How to Stop Thinking Negatively

what a lot of people get wrong about negative thinking is they think that negative thinking is always bad they think you should just be positive just think positively you know what your problem is you need to be more positive I don't know about you but if people tell me to be positive I don't want to be positive in fact if someone says to me smile I think to myself I'll smile when you get out of my face it's like a contest sometimes in the self help world look how happy I am meanwhile they're so could

be dying inside it's actually more important to get people to stop being pessimistic than it is to get people to be optimistic in this particular episode of The Changing Minds podcast I'm going to walk you through some of the most empowering strategies that you can learn to be able to turn your thinking around turn the smile and turn it into a frown no sorry it's turning the frown into a smile either way by the end of this episode you'll walk away with clever tools you'll understand some of the distortions and why we fall into the

thinking trap that we do why we find ourselves thinking negatively as is and how we can start to think more positively but more usefully and when it's appropriate to think more negatively as well so you're going to find a whole host of tools really excited let's get into it so in this episode I want to walk you through why do we think negatively in the first place I want to explain a little bit about negative thinking itself I want to explore why is it we need to stop it what damage does it inflict upon our

bodies Upon Our Minds what are the consequences of it why it happens in the first place why it's important for us to think negatively sometimes we're also going to look at then how we think negatively and I'll break down for you some of the distortions what we call cognitive distortions and this is really taken from the field of cognitive behavioral therapy but finally we will bring it up to an incredible Crescendo where we're going to be looking at well what can you do about it as you know I'm all about strategies and walk can you

through exactly what you can do to think more positively so we're going to finish with that if you want to skip ahead to that you can but why you might be missing on really really great stuff the next few minutes and you'll think to yourself oh it's fine I'll just skip today I'm telling you I'm going to cover really amazing things and some of it'll be surprising you'll be like really and you don't want to miss that do you anyway I want to talk about thinking negatively I don't just want to go okay everyone the

key is you need to be positive cuz positive thinking is good for you and be being positive means saying good things to yourself and blah blah blah blah blah because you've heard that a million times in fact most of the self-help books of the early 20th century even the late 19th century to be honest all were emphasizing the importance of your thinking from the books in the 1920s and 30s such as Think and Grow Rich to How to Win Friends and Influence People right away to the middle of the century The Power of Positive Thinking

by Norman Vincent Peele a large portion of the books that we have consumed over the entire history of personal and professional development have all being around you need to think better Think and Grow Rich you need to be able to inspire yourself more be more positive look in the mirror and say positive things to yourself you can do it you're amazing you're wonderful you're superb even when you're not and the trouble with that is is it just doesn't work now I know some people might say to me well Owen I like to correct you there

but I used to be very negative and I looked at myself in the mirror and I said to myself every single day and every single way I'm getting better and better I gave myself what we call an auto suggestion and if you did Super however for most people it's not enough and the reason it's not enough is simply because we don't believe in it so to start off with let's look at well why is it important for us to stop thinking negatively why shouldn't we be allowed think negatively right I remember once I was talking

to my uncle my uncle's very sort of uh straight you know very straight sort of sense of humor very funny but he just he's one of these people that just he comes out with on liners uh all the time and one of the things I said to him was I said you know it's important to make every second count I'm like into this all inspirational you should make every second count and he goes why he said why can't you just like let them go by and I couldn't answer him because he was right because while

I say you know make every second count you can do it fine that's great but at the same time you don't have to Oliver burkman wrote a great book where he talks about time management and it's a really sort of counterintuitive take on time management where he looks at it and goes look you can't get everything done and it's about changing your expectations and learning to be able to be okay with the fact that you will almost always have invariably a to-do list that is not fully finished so when we answer the question why we

need to stop thinking negatively we have to be able to recognize the impact that negative thinking can have have onos and one of the most interesting bits of research comes from Michael F Shire and colleagues in 2021 they did a a study where they found that from an impact perspective it's actually more important to get people to stop being pessimistic than it is to get people to be optimistic and I I love this I find it fascinating but what they found was is that pessimism itself in other words thinking everything's going to go badly is

bad for us but it's not as much that optimistic thinking thinking everything is going to go great is always going to be very beneficial to us and it's not that optimism isn't more powerful or more useful than pessimism it's that a large part of it is don't be pessimistic avoid falling into the Trap of thinking negatively a lot of research out there as well talks about like negative thoughts and negative emotions I was listening to Adam Grant Professor Adam Grant on a podcast and he quoted research by Maya Tamir and the research that they were

looking at was basically considering how we think about the negative feelings we feel and the the hypothesis that she she noticed was that when people judge their negative emotions negatively so when people think bad thoughts about the fact they feel bad that often can make things worse it leads to worse from a well-being score perspective it means that it impacts them negatively now the research out there shows that a lot of times when we are thinking negatively it is negative implications of on our health heart disease again probably along the lines of being impacted by

things like chemical cortisol which is fine on a regular basis we all experience it early in the morning for example it's a normal part of life whenever we're watching a movie and something goes wrong in the movie it happens but when we constantly our brains are releasing cortisol through a system and it becomes something that's chronic it's something that's constantly happening that's when it then has negative impacts and when you're thinking negatively a lot of times you're cultivating that kind of internal chemistry on an ongoing basis and so what we need to be able to

do is to be able to recognize that this can have a negative impact on our health it's been linked to not only things like heart disease and whatnot it's been linked to cognitive decline and even some preludes to alzheimer's it's been linked obviously it's a big precursor to depression and anxiety and stress and worrying and fear and all of the negative experiences we have a large part of them come about as as a result of our negative thinking now the previous episode we talked about the inner voice and I offered you lots of suggestions strategies

to help improve that but today I want to talk specifically about this notion of being negative because the idea is is that so often we think that it's almost like we feel obliged to be positive and we feel that being negative is a is a bad thing in and of itself and I think that's part of the problem because what we need to do is realize that once you understand a bit more about why you feel negatively why you think negatively rather that will then help you to understand why it sometimes can benefit you so

why do we think negatively well the first thing is to understand that our brains are wired based upon a bias we have called negativity bias and the negativity bias has come about since in order to survive back in the 100 GA days we have to be great at noticing when there's threats your brain is prediction machine it figures out what it needs to do next but one of its great skills is threat detection and so it detects threat in the environment the part of your brain called the amydala it's not just a lot of times

amydala is just associated with fear and whatnot it's not just about that the amydala senses when things are new and it's different parts of it different neurons inside of it will respond differently based upon if that new object new experience new event is a positive one right could be reward or is a dangerous one threat but either way the amydala notices when something new happens and figures out whether or not it's important whether or not it's important from a positive perspective or a negative perspective but whenever we experience any form of threat we have to

be able to pay attention to it we have to be able to figure out how do we survive this how do we get out of it therefore our brains are oriented towards negative thinking and it's not that they're oriented towards always thinking negatively it's that they're always ready to figure out what might be wrong so as a result of that some brains more than others but we tend to find elv airing on the side of what if everything goes wrong and sometimes we could be extra negative the negativity that we're experiencing that is a form

of threat detection we are detecting any possible threats because when we're negative we're thinking of everything that can go wrong might go wrong might be going wrong might have gone wrong that we didn't see we're noticing the threats in our environment another function of why we think negative or at least another theory as to why we think negatively is because so often if we expect something positive to happen and then it doesn't our brains then has a have have big sort of depletion in terms of the amount of dopamine dopamine is a a neurochemical that

we experience in our brain it's connected to reward and connected to learning and connected most of all to motivation and driving us forward and whenever we experience something that surprises us in a positive way and it exceeds our expectations we have a massive burst of dopamine whenever we experience something that we expect is is going to go well but it doesn't go well then we experience the opposite of that we have less dopamine than our default amount of dopamine so your brain is constantly releasing a certain amount of dopamine when we're surprised positively lots of

dopamine when we're surprised negatively as in something isn't as good as we thought it would be we actually feel disappointed and that lacking of motivation that low motivation that feeling of disappointment it tends to feel quite bad so one way of negative thinking is if you're always thinking negatively you can't be disappointed if you believe you're useless and everything's going to go wrong well if it doesn't go totally wrong and if you're not found to be completely useless it's a great day and actually that can be sometimes fun like you can literally go through your

life and you can just go okay I'm just going to imagine the worst possible day happening you can literally sit there and instead of doing the secret where you open up the book The Secret and you go okay I'm going to attract a million dollars okay I'm going to attract this amazing person into my life oh yeah just imagine it imagine it imagine it and then you open your eyes and it's not happening Instead try this one you sit down on your couch don't go out yet in the day sit down on your couch and

you know what you do then you stop and you think to yourself okay what if everything goes wrong what if this day goes dreadfully bad what if I just everything the worst possible thing that I can imagine happens over and over again and then you do that you visualize you imagine it you feel miserable and then you go out fear your day what'll happen is you go all these bad things didn't happen my life is not nearly as bad as I imagined it and therefore you feel delighted you actually have that nice positive drive that

burst of dop me in your system now you might be saying to yourself oh and so let me get this straight you're suggesting that we sit down close our eyes and imagine our day going awfully so that as we go through whenever bad things happen we go well at least it's not as bad as when I was imagining it and I was being kind of factious right I'm not suggesting that is a great strategy right it's not the best idea for you to be able to engage in but I am suggesting that if you do

want to be effective we need to recognize is Dr Richard bandler The co-creative Genius of of NLP and a great mentor and co-author of mine says the disappointment requires adequate planning you have to know ahead of time in order to be disappointed so negative thinking one of the functions is it allows us to be able to lower expectations and again I want to introduce you to the reasoning behind why negative thinking does what it does so that we can understand why we need to handle it differently or deal with it differently the next benefit of

negative thinking is it allows us to learn from mistakes if you're thinking negatively about let's say for example I go out and I do a keynote speech and I'm doing it in front of a few hundred people and I come off afterwards and I think to myself about the mistakes I made well on the one hand you might say oh you're being very negative while you doing that but on the other hand it teaches me by focusing on the mistakes I make it means I can learn from it I can get better as a result

and equally too it motivates me by me feeling bad about the fact that I didn't do as well as I wanted to that then motivates me and drives me to want to keep getting better to want to keep growing to want to keep improving to want to keep moving forward when we think things are going to go a certain way it means that we're thinking through all the things that could go wrong so we can prepare ourselves so we can get ready for them and know how we're going to handle them when they occur and

also negative thinking can also help us bond with others the truth of the matter is is that I don't know about you but I don't like being around people that are always super positive I like it I prefer it to being with people that are super negative but sometimes it's exhausting and people are like how are you amazing everything's so wonderful everything's great everything is this and like you're going are you are you in the same world as me did you did you ever see the news do you know what's going on but one of

the things about most people is that they'll be very positive in a lot of ways but they'll also be honest and authentic and real vulnerable about the kind of stuff that they're going through and so we bond with others by being able to recognize the negative side of life the hard times the challenges and understanding not everything is perfect and I think in the corporate world sometimes we make the mistake because we have what Robert mcke wonderful screenwriting Guru and story genius what he says as he says people a lot of times in the corporate

world have negaposi they have a phobia of anything negative so they avoid the negatives and so often I've sat in the room talking to different stakeholders that I'm working with and a lot of times they're very much well we we don't want to talk about anything negative we we don't want to sell with any negativity but negativity is one of the most important sides of any motivation when you're trying to motivate someone to buy you can't just rely on promise them all the great benefits that they'll get if they buy the product they also have

to be motivated and driven by the pain they'll experience if they don't and so pain and pleasure are equally valuable and that's why again negativity can be useful it's as a motivator but in this case negativity also allows us to bond with others as well so the bonding piece and the bonding part is another function of negative thinking so that brings us to well what are the ways in which we do think negatively and and for this I really want to touch on some of the what we call cognitive distortions that we have whenever we're

pessimistic whenever we're experiencing depression whenever we're in a sort of a funk and we're thinking in a way that is not advantageous to us what are some of these distortions these biases we have in our brain that cause us to think negatively and this comes more from cognitive behavioral therapy I did an episode a few seasons ago on CBT it's one of the most popular episodes that we've ever done so if you want to know more about cognitive behavioral therapy check out that episode I'll leave it in the show notes but for now let's talk

about some of these distortions and we'll talk about the All or Nothing frame of thinking first of all one of the things that a lot of people will experience or a lot of people will do whenever they're thinking about problems is they'll have it like an all or nothing either it's perfect or it's not and this All or Nothing frame means that we start to blow things out of proportion and we start to obsess about the negative things that are happening and perfectionism and the anxiety that comes or the stress that comes or the self-criticism

that comes with perfectionism comes largely because of this all or nothing thinking either I get everything perfect or I'm a piece of crap and if it's a choice between that then more often than not we're invariably going to make mistakes so what we need to do with the all nothing thinking is to recognize that every time we fall into the Trap of this black and white perspective of the world we need to realize that most of the time the world is gray and it's rarely All or nothing and by understanding that it means when we

notice ourselves using these big sort of generalizations we can catch ourselves out the next sort of approach or the next sort of uh Distortion rather that interferes with our ability to think positively and causes us to think negatively is overgeneralizing it's when we say every single day I struggle with this I'm always mess this never works out for me I'll never meet anyone I'm always making the same mistakes now overgeneralizing is something where we generalize out of everything that could be happening we create a generalization of our entire world now in NLP neural linguistic programming

we also have the notion of generalization we have three things that we tend to do in our thinking we delete information we distort information and we generalize information and one of the best questions and tools that we can use from an NLP perspective is when we challenge this sort of generalization or Universal quantifier as we call it and we do so by repeating it so if a person says to themselves I I I'll never amount to anything the response could be never and you could do this to yourself you can say I'll never amount to

anything never I'll never amount to anything I'm always messing this up you're always messing this up this will never work out this will never work out everybody hates me everybody hates you when you repeat it with oprate inflection you repeat that word is a great way to challenge overgeneralizing which is again another Distortion that we have third Distortion is something that a lot of people struggle with which is catastrophizing this is when you create the worst case scenario right so someone doesn't respond to your email straight away you're thinking why aren't they responding normally they

respond I don't know why they AR responding do they hate me did I say something wrong sh should I put that extra full stop I don't think I said thanks at the end of my email what if they don't like the fact that I said thanks what are they thinking about BL before you know it you're right in the street you don't have a place to live you're probably coked up out of your head and know you can't even afford cocaine you're probably on some like heroin you're you're in a really bad place in a

really bad State and you are in that position why all because you didn't put that extra full stop and you forgot to say thanks now I know it seems ridiculous doesn't it but be honest do you ever catastrophize do you ever imagine that you'll never hear from someone again just because you haven't heard from for them in the last few minutes happens right we do it I do it myself and you know what it's worse is have you ever woken up at like 4:00 in the morning and and randomly you think about something you haven't

thought about in two years and all of a sudden you start to think what if and as soon as you say that what if you create a a horror movie worse than Stephen King you catastrophize the hell out of it and before you know it an hour goes by and you're like lying in bed looking at the wall looking at the ceiling going I don't know what I'm going to do what going to do then finally you drift out back to sleep you wake up the next day and you go you make that sort of

sound probably because you know you might have like a a nasal infection or something but you're thinking to yourself that was stupid because you realize in the light of day as they call it that the catastrophizing wasn't in any way realistic sometimes though it doesn't happen at night sometimes it happens during the day and it feels realistic so what we need to do is ask ourselves the question is this really likely to happen what's the percentage chance of this happening do I expect it to happen we need to recognize when we're catastrophizing and understand there's

a difference between freaking out and overdoing it and Imagining the worst case scenario and actually thinking intelligently about what's most likely to happen in the future the next one is maximizing and that's really maximizing whatever problem is happening so you really blow things out of proportion you go oh my goodness this is the worst thing ever I can't believe this is happening oh my goodness this is Dreadful you take something small and you blow it so big that it becomes catastrophic little bit like catastrophizing but this is when you for example you think about a

mistake that you made and you make a bigger deal about it than it is oh this means I'm useless I knew it I'm no good even though it was a small mistake so this is maximizing and then you've got discounting the or disqualifying or discounting the positive it's kind of like minimizing it's when you do something positive and someone says to you oh oh and you saved my life and I go no I didn't really I mean your life was going to be saved anyway I mean you know what I mean you probably wouldn't have

done it or you know I love your book your book was great well it was okay book I mean I was going to write a book anyway and blah blah blah blah blah you won the Super Bowl oh well you know like they threw it into my hands I got it I didn't know what to do the point being that often times we can discount the positive things that we do and we don't really focus on them that much another thing we can do is label ourselves and categorize ourselves call ourselves certain things with certain

adjectives that we lock on to which negatively impacts our identity we can also personalize where we take something personally so someone does something we go I know it it's about me isn't it it's because I'm useless they like h no it's just because of this and they're like no it's because of me I'm never any good in anything you can start to go through that whole story and there's also should right we we we say I should do this I should have done that I should have done the other and so we feel guilt we

feel shame we feel terrible about ourselves as a result of using that term should over and over again and then the other thing that we do is emotional reasoning this is when we actively confuse the difference between something being true and something feeling true so when you're in a really bad mood you can start to feel like everything's going wrong and you feel like people don't like you and you feel like this is terrible and you feel like things are never going to work but you're just feeling it it's not a fact it's a Feeling

and you have to be able to distinguish the difference between a fact and a feeling because once you understand the difference between a fact and a feeling it puts you in a much better position to be able to take control now what a lot of people get wrong about negative thinking is they think that negative thinking is always bad they think you should just be positive just think positively you know what your problem is you need to be more positive positive positive positive imagine it working out isn't that great yeah you can do it and

I don't know about you but if people tell me to be positive I don't want to be positive fact if someone says to me smile I think to myself I'll smile when you get out of my face I don't like it I don't like when people tell me to be positive and the reason I don't like it is because they glorify this as if it's a badge of honor I'm more positive than you it's like a contest sometimes in the self world look how happy I am ask me how I am I'm amazing I'm awesome

I'm going for all these superlatives to tell you how amazing and happy I am meanwhile their soul could be dying inside now maybe this is more I've got a bad attitude B and if so what am I going to do but what I do believe is that there is a time to be negative and there is a reason why sometimes negative thinking can help us the problem is when we always find ourselves thinking negatively or even when we most of the time think negatively because that hampers our ability to be successful when you're negative it

limits your ability to take action you think it's not going to work out so you don't even bother trying you think you're going to fail therefore you don't even give it a go you feel bad about something that happened and therefore you keep beating yourself up over and over again and you make the inside of your mind a horrible place to be that's problematic but when you use negative thinking to figure out what might go wrong and let me imagine if this goes wrong what am I going to do when you actively use it effectively

as a threat detector but then you stop you figure out a plan you make sure you're protected and then you think positive that can be wonderful when you use it to motivate yourself Jim Rowan gives a great example the motivational speaker Jim Rowan wonderful example he goes one of the most important emotions you could ever feel is disgust I remember hearing that I remember I loved it I loved it disgust everyone's like be motivated imag how great things are go over how amazing your life will be disgust why is disgust so good it's because the

more disgusted you are with your life the more motivated you are to change it you're disgust I don't want to experience this anymore and as a result what happens you find yourself needing to change disgust becomes a tool that drives you forward and allows you to make incredible changes so sometimes thinking negatively can be good and you need to figure out when is that time when is it useful for you to be thinking negatively another misconception people have is suppressing it works there's a great musical a book of Mormon whereby um they have this wonderful

sort of satirical song where they said uh switch it off it's like if you ever have negative thoughts and whatever switch it off like a light switch just go click and you won't be thinking it anymore and the reality is as we all know is that if you try to suppress negative thinking it will come back and bite you in fact the more you try not to think negatively the more likely you are to think negatively so we can't use that as an effective strategy you don't try to bulldoze your negative thinking by going okay

I'm just going to be positive because the ne negative thinking will pounce on you when you least expect it constantly reminding you hey you I'm protecting you I'm just protecting you I'm just making sure you don't make a feel of yourself I'm just making sure you know what dangers lurk around the corner so in order for us to do this what are the strategies we need to use to be less negative the first one is becoming aware of our negative thinking noticing when we're thinking negatively and understanding whether or not that negative thinking is going

to be useful at that moment in time so it means tracking and noticing what am I thinking right now what am I saying to myself what am I imagining what am I visualizing in my mind once you identify that once you identify and be aware of what you're thinking the next step is to look for the evidence what evidence do you have that backs it up right there's one of the questions that Byron Katie asks Byron kti you know phenomenal author and she used a thing called the work and in it there's sort of four

questions one of them is is it accurate your thinking your thought your belief is it accurate so when we're talking about negative thinking is it accurate what's your evidence I'm so useless okay cool what's your evidence that you're useless well uh I made a mistake okay but how does that mean you're useless well um um uh see you can't do it whenever you're asked for evidence to back up your negative thing your negative thinking is your negative thinker whoever they might be right whatever the voice inside your head is that's quite negative and it's usually

it's a collection of voices but they they don't they don't have their due diligence done they don't have their research they don't have research papers going um Owen let me just tell you um you're a useless and and I've got all of these research papers so first exhibit is remember that time you walked into the wall well um that's an indication that you're an idiot right right that's the first thing that was done in uh 2017 I think then there's another example on where you you said the this dumb thing let me let me just

remind you this one right your brain isn't that smart it's not going to go to all the trouble most of the time negative thinking the negative thinking party is lazy doesn't do its research it goes out on a limb and it goes you're useless you're pathetic you're awful and if you go all right cool where's the evidence it goes well this maybe it'll give you two examples and you go you understand how old I am you understand you're talking about two micro examples and you're using that to prove that I'm all of these negative things

you say I am makes no sense so you look for evidence is a really good one another one is you go what else could it mean so it's like oh they don't like me anymore okay what else is possible by the fact that they haven't called you back yet and it's going to be at least two or three if not four or five or six different Alternatives what you want to do is you want to find a plethora of different types of Alternatives and then what I like to do is I go and I give

all of them a percentage of likelihood I go How likely do I think it is that they hate me How likely do I think it is that this is about them How likely do I think it is that they forgot How likely that I think it is that they're overwhelmed that they haven't got a chance to call me back How likely do I think it is that they think that they don't need to contact me because I've said everything there is to like there's a million different alternative explanations what I like to do is I

like to write them out if I'm really thinking negatively about something I write them out and I go okay what's most likely I give them all percentage it's kind of a nerdy way to do it now that I'm talking about it out loud but I give them all a percentage and invariably guess what you know the negative one never gets the highest percentage you know why CU it's not the most likely scenario most of the time you know what I'm saying look for the evidence and then when you can't find that much evidence and it's

kind of sketch and you're trying to go really then you go what are some Alternatives and more often than not you can find more evidence that suggest the alternatives are true the next thing you can do is practice gratitude now I know what you're thought you're thinking to yourself you're thinking oh yeah ow practice gratitude well number one yeah I am saying that number two gratitude has been shown psychologically from the research to be one of the most useful and most powerful ways to change the way we think if you want to become less pessimistic

gratitude is your best friend it's one of the best tools techniques you can use what do we mean by being uh grateful or or demonstrating gratitude gratitude journaling every morning spend 3 to 5 minutes thinking about three specific things in your life that you feel grateful for generally speaking when you do it about people tends to be better and you don't just go I'm grateful for my life I'm grateful for my friends I'm grateful for my pick pick a specific person and pick a specific thing they do that makes you feel grateful or some quality

about them that makes you feel grateful and when you're specific about it and when you're consistent with it you're training your brain to look at all the things you have to feel good at all the things that fulfill you in life as opposed to everything that you lack which is where your negative thinking goes and Bry Brown talks about this Bry Brown is a wonderful author and expert and I think she was citing someone or quoting someone talking about how we go to sleep at night and before we go to bed we think to ourselves

I didn't get enough done and then when we wake up we think to ourselves I didn't sleep well enough and it's constantly not being enough over and over again and that's because we're on this negative thinking train but once you start to get to the point where you focus on practicing gratitude and gratefulness it turns the train around and it goes back to the future right just like Doc Brown did or actually Marty McFly did in um Back to the Future 3 he got on the train and and Doc of course spoiler alert went off

because Clara climbed onto the train and Doc turned around and saw Clara and said oh I have to be with her so we got the Hover Board and managed to save clar do you remember that bet you remember that by the way in my um bookcase if you see there's a little yellow box it's kind of blurred but you can sort of see in the background that's a small case of plutonium it's not real plutonium right but it's plutonium that Doc Brown used in order to travel back anyway it is really important to demonstrate gratitude

to ensure that you're practicing that on an ongoing basis as a strategy another great technique is to identifies as an optimist be the kind of person that's optimistic when you see yourself as an optimistic person simply labeling yourself in that way and thinking of yourself in that way transforms your behavior there's two ways to change your identity one is inside out and the other is outside in Inside Out means you change the beliefs you have about yourself such as choosing to see yourself as an optimist choosing to focus this but the other way is outside

in where you act as if you're that person and then you start to become that person and so do both call yourself an optimist but at the same time practice optimism how do you practice optimism imagine things working out ask yourself question questions which Focus your attention on how could things work out what if everything went great what if everything went well what if this worked out exactly the way I wanted to wouldn't that be nice wouldn't it be nice can't even make up the lyrics because I don't know the lyrics of the song Beach

Boys right great song was that the Beach Boys I think was the Beach Boys yeah wouldn't it be nice fantastic again I'm hoping that this is not going to be a copyright problem Brian Wilson if you or any other member of The Beach Boys is is listening I'm sorry the next strategy is index your language this means you're aware of and noticing what language you're using there's a a great book I'll be honest it's not it is a great book it's just hard gone it's called science and Sanity It Was Written in the 1930s by

Alfred ksky it's basically a book that describes a a field called General semantics and the notion of this book is really about the way in which we uh establish or consider things or build beliefs and build knowledge and whatnot someone that was inspired by this was a guy called David burlon and um he created this form of language in the 1960s I want to say called e Prime and E Prime is English would have the verb to be in it so instead of you saying to yourself I am useless you would have to say I

seem useless to me or instead of saying this is a terrible meal this seems like a terrible meal to me or I feel that this is a meal to me and the reason I bring that up is what corsky said in science Insanity was that we can be more sane and communicate more scientifically when we're more accurate with our language when we index our language and indexing your language in this context would mean instead of saying this is terrible instead we say this feels terrible to me right now so we index it with giving ourselves

a time stamp so right now this is terrible and it feels terrible or seems terrible as opposed to is terrible and the beauty is if something seems that way you're reminding yourself that it's just your perspective if something is that way it is that way but if something seems that way or feels that way you know it's a feeling or you know it's a perspective and if it's a feeling or perspective guess what you can change it if it's something that's happening like in general this is terrible well it's terrible forever but if it's this

seems terrible to me right it's my perspective right now it means temporarily it's only a problem so simply indexing your language like that try it when you're thinking some negative thought try to Simply index it try to make it so that you put it in the now so this will never work out changes to I feel that this might not work out right now and all of a sudden it feels different your brain is less likely to resisted because you're still saying the same thing you're just being more accurate with language since your brain doesn't

have a a massive amount of evidence to back up the negative thoughts it's more likely to acques to your demands in that context see that word acques pretty fancy word if you ask me bet you didn't think you were going to learn some extra vocabul I'm sure most of you are listening going I know what Aquas means mate I don't know why you're talking about like you're impressed with Aquas you're pathetic on you're pathetic see that's me thinking negatively and there is a time that you need to think negatively and that's the next technique you

need to recognize is thinking negatively going to help me today is thinking negatively a good thing is this going to motivate me is this going to help me learn is this going to help me grow do I need to pay attention to possible threats and if it is if it does if it can great negative think away but again give yourself a limit think negatively so that it does what it needs to do and then move to the positive thought imagine things working out figure out how great would it be if things worked out the

way I wanted it to by you knowing when to think negatively and when to be positive which be positive most of the time but there are times to think negatively it'll really help you and the final technique is to recognize the consequences what are the consequences of my negative thoughts if I keep thinking negatively about this what's that going to lead to and all you got to do is you got to stop and go if I keep thinking negatively in this way about this what's the likely scenario if I change my thinking and I start

being more positive about it what's the likely scenario when you do that guess what you realize that the consequences of thinking negatively are a lot worse then the consequences to think positively Ergo that's another fancy word I know that makes me sound like an idiot but therefore you decide that you're going to think more positively moving forward it's wonderful you just identify the consequences so begs the final question what impact will this have well to me the more that we can start to think better inside our head the more we can as I describe it

to believe better the more we are creating a beautiful place inside our mind and the more people that walk around thinking better and believing better the more that they can act better and behave better and make more of a positive difference to the world and then we will create World Peace we will solve all the problems of humanity and one day we will walk on the moon again I believe we're going to walk in the moon 2025 I want to say so if this if you're watching this late and it's like after 2025 and we

haven't walked on the moood try not to think too negatively about it there's obviously good reasons for it so but we can do amazing things and I'm saying I know World Peace okay right I'd like to see that happen but it doesn't mean we can't believe and it doesn't mean we can't try and it doesn't mean we can't do what we can to make the inside of our head as good as possible so that at least we can live the best happiest lives and create better happier lives for those that we love and maybe just

maybe make a positive difference into the universe so I hope you found this useful I hope you think positively about this episode and don't think too negatively about it I hope you enjoyed it and most of all I hope you're able to find something useful from it for now take care be well spread the word let people know by the way if you if you wanted something to read got a great newsletter it's onit pat.com newsletter the wisdom in that and it's actually on this week it's on the same topic as this episode it's out

every Tuesday Tuesday so definitely recommending that one onfit factory.com newsletter I don't want to say it's amazing but you know anyway take care be well believe better and as always May the force be with you all bye for now