Danielle Jhiani explains why anxious brains fixate on negative events and suggests retraining yours by savoring positive moments intentionally. Pairing this with ERP practice strengthens positive memories so your brain stops defaulting to what went wrong.
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Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton Gianni. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach who has personally recovered from several years of anxiety, OCD and depression. And I help others also reach lifetime recovery from any subset of ocd, anxiety, depression, and compulsive behavior. Today we're going to talk about how to get your brain to stop focusing on the negative. But first, let's talk about why it's doing this, the reason why your brain can be so focused on the negative. It's called negative bias. Our brains are designed to pay more attention to the negative than the positive because this is a way that it keeps us safe. If the brain can hyper focus and scan for danger or negatives, then we can come up with ways to fix it or to eliminate from being in danger or taking any risk. Now, if you struggle with anxiety, depression, OCD, or any mental health disorder, this is probably a lot stronger for you than it would be for somebody without these disorders. But the wonderful news is we can retrain our brain out of this. Now, the important thing to remember is that our memories, the things that we remember, we remember based on emotion. So the stronger the emotion was at the time that something happened, the more, the stronger that memory is going to be, the more likely we are to remember it. And the emotion attached to negative circumstances or things that happen is actually two times stronger than the positive. So that's why when you are in a situation and people are telling you positive things, but one person says something negative, you're a lot more likely to remember that negative thing. Your brain hyper focuses on that, okay, this is actually quite normal. But this mental pattern can be worse and worse and worse for some people if we don't know how to shift it. And so how do we change this? So if you struggle with ocd, the first important thing to understand is if you're struggling with intrusive thoughts or your OCD theme, and essentially you know that OCD is attaching to something. If you have thoughts that cause discomfort followed by compulsions, it could be something that actually happened or something completely out of the blue that didn't actually happen. Okay. When you're obsessing about something, it's followed by compulsions. There's a lot of anxiety and discomfort or maybe just a little bit and romance. Right. And all of that's great, but it's not realistic all the time. And if we're always focused on that, we're not going to be able to enjoy the small moments very much. So, for example, maybe you're sitting on the couch with your partner or your family, and you might just notice, you know what? This is really nice. Not only is it really nice to be spending time with people that I love, but it's nice that we're all together. It's nice that we're holding hands or that we're sitting close together. It's really nice that we both have this thing, this show or this movie that we're really enjoying together. It's so nice that we have some quiet time right now and some downtime. Maybe you're really busy. Okay. You're going to just notice all of the things in that moment that are positive that maybe you either feel grateful for or maybe you want to feel more grateful for. You're savoring the moment and you want to spend at least a couple of minutes doing this. And what you're going to do is you're going to increase the emotion around this experience. Just like the emotion sometimes with negative experience is very high, you're going to start to increase your presence and the emotion in those positive moments. And what you're going to find is you get a lot more positive feelings. And the more you practice this, just like with erp, you are going to notice that it gets a little bit easier to do. It's not quite as hard to savor. It's something that you do more and more often. And eventually with ERP and with savoring, your brain starts to do it more automatically. And the more you practice this, I promise, the more you're going to notice that your brain automatically finds things that it's grateful for. It stops focusing so much on the negative and you're training it little by little to focus on the positive. And our feelings come from our thoughts. So learning what to do with these negative thoughts and how to react to them differently can completely change your life. None of the techniques and skills that have helped me get over ocd, anxiety and depression are rocket science. They're actually very simple techniques like this that we just have to do over and over and over again. So please hit the notifications if you'd like to get notified of whenever I post a video like subscribe. This helps me know what videos that you enjoy, what's helping, what you want more of. Thank you so much for watching today. If you want help with any of the things that we talked about, check out the link in the description. Thank you so much for joining me and we'll talk to you very soon.
That you enjoy what's helping what you want more of. Thank you so much for watching today. If you want help with any of the things that we talked about, check out the link in the description. Thank you so much for joining me and we'll talk to you very soon. SA.
