3 Ways To Reset Your Mind

Hello everyone, I'm Dr. Deanna Minick. In this video, I'd like to talk with you about three ways that you can reset your mind. Now I'm sure that you've already listened to my other video on 3 Ways to Reset your body. And we talked a lot about food and resetting the body through food. And what I have found is that most people do very well with that, right? So they're both body symptoms clear up and they feel better physically. But for other people there's still some work that needs to be done. And oftentimes I find that that resides in the mind. And this is probably one of the most difficult things to do, is to really get into the mental landscape. What we know about science, the science of mind body medicine, is that the mind and body are one. And so if we're tending to the body, that's good. We know of some ways to reset our bodies, but now we need to tend to the mind. And so I'm going to tell you my three strategies why I feel like these are most important for you to do. And they're easy. They're easy things that you can do on a daily basis. I have found for myself that if I'm not working on my thoughts that it's an incomplete picture. You know, I can tend to get very critical and perfectionistic, very judgmental in my mind and these thoughts aren't very serving. Right. And so what I like to do is to really get in the underbelly of our thought landscape. It's almost like we have to put ourselves on a thought diet. We have to look at what we're taking in through our thoughts because our thoughts are feeding us. You know, it's been estimated that we think on average 60 to 80,000 different thoughts in a day. Let me just Repeat that number. 60 to 80,000 thoughts per day. That's a lot of thinking. That's much more than what we're taking in in terms of calories and food. So it's worthwhile that we look at those thoughts. What are they telling us, what are they feeding us? And what we also know from the science is that it so important to look at our thoughts because our thoughts can translate into bodily symptoms. Now you're probably thinking, what is she talking about? That sounds a little bit woo woo. You know, I can understand the body and I can get changing my diet, but I don't understand the translation of my thoughts into my body and how this affects my health. Well, if you look at the literature, what it would say is that pessimistic thinking, negative thoughts can actually create more inflammation in our bodies. So this is not woo woo at all. In fact, if you look at the medical journals, they talk a lot about placebos, the placebo effect. So this is the idea that if you believe that something is going to help you, that you will have a positive response to something, chances are it will. And then there's a nocebo effect. I don't know if you know about that one, but the nocebo effect means that if you think something's going to harm you, chances are it will. It was really interesting because in the Framingham Heart Study, women that believed that they were going to die of heart disease were actually four times more likely to die of heart disease. So the power of our mind is immense and it's so important that we get in there and figure out what we're thinking so that we can course correct if we need to. Now, I have seen several thousands of people really work together with diet and their thinking. I feel like it's really, it's a one plus two picture here. We need to have the dietary components which affect our mind, they affect our thinking, and then when we work on our thoughts, that can in turn change our choices. So it's really a synergistic approach to look at diet plus the mind. And I can tell you that from being a university professor, I taught a whole course on mind body medicine and really brought forward the recent literature to the students and the practitioners on the power of, of so many of the different mind body modalities out there. So what I'd like to do is to share with you three of my favorite approaches. So this is coming from my teaching with the students, it's coming from the programs that I do with patients. So I'm just going to give you a little secret into my three top tips to reset your mind. And I can tell you it probably won't be easy. You're already thinking that, aren't you? Like, uh, oh, this is going to be a doozy. This is not going to be as easy as changing my diet, is it? And I would tell you that you're probably right. Changing your thought pattern is really a lifelong endeavor. But we have to start somewhere so I can show you where to begin. Now the first one is to really know your thoughts, you've got to know what you're thinking. Because if you don't know what you're thinking, then you don't really know what you need to change, right? So you have to get in there and start scrutinizing your thoughts. Much like if you were going to change your diet, you have to write things out so that you can see what you're eating. Most of us forget even what we had for breakfast. You write down your thoughts and then you step back and you say, ah, now I see what I've been thinking. Now I see what I've been feeding myself. So strategy number one is know your thoughts. Here's how you do it. What I like to do is to set a timer for three minutes, and you take a post it note pad, or you can take a piece of paper and for three minutes, you're writing down as many thoughts as you can. If you choose to use post it notes, you can write one thought per post it note. And then when you're done, look at all of your thoughts. What are the majority of these thoughts telling you? Are they positive? Are they negative? Are they affirming? Are they not so uplifting? That's what you want to look at. Just kind of do a general survey. Kind of like if you wrote down everything that you were eating in your diet, you could say, oh, I'm eating a pretty healthy diet, or, hmm, I'm not eating so healthy. Same thing with your thoughts. Just get a rough gauge. I are you thinking healthy thoughts or not? So know your thoughts. That's first and foremost. Secondly, reset your thoughts. Once you know what you're thinking and you have awareness in the moment of your thoughts, you have the power to change those thoughts. Now you're probably thinking, gosh, Deanna, that just sounds like a lot of work. I'm going to have to stop and listen to my thoughts and look at my thoughts. And now you're asking me to change my thoughts. Well, it starts one thought at a time. So let's just say that when you wrote down your thoughts, you found that you had a lot of thoughts, maybe about your body, or maybe it was about your relationships, maybe it was about your job or your stress level. Whatever the thought was that you most want to focus on, I want you to watch that particular thought. So every time it comes up, let's just say that that thought is I am not good enough. Every time that that thought comes up, I want you to do what I call the cancel reset technique, which means that you say to yourself, cancel. It's almost like the delete button on your computer. And then you replace that thought with something that's affirming, positive, and something that you can create a feeling around. So why don't you Try that. So this is really watching the thoughts and getting in and replacing that core one negative thought that keeps coming up for you. So I understand. I know it's going to take a lot of time if you think of all of your thoughts and how do you do an overhaul on all of your thoughts? And I'm not asking you to do that. I'm just asking you to pick one so that every time it surfaces, every time it rears its head, you can very easily do the cancel, reset, and replace that thought with an affirming thought. So that's number two. My third strategy is kind of a fun one, and it's all about giving gratitude. So the more that we can spend our thoughts in gratitude and being positive, the better off we're going to be. And it's almost like just one little thought of gratefulness has so much weight, it can carry us so far. Now you're probably thinking, well, gosh, Deanna, you know, this just sounds so Pollyannaish. You're just wanting me to be positive and happy all the time, and I don't really feel that. And that is the place that you're coming from, and we have to honor that, right? I mean, I think it's. You have to be authentic. You've got to meet yourself where you're at. However, it just takes one small move in that direction of being grateful. So maybe you just find one thing at the end of the day that you're grateful for and again, keep putting your thoughts into that. So every time it comes up, you express that gratefulness. There is so much good research on really coming from that place of being grateful, having gratitude, it just makes us feel good. You know, that sense of giving gratitude is so beautiful and expansive. So it may help to collapse a lot of your negative thinking. Okay? So I want you just to try that and again with each of these. These are simple, quick. These exercises take you seconds, not even minutes, except for the one where you're really doing the debrief of all of your thoughts. So just seconds per day, and you can already get into the landscape of your subconscious to start changing your thoughts. So let me summarize these takeaways. Number one for resetting your mind, resetting your thoughts is really to know your thoughts, you've got to know what you're thinking. So set a timer for three minutes. Write down all of the thoughts that you have, pull away from that. See if there's one unifying thought that seems to be coming up that's not very affirmative or supportive. And Take that thought and bring it forward into step number two, which is the cancel reset technique. Watch and replace that thought. So every time that that thought comes up throughout your day, I want you then to do the cancel where maybe you snap your fingers, maybe you blink your eyes, whatever it is, you've got that reset. And then you go into what is the affirming thought and actually try to feel that in your body. When we have thoughts that are coupled with our emotions, it potentiates that thought. So try to conjure up that emotion that can really connect into that new thought. The third strategy, again is giving gratitude one simple thing per day, helping you to be more optimistic rather than pessimistic. Because again, we know of the negative effects of being pessimistic. They actually work against you. So those are my three takeaways to reset your mind. And what I'd love for you to do is to write down your comments on this video as to what helps you to reset your mind. I know that we're all so different. There are so many different techniques. These are some of my favorite. But I know that you have some that you've been working with as well. So why don't you share that with me with this community? Love to hear them. And in the next video, what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about three ways to reset your emotions. So I hope that you'll come back for the next video video to get into now the emotional space. Thanks so much.