148. The Million Dollar Question

Have you ever noticed the kinds of questions you ask yourself throughout the day? In this episode of The Modern Creative Woman Podcast, Dr. Amy Backos explores the powerful role of our inner dialogue and how the questions we ask ourselves shape the answers our brains produce. Many women are familiar with harsh inner questions like “What’s wrong with me?” or “Why am I always like this?”—questions that tend to generate equally harsh responses. Dr. Backos introduces the idea that if we want better answers, we need to start by asking better questions.

Drawing from principles in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, this episode explains how thoughts are not facts but natural biological events happening in the brain. When we begin to observe our thoughts rather than automatically believing them, we create space to choose how we respond. Dr. Backos offers a simple practice of noticing thoughts throughout the day to build awareness of the patterns that often run on repeat in our minds.

From there, she introduces the concept of “thousand-dollar questions.” If every question you asked your brain cost $1,000, would you spend that money on criticism and self-doubt—or would you invest it in meaningful questions that guide you toward your values? Questions like “What matters most right now?”, “How do I want to show up in this moment?”, and “What action would help me feel proud of myself today?” invite curiosity, creativity, and self-compassion.

The episode also includes an art-based reflection exercise. By journaling and responding visually to your questions through drawing or collage, you can deepen your insight and engage the creative process as a way of understanding yourself. Combining writing and art allows for a richer form of reflection than thinking alone.

This episode is an invitation to rethink how you use your mind. When you begin asking higher-quality questions—questions rooted in curiosity, values, and possibility—you give your brain the opportunity to generate far more meaningful answers.

Transcript

Have you ever considered the quality of the questions that you are asking yourself? I'm talking about how you speak to yourself inside your head. And if you're a woman who have ever said something along the lines of what's wrong with me? Why am I so dumb? Why am I always like that? This episode is for you. We're going to get into how to ask million dollar questions, and give your brain the opportunity to give you $1 million answer. 

I'm Doctor Amy Backos, I am a licensed psychologist and a registered and board certified art therapist, and I've been doing this for over three decades. What I've learned about the creative process, and about how we think has transformed my life and the lives of thousands of women around the world. If you are a new listener, I am so glad you're here. And if you've been here before. Welcome back. Let's get into this. Let's get this started. In my line of work, I ask a lot of questions, and I get to ask the kinds of questions of women that we would never ask in a social situation, questions that we wouldn't even necessarily ask our best friends and closest family members. I'm talking about really personal experiences, and I'm also talking about the way that women talk to themselves inside their head. And we all have this experience of an inner dialogue, and the idea that this inner dialogue is somehow real and true or factual seems obvious to all of us. It's true. I thought that it must be true, or I keep thinking that. Or I've always thought that. And we look at history and we pull up information. We will pivot our brain and our entire way of thinking around a terrible insult we received as a child. It's unpacking these that truly transforms the lives of the women that I work with. And I want to teach you a trick today that is designed to help you talk to yourself in a little bit nicer tone of voice. And again, if you have ever struggled with these terrible kinds of questions, then you know the terrible answers that your brain will give you. Our brain wants to keep us safe. It wants to keep us conserving our energy, and so it will feed us the same thoughts over and over again. It's not really going to generate new information unless we're asking for new information. And until we're able to challenge the way we think about ourselves and others, we're just going to keep thinking the same things over and over and over again. The most common question that I uncover is, why am I like this? And what's wrong with me? Some variation of those two seem to be the most common. And I'm unsure if these two are more specific to women or not. But the idea that there's something wrong with us or we're a fraud is a universal thought that people in all professions, all genders, tend to have these. I'm not good enough stories. You can think of them as kind of a mean voice in our head, and they emerge around adolescence very strongly. They can come on earlier, but in adolescence we have the feeling of being onstage and being looked at, observed by others. And really, that's by design. Were evolving to ultimately leave our families and go out into the big wide world, and we should have some degree of awareness of how we are presenting ourselves in the world, not in a self-conscious way, but in a way that builds relationships, preserves relationships, and we get to act in ways that we can feel proud of. So this part of the brain serves an important purpose. However, left unattended or unmonitored, it will give us terrible thoughts and terrible questions and so many fears and worries about being judged by others. I've made up a little mental game that will allow you to shift your own thinking away from these terrible questions and into something that's a little bit better quality, so you get the answers you're looking for. But before we can do any of that, it's essential that we start to notice our thoughts and observe them simply as biological phenomenon. It's one neuron firing across the synapse, reaching another neuron. The things that go through our mind are a biological process. They're centered in Broca's and Wernicke's area, and that's the region of the brain that's dedicated to language. If we are so focused on the content of our thoughts, we start to lose sight of the fact that they are a biological process. Blood is pumping, brain is thinking. Lungs are breathing. Everything's in working order. We get tripped up with the content of the thoughts. If you set your timer on your phone to go off once every hour, all day long, and you just wrote down the thought that you were thinking in that exact moment when the timer went off, you would start to see a whole host of thoughts that are on repeat. You've heard these thoughts before. You'll start to discover the content of your thoughts, and this is an incredibly helpful exercise for beginning to notice that you are the person noticing thoughts, and the thoughts are just doing their thing, moving across your brain into and out of your awareness. Once you have this concept by noticing it every hour for a day. This is the strategy that I want you to try. First, you're going to need your journal. Some art supplies. I want you to consider this idea that for every time you ask a question, it's going to cost you $1,000. You want to invest your money wisely, and you want to ask really good quality questions, not waste your time on terrible $3 value questions. You're spending $1,000 on each question you ask your brain. So what would it be like to contemplate some deeply meaningful and important questions? So instead of questions like what's wrong with me? Why am I always like that? Why are they judging me? This is so terrible. What am I doing wrong? Why do I feel so bad? Those are terrible questions that will get you terrible answers. Instead, invest your thousand dollars in questions like this. What's important to me right now. Am I anchored in the present moment? What could I do right now that would help me feel good about myself and this current situation? How would I like to invest my time today? What's most meaningful to me? Who do I care most about and how can I express that to them? What's one way that I could approach my work task with curiosity and problem solving skill? What do you think of these kinds of questions? What do they inspire in you? How? Hopefully they're generating some enthusiasm for what's possible in your life. When we ask these terrible, cheap questions, it's like using a supercomputer to add two and two where we have this incredible brain capacity. And when we ask these bad questions, we're not using it to its full capacity. It's also like showing up at a job interview and asking really generic questions like, how do you like this job? Versus I understand your team is solving these particular problems. How does this role fit into that? See, it's a much more interesting question, much more likely to get an interesting answer from the person interviewing you. It's like having $1 million kitchen and only cooking chicken nuggets. You see all my analogies here. I'm trying to get you to really take the time to consider how you're using your brain. It's an incredible tool. Now, I imagine a lot of us are trying to figure out how to use AI as a useful tool. We are being trained in how to have an intelligent inquiry into AI so that we can get useful results. Think of this as your training on how to really use your brain to its full capacity to generate the information and the life that you want to live. If you're curious about the science behind this idea, the of quality questions, I'm using acceptance and commitment therapy, and the idea of making contact with the present moment is essential. That's why I suggested you set your timer for an hour for a whole day and observe your thoughts. The second part of that is diffusion strategies. Fusion is when we believe our thoughts to be true. We think they're facts. We think that we must take action on them. If we feel discomfort, we feel we must do something about it versus just experience it as a bodily sensation. These two concepts come together in a way that allows us to observe our thoughts as more like a curious scientist. And instead of simply believing what flows through our mind randomly on a Tuesday afternoon, we're consciously using the creative part of our brain to challenge it, to think more and create more via intentional questions that are leading exactly to what's most important to us. And what's most important to you is considered a value. And it's not about obtaining things. It's the value of what you want to bring and who you want to be in any given situation. In acceptance and commitment therapy. Values are the direction. It's where you want to head. You want to be a patient, kind, loving parent. That's a direction you'll never reach it. You won't have a check. Now I'm done being patient, kind and loving. No, it's something you always are striving towards. So value based actions are the kind of things that get us closer to our values. It means pausing in that moment to be patient with our child. If it's about work, it's about being attentive to our work project, being collegial and professional. It's how we want to be, not what we want to get. So the values are what we bring. It's our standards for ourselves. So that's the science behind this idea. And finally, the art piece. Making art while you're journaling and thinking about your questions, answering the questions with a visual image about them instead of just words can give you so much more. Knowing art is a way of knowing, and it's fundamentally different from simply thinking. Writing is better than just thinking and making art, and writing is way better. The combination gives you the most insight. So taking the time to not just think about what I told you today, but to actually do it, to measure every hour what your thoughts are. Think of quality questions as if you had to pay $1,000 for every question, generate those quality questions and then bring it to life in a art project. I think you're going to find it's so much easier to be gentle and kind and loving to yourself when you're able to relate to your thoughts in this way. So now that you know all about these thousand dollar questions, they should be million dollar questions. Now that you know all about this, what will you create? If you have a moment, would you share one of your favorite episodes with a friend? It would mean so much to me to have an organic kind of growth. For the Modern Creative Woman podcast. This is the kind of work that strengthens our communities as women. It allows us to be the person we want to be in all of our relationships and in all of our contexts. Have a wonderful rest of your day, and I look forward to speaking