Break Your Negativity Bias by Understanding & Regulating Your Stress Response | Nicole Vignola

In our fast-paced, always-on world, stress has become an inescapable part of our daily life.

We need stress to have these conversations, to be in a state of productivity, focus, and we should be able to also combat stress effectively.

But what if I told you that the seemingly invisible mental pressure is actually a very tangible force impacting your nervous system and your brain? The brain also registers negative stimuli more greatly than positive, so negative information means a lot more We're not hardwired for life, that our brains have plasticity and it's capable of redesigning new neural pathways based on our choices and our inputs.

It's not you, it's your brain trying to help you out.

You want to make the things that are good for you easier, and you want to make the things that are not so good for you more difficult.

Because if you always give in to the urge, you're going to get really good at reinforcing responding to the urge. So wait 5 minutes and then check your phone.

What can we do to break out of this rumination?

One of the best ways to regulate our stress, I'll give you 3 different tools.

One— Welcome back, Kwik Brains. I am your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik. In today's episode, we are joined by Nicole Vignola. We'll be looking at stress from a neuroscience perspective to understand what is actually going on in our brain during this state of mind. And I think everybody could relate to stress. It's almost this invisible thing that's always there. It's like, fish in water. We don't sometimes realize it's there, the water itself, because we're so used to it. But we're going to talk about things like why we have a tendency towards negativity bias and what we can do to catch ourselves entering a stressful state before we find ourselves too deep in it already. Nicole is a neuroscientist, an organizational consultant, and author of a brand new book called Rewire. It's Rewire: Break the Cycle. Alter your thoughts and create lasting change. Welcome to the show, Nicole.

Jim, thank you so much for having me. I've been following you for a long time.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to this conversation. This is a very highly requested topic. We have a private Facebook group that many of you listening are part of, over 150,000 people. And stress is always one of the things people are Need help with.

Something that is definitely part of our lives, but hopefully after this conversation, you'll be able to see there are tools and mechanisms and ways that we can handle our stress and hopefully change our mindset around it as well a little bit.

Well, I encourage everyone to listen and also really focus on this for the next 20 minutes or so. Take notes because stress is something we deal with daily, but we still find it difficult to detect, you know, be detected before it has completely taken over, you know, how we feel, take over our life. And in these moments, it can be very helpful to remember that stress actually can be quite tangible. So can you explain what is happening in our nervous system, you know, and our brain, obviously, when we are stressed? And how can this understanding help us to catch, like, the oncoming stress quicker? I assume self-awareness, you know, is part of the equation to make any kind of positive change.

Yes. So I'll go by explaining stress first, and then I'll talk to you a little bit about the mindset around stress. And I'll break down stress into 3 different categories, which is what I've done in Rewire. So we all feel stress, and rightly so. We should actually feel stress sometimes. We need stress to have these conversations, to be in a state of productivity, focus, and we should be able to also combat stress effectively. So we will experience acute stress in our day. Maybe something scares you or somebody cuts you off in traffic. Your cortisol and adrenaline levels go up, and then you can quickly recover from that. The problem is that when stress remains and it becomes chronic, that's when it has detrimental effects on the brain and body. So let me rewind and just explain the mechanisms of stress a little bit, just to help people really grasp this concept and understanding as to how we can hack it. When you experience something stressful, your brain will release something called norepinephrine, or you'll also be releasing epinephrine or adrenaline from the adrenal glands in the body. So these 2 systems are somewhat quote unquote married to one another, they trigger each other. But the interesting thing is that over time, when we voluntarily put ourselves through stressful situations, such as exercise, or, you know, taking an endeavor like hiking goal, perhaps, or anything along those sorts, we can teach our brains and body to separate those 2 systems. So like a boxer in a boxing ring, his body will be— or their body, her body will be filled with adrenaline, but the mind is relatively calm and is able to make decisions. So being able to separate these 2 systems by voluntarily putting ourselves through stressful situations while still being safe, and then also being able to recover from the stress very quickly means that we can then translate that into everyday life. So when you are experiencing something stressful, like somebody cutting you off in traffic, you can then go back into a parasympathetic state, sorry, which is a state of rest and digest after the stressful event has passed.

And are there different types of stress? Like, you know, some people used it in reading your book. I mean, can people be stressed or anxious or worried? And we know what's, what's the difference?

Yes. So stress and epinephrine and adrenaline are chemicals that the brain reacts to regardless. But there does appear to be a mindset around stress. So I've broken it down into 3 different categories. So acute stress, which is when you experience something like somebody cutting you off, and then it should pass shortly after. If you are lingering in that state of stress, then generally there may be other things going on in your life. which means that you struggle to then come back down into a parasympathetic state. Again, parasympathetic meaning rest and digest, so a state of calm. And then we've got arousal stress or adaptive stress where you want to be in a state of alertness so that you can go for a walk or go for a run. It's an element of being able to put yourself in motivation drive to do something. Because if our base levels of stress are below baseline or at baseline, you're going to feel lazy, quote unquote, tired, you know, calm. And, you know, I don't feel like I want to lift 100 kilos on a deadlift bar. When I am in that state of calm, I have to be somewhat stressed to do that. I don't deadlift 100 kilos. I don't know why I said that. That was a good number to go with. But the problem is that then there's a sort of interplay between stress and anxiety. Now, Anxiety is the, the worrying of the future with the stress attached to it. So generally what that means is that the brain will perceive threatening stimuli in the environment. The amygdala, which is part of that threat detection center, alerts the brain, alerts the HPA axis, which tells the adrenal glands to release adrenaline. And that can sometimes be overactive, meaning that it will perceive threats in the environment where they're not necessarily there. Now, the difference between stress and anxiety is that stress is caused by an external force. If you were to remove the external stressor, so perhaps the deadline or the financial worries, et cetera, then generally speaking, that stress system will come down back to a parasympathetic state. If, however, you are still feeling anxious, worried, stressed about the future, but there's no obvious external stimuli, then that's generally an anxiety rather than a stressful situation.

And stress and anxiety often lead to rumination or maybe this kind of loop where you're dwelling on maybe negative things that are happening in life and fail maybe to see the good things or the accomplishments or the progress because we're focusing on how far we still need to go. I'm curious, Maybe through a neuroscience lens, can it help us explain the negativity bias here? And what can we do to break out of this rumination or this? I think a lot of people listening can not only relate to the feeling, but also those negative thoughts that are also feeding it and reinforcing it.

It's one of my biggest questions everywhere I go on Instagram, social media, friends. And even in my public speaking, is that I think everyone can resonate with that feeling of that negative self-talk, that ruminative state of thinking. Now, the brain is more inclined towards a negativity bias. So out of the 8 basic emotions, we have 4 negatives, we have 2 positives, joy and trust, and then we have anticipation and surprise, which are either negative or positive depending on the situation. Generally speaking, we are in a state of anticipation because we may be worried or surprised. Something shocks you that you weren't expecting. Now, not only do we have more negative emotions, the brain also registers negative stimuli more greatly than positive. So negative information means a lot more to us than something positive. So that means that we can tend to go through life focusing on the negative. With that being said, we also have a confirmation bias. So if you wake up and you think, I'm having the worst day, and you start focusing on all these aspects of your day, your brain will also try to find evidence to reinforce that that statement is true. And that's particularly important for when we say things to ourselves like, I'm not good enough, I could never pass these exams, I'm not smart enough to take the SATs, and these kind of inner dialogues that we repeat in our heads. We have that negativity bias, but then we also have the confirmation bias. Now, that all sounds doom and gloom. The great thing is that we now know a lot about neuroscience, and we know how to sort of hack these thoughts and the stress. So, one of the best ways to regulate our stress, I'll give you 3 different tools. One, I'm sure you will have heard, I'm pretty sure you talk about it as well, is the physiological sign. So it's an inhale through the nose, then another inhale through the nose. So you take an extra sip, pause at the top for a second, and a long exhale through the mouth. Let's do it twice together.

Yeah.

So in through the nose and out through the mouth.

Long time.

In through the nose. One more time. Sip, pause, and a long exhale. I don't know about you, but I feel really good.

After just 2, after 2 reps, it just, it, it makes, it makes a difference.

Have you ever had it when you're standing in the queue to somewhere or you're stressed and you start sighing or you're huffing and puffing? It's actually a good thing. That is your brain's mechanism or ingrained mechanism trying to reset breathing rate. We've just associated sighing with a negative thing, like, oh, why are you sighing again? But it's a positive thing. And it's our body trying to dump the extra stress, the carbon dioxide from our system so that we can recover.

And it's almost like we're informing, you know, ourselves that we're safe, that we have taken, you know, that we're not doing that fast, shallow breathing, like we're in danger and fight or flight.

Exactly.

You know, and so I imagine a lot of the, some of the negativity bias that we're looking for what could go wrong is for survival.

Exactly.

Well, let's go through the other tools besides the physiological.

Well, I'm glad you said that about the communication to the brain, because the body is designed to run, fight, fight, flight, freeze, fight, fight, fight, fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, etc., in stressful situations. So the body has to communicate with the brain that the threatening stimuli has left. And we do that through breathing, we can fast-track that breathing mechanism by communicating that we are now safe, and we can relax. And generally speaking, with the negative thoughts is that they will raise our adrenaline to some degree. So being able to interrupt those thoughts with a physiological sigh means that you can reinstate some frontal cortex activity by lowering the adrenaline, the adrenaline that's coursing through the body. So that limbic system is your emotional brain. It works in tandem, quote unquote, with the frontal cortex. So when we have higher stress levels, the frontal cortex has less activity, the frontal cortex being responsible for executive function, analytical thinking, logical thinking. And when that is less active, whilst we're ruminating, we can go into a state of catastrophizing as well. where it then goes into a further loop and reinforces that snowball effect. So by doing the physiological sigh, you're lowering stress, reinstating frontal cortex activity. So you can then come back to those thoughts and maybe analyze them or move on from them, whatever is more sort of apt for the moment.

And in that stressful state, it's kind of like we're held hostage, like almost in our survival brain. And we don't have easy access to that executive functioning, you know, problem-solving, creativity, and so on.

Exactly. The second tool is walking. So what's really interesting is that in 2018, they had a paper, they did a paper in mice, and they looked at lateral eye movements. And what they saw was that it was lowering the amygdala response in the brain, but it was creating fear extinction learning. So fear extinction learning is basically just the unlearning of a trigger. So we always talk about neuroplasticity in the context of creating new synapses. But the wonderful thing is that we can undo synapses as well. So we can remove the emotional friction that is accompanied by some thoughts. And walking has the same effect. So when we're walking through the world, our eyes are moving side to side naturally. So provided you're not on your phone, you will be creating a type of EMDR-type therapy.

Hmm.

So for listening, EMDR is a type of therapy where they use goal-directed eye movements in therapy to help you process the thoughts and emotions without the fear perception involved. And that is because what they saw in this paper is that the lateral eye movement was activating the orbitofrontal cortex, which was competing for resources with the amygdala. So if the frontal cortex is active, then the amygdala was deactivated. And what's interesting in this paper is that they said I think we just accidentally figured out how EMDR works, which is crazy because we knew that it worked. We just didn't really know exactly how. And this paper was quite groundbreaking for neuroscience and the understanding of amygdala activity.

That's fantastic. The, um, and I want to talk about the energy expenditure. Did you say there was, there was one more, uh, before just to kind of close that loop? So it's the physiological sigh. And then the walking, because you're getting in, you know, tapping into that, some of the principles of EMDR and other things. You have too much to read, but too little time. Studies have shown that your ability to read is directly correlated to your level of success in life. But when was the last time you took a class on how to read? I want to introduce you to the Kwik Reading Free Masterclass. Class. In this free training, I'll show you how to instantly increase your reading speed by 25 to 50% or more. Plus, you'll boost your understanding, your comprehension, your focus and concentration along the way. Don't miss out on this life-changing opportunity. Click the button or go to jimkwik.com/free-training. Speed to access this free training now.

Yes. And I was just going to say that the last, the last one is hobbies. So making sure that we stay engaged in activities that can take our mind off things temporarily. What it does is it helps the stress hormones come down and you're thinking about something else. So you ever had that feeling when you go for a walk or you go and you play guitar, whatever it is that you do with your spare time, and then you come back to the problem at hand, And you almost seem to see it from a different angle with more logic, with more kind of goal-directed solutions. And that's exactly what I love.

Do you have kind of go-to hobbies for yourself?

Oh, I'm completely immersed in guitar playing at the moment. I started last October and I'm obsessed.

Oh, I love that. And then that could activate different parts of your brain. And it's interesting because these are things that people could do during a brain break. They can move, they could They could do their size, breathing, hydrate, hobby. Because we talk about, you're talking about mental currency, right? So our brains, they're only, what, 2% of our body mass, utilize upwards of 20% of the energy, nutrients, oxygen, and so on. So it's really an energy hog.

Yeah.

And so if our brains have limited capacity for daily energy expenditures is, do you take breaks throughout the day? Or what does that look like to help recover and recharge?

Yes, absolutely. So this is my area of research, where I was looking at how we effectively spend this mental currency on different activities. So generally speaking, when you're, say, maybe working on your computer, you've got an exam and you're studying, what tends to happen is we tend to want to grab our phones because we think I need a mental break. So I'm just going to switch, task switch to phone use, which is deceivingly calming and deceivingly sort of relaxing. But what I've seen in the research is that it's actually still using up this mental currency. So if you have a finite amount of resources for things that you can give this money to, phone usage is still taking away from that currency. So people then come back to the task at hand and feel even more depleted. Now, the thing with the mental currency or this energy expenditure is that if you don't take a mental break, your brain will do it for you in the least convenient time. Maybe you're in a meeting, maybe you're in a pod— lose your train of thought, you know. So making sure that we are effectively taking these mental breaks, strategic breaks, where we're clocking off from anything that's externally stimulating, means that we can replenish these energy resources and then be better equipped For whatever is going to come next. So I've had a really long day. I just, I flew, you know, this weekend, it was a, it was a long, very long weekend. So before this call, I took a 20-minute mental break where I just shut my eyes. I didn't, you know, per se meditate. If someone knows how to meditate, then I, you know, do that for sure. Meditation is incredible. You'll, you'll, you'll talk about it a lot. But what I don't want people to get worried about is this idea that they have to be doing something. So even just closing your eyes, or going for a walk, or maybe it is playing guitar, if it's something that helps you unwind. But ideally, you want to just shut off from anything that's going to have an external stimulus on your system, so that you can replenish these energy resources, and then be able to make effective decisions for the rest of the day, and have executive control, have sustained focus, sustained vigilance, so you don't come home and start compromising on the decisions you make.

Right.

Maybe they're health-related ones like, okay, I'll take takeout tonight because I'm really tired, I've had a long day. When we are replenishing these resources effectively throughout the day, we can come home and continue to make healthy decisions for ourselves.

So, in your thing about healthy decisions, in your book Rewire, you mentioned that people often attribute things like, I think it was mood swings, irritability, depressive symptoms to something being wrong with them. When it also, but When it could be just our body's way of trying to reach this homeostasis.

Yes.

Could you, could you kind of shine a light on that and, and, and kind of tell us what's happening there?

So provided there's no sort of clinical diagnoses there, generally speaking, you know, the way that neuroscientists will see a brain is, is a system that ebbs and flows and it should ebb and flow. When we go through major highs, maybe you have an achievement or an exam, or, you know, I just— after I wrote the book, I went through a really big dip. We also see it in post-Olympic depression, so post-Olympic activities where athletes, win or lose, will feel this very, very heavy state of depressive-like symptoms after competition because the body and brain have gone through so much. So it's your body's way of trying to regulate those emotions, the neurochemicals at play to reach homeostasis. If you've used up all this energy to do the activity, it's then going to have a rebound effect when it's quite literally an emotional comedown before the neurochemicals replenish and then go back to baseline. But that state is where I want people to understand that, you know, I've used the slogan, it's not you, it's your brain. Trying to help you out. And I want people to befriend their brain instead of seeing it as something that's sabotaging them, keeping them in this negative loop of thinking that there's something wrong with them.

I can appreciate that because then it's just, it's a vicious cycle, right? Where people are stacking self-judgment and shame or other things that it's, it's like an identity issue that there's something inherently wrong with them.

Yes.

In the age of digital distractions, maintaining our focus is increasingly challenging. Is there a tip that you offer in your book Rewire to help our listeners to enhance their concentration and productivity in the midst of all that?

One of the things that I will say is that more than 50% of our interruptions come from self-generated interruptions or self-generated thoughts. So generally what will happen is people will sit down to work and they'll think, I'm just going to quickly scroll. There's this urge, right? That's dopaminergic activity saying, we know we can get fun from the phone. which is in our vicinity. Or you'll sit down and think, I'll just quickly make a cup of coffee, and then I'll work. So those urges are pretty normal. They're pretty natural. It's your brain wanting to prioritize quick fixes, or sort of quick thrills, easy dopamine, if you will. So what I always say is, if you wait 5 minutes, and then you do it, what happens is you're leaving time for that urge to dissipate. Because if you always give in to the urge, you're going to get really good at reinforcing responding to the urge. So wait 5 minutes and then check your phone. Ideally, you would also keep your phone away from you. Your phone is a huge distractor. So, Jim, you're looking at me right now, but there are things in your periphery. There are things in my periphery. There are noises outside which keep, you know, distracting me. There are— there's a mug, there's my guitar, and I— but I'm still looking at you, right? But my brain knows that all those things are there. If the phone is in your vicinity and you're still looking at the screen, your brain knows that it's there and that it can reach it at any point.

Yeah, it's so, so important to take control of your environment. It just makes, you know, for me, my rule in the household is, you know, you want to make the things that are good for you easier, and you want to make the things that are not so good for you more difficult, you know, so you don't have to use that willpower or that even when you go to the restaurant and let's say you're not eating a lot of bread, prefer gluten, and they bring bread out and they sit it on the table, it's a lot easier to say no, thank you right up front, have them take it away as opposed to keeping it there. And then it's just like the phone. It's just like you feel you have to—

Yeah.

You have 50 times during a meal you have to say no. And it takes a lot of energy, you know, mental currency. I could talk to you for hours and geek out over Rewire and neuroscience applied towards these areas. Um, and I'm sure a lot of listeners would, would listen also as well. Where can they continue their journey with you? How can they stay connected with your work? Where can they get the book?

I'm on Instagram as Nicole's Neuroscience. I don't have any other social media at the moment apart from LinkedIn. My website is nicolesneuroscience.com and the book is available on my website or on any bookstore. So Barnes& Noble, McNally Jackson, anywhere in the US. It's, um, is available. So thank you.

Thank you for doing the research and putting that into a book. I know all our listeners love reading, so I recommend everyone get their copy of Rewire. We'll put all those links to Nicole's social media, to her website, to get the book at our show notes, as we always do, at jimkwik.com/notes. You know, for me, the key takeaway is that We're not hardwired for life, that our brain's plasticity, it's capable of redesigning new neural pathways based on our choices and our inputs that we decide to give them.

Yeah.

So let's all of us who are listening take Nicole's advice to heart and be intentional about these things we talked about, our habits, our mindset, our self-talk. Because we're always programming our nervous system and our gray matter. And so, as always, don't forget to subscribe. Join— we put the extended version of past 20 minutes on YouTube. So join our 1.6 million YouTube subscribers there and leave a comment. I read every single one. A lot of speed reading there on whichever platform you happen to be listening. And if you want, take a screenshot and post it. And put a link to it and tag Nicole, tag myself. I actually bought an extra few copies of the book. So if you tag us, I'll see it and I'll repost a couple and then gift a couple of random copies to our audience as a thank you. But Nicole, it's been a real pleasure.

Jim, thank you so much for having me again. And yes, it's been an absolute pleasure.

Wonderful. Thank you again to all our listeners. Until our next episode, Be limitless. Be limitless.