer to them. The Buddha called it two arrows, right? You have the thing itself, which is the first arrow, and then you have the storyline about the thing, which is the second arrow. The question he asked his students is do you want to feel the pain of one arrow or two? When we feel sad, we can feel sad that we feel sad. When we feel insecure, we can feel insecure that we feel insecure. So a good starting point for negative thoughts is just to kind of go, okay, I guess I'm feeling a bit down. I guess I'm feeling some negative thoughts. Don't need to change them. They're okay where they are, they can come, they can go, everything is in flux, everything is changing. I am the space in which things arise and pass away. Arise and pass away. The space in which sounds come, feelings come, temperature comes, thought comes, and thought goes. We know that we feel different hour to hour, day to day, week to week, month to month. There was something in your past, let's say a week ago, that was a real concern for you in the moment that stressed you out. And now, where is it? It's not here anymore. And do you even care about it anymore? Probably not. In the moment, when you're going through a difficult experience or you're having these negative thoughts, it can be hard to internalize that, of course, because you're like, well, I get it, but I'm here now. And it's tough. And that's absolutely valid. But as much as possible, we want to just try and accept all feelings, all emotions, just welcome them in, allow them to come, allow them to go. This is the acceptance paradox. When you feel after you start to embrace the feeling and you just welcome it, you say you're allowed to be here. Now you have two paths. They can be complements to each other, but let's just say we have the eastern path of psychotherapy, Buddhism, and then we have the western path of psychotherapy, which would be CBT or Stoicism. As I said, you can combine these and maybe have a force multiplying effect. But let's start with the Buddhist approach. So the Buddhist approach would have you to get very curious about the feeling that you're having, the thought that you're having. To simply stand back and watch it. And if you get distracted, to watch the distraction, and just to be that observer. Oh, I feel anxiety when I have this negative thought. Interesting. Where is the anxiety? Oh, the anxiety is in my abdomen. What shape is it? Is it moving or is it still? Is it warm? Is it cold? Is it red or is it blue? Does it have a pattern? Does it have a shape? And you just get curious with it. But you're not getting curious for the sake of it going, because then that would just be another form of trying to fight the feeling. You get genuinely curious and you take on this perspective of, oh, I'm actually going to try and master my emotions from the perspective of a firsthand scientist. I'm going to look within myself. I'm going to use introspection. I'm going to I'm going to examine what's going on from what Douglas Harding called zero space. It's the space within consciousness. You can read a thousand books on psychology. You can read about neurochemistry, biochemistry, the workings of someone's mind. All of these give you models and materialistic views of how the mind works. But ultimately, there's no better way to study the mind than from the first hand experience. You are a mind. You have a mind. And so getting curious about consciousness and how the mind works, which is ultimately the aim of Buddhism, you'll find that you naturally release suffering and get clarity into the nature of mind. You'll examine your emotions, you'll watch your thoughts, and in the process of getting more acquainted with how these things operate, you'll be able to better let go of negative thoughts. Now on the other side, we have the Western approach, which would be something like CBT or Stoicism. And the idea here is we we recognize that the thought is a thought, and it's not necessarily grounded in reality. It's an impression. It's a sort of blurry, subconscious attempt to grasp this really complex and triggering thing we call reality. All of our entire experience, intelligence, and limitations are overlaid onto reality that creates this impression. And we would be foolish to just accept every initial impression that we make as being truth. And CBT have these cognitive distortions. They are very useful and very handy. And when we have this initial impression, this negative thought from the past that just pops out of nowhere, we just ask ourselves, is there any distortion in here? Right? Is there any mind reading going on? Mind reading is a big one for me. If I'm texting someone and they're being quite vague in their text, I might mind read and project onto the conversation all of these ideas that I have about how they feel and what they're thinking and what they need that may or may not be true. And typically they are not positive. I don't typically imagine that there's a subtle reading between the lines of you're amazing, you're the best, you're the best thing ever. Because I'm not naturally on the kind of narcissistic end of the spectrum. I think if you were very manic and narcissistic and grandiose, you might actually read greatness into every interaction that you have. But you also have things like labeling, where you simplify things into I'm a loser, or you have fortune telling, where you think you can predict the future, and you also have catastrophizing, so you make things much worse than they are. And it's a really good idea to write down thoughts, write down the negative thoughts that you're having. Don't try and do it all from within your own mind. Eventually, you can do that after you've built up the skill. But it's sort of like if you learn chess, it's probably not a good idea to practice chess in your own mind to begin with. You want to practice playing actual games with a board, and then a couple of years later, you can play games in your head, right? And this is probably what the best chess players in the world do. I had a piano teacher who was a master level pianist, a concerto player, and he would read music in his head and practice the entire piece in his head away from the piano, but he obviously didn't start there. And so it's better to start with pen and paper and write down the thought than ask that question. Are there any distortions in this thought? It's like, okay, what could the thought be? I had this thought of being cheated on five years ago, and I think my current girlfriend is gonna cheat on me too. Okay, so right. Are there any distortions in there? Well, I'm fortune telling, I'm predicting the future. I am emotionally reasoning, right? I don't have really strong evidence for this, it's just I have this emotion, and it makes sense to me that they would do that based on this emotion. I'm catastrophizing, right? And my I'm thinking that this really good relationship is gonna go absolutely terrible and go horrifically wrong immediately. There's not gonna be any kind of gradual change, it's just gonna be a catastrophe overnight. And so you go through this thought, and then at the end of this process of identifying the distortions, you try to rewrite the thought in a more balanced, rational way. Right? And that might look like, you know, infidelity is a real thing that exists in certain relationships, but I have seen no evidence of that with my current partner. There's no track record of them doing that in any of their previous relationships. The last few weeks have been amazing. I also know that they've been stressed out in work and they're having a hard time. And so you just sort of you say the things that you would say to a friend if they were going through the same kind of situation, because that's typically way more rational than the stories you tell yourself. So those are some ways to deal with negative thoughts about the past that seem to appear from nowhere. But one final thing I would really encourage you to do is to not just isolate negative thoughts in the moment and instead to develop a sense of emotional mastery in a general sense. And that might look like developing daily practices of journaling, of meditating, of reading stoicism, right? Just start to build up this skill of navigating difficult and negative thoughts. It's almost like a preventative medicine. You don't want to just be going through life and then all of a sudden these negative thoughts come and you have no kind of grounding practice. If you were to meditate 10 minutes a day for the last year, that same negative thought would hit different. You'd be able to let it go with more ease, or you'd be able to process it in a journal that you've been keeping for six months, right? Or you'd be able to imagine what Epictetus would say to you as a coach if you've been reading Stoicism for a few months before that, right? So there are all these different ways that you can deal with negative thoughts if you already have practices set in place. And for me, and I've said it before, I do see Stoicism, Buddhism, these different philosophies of life as preparation for when stuff goes wrong, because stuff will happen that are painful. Death, bad luck, injury, breakups, betrayals, you know, this is the stuff of life. And it's good to have that baseline practice.