Bloom Your Mind

Ep 100: Using Words to Feel Better

• Marie McDonald

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Do you feel better when you had a really bad moment in your day and you get to vent to someone about it?

And did you know that we literally can create reality in the other person's mind when we do that? Mind-blowing, right? So if we're creating reality with our words, for ourselves and the people that hear our words, what is the reality that we want to be creating?

Today, I'm going to give you some questions that you can ask yourself to help use your words to make yourself and others feel better. Because, when we share our stories and we're focused on the negative parts of them, we allow our brains to confirm them and look for evidence of that reality.

In this episode, you'll understand why our brains work like that and how we can break out of it.

So, join me and let's create an impact in the world that we're going to be proud of.

What you'll learn in this episode:

  • How we can use our words to feel better instead of worse
  • Why our brains are wired to focus on the negative side of things
  • Practices to break out of negativity bias
  • Questions you can ask yourself to understand what's happening in your thinking
  • Stories to help you apply these questions and practices yourself

Mentioned in this episode: 

How to connect with Marie:

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Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want, and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it.
 
Oh my gosh! Hello, all my friends and welcome to episode number 100 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. That's so exciting. And it's so awesome that episode number 100 is today, because today was also ironically or synchronously, I didn't plan it, but it was also the first day of the Bloom Room membership. 

We started it today and it was just so wonderful we decided to keep the doors open, ongoing, so anyone can join at any time. There's going to be an archive of all the call recordings and there were so many amazing people in there, from people that were in Turkey, Costa Rica, Texas, Washington, Nevada, and California, all over the place. 

There were doctors and professors at university, there were sales professionals, other professionals, artists, musicians, nomads, just all kinds of people there, and it already is so wonderful. I can tell how much Tuesdays are just going to light up my life. 

So, get into the Bloom Room If you want to be there, email me whatever method of communication works for you If you have questions, and you will continue to see me post things and share things from that incredible group as we make our ideas into real things and use our minds our unconscious and our conscious minds to be better in the world. Be who we want to be. Create what we want to create. 

Have the impact that we're proud of. Speaking of that today, I'm excited to talk about what we're talking about, and before that, I just wanted to share a little hack that I've recently been experiencing the benefits of. So sometimes our brains go into negative spaces, and one thing that I do in my life I've never read about this or really seen it talked about, but I create little hubs in the physical world, that where I train my brain to associate things that are a part of living in a physical body in the world with gratitude. 

So, I'll tell you a couple of examples of this. One of them I just experienced and it just made me giggle and made me so happy. One of them is there was one time where I was sitting in a parent meeting in one of my kids' classrooms and I said something about the birds that were singing outside and about how beautiful the sound was, and the woman sitting next to me was like, yeah, I guess that just depends on who you are, cause to me that sound is so annoying and we cracked up and I teased her a little bit about, like you know, twittering birds being annoying. 

But in reality, I also really appreciate that she shared. That really makes me laugh and makes me appreciate all of our different experiences, because to some of us we think something that is either joyful or annoying to us is occurring to everyone around us in the same way, when it definitely is not. We all experience things in our own way. 

But I never thought that twittering bird song would be annoying to someone. It reminds me of like cartoons that I've seen, you know, where a cat is annoyed at a bird's song or something makes me laugh, but I also really appreciate it. Similar to when we. 

I have trained in this very Pavlovian way my brain to stop when I hear birdsong and pause for even a split second and feel joy. I experienced birdsong as a connection with nature that I get to have even when I'm inside a building. It's a little reminder that there are animals out there all around us, everywhere, infinite layers of them everywhere. 

I am this little blip on a screen and there are all these animals and, of course, people having their entire experience that I'll never know is happening right next to me. But the birds are a little reminder. There's a whole world happening for every single one of those little twittering voices. They're excited, they're angry, they're chasing worms. Whatever they're doing, I love it, and it reminds me, gives me a little feeling of humility and the miracle of life all around me. 

I also experienced birds is hilarious. I was going on a walk around a lake one time and there was a duck that was quacking and it sounded like laughter, and I stopped and was kind of like cracking up to myself. And if I train my brain in this way, which I have, all of these things that's the sound of a duck, the sound of a twittering bird, they make me laugh, they make me connected, they make me smile, and so I've sort of trained my brain by thinking these things over and over again. 

And I also wrote a post in an email a little while ago about sparkle in people's eyes and I wrote about how what I want to see in the eyes of the people around me is a sparkle, that sparkle of life of like curiosity, excitement, joy, love. That's how I want to feel. I want to feel the sparkle in my eye. 

I want to feel like I'm walking around the world, excited to see the people that I see, to have the gifts of the moments of life that I get to share with them, that we don't get back, you know, if we're not there for them, that I'm like into, into something I'm excited about, something I'm engaged in my life and the and the miracle of the world around me. And so, what I did to remind myself. It's almost like a mnemonic device that we use to remember things. 

I've sort of used this Pavlovian conditioning when I see a shadow of the sun anywhere around me so maybe it's coming through the tree leaves and twinkling, so it looks like a little sparkle it immediately reminds me of the sparkle in our eyes and it reminds me of that feeling I want to have. It's like a visual anchor, the sparkle in my eyes. 

It reminds me of the experience I want to have in my body of like present life and love and curiosity and playfulness. The sun shining through the window but through a layer of a bunch of branches of trees. So, it was sparkling, and it completely snapped me out of that. I was like, why am I thinking about this right now? There's the sparkle to reminder. 

To get back to that feeling of sparkle, this miracle of life being in the moments that I'm in. So, I do this with things all the time. I train myself to experience the breeze that blows through my house as like magic and a reminder of gratitude for the place that I've created in my home. 

So there's, like this breeze, there's the bird song, there's the little sparkle of the sunlight, and I plant these little anchors all around me so that, as I'm moving around my day, my experience of being a human and a body in the physical world is going to have positive triggers for me. But I plant them on purpose so that I have those associations ready to go, and so then they surprise me, like I don't have to work at it anymore. I just hear bird songs, see a sparkle of sunlight, you know, feel a little breeze. I'm like, oh, that's nice, that's oh, I'm grateful, I'm curious, I'm present. 

So just think about what kind of little physical cues do you want to plant around your life and around yourself to remind you of the ways you want to feel, to remind you of the things that you value for me. I value gratitude, I value playfulness and humor a lot. So, the ducks right, remind me to laugh at the things around me. What are the things that you want to sort of train yourself to remember all day long? You can plant triggers in your life and if you plant triggers that happen a lot and happen randomly and frequently around you, you're going to experience more and more of that. All right, fun, little idea for you. Now we're going to talk a little bit about using words to feel better. Basically, that's how I want to say it. 

I was listening to a colleague tell a story about how he's a teacher and he was at a school, and he heard a family say that another family in the school had a terrible experience in general at the school. And he was thinking in his mind what the heck? I know that other family and that's not true. They had a great experience. I wonder what's going on here. 

So, he saw the family in question that he knew, and he walked up to them, and he said yo, why'd you tell this other family that you had a terrible experience? I know your experience. That's not true. And they said well, our child did have this one negative experience, and he said all right, okay. And the family said we, we want to give our child their own experience. 

We want them to be able to have the experience they had. Respect that. And he said no, I get that, I get that. And then the family went on to say after that the child had a great experience. The child actually turned around to us and said I get why everything happened the way that it happened. 

And after the child graduated from the school, the child said oh my gosh, now that I'm in college, I realize all the things that I took for granted back then and I am much more prepared. I have all of these capabilities that I didn't have before. Now I get it. And the teacher said wait, why didn't you say any of that stuff? 

Why did you only tell the negative part? None of those wonderful positive, like the important part of the story, which is like in the end, the child loved it all. Why didn't? Why did you leave that out? And the family said I don't know, we just shared that one part that we shared, but for the other family that only heard the negative part, their whole narrative about the school was a negative one. Their whole story, their understanding of this institution where the teacher worked, where my colleague works, is negative. 

When we tell a story, when we relate certain parts of our experience, they create reality. Now let me tell you a few ways that they do. In the example I just gave, a new narrative is literally created from one family to another, and I want you to think about a time when you've sort of been stuck, maybe, in a negative story or about, you know, a negative experience that you've had. Maybe it was about an airline or a restaurant or a party or a person and you told somebody about it. 

When we do that, and we've all done it, we literally create reality in the other person's mind. We create a new story that's usually stuck in the other person's mind. They can reject it, they can think critically about how what do I think about this story, what do I think about what this other person is saying? But only if they're present enough in the moment to do that. 

Oftentimes, what I find is that when we're rolling through our day, we're either overstimulated, distracted there's lots of things going on or just in an interaction with a person, we're thinking about other things too, or we're trying to support the person or we're just trying to listen. 

So, we're not thinking super critically all the time about what's being related to us not all the time and we might not be focused enough or present enough to realize that what we're hearing is just one part of an experience. It's one moment in time, it's one opinion that's filtered through the other person's whole perspective, and the person that we're talking to and sharing an experience also doesn't know that. 

So, it's much more likely that we've just created a reality for someone that we have altered their perception of whatever it is that we're telling a story about. And if we're telling a negative story, we've probably altered their perception of the person, the place, the thing for the worse. So, if we just think about the times when we've said, oh yeah, that person I don't know, I don't like them that much, or how that person yeah, I don't know, they're just really irresponsible. 

Or that place, they've gotten my order wrong twice and I just don't go there anymore. Whatever, it is right. That book I don't know; I didn't like that book. Like, sometimes it's great, but sometimes we have no idea that we're doing it and we're creating a total reality for someone. 

What I'm focused on today is really like when we're telling one part of an experience, for us it's just one part of the whole story, but when we're saying it out loud for someone else, it might be the whole story for them. So, we just got to become aware of that. Now the other thing we do is we impact our own brain as we retell stories. 

We're editing our own memories. We retell stories over and over and as we do, we refine, we change, and we emphasize certain parts and de-emphasize other parts of memories as we retell them to ourselves and to other people. And the more times we retell them, the more whittled away our memory of something becomes. 

I remember I remember trying to remember experiences that I had in high school with cow tipping. Oh my gosh, I was terrible. I know I wouldn't do this now, but I grew up in a country town and we would go out in the middle of the night and try to tip cows over while they slept. I never successfully did it. Can you imagine how heavy a cow it’s like a 120-pound person? 

You're trying to like push that thing over. Who does that? Anyways, I'm trying to even construct the memory of cow tipping, and I don't know what's real and what's not in my brain anymore, because I've had so many conversations about it and then other people tell me what they remember and now I can't really remember what's my memory and what's theirs. 

I actually have a lot of that experience with my best friend from kindergarten. We have so many similar experiences that they're not like we were in the same family, right? So, there's, you know, more clarity around those sometimes, I think. But with my best friend we were in different families and went through all these experiences together, through kindergarten, grade school, junior, high, high school, college. 

Still our kids go to the same school. And when she tells me stories from grade school, junior, high, high school, college still our kids go to the same school. And when she tells me stories from high school, sometimes they become my memory of it. Her memory of the event is stronger than mine. So I listened to hers and then the next time I remember that event, I more remember what she told me than what I experienced All of a sudden. The way that she retells it is the way I'll always remember it. Yeah, it's interesting, right? 

So, we, as we retell stories, if we're focused on the negative parts of them. We are editing our memory to be a negative one. We have anchored it in our minds, firmed up our brain's experience of a thing by emphasizing the bad part of it. By emphasizing the bad part of it, and both for us and for other people, we have put actively, sort of framed our unconscious bias by telling our brain the negative parts of something again and again, allowing our brains to focus on the negative part. Our brain is going to go to work confirming it and looking for evidence of it. 

So just think about a conversation that you've had with someone where you're sort of frustrated and you said something about something you were frustrated about, and maybe the other person says, yeah, yeah, that makes sense and maybe they build on it. And now you're both perceiving the thing as negative, and both of your brains are going to start looking for evidence of that set of traits in the thing or the person you were talking about. 

You're going to start stacking that evidence up until it's so hard for that thing or that person to break out of the story you've created about it. And if it's a person, that can be pretty harmful to other people. But the other thing is, we feel worse when we allow our brains to focus on the negative side of things. We feel negative, but we don't have to, so we're going to talk a little bit about how we can break out of this, how we can use our words to feel better instead of worse. 

We can break out of this, how we can use our words to feel better instead of worse, but first let's understand why our brains do that. Now, first of all, there's nothing wrong with you If your brain gets negative. You're not broken, you're not bad, you're not wrong. Just get curious without judgment. When your brain is doing this, try to have a little sense of humor about it, because your brain is literally wired to do this. 

We have an 80% negativity bias, which means that when we look back at an experience, we are very likely to be over-focused on the negative aspects of things. We also have a brain that is wired to do threat scanning. It's wired to scan for threats, and a lot of those threats are very outdated. 

So, it's scanning for ways that were rejected, ways that we aren't taken seriously, ways that we can take things personally, ways that things are hurtful, ways that we messed up, and the reason is because we're afraid of not being liked by the people around us. We're afraid of getting kicked out of the tribe, kicked out of the cave. That's our lizard brain talking. 

So, if we have a negativity bias and we're scanning for threats and we also have the majority of our thinking, that happens subconsciously. Vast majority of our thinking happens on the subconscious level then of course we're going to look back and automatically think about the things that were slightly threatening and think about the negative perspective on them and then, when we say them out loud, we're creating something that we and others have to work against in the world. So, all we have to do is pause before we say it out loud, pause before we act on it, pause and question our thinking Interesting. 

I know my brain's designed to focus on the negative. It's doing a lot of automatic thinking. I'm probably scanning for threats. Let me pause before I say things out loud. Maybe in the middle of when I'm talking, I can pause myself and think why am I talking about this right now? In a moment I'm going to give you some questions that you can ask yourself when you pause to understand what's happening in your thinking. But before that I have a little story for you just to illuminate sort of how you can actually do this in the moment. 

The other night I was out at dinner, and I was. It was my daughter's birthday, she turned 12 and I had a big gift that I was giving her concert tickets and a trip to go see this concert, and I was so excited. I was holding this to be a secret for months and I'm not good at secrets. My husband says that I do not have a coy bone in my body and I'm just really bad at secrets when I'm excited. 

I'm bad at secrets in general because I'm bad at hiding things. And so, I finally was going to get to tell her about this gift I had gotten her, and I set up a three-part scavenger hunt. She wanted to go get dinner and then gelato for dessert on her birthday and then go to our hot tub. That was her birthday wish. So, the first step in the scavenger hunt, the first hint, was at dinner. The second one I had the gelato. 

People that own the restaurant that we love, our friends, come up to the table and say they found the second hint on the floor. So, she opens up that hint. And the third hint was at home, and she got to open up her whole gift and she was so excited. So, this was an exciting night. 

A lot of planning went into it, and we're sitting at the dinner table and one of my family members is sitting next to me and we're about to open up the hint and everybody's having conversations, and the person starts talking to me about some health issues that I've had going on. So, it's asking me questions and I'm answering the questions, and then they're asking me more questions and I'm answering the questions and then I'm describing stuff that I've been dealing with and all of a sudden, I come to, and I think, why am I talking about this right now? 

I don't want to be talking about this right now. I want to be at this dinner celebrating 12 years old. Why am I talking about this? So, I literally said out loud why am I talking about this right now? My husband looked up at me and kind of started cracking up and the person that I was talking to kind of like stopped. 

I was just like, was like huh, and I just started laughing. I'm like I don't want to be talking about this right now. Let's talk about something else. And I said my daughter and I, you know, started talking to her about what do you want out of this year? 

But this is a way where we don't have to be shy or embarrassed about our brains going to the negative or our brains going into automatic thinking. We can just interrupt them anytime, and we can even do that publicly, you know it's fine. 

It actually probably gives other people permission. So, when we pause, when we create an awareness around this automatic thinking, this negativity bias, this threat, scanning, this tendency to focus on things that are negative or painful or bad or judgmental, just pause. We can refocus when we pause. 

Here are some questions that we can ask ourselves. Number one why am I recounting the hard part? I often find people come home from their day and they tell their partner about the hardest parts of the day. So, we can just ask ourselves why am I talking about the one part where something felt unfair? 

Why am I recounting the one part where someone acted in a way that I didn't like? Is it because I need to vent? And if so, you know what I do. I'll say, okay, I just want to call out that, like, 85% of my day was amazing and I loved it, and then this one part needs some air, and so I'm going to let myself vent, but I just want to say that my brain's focusing on the negative and I'm just going to say this one part. 

But I just want to acknowledge most of my day was awesome. So, we can still vent, but we can just keep ourselves accountable. Maybe we even tell our partner, whoever is we're talking to, that we want to talk again later and tell them about all the good stuff, but we just need to get this one thing out. 

We can ask ourselves another question when am I trying to be right and make others wrong? Maybe we're telling a story where someone rubbed us the wrong way and we're so focused on their faults. Maybe we can pause and think where did I maybe rub them the wrong way? Where do I think they were coming from? Maybe where did they have a point that I might be able to learn from? 

Another question we can ask ourselves is where am I practicing black and white thinking, all or nothing thinking? Where am I assigning negative intent that I have no idea if it was there or not? Actually, where am I trying to be the good guy? Where am I trying to be the good guy and make somebody else the bad guy? 

How honest can I be about that? If I'm gentle with myself and nonjudgmental, I can be more honest with myself. If I'm like, oh, of course we all want to be the good guy, and our brains do that automatically. I'm way more likely to be honest with myself about making myself the good guy and somebody else the bad guy. 

And when I'm honest with myself, I can change it making myself the good guy and somebody else the bad guy and when I'm honest with myself, I can change it. If I'm not honest with myself, I can't change it. It all comes down to compassion. Got to be soft on ourselves, nonjudgmental. 

My favorite question whenever I'm so sure something happened or something is right and I'm right, I can say, okay, well, just for fun. What if the opposite were true? Just for fun, what evidence could I possibly find? If the opposite were true and I had to prove it, where would I find a little evidence of that? So, if we're creating reality with our words, for ourselves and the people that hear our words, what is the reality that we want to be creating? 

The best question is what would I be proud of if I went back and watched the video of this conversation? What if I were watching it in a theater of my friends and acquaintances and family. What would I be proud of, then? What words do I want to choose that represent who I want to be? Let's hear them. 

All right, that's what I've got for you this week, my friends, a hundred episodes down just getting started, and I will see you next week. 

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I'll see you in the Bloom Room.