Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs): How to Break the Habit - Wisdom4Humanity with Patrick Mosher

So when this neurologist-psychologist talked to me about resilience, and I love this conversation, he said, you know, we have automatic negative thoughts. And how he described it to me is a bee lands on your hand and you have an automatic negative thought and you wipe the bee off right away. Okay, that's what an automatic negative thought turns into, a negative feeling. Ooh, I don't like that. You know, bee on my hand, and then it creates a negative action. I wipe the bee away. So that's what— that creates a cycle. When you have enough negative thoughts, it creates, you know, and it comes over and over again, it goes into negative feelings, and then those become automatic negative actions. ANT— these are ants. If you want to search that online, you can. ANT, automatic negative thoughts, or ants. And so this is a cycle that happens with people. And here's what he showed me, which I thought was a fascinating way to describe resilience. He said, "Patrick, you break that automatic negative thought to automatic negative feeling." And how he described it to me is he said, "A bee lands on your hand and you go like, 'Oh, it's a bee. It's a bee. I wonder what the bee needs. I think what the bee wants. Isn't it cool that there's a bee on my hand?'" So I don't have this automatic negative thought that goes to a negative feeling. And you know, I was a change management professional and talked about sales and marketing for 30 years of my career as a consultant, jumping from fire to fire to fire with clients. This resilience factor, this was a core superpower of mine to say, "Hey, I can bounce back each time, reorganize, and really retain my identity of who I am as a person." So I look at this and I go like, "Ah." So if you don't have the cycle automatically happening, that is what I would call resilient self-talk. It's the way of saying like, "Oh, I'm not going to be consumed by this thing. I have a different way of looking at that." We're going to talk more about the strategies about how to do that.