Welcome to the nourishing. Amy podcast. I'm Amy Rankin. I am an emotional intelligence and life coach as Speaker, a Creator, and a wellness. Chaser, I have created this podcast for you to learn how 'but mindset changes and get really actionable. Takeaways to find out who you are, what lights you up, how you can love yourself again and how to live your best life. Give yourself the space to welcome in more self-care and
confidence. Reduce feelings like overwhelm and stress and let find your sparkle again. Are you ready? Let's do it. Hello and welcome to episode 105 of the nourishing. Amy podcast, welcome back. Thank you so much for being here with me today. Today, I'm going to be talking with you about confirmation bias. Now it is a topic that I have spoken about before a little while ago in the mindset series when we were talking about cognitive distortions and thinking patterns, but it feels
like a super relevant. One that has been coming up for me personally myself. Certainly, but also quite a few other people when we've been like having conversations and noticing noticing things coming up for us. And it's kind of that feeling of like, you know, what, it's like when it rains, it, pours, and you just feel like, could there
be anything else to go wrong? So I want to talk about that today but of course, before I jump into that topic, I'm going to give you my recommendation, so if you follow me over on Instagram, you would have seen that. I've recently. Over the last few weeks really gotten back into reading again, it's a habit that I've started to bring in as a bit of a habit swap. So, again, habit swaps is something that I have spoken a
lot about on the podcast. There's a whole episode on ditching bad habits and the benefits of bringing in habit swaps and stuff like that, that you can go and listen to. But a bad habit that I was getting into, was scrolling more specifically scrolling either early in the morning and also
later at night as well. So, after I finished work, I feel like You know, having a baby and then having work and all of that kind of stuff, it just can feel really overwhelming some days and I just want to switch my brain off and so my go-to will either be like a TV show or scrolling on my phone, which you guys will always know that I don't encourage anyone to fully cut these things out of their lives all together, but the key is kind of recognizing how is this
becoming limiting for me and, or is it actually becoming limiting? And I know for me, when I, Myself that question. I was like well yeah it is because it's keeping me up later at night. That ideally I would like to be which means I'm then also not getting up as early as what I would like to be and I'm not getting that time for me in the mornings and prioritizing that time for me in the mornings because I'm pressing snooze because I'm tired, which I know a lot of you guys can relate to
as well. So I started to read my books again. So, I kicked my little butt into gear and I just saw this, is it, like, you've got to stop the scroll and it's just so Ritual, especially when you're feeling tired, when you're feeling exhausted, if you're feeling mentally physically emotionally drained, it's just really easy to switch, back to a flip back, to those distraction techniques again. That's also another episode that I have as well on distraction techniques.
I think it's called, I used track distracting yourself from reality. So anyway, a book that I just finished, which I did post about, on my Instagram is called you need to know by Nicola. Moriarty guys, it is the best book I have read in a very, very long time.
And I think the reason why I kind of fell off the wagon a little bit from reading, is because the recent ones that I've read whilst I did like them, I wasn't like fully fully hooked in and so I was reading them because I was like enjoying the storyline and it was good but I wasn't like, oh my gosh I can't put this book down. Honestly, I read this whole book
in, like, two days. I woke up at 5 a.m. so that I could read and try and get the book finished before I wanted to be out of bed and doing my normal morning routine and that's not something that I normally do. So yeah I really really recommend that book. If you're looking for a new book to read and I also have a books highlight over on my Instagram now, too, because there's been quite a few different like shares and message. That have been coming through with different books that other
people are reading as well. I popped a question box up on my Instagram and just asked, like, what are you guys reading now? And yeah, so, shared all of that. And also, just some of my like, very brief reviews or perspectives and opinions on a whole heap of books that I've read. And there's also a whole list.
So I am in to book club, Facebook groups, one is I think the Shameless book club Bob actually don't even know what the other Facebook group is called, but I kind of just scroll through and have a little bit of a look and I click through and read the comments on comments of, like, people that have read either books that I have just finished reading or similar type of books to what I like.
And then I read through all the comments and get recommendations and create a little bit of a list there so I also popped that up in the books highlight as well. Actually another little recommendation off the back of that would also be Goodreads if you Use Goodreads. It's an app and also a website, and you can create your own account, and you can put in different, you can create
different shelves. So, like bookshelves of like books that I've read books, I want to read you can create all different shelves, I just have books. I've read in books, I want to read and then it will automatically put books. I'm reading as well. It creates your own for you. When you mark books as reading or red, you can give Our ratings, you can write comments, you can read through this. Literally like thousands of comments on all like, you could find any book that you could
ever think of on there. And it's just so good at such a good tool and also it will recommend books for you. So say, for example, if when I clicked read on you need to know and marked it from Reading to read it. Then pops up at the bottom and is like because you read this book, you might also like and gives you all these other different recommendations to. So It's so good.
It links with my Kindle up somehow, I don't know how I'm not very tech savvy with that but it links with my Kindle app gives me suggestions over on my Kindle and I love it. So there you go. You need to know is the book Goodreads is the app that I'm really loving, and I have also just started reading last night after you need to know, I started reading. It Happened One Summer by Tessa Bailey, and I'm loving it so far. I've got to admit. I did stay up for about an hour
reading it last night. Which is pretty rare for me as well. So there you go. Some fun recommendations for you. A few little different ones. I haven't recommended books for ages. So go and check out my books, highlight, if you're into reading, and you can get a few recommendations for yourself from me, and from you guys as well. All right. Now, let's talk about what we actually came here to talk about
today, cognitive biases. And again, like I said, it's sometimes that feeling of like, when it rains it, pours And for me, I noticed this coming up for me more.
So, like last week and the week before, when I was already noticing that I was feeling a little overwhelmed and just busy, like I had a lot of things that I was trying to get done and a lot of things on my to-do list and I realized that, okay, like I've probably scheduled in a few too many things and committed, that's the word I'm looking for. I've committed to a few too many things.
And what I've done is, then also left my Myself feeling a little overwhelmed couple that with Ali being in that leap 9 and just being an absolute psycho some days. It was a lot the last few weeks and I kind of started to notice my mindset shift, when I was noticing, my feelings starting to shift as well. So, rather than just feeling a little overwhelmed or burnt out towards the end of the day, it
was more. So, like, starting to become an all day feeling once I was getting towards the end of the week, Because I was starting to feel like, oh, gosh, like I don't have enough time. I've still got so many things left on my list that I want to get done. And you know, like it's Thursday, it's Friday. I've got so many things to be doing anyway, so what then started to happen once, I noticed that mindset shift and me feeling different started to happen when I was more
regularly. Feeling overwhelmed was that the mindset flow-on effect from That Was Then me really starting to pick up a notice the things that were going badly or wrong or just things that weren't like ideal situations. So, you know, it can be the things that we feel like we are like wanting to, like roll out eyes about and like, oh God, okay, like here we go again or you know, it's just like, oh, of course I'm stuck in traffic. Like, you know, I'm already
running late. And now I'm stuck in traffic or I'm running late and now I need to go and get petrol and my petrol lights, come on, and I've put on an outfit to get dressed for the day and it's got baby food all over it or whatever. The case might be, it's noticing that when we have a cognitive distortion and in this example that I'm using the cognitive distortion is like I'm having a bad day or like this week is not going as according to plan things like that.
What your brain is actively doing is looking for evidence to support that thinking. A pattern or that thought and there's a reason that this happens basically your brain always wants to be proving yourself, right? It's evolutionary. If you were being proved right or if you were, you know, the leader of your pack back in the caveman days, then that would be a really good thing. It meant that your tribe continued to grow and to flourish, and to stay alive and all of these types of things.
So there's definite benefits in Eight of our brain being this way and creating these this want to always be right? But as we look at how we have grown and evolved and how our thinking patterns have now changed from there, of course, we don't always need to be right. But it's a way that we filter information, because guys, it's physically impossible for you to take in information from every single thing. Every single second that is happening around you. Every single day.
I know I've told you this statistic before but we have something like 3 million things to be aware of through all five of our senses, every single second. And that's obviously way too many. I'm trying to remember if it's 3 million or 3 billion, I'm going to say million just to be safe. But obviously I mean regardless a three million things to be aware of every single second is just way way way too many, it's so overwhelming.
It's just physically and mentally impossible and so to do That with filtering our information and in a way that we in a way when we do that, we are looking for evidence to support the thoughts that we already have. Because as well, that also feels easy like it's not hard. It's not an energy intensive tasks that we need to be doing. And so what the key here is to really start to be noticing and recognizing what are the thoughts that I have? What are the stories I'm telling myself?
So whether it's things like, you know, we can look at limiting beliefs here as well. And how our limiting beliefs, or negative self-talk can come into play here. When we are having some negative self-talk, or a limiting belief coming up, I'm not good enough. I'm not fit enough, I'm not healthy enough. I need to, you know, all of the need two things I need to lose weight, I need to eat healthier, I need to be doing this, all the shoulds, I should be at this
stage in my life. I should be doing this. I should be doing that and comparing what that means is, you know, mind we're creating a gap of like, where we are at the moment and where we feel like we need to be, always should be all we have to be in our life and when that happens that can feel really disempowering. And so then what were also doing is when we look at then creating that cognitive bias is that we're buying into that thought and we're finding evidence to
agree with that thought. And to Support that thought. And so what that means is any time that something happens for you during that day that supports, that thought of like, oh like let's say for example, you decide to go for a go for a run or do a workout. If you're thinking pattern is something like, I'm not fit enough and then you're going for your run and you start to get puffed and you start to buy into that cognitive bias of like, see I told you I'm not fit enough.
I'm so puffed I Finish this round this is really hard. We start to get that thinking pattern and that Snowball Effect is sorry. What I was trying to say that snowball effect of like one thought then jumps to another to another to another. And all of a sudden we've created this big story in our head, just from the original
thought of, I'm not fit enough. So this is obviously related to so many different thinking thinking, patterns thoughts that we can have, it can be things like I'm not smart enough. If I'm not good at public speaking, if we're thinking about like work things, or this presentation is really bad that I've got created. It could be.
Also if we look at how it relates to relationships that we have in our lives, whether that's a romantic relationship or, you know, a friendship relationship that you have and we want to be looking at generalizations that we can be making about people. So, like this person's so rude, or this person's really mean to me.
You things like that? Or this person always does this, or does that how we then buy into that and we create a cognitive bias then and we are looking for evidence to support that and your brain will then grab on to them and be like, see I told you this person's rude or see, I told you this person doesn't like you. I told you this person's mean because this just happened, or they just said this and look, it can be related to so many different cognitive distortions.
So, again, with that mindset, These that I've done, I run through, I think 15 or 16 different cognitive distortions or thinking patterns that we have and it can be related to then things like mind-reading or things like personalization, which there's definitely separate episodes on that.
So I won't run specifically through that again for you but it's funny like I think with this specific episode today, I want to look at calling yourself out because I know I really needed to do it for me last week, calling yourself out and just Rising like hang on a second. Am I feeding myself some bullshit here? Like, is there something coming up for me? That I am creating this thought, like I'm having a bad day or I don't have time and how am I then buying into that?
How am I looking for evidence to support that? Which is then also making me feel worse, right? It's not making me feel any better. And then what we want to do is look at 0. Okay. Well, what's the opposite of this for me? Like, yes, I'm recognizing that I'm feeling overwhelmed, or I'm feeling stressed or, I feel like, I don't have time or if we look at some of the other
examples, okay. Yes, I've got a presentation or a meeting that I have at work that I'm feeling nervous about, or yes, I recognize that I'm not at the level of Fitness, I would like to be at, we don't want to take away from the reality of the situation because that's, that's the words not coming to me. I'll come back to it in a minute, distracting yourself. Sorry from reality and It's just repressing how you're actually feeling.
So we want to bring acknowledgement to the situation itself but what we also want to do is bring acknowledgement that, okay? This is how I'm feeling. These are the thoughts that are happening around this situation, for me. So what is the reality that I'm actually creating for myself? Because at the end of the day, you create your own reality with your thoughts. And so when you keep that in mind and this was kind of the turning point for me last week when I reminded myself of that
and I was like Hang on a second. Yes, you're feeling overwhelmed and stressed. Yes. You feel like there's not enough time and you still got a lot of things on your to-do list. This is like me just, you know, giving myself a little pep talk, but that doesn't mean that this whole week is a write-off that this whole day needs to be bad.
That it doesn't mean that you need to keep buying into this and finding evidence to support that and just agreeing agreeing agreeing with today's bad today sucks. This week's terrible? This week's really hard. I'm feeling so Burnt out. So I do encourage you. If you would like to get a pen and paper and just write out like what's that first original thought that you can recognize or pinpoint that has started off that whole like I'm having a bad
day or I'm feeling overwhelmed. I feel quite anxious. I'm feeling worried, I feel stressed, like, whatever the thoughts are recognize them first, because this is your very first turning point. And then what you might also be able to do and maybe, It might be based off some of the examples I've just given is recognizing. All right. Well, what's the flow-on effect effect from there? Oh my goodness. I cannot get my words out today. What's the flow-on effect from
there? Or what's the snowballing that's happening after that? That it's like this thought jumps to this one, to this one to this one. What's the evidence that my brain is then creating and then our third question that we can ask is how is all of this actually making me feel? Because when we can recognize the feeling that's Not. That's also a really big awareness point that we can notice.
Okay well is this a feeling I want to be feeling because we can also look at it in the opposite way that we can create more empowering and liberating cognitive biases and we can create cognitive biases and thoughts that feel really good for us. Like I am fit enough, I am healthy, I am living a healthy lifestyle and feeling really good and by having those type of things. Thinking, of course, again, there's like a whole array of
examples. That's just some very quick examples of the top of my head, that, that could be related to that. They feel so much more empowering. They feel more positively stated, well, because they are more positively stated, which means that, then what your brain is also, doing is looking for evidence to support those more positively stated cognitive biases of like, yes, I am doing all of these things to help to support the lifestyle that I want to be living.
Habits are feeling really good for me. I'm feeling really empowered within myself because I am taking responsibility for my own life and I'm taking responsibility and taking action on the habits. That the that I know make me feel good that I really helped me to be moving towards the person that I want to be and towards feeling the way that I want to be feeling because at the end of the day that is what we really want to be focusing on. How do you feel?
What are you doing to take responsibility? E2, Move Yourself towards feeling the way that you want to be feeling and creating the lifestyle and living the life that you want to be living because at the end of the day, there is always going to be things that are happening that
are outside of your control. There is always going to be other people and other situations and circumstances that come into play for how you are navigating through, whatever it is, that's happening for you in your life. Whether that is situations that feel really great and empowering and self and you're bringing in, Zach self confidence and self esteem for you or whether it's things that don't feel so empowering and that you are noticing.
There's some negative self-talk, there's some self-doubt, you know, all those types of things that can start to come up. There's some questioning, there's maybe relationship breakdowns or non ideal situations in the workplace and things like that, that we can look at. So we want to look at okay. How can I make these cognitive biases, feel empowering for me and If that feels a little bit too far out of Reach For You. Alrighty.
Well, how about I just take that one step backwards for a minute and think about instead of creating those biases, that feel really positive and empowering, how can I actually just call out the ones that are happening for me at the moment and have a look at a really hard. Look at, what is the reality that I am creating for myself right now? Does that feel good for me? And if it doesn't, what are some small steps that I can start to put into place to start to
create some change? Onto that. Because when we start to put in the little steps, they start to create a flow on effect that they get more and more. And we start to focus on those things that we're doing that. Do help us feel good. And then we notice that it might take a few days. It might take a few weeks, maybe it takes a few months, but we start to notice that it really has been in all of the little little steps that we've taken when we've broken down. What is going to help me to feel
good today? How can I take action on that? What's one thing I could do? To help me today and we then have a look back in another few weeks or a few months and realize it's actually been in all of those tiny little moments that have made, the biggest difference to me and this is how I've started to take responsibility and take control back of my life and how I want to be feeling by focusing on
those things. So, yes, there's a little bit of calling ourselves out on a bullshit here and just recognizing what's actually happening and really just starting to be aware of how your brain is creating the reality that your Being everyday, how your brain is creating these thoughts and calling out those thoughts. But then, the cool thing is that we, if we are aware that that's happening, we can make it work for us instead of making it work against us, and that is the cool part.
So I will leave you there for the end of the episode. I hope there's been some cool things that have come up for you. Of course, as you always do, send me a few messages over on Instagram, say hi, let me know if you've enjoyed the podcast and common join the glow up, Facebook group, if You haven't already the glow. Up is still happening. We are on day ten, I think it might be today of the refresh. So there is an action step every
single day of the refresh. Today's action step is about setting a goal for yourself over the next two weeks. So there's really nice action steps that we've been focusing on. I know like I said, last episode, there's been things like having 30 minutes of no screen time in the mornings, there's been things like prepping some healthy meals for you prepping, some help. Snacks getting outside and going for a walk, getting some fresh air. I think that tomorrow.
Or the next day the action step is taking yourself on a solo date and doing something for yourself. So there's a really nice mix of giving back to yourself. Getting outside, getting some fresh air focusing on creating some really beautiful healthy habits and routines for you. And the Facebook group over there in the glow up, refresh is just absolutely going off and I'm loving all of the shares in there. So thank you so much to
everybody. Of course, every share that you do. Do-over on your Instagram and social media Pages as long as you tag me. So I can see it goes into the running to win the prize pack. I actually think I forgot to mention on the podcast because I hadn't been delivered last week when I was recording, was that Eco Modern Essentials have been so generous and they have sent through their brand new Blend or Blends, sorry of oils.
Which I'm so excited about because you guys get exclusive access to that, they are fully Not even on presale yet. They haven't even been released to the public. No one even knows about them yet. So I'm so excited. I've got that bundle of Blends which is amazing, but they also just included and sent out their brand new diffuser as well. Their Coastal diffuser, which is amazing. And I have personally been looking at it on their website, just after Christmas.
So I'm very jealous. I can't win this prize, pack myself, but for you to go into the running, for the prize pack, all you need to do is get get involved in the refresh Cummins, share some things that you're doing and taking action on for yourself, and tag me in them, so I can see them and you will go in the running. Alrighty, that's it for me, guys. Thank you so much and I'll see you next episode. If you liked this episode, I would love for you to screenshot and tag me on Instagram.
You guys have no idea how much that absolutely makes my day. I get such a big smile on my face. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today and I hope that you have got them something from this episode. If you want to hang out more you can search the nourishing, Amy podcast community in Facebook and come and join our group. We're talking all things life, love overwhelm and everything in between, you can share your funny memes.
Stories and all of the life stuff, if you would like to get in contact with me, please don't hesitate to reach out and shoot me a message on Instagram. You can find me at a me underscore Rankin. Last but not least, it really
helps to support my podcast. When you subscribe and leave a review on whatever app it is, that you listen to this podcast on, I am just a little independent podcaster and every subscriber and review helps my podcast to be seen and heard by more people and to help more people get there. Sparkle back. Thank you again so much for being with me and have a fantastic day.