Master Your Mind: Flip Negative Thoughts for Success | Anxiety Specialist | @caroline-cavanagh

The what-if monster. I'm sure you will have heard many times, oh, what if I get to the party and my friends aren't there? Or, what if I fail my exams? And the mind is wired to catastrophize because it's one of our survival instincts. We are programmed to go down that path to the nth degree to see if you can survive. And if you can, the risk may be worth taking. So we will naturally look at the negatives of things. So trying to get them not to do that is futile. But what we can do is a lovely thing called flip it. So if I hear someone say to me, for example, what if I fail my exams? I will just flip it and say, yeah, but what if you pass them all? Because then the brain also is wired to answer any questions. So if you feed them a positive question, they'll hurtle off down the positive path. Well, if I fail— if I pass all my exams, then that's going to be really good news. So flip it is such a simple technique, and it is really, really powerful.