STOP Thinking Negatively and REPROGRAM Your Mind for Success

Welcome to today's video. Today I'm going to talk to you how to stop being so negative and how to actually reprogram your mind through positive thinking. Let's dive in. Today I'm going to talk to you about positive thinking. I'm going to talk to you about negative thinking and then we're going to actually dive in. Does positive thinking actually help you? Or is there a chance that positive thinking might actually hurt you? And I'll describe to you why positive thinking doesn't work for a lot of people. And if you are the type of person that wants to make it work, I'll talk about how to make it work for you. And I will say this before we dive in. A lot of people talk trash about being positive. They think it's kind of odd. They think like, oh, just ignore the negative, don't pay attention to the negative, only focus on positive. And if anything bad happens, only focus on positive and it's toxic. Positivity is what they call it. And really what it comes down to as far as positive thinking is not ignoring the negative, it's really seeing the negative for what it is and saying, hey, can I find a silver lining and can I turn this negative thing into a positive thing? So basically actively searching for the good in your life when bad stuff happens and I want you to understand, like think of the bad things that have happened in your life. I associated with a higher risk of mortality. And the study found that pessimists have 19% higher risk of dying or over a 30 year period compared to optimists. And so the research showed that there's a link between a pessimistic outlook in life and worse overall health outcomes in someone's life as well. If we just extract from those lessons we just went through the three that I spoke about, it seems like negative thinking creates a worse life and positive thinking creates a better life. So then why did I start off saying, hey, positive thinking doesn't work for everybody? Well, let me explain to you, let me tell you why I had a video. It's funny, I had a video go viral about six years ago and where I showed clean water, dirty water, putting dirt into water, and I'll explain it all to you. It's funny because I don't know if somebody happened to find that video, but it's been redone multiple times. It's starting to go viral again by other people, which is kind of cool to see. I've seen it on TikTok and Instagram. But basically what I showed is that lots of people talk more negative to themselves than positive. And so in this video, I had a big bowl of water, and it was clear. It was a huge, huge bowl of water, and it was just clean water that was in it. And I said, think of every single scoop. I'm sorry, every single negative thought as a scoop of dirt. And so with every thought, you just put a scoop of dirt in the water. You put a scoop of dirt in the water. You put a scoop of dirt in the water and every positive thought as a scoop of clean water. And so most people, you have this. You know, we come to this world completely clean, beautiful, clean bowl of water, and then we talk negative to ourselves, and we say stuff like, oh, I'm dumb, I'm ugly, I'm fat. I'm not what society wants. I'm unlovable, I'm not enough. I have so many failed relationships, Whatever it is. There's so many different things that so many people, you're stupid. You'll never be loved. There's so many things that narratives that people have in their own head, and it's like every single time they speak it, 5, 10, 20 times a day, is like taking that clean water and putting a scoop of dirt into it and a scoop of dirt into it and a scoop of dirt into it and a scoop of dirt into it. They're like, you know what? Maybe I will start to actually think positive. Maybe I'll try this positive thinking thing and see how it works for me. And so they're like, I'm going to do an affirmation. I believe in myself, right? And that's like taking the dirty bowl of water and putting one scoop of clean water into it, and then being like, this doesn't work. It's still dirty. Well, of course it doesn't, because you have to understand that when you put so much negativity and negativity and negativity and negativity into your mind, and then you put a tiny bit of positivity, and your life doesn't change, and you're like, that doesn't work. You have to understand. You have to do more of it. You have to do more of it. You have to do more of it. And you have to be your biggest fan, you have to be your biggest supporter. You have to learn to change your internal narrative and to start to speak positively to yourself. You have to demand happiness for your life because there's so. We live in a world that can be so negative that we need to work on ourselves and create A positive atmosphere because the world tells us what society wants, what's not acceptable. Your parents tell you what they want. People think that they're not enough. You have failed relationships. You're comparing yourself to Instagram models. There's advertisements that are designed to make you feel like you're not enough until you buy their product. And it turns us negative. It's impossible to go through life without getting scars. And so we have to wake up at some point and be like, I need to actually create a positive environment within myself. I need to start trying to be my biggest fan. I need to change my internal narrative. I need to be more one of my biggest supporters. So when you first hear about positive thinking, you might have a really dirty bowl of water that's in front of you, and you're like, I'm going to try positive thinking for a couple days. And you try it for a week. And you put a couple of water. Look at a little bit of water. You put a little bit of water, but it's still dirty because you have way more negativity in there than positive. And you're like, ah, it doesn't work. You know, the water is still going to be more dirty because it's had so much dirt that's put into it. If you're having more negative thoughts than positive thoughts, the water's always going to be dirty. Positive thinking can't be something that you just try. You have to turn it into a way of life. It has to be something that you do all of the time. You have to be super intentional about it. It is natural for a human to be negative. If you don't believe me, go back to past episodes where I've talked about this. Our negativity bias is a part of the human circuitry. We're negative nowadays. But what that comes from is us naturally trying to protect ourselves and our species trying to protect themselves for millennia at this point. And so it is natural to be more negative as a protection mechanism. And so what we need to do is understand that a mind left to its own devices will almost always sway towards the negative side. And so we have to actually be intentional about being positive. We have to notice that the negative thoughts when they come up, because they will come up. And every negative thought that comes up counts as one scoop of dirty water and put the dirt in the water. And if we want to be more positive, we need to replace that one scoop of negative with three scoops of positive. You have to beat the negativity out of your head sometimes and in the video, the video they made that went really viral, it was basically what I did was I was like, you can see this water's still dirty. So this is what you have to do. When I turned on a hose and I put the hose inside of the water, and if the hose is in the water long enough, you can start to see it spins out all of the dirt, and after a couple minutes, there's no more dirt in the water and it's clean again. That's what it has to be. That's how we have to be in our own heads. We have to kind of like. We have to kind of bash negative. Sorry, bash positivity into our own heads. It has to be like, omnipresent. We have to be intentional about it. And if you do this, you'll start to notice that your feelings are going to shift. You're not gonna feel as bad anymore, you know. And if you do notice yourself shifting into negativity, if you feel yourself feeling bad, the best question to ask yourself is, what was I just thinking? And in cognitive behavioral therapy, they say there's these things called automatic thoughts. Automatic thoughts, we don't even really notice they're automatic. They just kind of come from the subconscious and immediately hit us. What we do notice is how we feel after that thought. And so what happens is something will happen to us in our life and. And then we'll feel something in between. That was an automatic thought that came into our head. So we have to ask ourself, okay, I'm noticing myself shift. I don't feel good. I feel sad. I feel negative. You have to ask yourself, what was I just thinking? And I gave this example a couple years ago. I remember this really happening, like in my life. I was on a podcast, I was interviewed for a podcast, and I was just like speaking with the person who was interviewing me. And. And I've done a lot of podcast interviews over the years. And I was basically just talking about how when I was younger, I couldn't afford therapy, and so I just read books and I got into self development to try to help fix myself. Well, this person turned my words into me saying, you don't need to go to therapy. Which is not what I said. You don't need to go to therapy. You just need to read books and try to fix yourself. But they basically put that in the comments of the YouTube and I had seen it, I was looking through it. Cause I saw the video went up on YouTube and I watched it for a few minutes and started reading the Comments, which is never a good idea. Don't ever read comments about yourself if you want to keep up your own personal positivity space. But what did I do? I read the comments, and all of them were positive. And I saw this one guy who said this, and I was like, all right, I'm gonna shut my laptop. I'm gonna go make some eggs. So I went in, I was making eggs, and about 10 minutes later, I noticed myself feeling really anxious. And I was like, why do I feel anxious? I was like, that's weird. I. I've had a great day. I did my workout. I'm making some eggs. I'm just crating breakfast. And I was like, what was I just thinking? And I went back because I noticed my body shift. I didn't notice my thought shift. I noticed my body shift. I was like, what was I just thinking? And I was like, oh, thinking this. I was thinking this. Oh, my God. I bet it was the whole thing that happened with that guy. I was like, what was I just thinking? I was thinking to myself, you know what? I try my hardest to do so much good in the world, and still some people want to take that and try to change it into something different, into their own narrative. And I realized that I was creating my own internal narrative, which made me feel bad. It wasn't the guy who made me feel bad. It was me that made me feel bad based off of my perception of that guy, Right? And so I was like, what was I just thinking? And I had to then turn into kind of like my own psychologist at that point, which that guy would probably hate. That comment. And what you have to do is you have to ask yourself, when you notice your body shift, what. What was I just thinking? And you start to write it out, or you start to talk to yourself out loud, you start to think about it. And then what you do is you test the validity of your thoughts. Are those true? Like, whatever it is that you're thinking, Your beliefs, your thought patterns, are they true? And when I say true, I mean, like, written into the fabric of the universe. Or are they just a thought or a belief that you've held for a long time? A belief is not truth. Just so you know. This is very, very important to know. Your beliefs don't mean. My beliefs don't mean anything. Absolute truth. Your belief is just a thought that you continue to think. So if you notice that something made you feel bad was negative thinking there. And if negative thinking is there, can you pull those weeds? And then can you do something that's called cognitive reframing, where if you're going to think negative about something, can you force yourself to cognitively reframe what you were just thinking and. And to think the exact opposite and to try to see a different perspective? Cause when you can see a different perspective, you start to realize that your quote unquote belief might not be as strong as you thought it was. And so I always say it's like most of our lives, it's like we have this thought pattern, this belief, and it's like us being on one side of the debate table. And when you cognitively reframe, it's you going, I'm going to actively go to the other side of the debate table and I'm gonna try to debate my own thoughts in my own beliefs and my own thinking patterns. And what you notice is that you can actually take your negative thinking patterns and turn them into something positive. You can realize that there is always another perspective than just the perspective that you're seeing on your own. And so when you start to think about it, if all of these studies have done that show that positive thinking help you, then maybe that doesn't really hurt you. It is something that you can do. It just needs to be something that becomes omnipresent and something that you do actively, often throughout the day. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me and obdial jr r o b D I A L J R The only way this podcast goes is from you guys sharing it. 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