11. Change Your Negative Thought Patterns

Hello everybody and welcome to episode 11 of a dopamine kick. Hello and welcome. As we've said many times in our episodes, our aim is for you to take something away from his podcast. So we would really appreciate it if you could stick around till the end because that's when we have our little kicker, and a little kick out is something that you can take away from this podcast and use in the future. So following on from last week's episode on increasing your positive thoughts today we're going to discuss negative thoughts and how to control your dialogue around when they occur. And to start off, I just want to say this is not an episode where we're going to be saying to you, we used to have negative thoughts we used to struggle with this but now we don't because of x, y and Zed. This is something that Sparky and I still very much struggle with today more than we would like. And this episode is more about the days that we've got it right. This is what we've done. That's that's helped us. Yeah, and I just want to also add to that as well that we know that negative thoughts and controlling your negative thoughts is more of a serious topic, but we don't want to make all of our episodes doom and gloom. We're going to try and put as much of a positive spin on this as we can. So we always think and we've always thought this that laughter is a great medicine and it can be a great inspiration as well. And also seeking comfort in other people knowing that they are going through the same thing can make life feel a bit more bearable, it can make us feel a bit better. And it also gives us dopamine kicks as well. So a good dose of humour can be a great way to remind us of our self worth. And it also helps us get through a difficult time. So just wanted to mention that if we are trying to make this more of a lighthearted episode, that is why I think it's really important. What you said Sparky as well about seeking comfort and knowing that someone else goes through the same thing because that's the thing with negative thoughts is they can make you feel quite isolated and you can feel like nobody else is experiencing the same thing. So we're going to try and be as open and as honest as we can in this episode and use examples from our personal life and no I would say for myself, I'm generally quite a positive person and certainly with other people I try and keep my language fairly positive.

But inside my head, that is not always the case inside my head. My thoughts can be quite dark at times in my inner critic is absolutely brutal and can be so self sabotaging as well. You know, I think one of the reasons that I am able to be positive in negative situations is because nobody hurts me like I hurt myself. And when I'm in that negative mind frame it's not as simple as just switching it off stop feeling down stop being sad just think happy thoughts and it'll all go away. It's definitely a process so we really want to respect that in this episode and see are hearing that as well like makes me feel a little bit sad at the fact that you know when you say things like Oh, no one hurts me like I hurt myself. We talked about this before about having friends and family around us. And no one would speak to somebody that way. And we've mentioned before in a past episode about how we do speak to ourselves. So it's really important sometimes to remember how we speak to ourselves. And you know, sometimes there may be times where thinking positive isn't helpful. If you're in a crisis or you've just suffered a loss. It's actually okay to be sad during those times. It's okay to have a bad day. But it's still important to control your negative thinking and make sure that you actually are adding additional misery to the situation. And I think you know, we all do this on a daily basis. We have a tendency to catastrophize situations, and we have a tendency to sort of spiral a little bit, but I think it's important that we do reach out to our loved ones and we do tell people and we do kind of make ourselves feel valued for the fact that sometimes we can have negative thoughts, but we just need to learn how to manage them correctly. And negative thinking is something that doesn't just crop up when you're sad. As we previously discussed, the majority of our daily thoughts are negative and sometimes this can spiral us into a pit of negativity that we didn't need to be in. So I thought it'd be really good here for us to talk about times that we've spiralled into negativity. So, Sparky, I'm gonna call you out first here. You spiral into negativity anytime you have any minor health concern.

Okay, so I do I am a little bit of a hypochondriac. I'm not so much anymore, but I used to be terrible. I used to Google things. I used to go to the doctors and say this is what's wrong with me. I used to go onto a website and any tiny little symptom that I had, was like negative thought process in my mind, it would spiral down this massive Dark Hole of right, I've got cancer, I need to go get this checked out. Whatever, I've got cancer, oh my god, I'm going to die. It would spiral to a point where I would just believe that this was the end. This was the end for me. I literally can't count the amount of times that I've had to talk you down from the precipice where you've convinced yourself that you are weeks away from death. And like you've not even even even had a single test. Yeah, you just Googled a symptom. Hey, sometimes Dr. Google right, can actually provide you with an insight to Google is not your friend. No, no. You know, because we both know that when you go to a doctor's you don't have to accept the cookies for us for you know, we start going down the rabbit hole. But I completely think here that this is a case where you know, a lot of people can catastrophize it and think to themselves, Oh my God, I've got this I've got that that will start the negative process and and that's when they start spiralling down to this dark hole. And I think I think, you know, years ago, we just used to pick up a book didn't pay, and it used to be factual, but now we can Google anything on the internet and we think to ourselves, Oh, that's true. That's true. You know, it's not it's not always a good thing. Definitely. I mean, you Google something, and it might just give you like, one option when there could be like 10 or 12. But often when you when you see it written down, you give it so much weight, don't you? Like yeah, how many times do you read something and think is that factually true? Or do you just take it as gospel because you've read it on the internet, you just take it as face value because you think, yeah, I've got that symptom and I've got that symptom. So I almost have cancer or whatever the worst case possible scenario is, that's what I've got, and then that will start a negative spiral which can turn into things like anxiety, and can actually stop you progressing as well because it might actually stop you from going to see the doctor because you don't want to hear what you already believe that you think is going to happen to you.

In my defence, I didn't really do anything on that website. I was just trying to help out the situation. And then all of a sudden I get a text message from you saying you do realise that you've deleted everything off the website and then that's where my negative thought button came. In. And so now I've ruined

it and you know, we do this as well don't we all the time. Like how many times has someone said to you, can I have a chat with you or are you free on Monday at two o'clock because we need to have a tour. How many times we need to have a talk that just like my stomach just goes to the Yeah, I can't cope with that when someone is like can we just have a chat? I immediately I'm like, What have I done? Oh, God, this is gonna be so bad. And you know, sometimes they'll be the chat is isn't even about me.

45 Yeah, I mean, it's like sometimes you can take negative thoughts from someone's wording or a text message. You know, someone texts slightly different and then all of a sudden, like your mind's going crazy like thinking oh, no, this person this person's angry with me or everything's just falling apart. Like when you thought our partnership was completely over because she deleted the website. Yeah.

So like for example, last night, I started looking at barefoot shoes for children because apparently like the shoes that we wear now not very good causes problems with like the way their feet grow. So at three in the morning, I was like reading reviews on like the best barefoot shoes that you can buy for toddlers. 59

I live on my Amazon and that being annoyed that missing America in the UK and that kind of stuff is fairly normal behaviour for me to like him to like. Like I said roll over in bed and three in the morning on my phone, frantically researching something. Yeah, I mean, that's just procrastination, which is just what we've talked about. So I want to be asleep. I'm not procrastinating sleep. I'm desperate to be asleep. I just can't switch my mind off when I'm stressed that something is like important. I've missed something in life.

Right, I'll do the science bit. Oh, this is Shell's favourite part the science bit. Okay. Well, as always, I've got some fantastic studies for you this week. So we know from previous episodes that positive thoughts have an impact on not just our well being but our physical health as well. And that's also been shown four negative thoughts. So the first study that I've got is demonstrated that worrying affects our ability to make decisions. Now this isn't actually mentioned in the city, but I would very much linked that in with decision fatigue. So I think that having racing thoughts and worrying about things is going to be contributing to decision fatigue and therefore your ability to make decisions. So if you've not listened to our previous episode on that, absolutely, go back and take a listen. The second study shows that negative thoughts can also impact how we perceive pain. And this can lead to a really vicious cycle because the more pain you're in, the more negative thoughts you're likely to have. So as always, both of these studies will be in the show notes. But I just think it's really interesting to bring to light, what an impact negative thoughts can have on you as a person? Yeah. And also, when we think about negative thoughts, like I was saying before, it can be something so small that sets off that vicious cycle. So something so small, such as I don't like listening to the sound of my own voice. So I'm not going to start a podcast, you know, the thoughts then lead to the action or the inaction and if we're if we're listening to our negative thoughts, then we tend not to follow through with the actions as well. So that can really hold us back in life. So now we're going to talk about how you can control these negative thoughts. And I just want to add here as well. We're not saying that all these are 100% fix for you. But we do feel that some of these things can really help when you are spiralling into those negative thought processes. So the first thing that you can do is just to try to catch yourself once you spiralled into that piece of negativity, it is so much harder to pull yourself out. If you can catch yourself beforehand. You'll find it easier to turn things around. So if you're thinking about a situation, and you're thinking, oh, you know this is turning into a negative spiral, try to tell yourself, I'm thinking in a negative perception here. Now, how can I turn this around? How can I think about this more positively so that I can move forward and I can actually start doing the things that you want to achieve? So another really important thing to do is to stop labelling yourself and making that negative thought part of your identity. You can distance yourself by labelling the behaviour that you don't like instead, so I'm a horrible person becomes I feel horrible for picking a fight with my partner last night is so much easier to work on and change your behaviour. You don't like them to change your whole identity. And it's so true. We do it all the time, don't we? We will do something and then we instantly start thinking ourselves as some sort of bad person who deserves to be punished. And we go through all these different scenarios in our mind about how we're supposed to be punished and how we're going to be punished. But in reality, we don't actually have any evidence for that. So that's the next point that I wanted to mention. Is that thought actually true. What is your evidence? So for example, I'm a loser. What evidence do you have for that? Now, we talked about this in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy last time about negative thought processes and the kind of thoughts that you can have. So think about it like this. When we talk about what evidence do you have put your brain on trial for being a loser? Can you submit credible evidence to the court that would say that you are a loser? Most of what we tell ourselves is actually fiction. And you know, most of the time, if not all of the time, there is no evidence for that. So if we can't present evidence to the court, then it's not true. This is something that I found really, really powerful. I think I've touched on this on episodes previously. But it's only really quite recently in my life that I've learned that you can challenge your thoughts. So I just always assumed that the dialogue you had in your head was just a narrative of the day and that was that and you you couldn't really change that. But actually, when you start to question when you start to look for the evidence, you'll realise that so much of what you're you tell yourself is not right. And it's not true. Is it like it's not true? It's not and it's incredibly powerful that you recognise that and you're able to know see from that point of view, because although it doesn't stop the negative thoughts, sometimes because we're all human, we're going to have those negative emotions. The fact that you can reframe that and see that as I think can know, controlling in a different way means that you're making progress, and that's what it's all about. It's all about just making progress. Black and white thinking is another way of spiralling into negativity. So an example of that would be to think, you know, I failed at this, everyone else can do it. In reality, life is often Shades of Grey, but by black and white thinking we push those shades of grey into a negative. So when you're boxing yourself into that failed or not failed think is this truly a black or white situation. This is something that I used to really, really struggle with. And I'll just give you a small example here with this because obviously, I don't want to go into a large detail about the situation. But I used to really struggle with the negative things that used to happen in the world. And it used to really bring me down to the point where I actually suffered with anxiety and depression for quite a long period because of this. So when we talk when we talked about last time about how you know the things that we have in our lives, the people that we have in our lives, the things that we do on a daily basis. That help us perpetuate those negative thoughts and feelings. We don't realise that things like TV and the news, if they're negative can really get into our mindset. And if you're sitting there listening to the news every single day and you're taking in all of the negative things that can really perpetuate and spiral you into a deep dark hole. And I used to really struggle with nature and I know he sounds absolutely crazy shallow and you're going to think I'm absolutely mental.

And I probably am. But I used to think to myself that if an animal eats and other animals so for example, a whale playing with a seal because they have this thing where they do play Wii seals, then that was that was that was absolutely terrible. And I can't live in this world where that is existing. And I actually went to see somebody and they reframe the way I thought about that. And the way I now see is it's the ying and yang of life, there is always going to be a negative and there is always going to be a positive. But if we can bring them together and we can reframe the structure of how we see positive and negative and realise that one cannot exist without the other, then we can really move forward with the way that we feel about things and I think this is just me going off on a tangent again and you're probably sitting there thinking, Oh God, this is another thing coming out of Spark is this crap I'm looking at I can't see anything about Wales on this. But the point I want to make here really is that we do sometimes have a tendency to just discard the negative aspects of ourselves without working on them. And I think if you do push those negative aspects away from yourself, then you can't learn and grow from them, which is a theme that we talked about at this podcast on so many occasions, that we can learn from our negative experiences. And our negative thought processes. We can become more positive in the process and I hope that makes sense because that was just a ramble. I love it. sparkies sparkies weekly.

So I think so. So you you got on your soapbox you did your rant about your whales and your seals. Thought distortion is another way that we can spiral into negativity that is by catastrophizing and assuming things, it can just lead to spiralling thoughts that are often far removed from the actual facts. So when you find yourself distorting and spiralling take it back to is this thought true. Where is my evidence? Exactly? You know, we were talking about how we can read things online and how it can be so polarised so opposite, and then you don't know what's true. You don't know if this is true, or that's true. And I guess we could we could draw the same conclusion to our own thoughts and negative thoughts. So just basically conspiracy theories. That we tell ourselves there are conspiracy.

Where's the evidence? That's what you need to be asking. Exactly. And that leads us on to the next thing, which is the should statements. I should eat healthy. I should exercise negative judgement on yourself before we've even started things. So I should do this and I should do that statement. What you need to do here is trying to change the narrative. Not should I eat healthy, but can I eat healthier? And I know I'm not the biggest fan of SMART goals. As we all know about this. You recommending a SMART goal off script Sparky? I've I finally got through to you. This is me recommending a goal that you can stick to. So maybe changing those should stains too. Can I eat healthier? And then using those smart goals to actually stay on track? Yeah, because by saying I should, you're already implying that you haven't. And there's a negative connotation with that. So by saying I should be doing this, I shouldn't be doing it, but I haven't. So it's always it's always followed by some negative statement as well as I should be doing this. But I can't. I don't know if I can or something. It's always followed by some sort of negative Yeah. Whereas if you reframe that into a positive language, I can eat healthier by you know, you don't have to put a butt at the end of that sentence. But I should always always like you said it's always followed with a buck. Yeah, but and when people say things like but you think, are we we go it's the negative again, isn't it? Like yourself, oh, but I'm saying but again, like I want to be positive, but I'm voting for books.

Just just by and I guess the next one that we could talk about here is personalization. So that's taking things like criticism of your work as a personal slur. So you need to recognise that not every negative is directed at you. And you may internally in your internal dialogue, blame yourself for things, but it doesn't mean that others are you have no idea what other people are thinking. So when you're personalising things and you know, assuming oh, this person said this because they didn't like me or this person thinks I'm an idiot. You don't know what that person's thinking you have no idea and probably they aren't spending much time thinking about you. Like if you think of your own internal dialogue, how much time do you spend thinking about other people compared to the time you spend thinking about yourself and criticising yourself? That is just so true? Like it's not a thought process that enters your mind is yeah, definitely most people are most people, myself included, are more preoccupied with their own thoughts. And I guess you know, the last thing that we need to do which is the last point on our list, is just to be patient. This is a process and it will take time. You know, you've spent your entire life perfecting your iniquity and your negative thoughts. So don't be disheartened if you're not making much progress in the beginning. Absolutely. So I would say this is similar to something like getting getting fit, you wouldn't just go out buy a pair of running shoes run a marathon the next day having never trained, you probably wouldn't even get out of sight of the startline before beatable over gasping vomiting.

If we want to make big changes to our physical health is sort of accepted that is a process and it takes time. You don't go from zero to hero and overnight. Mental health is no different. It's it's still a process is still takes time. And you need to be patient with yourself and give yourself that time and don't just give up because it's difficult at the start. It's going to be the most difficult at the beginning. Because that's when you're trying to change your habits, but it will get easier and it will get better over time. So as I said at the beginning of the episode, I wanted you to stick around and wait for this little kicker because I think this is a great thing that you can do to help with your negative thinking. So this week's little kicker is a challenge. Yes. So our challenge that we set you is for the next seven days. I want you to pause and catch yourself when your negative thinking just went today, are you to pause and stop that negative thought if you can manage to turn it around with some of what we discussed today. Then that's absolutely great. But the actual challenge is to just catch yourself once a day is the first step to change and it's the one you're going to need to practice time and time again. It doesn't require any crap you don't need to buy anything. So start straightaway today from now for the next seven days went today. I want you to catch yourself with a negative thought. And we'll check in next week and see how you've got on. And also I just want to quickly add to the end of that little kicker that we are going to do this ourselves and this is not a script. This was not written in the script. This is something that I feel that we should do, because I think that we can actually report back and see how it made us feel perfect. See you next week. All right. That's everything this week, guys, but if you want to carry on with the conversation, join us over on our social media platforms or on all the major channels and our handle is a dopamine kick. We'd also be super grateful if you could leave us a review on the podcast wherever you're listening, because it helps us to grow our audience and helpful people. Okay, we'll see you in the next one. Bye bye