Latest / MIDDLE GROUND - Real Conversations on Faith, Identity & Becoming — Through Brynne's LDS Lens of Curiosity, Love and Doubt / Your Thoughts Are Optional: Circumstances vs Thoughts in the Thought Model — Part 2/4
Transcript
- Brynne Erickson (00:06) Something happened this morning. Maybe someone cut you off in traffic. Maybe your kid had a meltdown before school. And maybe you got a text that the whole tone of your day. And you had a feeling about it. Probably frustration, angry, irritation. And it felt completely caused by that thing that happened. Guess what? It wasn't. There was actually a thought. Between what happened and that feeling. There's always a thought. And it's that thought where all the power lives. In episode two of the Thought Model series, today we go deep on circumstances and thoughts, and specifically how to tell the difference between what actually happened and what your brain is saying about what happened. Because those are two completely different things. And most of us have been treating them as the same thing our entire lives. So let's dive into it. A circumstance in this model is a neutral fact. It's something that happened or is happening that could be captured on a video camera or stated in a court of law without interpretation. So no adjectives, no judgment, no meaning assigned to it. So here's some examples. My husband didn't take out the trash. That's a circumstance. My husband never listens to me and doesn't care about what I ask. That is a thought. It might feel like a fact, but it's just an interpretation of what happened. It's a story your brain is telling about the actual neutral event. Here's another one. I didn't get the job. That's a circumstance. I'm not good enough, and I never will be. That's a thought. My child got a C on their test. Circumstance. I'm failing as a parent thought. This is harder than it sounds because our thoughts feel so true that they seem like facts. That's what Aaron Beck called cognitive distortions. They're patterns of thinking that feel completely accurate, but are actually filtered, exaggerated, or distorted interpretations of reality. And his research identified dozens of them, all or nothing thinking, catastrophizing, mind reading. Overgeneralization and your brain is doing these things constantly, mostly without your awareness. And here's the neuroscience behind why this happens and why it's not actually a character flaw that your brain does this. It's a survival feature. So neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett's stor Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion explains that your brain is not a passive receiver of information, it is a prediction machine. And before you consciously register what's actually happening, your brain has already run the incoming data through its entire library of past experiences, memories, learned associations, and produced a best guess about what this means and how to respond, all based on the evidence it's collected over time. And this is why two people can experience the exact same event and have completely different thoughts about it. It's because your brain's prediction. Is based on your specific history, your specific conditioning, and the beliefs you've built up over a lifetime of experiences. So it's not producing objective truth, it's producing a personalized interpretation based on everything that has ever happened to you. So Dr. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and author of Thinking Fast and Slow. Describes two systems of thinking. This is great. So system one is the fast, automatic, intuitive thinking. It's the one that fires instantly and produces most of our moment-to-moment thoughts. Whereas system two is slow and deliberate. The problem is that system one is running the show most of the time and producing thoughts we don't wait. And producing thoughts we don't stop to examine based on patterns. We didn't consciously choose. The thought model is essentially an invitation to activate system two, to slow down and examine the automatic thought and ask: whoa, is this actually true? Is this the only way to see this? And here's the most liberating idea in this whole series. And I want you to really hear it. Your thoughts are optional. Isn't that crazy? Whatever your brain feeds you does not necessarily mean it's true. Not all of your thoughts feel optional in the moment, I get it. And when your brain produces, I'm a terrible mom, it does not feel like a choice. It feels like a fact that arrived fully formed and demands you to believe it. But it is just a thought. They're just words in your head, generated by a brain that's doing its best job to protect you and make sense of this world. And guess what? You can actually question your brain. This is exactly what CBT or cognitive behavior therapy teaches. So Beck's foundation Beck's foundational technique is called cognitive restructuring. And it's the practice of identifying an automatic thought and examining the evidence for and against it, and intentionally choosing a more accurate thought. So decades of research. Decades of research show this is one of the most effective interventions for anxiety, depression, and a wide range of other health ment and a wide range of mental health challenges. Not because positive thinking cures everything, but because accurate thinking is genuinely different from distorted thinking. And the goal isn't to replace every negative thought with a positive one. It's to find the thought that is both believable and more. Useful and helpful. So the thought that is actually true rather than the thought your panicked pattern matching brain produced in half a second. So how do you actually start doing this? Here's a simple practice. Here's a simple practice. When you notice a strong feeling, backtrack to find the thought. Ask, what am I making this mean? And then ask, Is this a fact or is this an interpretation? Could someone else look at this exact situation and think something different? And what would a n and what would a neutral observer say actually happened here if you took away all of the meaning I've attached to it? You're not trying to toxic positive your way out of reality. I don't want you doing that, but you are trying to see reality more clearly. Trying to get more clarity here on what's actually happening. So sometimes you'll examine a thought and realize it's actually pretty accurate. And sometimes you'll realize your brain has been running a story that has very little to do with what actually happened. And both are useful information and both move you forward. So remember, circumstances are neutral. Thoughts are the story that your brain creates to explain your circumstance. And in that story is where all the power lives. Because the story is the one thing you actually have the ability to change. Not the thing that happened. You can't go back and change what happened, but you can change the meaning you're making of it. And that is so powerful. So this week, try the video camera test. When something happens that gets a reaction out of you, pause and ask, what would a camera actually capture here? What is just the fact? And then notice what your brain added on top of it. That's the thought. And that's where the work is. Next episode, we're going into feelings, where they actually live in your body. What is the physiological, what is physiologically happening when an emotion fires, and why you absolutely cannot think your way out of a feeling. Don't miss it. I'll see you there.