Ep. 91 Negative Thinking

Hi, and welcome to the Mindful Shade Podcast. I'm Paula Parker and I'm a life and weight loss coach. So we have on average 60, 000 thoughts a day. And according to, you know, the internet, I don't know how they got this information, but 75 percent of those thoughts are negative, which is 45, 000 thoughts.

They also say 95 percent are repetitive. Now, again, I don't know where this research comes from and how they came about it, but just imagine, even if that's half of it is true, that's 30, 000 thoughts a day. And I can't, I'm not the best at math, but 22 or so 22, 000 are negative. That's still a lot, even if we cut that by half.

So we all have a tendency towards negative thinking. So, Some, I think more than others, I'm sure you can think of someone who tends just to skew that way more often than not. It's like no matter you, what you're talking about, their comment is negative, right? So usually a colleague or a family member, someone who's in your life by default, not by selection on your part.

So I have someone in my family who I love dearly, but who pretty often is negative. So give you an example. Okay. So once I was feeding Rea, my baby, and commenting on, you know, how cute it was and how sweet she is. And this person said, you know, it just makes me think about all the babies who don't have food.

And I'm like, why, like, why, why would your brain go there in this moment? Why would you even bring that up? Right. Or there's a picture of we have a picture in our bathroom of a rainforest trail and my dog is in it. So my dog is like really small. He's just on the trail and you can barely see him.

And when she saw that picture, her comment was, Oh, you know, it's going to be really hard to look at when Huxley's gone. And. You know, I'm like, why? Why would you say that? It's like so negative. And you know, I have to say that unfortunately, actually has passed. And it's not hard when I see that picture. I am just filled with love of that memory of him when we were on that hike.

Okay, so You know that there's people like this who just tend to have a negative comment about things and when they are commenting negatively, you can only imagine what's going on inside their head, right? The thinking that's going on, all that negative thinking that we only really hear a fraction of. So you're not likely one of these people, okay, but you still might have a lot of negative thinking, especially when it comes to food and weight.

So today I'm going to talk a little bit about how it shows up, how negative thinking shows up in weight loss, and also why this happens and then what you can do about it. All right. So essentially I was thinking about this and I think there's really three main ways that it shows up. One is that we minimize what's going well.

So for example, we just don't see it. We just see the negative. So we don't see, we just minimize any progress that we have made. Maybe we have released five pounds, but we have 20 to go. So our brain just really discounts the five pounds and it's just so focused on the 20 pounds that we still want to release.

Or we really minimize. How we have been showing up for ourselves, how we have been drinking lots of water, how we have been allowing some hunger, how we said no to the popcorn that we really wanted the other night, that kind of thing. We just don't see it. We just focus on, oh, you know, I overate on this day or, or my pants are feeling really tight or whatever it is, right?

We're just, we don't see the good in our brains. It's like we put on this, these glasses where we only see the negative. Another way this shows up. is in pessimism about future success. So we will have negative thoughts like it's hard to lose weight. It will be a struggle. Even if I lose it, I'm not going to be able to maintain my results.

So what I'm doing isn't sustainable. Or a huge one is I can't trust myself, right? So I'm worried. About how I'm going to show up in this situation or I have this thing coming up and I don't trust myself And so you're already feeling so negative even before that thing has even happened Even before you've overeaten or had, you know, a couple of glasses of wine that you don't want So you're already thinking I can't trust myself and you feel negative beforehand The third category that I really notice a lot is negative thoughts about your body.

So this is so interesting because there aren't usually huge fluctuations in the body from day to day. But I'm sure that you have had experiences where one day, either you have a lot of positive thoughts about your body, or you're not really thinking about it that much, it's kind of neutral. But then for some reason, The next day, nothing really has changed and yet in your view, everything has changed.

It's like, Oh wow, I really didn't notice all the cellulite before. Oh, I really didn't notice that. Like, Oh, I don't look good. Or I have such an, all these negative things about your body that the previous day just didn't occur to you. Right. So it can show up in that way too. You look in the mirror and you're thinking, Oh, wow, how did I not see this before?

Like I don't look good in these clothes, anything like that. I just want to normalize that for you. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about why this is happening. So a few reasons. One is of course, our brains have a negativity bias, which is just by design. It's how our brains function to protect us from danger, right?

So for millions and millions of years, this is how we evolved. So that we would pick up on danger and we were more likely to survive if we could identify that danger. So, of course, in today's day, we don't have danger in terms of a saber toothed tiger chasing us or some, like, rustling in the grass that could be negative, right?

But it might be other things that we perceive as negative. So Our brain is just very high. Our brain is just going to highlight that for us. And it's considered a negativity bias. Our brain tends to really highlight and spot anything that's negative. Another thing that I noticed a lot is a tendency to anchor up.

So what I mean by anchoring up is in your brain, you will compare yourself or your body to others who are thinner or who are more seemingly successful. Our brains tend to not anchor down. To other people, our brains tend to anchor up, which is just really interesting. Right? So we can also do this with ourselves.

So we forget about where we were at our highest weight or when we were really in a lot of food drama. And we forget about that version of ourselves and we don't see our progress. Instead, what we typically do is we remember a time when maybe it was really easy for us or, you know, your wedding, what you look like in your wedding photo.

We anchor our current experience or our current body weight to that small moment in time. And then we feel bad, right? Because it's, it's more, we have negative thoughts about where we are in the present. Another reason negative thinking happens is really hormones, right? So for sure, if you still have your period, there's going to be a drop in estrogen and progesterone before your period starts.

We. Most of us have experienced this, right? And this just affects the neurotransmitters in your brain, such as serotonin and dopamine. So if you are grumpy, if you are cranky and you're thinking just skews more negative during those, like that week before your period, it's hormonal, right? Nothing has gone wrong.

It's like physiology that you're working with. And then the last one is habits. So this goes back to that example that I gave in the beginning of people that just tend to skew negative. So. That can just become a habit, right? It simply becomes their default way of thinking. So if this is you, don't feel bad.

You probably learn this from the people around you, from your family of origin, who role modeled this way of thinking. So I truly believe the biggest gift that I ever received from coaching was from my long time coach, Karen, who really helped me shift an overall really negative view of the world. into a more neutral and even sometimes positive view of the world.

I was able to access that through my coaching with her. So we often learn that view or that way of thinking really early on. So I've heard that. And for the psychologists out there, I'm sure you know, but it's oftentimes before the age of seven that we have learned how to view the world. So you are looking up to your family to help you understand the world and determine how to think about the world.

And so what they said, The way that they talked about things just became how you started to think about it too. Not intentionally, of course, but just because you were so primed to learn. You were like a sponge absorbing all that information. Okay. So when it comes to food and body, my clients talk a lot about the negative thoughts that they picked up early on.

The biggest example I see is you should eat all the food on your plate, right? That's probably the most common, but the great thing about negative thinking being a habit is that all habits So if you are one of these people and your brain tends to go there a lot, you can totally change this. So let's talk about that.

What do we do about our negative thinking? So conventional wisdom will say, look for the positive, you know, do a gratitude journal, but I don't know about you. I have not found this to be very effective. Why? Because that negative thinking is creating a negative state in your body. Okay. And then you're not going to have access to positive thoughts that you genuinely believe in that moment, that feel true to you.

So, here's what not to do, okay? I call it paper, papering over with positive thinking. So, I'll give you an example. So, I'm sure that you've gone on holiday somewhere and maybe you've really been looking forward to it, but especially if you are with your kids, it's not really much of a holiday. It's not really much of a vacation for you.

It's just work in a different place, right? And so if it's not going well, if the kids are cranky, if it's really hot and muggy, and there's bugs biting you that you didn't really see in the pictures online, then you're Even if you booked a nice hotel, depending on where you are, it might be kind of musty.

There's that moldy smell in the bathroom that just doesn't seem to go away, even if it's a nice hotel. And so maybe you're just disappointed and you're having lots of negative thoughts like, this sucks. It shouldn't be this way. This is not what I signed up for. Why do I even try? Like, why do we even try to do this kind of thing?

And then you tell yourself, Oh, I shouldn't be so negative. I should be grateful. Like, look at how fortunate I am to be here on a holiday. So you decide to think, okay, you know what? This is great. This is going to be great. This is a great holiday, but you don't believe it. That's the problem, right? So even if you have those positive thoughts, it doesn't do anything.

It doesn't change your experience of the holiday. This is why if you are in the practice of doing a gratitude journal, it can be great. So if you're doing it and you love it, don't stop doing it. It's, it can be wonderful. But if you're doing it and you're just going through the motions and you're having lots of negative thinking and you're writing down things you're grateful for, but you are not embodying any of those thoughts, you're not experiencing any kind of grad, the feeling of gratitude, then it's forced.

Don't fight it. When you are thinking negatively, simply accept it. Don't try to make it go away immediately. And you'll notice that just by dropping this resistance, it will lessen its impact. It won't feel like suffering. It won't feel so negative. And the other thing I want to mention is to not judge yourself for negative thinking.

Even if after I'm talking, you're like, God, you know what? I think I complain a lot. I think that I may, I might be one of those people that. is very negative. Don't judge yourself for that. Know that thinking negative doesn't mean that something is wrong with you. We all do it to a certain degree. Okay. So everyone does it to a certain degree, but then it just becomes, does it become a habit or not?

And of course, even if it is a habit for you, we can totally change that. Okay. It's not going to go away immediately. And it doesn't have to, we want to accept a certain level of negative thinking. Okay. And also know that there is things that we can do about it. Okay. So that's what I'm gonna talk about now.

What do we do about it? The first thing is no surprise here. Awareness. Okay. So identify the thought as negative. So we want to be aware of our thinking. It's called metacognition, right? We can't do much if we are not aware of what is actually happening in our brain, why we feel the way that we feel. So for example, you want to be thinking to yourself, this is just a thought error.

That's why I think about a negative thought. I'm like, Oh, my brain's confused. This is a thought error. Thoughts are simply electrical activity in my brain. It's not what I truly believe. I don't trust it and I won't act on it. Right? So I won't act on any thought that I have before coffee. That's my sister's rule.

And it's also mine. I've adopted it. Okay. And feel free to adopt it. yourself. So it takes a long time for us to learn and build proficiency in something new, like creating awareness about our thinking and then thinking differently, especially when it comes to weight loss, because we've just been thinking a certain way about our bodies and food for so long.

So don't feel like you have to learn it all in one go. Give yourself the gift of time. If you notice a lot of negative things, If you have negative thinking coming up, that's okay, right? Give your, give yourself some time to even like ideas and concepts that I'm talking about today. They will click after repeated exposure.

So you might find it helpful to relisten to some of the episodes here, or of course sign up for coaching because when you sign up for coaching, you are constantly going to be exposing your brain to tools on working with your brain and working with negative thinking and to accessing. Okay. What I think of as like a higher level of thinking, not necessarily positive rainbows and daisies, but a higher level of thinking.

So I'm in a few different coaching groups and I find that I just need to hear things over and over. I need deeper explanations on things and that very dedicated time and space to focus on something and to explore my experience of it. So having that is just, it's more conducive, I think, for focus, for. A reorientation to what I'm working on and I just get more insights.

So recently I was on one of my calls with my parenting coach and we're working on teaching Tristan to fall back asleep on his own when he wakes up in the night, which sometimes can be. You know, two, sometimes three, but normally it's at least once. And I know this is going to seem so obvious now, but it wasn't until I was talking with her that I realized how much I was sabotaging his learning by falling asleep alongside him in the middle of the night.

So he goes to bed on his own. We have like a good bedtime routine. He falls asleep all by himself. But when I was going in there at night, I was falling asleep with him. So sometimes it's like the most obvious thing that we can miss. So having another brain on the problem, asking you to map it all out, things click into place that maybe you've heard before, but it just didn't get fully integrated.

Okay. So I had a bedtime sleeping strategy, but I really needed to go try it out. See that it wasn't working. Talk about it, think through how, what I was actually doing in real life and be honest about that with myself in a safe environment with a safe person. And then I could change it. So when you start becoming more aware of your thoughts in general, you'll likely feel even worse.

It's not good news, right? Because now you're like, Oh God, I have all of these negative thoughts I need to change. If I want to start feeling better, if I want to start, you know, eating better and releasing weight, it's kind of like, I always give the example of we've been doing a lot of home edit kind of stuff.

Maybe you've seen that show. I think it's still on Netflix home at it. They have some books and stuff. And it's, so it's like, The strategy is to take everything out of the closet and take a look at it. And that's like what we do with our brains and coaching. So you take everything out and you just take a look at it and then you decide intentionally, okay, this is what I want to keep and put back in intentionally in the right place.

And this is what I just, I made a mistake here buying this thing, right? Or I don't use this or this is not serving me energetically. It's not serving me. And so I'm going to get rid of it. It's the same thing, but you'll notice if you've ever done any kind of home edit or Marie Kondo or any kind of closet organization, the minute you have everything out of the closet and onto the floor, that's when you don't feel like doing it.

This was a terrible idea. Why did I decide to do this? I don't have the energy. I don't have the strength. It feels overwhelming and it can be like that sometimes, right? So we take a look at all of our thoughts and then we're like, okay, Oh, wow. I have a lot of negative thinking that I need to clear up.

Okay. So just know that that is normal when you start taking action and start working on this by some of the things, even then I'm going to offer in this episode, you will just like putting things back in the closet, slow and steady. If you can get through that initial river of misery, you will get to the other side.

So instead of trying to go straight to gratitude or thinking positive to feel better instantly, I want you to try neutralizing the negative thought. So I'll give you an example from my, from my life. So Tristan is in soccer on Mondays, Monday afternoons, and we have it in our family calendar, and he's been going for a few weeks.

And how it typically works is my husband goes and gets him from preschool and brings him home, and then I walk over to the community center with him. And last week. My husband was out with a friend and he had the stroller in the car. And I was thinking it was getting closer and closer to the time. And I was thinking, well, either he's gone to get him at preschool or he's forgotten.

So I called him and of course he doesn't answer, which I also have a lot of practiced negative thinking about, okay, that he forgets to put on his phone and I can never reach him. And I always get very annoyed that he doesn't answer me. Okay. So I'm texting, I'm calling, it's getting closer to four o'clock when we have to, when the class starts.

And. I'm thinking, okay, well, if we leave now, we'll be a little bit late, but that's okay. I'm like managing my thoughts and like, it's okay for a little late. That's okay. But then I'm thinking, of course he forgot, right? He always forgets stuff like this. I'm the one who has to keep our lives organized, et cetera, et cetera.

So I'm getting pretty cranky at this point. I'm thinking, well, okay, I don't mind if we're late, but now it's getting to the point where we're not even going to make the class and this is really annoying and he always does this. And, you know, I booked off time from my. from my schedule off work for this.

Eventually I track him down through his friend, but of course at this point it's way too late to make the class and he's just going to go pick Tristan up and then just come home. And then his mom texted me because she was there waiting at the class, at the soccer class. And then I was even more mad at him because I was like, okay, he disappointed me.

He disappointed his mom and Tristan missed out on his class that he loves. And. You know, really, in retrospect, is this a big deal? When Tristan got home, he didn't even notice. At least he didn't say anything about the class. He didn't even mention soccer when he got home. I definitely was more upset about it than he was.

But I share this because our brains just go there sometimes, right? They have little fits. It's okay for him to miss a soccer class. He's three. It will be fine, right? But I just want to emphasize that this is normal. Our brain definitely goes negative, right? My brain too. But what I have now is the ability to recognize it within minutes and clean it up.

So see it for what it is so that I don't react from that place of anger. When my husband gets home, I can neutralize the negative by having that self awareness and asking, do I really want to be upset about this? No. Okay, so I don't have to feel super happy about it, but at least I'm calm and I can see the bigger picture, right?

So when they come home, I'm in a good place mentally. So you can also neutralize your negative thinking by telling yourself, it's okay that your brain goes there sometimes. that you don't have to change how you're thinking right away. It's not a problem that you need to fix immediately that you're thinking negative, right?

So what you might do in the meantime is get out of your head for a minute and go into your body. So move your body in a way that feels good to you. Walking, especially out in nature, if you can stretching yoga, or maybe it's more high intensity for you like boxing or running dance. I recently started doing bar this thing online.

I would highly, highly, highly recommend it. It's called, I think it's called bar definition. I have to take a look. I think the girl's name is Jacqueline who does it. But it's an online program and you can do it from home and her, I've never done bar before, but I really love it. And I will say it's changing my body.

So anyways, check that out. I would totally, totally recommend it. And it's super affordable too. So we can use our body to help shift our mood. Only when you get to more neutral thinking, can you then go on to access that more positive thinking and then start feeling better. So intentionally thinking things and more importantly believing them at the same time.

So when you build up this proficiency in managing your thinking, become more able to neutralize negative thinking, for example, so that you can then Move towards thinking more positively and taking more action from that place and really just having a better experience of life. Something we all want, we're all striving for.

I just want you to know that it's totally possible. Sometimes we do something well, but then we forget. Right? So you might be doing this for a little while and you're like, Oh, I got it. And then you slide back into more negative thinking. That's okay. It's just like when you say you do a recipe and you do, you make something really well the first time and then you go back to make it again and you're like, Oh, why didn't it turn out so well?

It just didn't turn out. It's like, we kind of just forget. It's just how our brains work, whether it's a recipe or weight loss or anything. So we need to learn how to repeat our success. We need to learn it. Over and over and over again. So we need to break down exactly how we did it. Our specific thoughts are specific, how we implemented the tools that we learned, how we neutralized our thinking in that moment so that we can do it over and over again.

So if you're into that, that's exactly what we do in coaching. So feel free to book a call with me. I have room for clients right now, and we can talk about what. That might look like for you. So how we would create a strategy and more importantly, a mindset that you need to reach your weight loss goals.

All right. I hope that was really helpful. If you have any questions, please reach out to me and I will talk to you again soon. Okay. Bye.