Basketball player Elijah Bryant explains how positive thoughts can crowd out negative ones in your brain, like caffeine blocking adenosine's sleepiness receptors. He suggests writing down good experiences in a gratitude journal to fill your mind's limited emotional slots with positivity instead.
This is a great mind hack for young hoopers. As humans in life, we have a negativity bias. What does that mean? That means we focus more on the negative than the positive. We care about the negative things more because back in the olden days, the negative things could kill us. Oh, you're not feeling too well? Oh, you might die. Hi, my name is Elijah Bryant, professional basketball player, wannabe neuroscientist. So at night when we're going to sleep, we have this neuromodulator called adenosine. I don't know if I'm saying that right. Let's say adenosine has 6 parking spots for us to park in every single day in our brain. Adenosine is supposed to make us feel groggy, tired, but instead we take caffeine that is shaped just like adenosine and it parks in that spot. So instead of feeling groggy, we feel energized. The same thing can be applied to positive and negative emotions. So how do we do that? Writing down in your gratitude journal or your journal in general, when you put those positive thoughts in your brain, they take the parking spot up for the negative thoughts. So when the negative thoughts show up, there's no space for them. So how are we gonna do
