Your Mind is like a Muscle | @caroline-cavanagh | The Anxiety Alchemist

10 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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1:04

In this short talk, Caroline Cavanagh (The Anxiety Alchemist) uses a muscle analogy to explain how the mind operates with paired "positive" and "negative" muscles. She notes that humans are evolutionarily wired to have a stronger negative muscle, which helps us notice risk, but this can lead to a bias toward negative thinking when the negative muscle is over‑flexed and the positive one is neglected. Cavanagh advises clients to deliberately exercise the positive muscle—through practices that cultivate optimistic or constructive thoughts—to restore balance, emphasizing that the goal is not to make the positive muscle overpowering but to achieve a healthy equilibrium between the two.

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I often think about the mind being a lot like a muscle, and like many muscles, it works in pairs. So if you've got biceps and triceps, when you move your arm, one's working, the other one's not working, and vice versa. In our mind, we have the positive muscle and the negative muscle. We are naturally designed as human beings to have a stronger negative muscle, because if we don't look at risk, and just look at the nice stuff, you might get bitten on the bottom. Yeah, so that is a natural tendency, but what happens is when you keep flexing a muscle, it gets stronger and stronger, and if you don't flex the other one, it gets weaker and weaker. So you end up with a bias. So one of the exercises I give a lot of my clients to do is to start practicing flexing that positive one, because then you get balance again, and it's not about having a really, really strong positive one and a weak negative one because that's not sci-fi ever. It's about having balance.