Nicole Vignola and Dave Asprey discuss the default mode network, the brain system behind automatic negative thoughts. Generating words can interrupt these patterns and shift your thinking.
Doctor Daniel Amen, who's a good friend, fellow neuroscientist or psychiatrist, talks about ants, automatic negative thoughts. And I'm, I'm on his board of directors and I'm really grateful for his work educating me when I was in my 20s. So he talks about ants and a lot of people talk about the angry critical voice in their head and there's, there's different words for it. What is that voice and how do you change it?
Yeah, so we have these voices in our head that reside within an area called the default mode network. Now the default mode network is a network of brain areas, as the name says, that is your default mode of thinking, your idling state. What are you thinking about when you're not thinking about anything? Generally speaking, those thoughts will arise when you are not in the network that you're in now, which will be a central executive function. So you're paying attention to me, but it'll be more when you're sort of washing the dishes, folding your clothes and just doing mundane things like walking, maybe driving. For some people, that default mode network has autocorrelated with negative self referential information. So it may have stronger connections to the amygdala or it may be exacerbated with negative thinking, ruminative type thinking. The problem is that the thoughts in this default mode network, they don't really have a beginning and an end. They're spontaneous. And it's the reason why sometimes you're washing the dishes and you have this idea, you're like, oh yes, I've got the answer, I know what I'm going to do. That's the same thing, but with negative thinking. Right. And the problem is, is that there's no real narrative to these thoughts. They run seemingly incoherently in the mind and they can exacerbate feelings of, you know, negative thoughts and negative feelings and emotions. So one way that we can interject that is to start generating words. So when you generate a word and you start putting a sentence to it, you use more of the frontal cortex, the, the medial prefrontal cortex to be exact. And that snaps you out of that default mode type thinking. Because as soon as you have to explain how you feel, you'll find that people generally struggle to do that. And it actually either means that you didn't feel like that at all or that the feeling wasn't as bad as you made it out in your own head.
