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Best Ways to Navigate Negative Thoughts · RiseUp - Live Joy Your Way

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Today's episode is produced by my friends at WalkWest.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: If you're looking to grow your brand and generate leads through podcast or video production, head over to walkwest.com.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's start the show.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Rise up, live joy your way.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: From emotional intelligence through cognitive distortions, certified life and wellness coach Comedy Wood is on a mission to help people see the magnificence of their own unique human spirit.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Through these small bites of self-visualization and self-confidence, you can have healthy relationships, success in business and career, and live the life you want to live.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Rise up, live joy your way.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Hi there and welcome to another episode of Rise Up, Live Joy Your Way.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Whether it's morning, afternoon, or evening, when you have chosen to tune in, I just want to say thank you.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for taking some time out of your day to spend with me.
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  SPEAKER_01: It means a lot.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: And today I want to be I want to talk a little bit around negative thoughts and the ideas behind trying to control your mind or your mindset.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: The truth is we we really can't control our thoughts.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I do want to dive into that.
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  SPEAKER_01: But the very first thing is to just recognize that our emotions, our thoughts, and our behaviors are they are linked.
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  SPEAKER_01: They it's really hard to separate the two.
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  SPEAKER_01: Oftentimes we'll have a thought which creates an emotion, or maybe we have an emotion which creates a thought, and then we take an action based on that.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so when we have negative thoughts routinely, it can wreak real trouble for ourselves on our on an emotional level as well as on a physical level, because when we consistently have negative thoughts or we're stuck in these negative thought loops, yes, our emotional and mental health takes a hit, but eventually our physical health will too.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: As well as it can start to affect our relationships, uh, whether they be friendships or romantic relationships or familial relationships or even workplace relationships.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it also can start to take have an effect on just your work product in the professional world.
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  SPEAKER_01: So why?
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  SPEAKER_01: Why does this happen?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, because when we're stuck in the negative thought cycles or the negative thought loops, what ends up occurring is we could end up creating anxiety.
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  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we could start um not really believing in our own abilities.
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  SPEAKER_01: So we start to lose lose self-trust, our self-esteem takes a hit, maybe our confidence takes a hit.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so the key to overcoming negative thoughts is to really give yourself permission to recognize them, to acknowledge that they're there, to identify what's happening, kind of get curious with them, but also then give yourself permission to um come up with strategies to move away from that negative thought cycle.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not about pushing them away or saying it's bad.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: I it because the truth is if we try to say stop thinking like X, we're gonna continue to think like X because we've brought it into our conscious mind.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: So at the very onset, we should think about, we should sort of look at why.
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  SPEAKER_01: Why do we end up in these negative thought cycles?
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  SPEAKER_01: Well, a couple of things come to mind.
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  SPEAKER_01: One is as humans, we have the negativity bias, right?
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  SPEAKER_01: Evolutionary, by evolutionary standards, go back thousands of years, there was this need to survive.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: So there was this constant scanning of what could go wrong because we were trying to survive, or I should say our ancestors were trying to survive.
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  SPEAKER_01: So there's already this negativity bias.
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  SPEAKER_01: Then, of course, you add in other aspects too, right?
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like the difference between a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset.
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  SPEAKER_01: Many of us, either from messages we have received socially, culturally, um, from our family, from our own personality traits, we start to take on this idea or this belief system that whatever we know is the best we know or that nothing's gonna change.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's really the fixed mindset.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: When we're in that fixed mindset versus the growth mindset, the inner dialogue can tell us that, you know, if something bad is happening, it's not gonna change.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing good can come out of this.
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  SPEAKER_01: So when you have that pessimistic mindset and you're you're constantly thinking about everything that's going wrong, really what you're doing is feeding into those false beliefs or those limiting beliefs.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so those limiting beliefs can end up holding us back in terms of being able to move forward.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: We forget that our recep our perception of reality is it it becomes our reality, right?
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like so how how we feel and what we're thinking, that's going to create the reality that we're experiencing.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: So if we're continually having negative thoughts or we're looking at what's going wrong, we're going to continue to trigger though that reality that that has the anxiety or doesn't have the self-belief.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: And we're going to make it very difficult for ourselves to feel good or to um feel like things are possible.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what I mean by the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: Because if we have a growth mindset, the question that we're really asking ourselves is what's possible here?
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  SPEAKER_01: You know, I might not know how to do X, Y, Z right now, but what's actually possible?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: So when we are thinking about how do we shift out of this negative thought cycle, a lot of times you'll hear people say, well, you just have to control your thoughts.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's, I mean, yes, that'd be great.
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  SPEAKER_01: But the the truth is we can't always control our thoughts.
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  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna have thousands of thoughts a day.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe it's less about controlling them, but coming up with ways to recognize and then shift away from that negative inner voice or recognize that we're having the thought, and no miss like a roommate that we don't totally get along with, they kind of sit on the other side of the room.
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  SPEAKER_01: You know, we don't really engage with it.
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  SPEAKER_01: We choose a different way to engage with ourselves.
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  SPEAKER_01: So some ways that we can we can sort of shift from that negative thought spiral is take a time out, take a pause.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when you're having that the moment and you're recognizing you're you're spiraling into that negativity, it's slow down, slow down and take a breath.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, giving yourself a minute to just breathe or a minute to go drink a glass of water and just become, you know, present in the moment, right?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: So now we're also talking about mindfulness.
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  SPEAKER_01: It's be present in the moment of the right here, right now.
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  SPEAKER_01: A lot of times when we think about negative thought spirals, it's because we're ruminating on something from the past or we're worrying about something from the future.
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  SPEAKER_01: So take a take a timeout, take a pause, breathe, and then practice being in this present moment.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: What is happening right now?
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  SPEAKER_01: What are my five senses experiencing in this moment?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: Another great technique is to just breathe, actual breathing techniques, such as the box breathing method.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I know I've talked about this before, but it's a very simple breathing technique that can happen, you know, within a few minutes.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's, you know, focusing in, focusing on the inhale for a count of four, holding it for a count of four, exhaling for a count of four, and then waiting for a count of four and just repeating it two or three more times.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: What why do we do this?
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  SPEAKER_01: One, it takes us into a practice of mindfulness right then and there because we're in the present moment focusing on our breathing.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: And second, we're taking ourselves out of the thought spiral, the negative thought spiral, and we're refocusing our thoughts onto just our breath.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I know I've had a podcast on breath work in a deeper um podcast around breath work because there are actual breath work practices that can take 20 to 30 minutes that can really get into, you know, just releasing a lot of things that you're holding on to.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: But what I'm mentioning here about the box breathing technique is when you're in the moment and you're you're recognizing the negative thought spiral, that's a really quick way to just do a reset.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then the other thing is to just, and I mentioned this before, is it's just acknowledgement, right?
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: Because when we become aware of what's happening, we then have a choice point where we can make a choice for ourselves as to how what action we're gonna take forward.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: So when we can recognize, for instance, maybe common negative thoughts or a pattern to the negative thought cycle, instead of, again, it's not about controlling it, but it's recognizing, you know, there are certain triggers or this is a pattern that I have.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like, for instance, maybe you you tend to catastrophize um situations, like, oh my gosh, the whole everything is gonna just totally blow up in my face now that this one thing went wrong, because you're you are constantly scanning for the worst case scenario.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: Instead of uh judging yourself for that, it's naming it, it's acknowledging it and naming it, labeling it.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: This is what you know, I'm I'm I'm starting to go down the path of catastrophizing the situation.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: What's actually true here?
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  SPEAKER_01: So, what we're doing in that situation by asking that question is we're interrupting that pattern of catastrophizing.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, this won't surprise any of you if you've been following me, is it's about compassion.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's about self-compassion and being really kind to yourself over judging.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: When we open our hearts to ourselves and recognize that sometimes we are gonna have patterns like this, it's about saying, okay, I'm seeing it and I am going to treat myself with kindness here.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: And through that kindness, I'm going to give myself permission to uh take a different action instead of simply going down the negative thought train.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to give myself permission to stop, take a breath, be in this moment, and ask myself, what's actually true and how do I want to move forward.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: And one way that we can really practice this is just um engaging in a gratitude practice on a daily basis, you know, really making it part of our everyday where we stop and we ask ourselves, what's going well?
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: What am I grateful for?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: What can I be grateful for about myself?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because when we do that, what we're starting to do is build that muscle to look for the good and not only look for the negative.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: So when we're thinking about breaking the negative thought cycle, when we can start building the muscle where we're allowing our brains to scan for what's going well or what's going, quote unquote, right, we're already setting ourselves up for when we are hit with a negative thought spiral.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: We now have the ability to also scan for what's going right.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Negative thought cycles can really uh hinder us in terms of our abilities to move forward because what they do is they really feed into our limiting beliefs.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that is something that I really do uh pride myself on the work that I do with my clients is really helping them become aware of some of those limiting beliefs so that they can move forward and really live the life that they choose for themselves.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: If it's something that you'd like to talk more with me about, by all means feel free to book a call with me at chatwithcomedy.com.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: And until next time, stay well.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to Rise Up, Live Joy Your Way.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: For more information, book a chat with comedy at www.chatwithcomedy.com or visit her website at www.comedywood.com.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: You can also find comedy on Facebook or Instagram.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Username it's authentic me.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.