149. #Dradriennemusings:Cultural Views on Negative Thinking and its Influence on our Hunger, Health, and Weight

Have you ever wondered how your cultural heritage and family traditions may influence your attitude toward negative thinking? 

Are you struggling with thoughts that make you feel bad about yourself, your eating habits, or your health? 

What are some of the ways culture and society can influence these feelings? 

In this week’s episode of Health Bite, we thought we would try something a little bit different, it’s called Musings. 

We would love it if you would let us know your thoughts once we are done. But for those of you who are here for weight loss or even a health and wellness spin, we promise you we are going to get there. 

So stay tuned!

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• Learn about cultural views on negative thinking and how it influences hunger, health, and weight
• Learn how your negative thoughts become your biggest enemy and how to fight them head-on 
• Discover the impact of negative thoughts on your hunger hormones and what you can do about It

“...Make a more active intention to be more mindful of your negative thoughts and to counter them, to be willing not to engage with them, to be willing to create a little bit of a buffer between you and the thought.”

-Dr. Adrienne Youdim

If you're interested in these musings, these casual, little podcasts. 

Let me know and I'll see what I can come up with. 

And as always, head over to the show notes and sign up for my newsletter. 

You can also send me a message if you go to my website, email me via the website or DM me at @dradrienneyoudim on Instagram. 

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Connect with Dr. Adrienne Youdim

• Website :https://www.dradriennespeaks.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dradrienneyoudim/

Transcript

I thought I would try something a little bit different this week, I'm going to call it Musings. And I would love it if you would let me know your thoughts once we were done. But for those of you who are here for the weight loss or even health and wellness spin, I promise you I'm going to get there. So stay with me. 

Some of you probably already know, we just ended a week in the Jewish calendar of the High Holy Days. So this is a period of 10 days that starts with Rosh Hashanah, which is the Jewish New Year, and ends with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, that just finished last week.

And I had some thoughts and musings that I wanted to share with you. So, I historically have been the ”Rabbi” in my family. We are not a religious family as you might guess, but because I went to Jewish day school when I was younger and I'm the only one in my family who really learned Hebrew. 

I'm also the first born, so my brothers learned too, but I always became the designated person to conduct a lot of the traditions, the religious traditions that we observed in my family, one of which is the Rosh Hashanah Seder. And the Seder is basically a time when we all gather with family and friends and we have prayers over food. So, various foods are placed on the table, these foods symbolize different things. 

We talk about the symbolism and then we basically eat the food and then eat a huge dinner afterwards. And it's basically like most things Jewish, a big eating fest. 

But as the “Rabbi” in the family, I was the one who conducted these, you know, seders. And I always found myself struggling with trying to find meaning in these prayers. And this particular year was no different, I was at my aunt's house, a lot of my younger cousins were there. And as I shared the prayers over these symbolic foods, there’s a lot of conversation around our enemies. 

So enemies, enemies, enemies, that does not resonate, as you can imagine, with younger kids. And again, I was struggling to find a way to make this relevant to them. Why do we do this? What is the significance? And who are our enemies? So the next day I was in synagogue, one of the very few times of the year that I go to synagogue, and I was reflecting on this when it dawned on me that, enemies could be enemies as in the literal sense, but really who are and what are our enemies? 

And so often our enemies are the thoughts in our own heads. 

So think about it, how often are you your own worst enemy, as the cliche goes? We are, as humans, we are constantly being inundated with negative thoughts and this is a fact. So if you are someone who often is ruminating or has negative self-talk or negative thoughts, know that you're not alone. 

This is actually the human condition and it takes different forms. This negativity takes different forms. Things like, I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not thin enough. I'm not whatever enough. Or I will never be X, Y, and Z. Or I will never do what so-and-so can do. It comes in the form of comparison. Or self-judgment. I'm such a terrible wife, mother, husband, employee, boss. Nobody cares about me. I don't deserve success. I don't deserve the money. I don't deserve happiness. Bad things always happen to me or what's the point anyway? I will never accomplish X, Y, and Z. You get the message. 

We are constantly inundating ourselves with negative thoughts. We have what's called a negativity bias. 

This is when we scan things in our environment and we pick up on the negative. And again, this is a human survival mechanism. Think about it, evolutionarily speaking, we are very much how we were as hunters and gatherers, how our ancestors were. And in that scenario, our ancestors were literally scanning the environment for threats like lions, tigers, threats to their survival, or lack of food. Again, a threat to their survival. And so we have adapted this negativity bias in our day-to-day lives and in our day-to-day interactions, which of course does not serve us well. 

This negativity also comes up in catastrophizing. Something bad happens or difficult happens and we make it to mean so much more than it really means. I see this with my patients who are trying to lose weight all the time. We had one bad day, one bad weekend, one bad week, one bad month because we were traveling in Italy, and we catastrophize that just because we didn't do well for that period of time or maybe gained some weight or maybe even gained a lot of weight, we catastrophize and make it to mean that we never can lose that weight again or we'll never get back on track again or we'll never get back on the wagon again. 

Negative thoughts come in the form of hostility towards others or polarizing ourselves, pitting ourselves against others. 

And we see so much of that these days in terms of our social values and social justice and our politics. It also comes in the form of cynicism and conspiracy theories. That's also something that, funny enough, popped up during the pandemic. And it's something that, funny enough, I see in my community as a Persian Jew, mostly Persians. 

But it has to do, I think, with the fact that they lived under a government that was and continues to work against them, against human rights. But again, there are all of these ways in which we can use our human experiences, whether they're justified or not, and they result in negativity in our minds and negativity bias or negative thoughts and feelings that we direct to ourselves. 

Now, for those of you who have hung in there and are still with me right now and have listened to the podcast so far, you might be wondering, okay, how does this relate to Health Bite? How does this relate to what I usually talk about, which is health and wellness, or sometimes because of what I do in my day job related to weight, weight loss and nutrition and health. 

It actually has a lot to do, some of you may have read my book, “Hungry for More”. And I talk about in Hungry for More, how our hunger is not just a physiologic phenomena. It's not just our bodies needing nutrients, but it is an emotional phenomena. It is a psychological phenomenon. We are oftentimes, hungry for something more. It's a spiritual emotional hunger that then leads to a hunger for food or cigarettes, alcohol, overworking, shopping, whatever that thing is that we go to to scratch that itch, to soothe that hunger. And this is again, very substantiated in science. 

So when it comes to food, we know that negative thoughts and emotions literally hijack our hunger hormones. 

Our hunger hormones go up when we experience difficult emotions like stress or sadness. So there is a very clear link between negative thoughts and feelings and our hunger and how that relates to weight gain or other habitual practices that impact our health. We also know that negativity and negative thoughts have very concrete physical side effects as well. 

Any symptom related to or including headaches, chest pain, fatigue, palpitations, indigestion, or stomach issues, stomach pain, that was a big one for me growing up. Whenever I was upset, I used to get stomach aches and there was a period in my life where I remember my parents took me from doctor to doctor to doctor to try and find an organic cause for my chronic stomach aches and found nothing.

It was just anxiety. So stomach issues, insomnia, and other sleep problems. And not surprisingly, of course, depressed mood, anxiety, social withdrawal and isolation. And depression and anxiety diagnosed, not just the symptoms of it, but actual diagnosed depression and anxiety as well. But it goes even further than that because these negative thoughts and emotions don't only relate to systemic signs and symptoms, but have also been actually linked to diseases and conditions, like cardiovascular disease, heart attacks, hypertension. 

Believe it or not, negative thoughts have been linked to degenerative brain diseases, including Alzheimer's. 

There was a study that I reported on Health Bite, I guess it's been a year or so, but basically showed that people who engaged in more negative thinking and ruminations had greater amyloid in the blood. And of course, amyloid plaques in the brain is one of the features, pathologic features of Alzheimer's disease. So, it's not insignificant. It's not insignificant the impact of our thoughts and our feelings on our emotional health and our physical health. They're very much related. 

And so fast forward the 10 days of reflection between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and I found myself again at synagogue, not something that I do very often, but do for the High Holy Days. And now we're talking about our sins, repenting for our sins, and as I'm listening to this and reading the text, again, I'm thinking to myself, how is this relevant to me? I mean, I'm not an angel. I'm not a saint, that's for sure.

But I also wouldn't consider myself a sinner,I don't steal, I haven't murdered. I don't engage in idolatry. You know, those kinds of big sins that you think about. And so how could I make this relevant? 

And I thought to myself that it really is a sin to engage in negative thoughts. 

Now, I want to reiterate that this is a human phenomena, so I don't want to suggest to you or myself that there's anything wrong with us or we're doing anything wrong by having negative thoughts because it is so common and it is so human. But I also feel that maybe it is a sin not to be aware. Maybe a sin not to acknowledge that this is what we do. And perhaps it's a sin not to make active attempts to counter that very human phenomena. 

So I'm not saying that we can rid ourselves or we should rid ourselves of these thoughts. It's not possible, nor should we blame or judge ourselves for them. But maybe we can make a more active intention to be more mindful of them and to counter them, to be willing not to engage with them, to be willing to create a little bit of a buffer between us and the thought. 

And this is an ongoing practice. I have to say that in my own life, that this is something that sometimes I feel really good about and really good at. And just as I have that thought, like, wow, Adrienne, you're doing really well at managing your thoughts and emotions. I find myself in a mental storm where I'm not doing so well. So that's why they call these things practices. 

We practice because we can never truly fix, nor do we need to fix ourselves to eliminate our human tendencies.

But we can, through practice, awareness, acknowledgement, and a true intention to do better for ourselves, we can work with these very human experiences and reckon with them a little bit more. 

So yeah, that was my thought this past few weeks during the High Holidays. And again, you don't have to be religious or have experienced the holy days like I have, to maybe consider these musings a little bit. I wonder when you finish this podcast, if you can think for yourself, “what are some of the threads, the negative threads that pop up in your mind and in your life?”. What are some of the things that you listen and repeat in your own mind? How do you ruminate? What are the kinds of things that you say to yourself? Where does your negativity bias live or your negative lens when you're looking at things on the outside? 

Can you be aware of them? Can you acknowledge them when they pop up? And can you actively try to counter those negative thoughts and sentiments by thinking of the alternative or pursuing the alternative? I'd love to know what you came up with. 

And as always, if you head over to the show notes, there's a link there to sign up for my newsletter. You can also send me a message if you go to my website. So yeah, think about this a little bit and either email me via the website or DM me at Dr. Adrienne Youdim on Instagram. I really wonder what this brought up for you. And if you're interested in these musings, these casual, little podcasts. Let me know that too and I'll see what I can come up with. 

 Okay, I'm wishing you guys a happy and healthy week. And I look forward to seeing you here again next week on Health Bite. Bye now.