Balance & Beyond
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Balance & Beyond
Moments: Breaking the Cycle of Negative Thinking
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Welcome to Balance and Beyond Moments, your weekly dose of insight, wisdom and mindset shifts, all in 10 minutes or less, whether it's a powerful truth, a fresh perspective or a spark of inspiration, this is your space to pause, reflect and reset. Let's dive in. Let's dive in. There's an equation that I came to know a number of years ago and, as somebody who was never that great at maths or that interested in maths, I initially dismissed it until I really understood what stood behind this equation, and it blew my mind and literally changed my life, and I don't say this very lightly, and every single person I share this equation with has this light bulb moment of oh my gosh, you're right. That is how it works and it can change everything. Let me share with you what this equation is, and I'm going to talk you through each of the components, and it's going to give you some insight into what's going on with you and how you're feeling at the moment, but also why some of the strategies that perhaps you're trying, or why you're trying to change, aren't actually working for you. So this is going to work both sides. So this equation is that your thoughts drive your feelings, which drives your behavior, which gets you your results. I'll say that again your thoughts drive your feelings, which drives your behavior and drives your results. This has been shared in many different ways throughout history. You call it ancient wisdom, things like mind over matter, but my logical brain always thought you know what it's about. The strategy, these thoughts and stuff that doesn't matter, that's fluffy stuff, that's woo. Let me double down on the strategy, let me double down on shifting my behavior, and then I'm going to get the results that I want, thinking that if I was just clearer on my goals or I worked a little harder or I pushed a little harder, everything would change.
Speaker 1:Let me break down each of these four components and share with you what really sits behind them. So first, let's talk about our thoughts. These are the voices in our head. We have, depending on what research you read, about 85,000 of them a day, literally multiple thoughts. A second 90% of them are repetitive and negative. Your brain is not really interested in thinking about something different. We get stuck in this loop that goes around and around and around, and many of the voices that are in your head are subconscious, which means you're not intentionally thinking these thoughts. They're part of almost like an old program that continues to run again and again and again, and what drives the thoughts that run around in our head are very often the questions that we ask ourselves, questions like did I make a mistake? Was that good enough? What are they going to think of me? Did I win? What am I going to miss out on? What's going to happen if I don't do this?
Speaker 1:And as we have a thought, that thought triggers a chemical reaction in our brain that actually then creates a physical reaction in our body, which is called an emotion. So, just to be clear, these emotions or feelings are being driven by a thought and you can imagine, depending on what that thought is. If that thought is, oh my gosh, tiger, then we are going to feel fear and we are going to have a physiological reaction in the body. We are going to have our heart rate is going to elevate, we're going to have blood rushing to our extremities. Our body is preparing us to run. If I've had a thought about, oh, it's such a lovely hug and I'm feeling love, well then I'm going to have this warmth in my chest. I'm going to almost feel a nice glow If I've been cut off in traffic or somebody's just asked me for something that I can't produce. I might feel angry, I'm going to clench my fists or my jaw, I'm going to feel this burning in my chest. Researchers have even mapped how each of these different emotions literally show up in heat maps in the body. So this thought that now drives the emotion, or the feeling, has changed my physiological state, which, no surprise, then generates a whole heap more thoughts about why I'm feeling and let me find more reasons to feel that way. And so we kind of dig ourselves in this hole and dig, and dig and dig and we'll stay there.
Speaker 1:In some cases, it might have been a physical event outside us that triggered the thought. Our eyes go, oh, tiger running towards me, okay, and the thought goes tiger, bah, and everything else happens from there. But, interestingly, an emotion can be triggered, whether the thought is of a real thing that's going on in front of you or whether it's completely imagined. Your body does not know the difference between real fear and imagined fear, and I do this exercise sometimes with my clients, where we get them in a room or virtual rooms and I get them to deliberately think of something that they're afraid of. And when they're doing that and stepping into that environment when they turn around and go oh my gosh, I'm not, I'm now conscious of what I'm doing. Whoa, like they could not believe the difference in their body. When you're lying in bed reliving the anger of being thrown under the bus in yesterday's meeting, your body is experiencing that anger in that moment, as though it's happening in real time. Your body doesn't know that that anger is from yesterday or from last week or last month, or that sadness from when you were fine, that is still living in you, is still being run on a loop again and again and again.
Speaker 1:Our brain likes to conserve energy. It's one of its key methods of survival. And to do that, well, new thoughts require more energy. They require reprogramming from habit, from a trigger. So it's designed to just keep things on a loop. It doesn't care whether it makes you happy or not, it's not interested in that, it's interested in your survival. So as you sit there reliving the past memory as if it's in the present, you can see how what's really happening here is. Your body is now trapped in the past. You continue to live in the present moment.
Speaker 1:A past thought drives that feeling and we go round and round, and so your current reality then reinforces the thought and comes up with more reasons, usually from your past, or it then projects forward, because when you're particularly, the emotions that most people in my world who haven't yet worked with me are living in is guilt and shame and fear and overwhelm. When your body's in that heightened state it's really worried about. Well, I'm heightened because I'm waiting for the tiger to come, and so it continues to project forward in a desire to protect you, because it thinks that's what needs to happen. To keep you alive is okay. When's it going to happen again?
Speaker 1:And we go back to primitive brain. We go back to we've just seen a lion and we're out on foot on the savannah. I am now going to be extra heightened as I step forward, even though the lion's gone behind the rock, I hear a crack to my right in the bushes. I'm going to be on high alert because my brain is trying to predict could that thing, could that lion, be coming at me again? And so we're very, then, focused on trying to avoid that fear or that threat coming in the future Makes sense when it's a lion, and we're trying to make sure that the lion hasn't been tricky and gone and done a loop around and it's going to come and attack us from the front, but when that thing that we're focused on is our inbox or something from the boss or our kitchen bench, that's when it becomes debilitating and our brain is having exactly the same chemical reaction and stuck in this loop as if it's a lion.
Speaker 1:Exactly the same stress response as on the savannah, plunked into our digital modern world. And so we continue to stay trapped in the past world, and so we continue to stay trapped in the past. Thanks for taking this moment for yourself. If this resonated, share it with a friend who needs to hear it today, and don't forget to subscribe to Balance and Beyond for full episodes and more of these bite-sized breakthroughs. See you next time.
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