Vesna: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Peak Revival Podcast. My name is Vesna Herster. Today I'm going to talk about how just three minutes of negative thinking can start to sabotage your entire life. And here is how to stop this happening. In my practice many, many years ago, I could see that my patients would come in and they were doing all the right things, but they carried so much [00:01:00] stress on their shoulders. They had so much pressure on themselves, whether it be with family, with illness in the family, financial pressures, and I could see it was blocking their health, but back then I really didn't know how to help them.
Right. I didn't have the tools that I have today. And all I did was I asked them like, “what is going on with you?” And they would talk and they would share what was happening. And honestly, at the time that was a lot because it helped them to kind of release their burdens and just to kind of share and talk about it, but it wasn't enough still.
So even though that made a difference, it wasn't enough to get them to the next level. And what I want to share with you today is that for most people, they're not aware of their negative thinking Now you may be aware of it when it gets really bad. I had a client. email just the other day and she said that her negative thinking was stopping her from achieving anything in her life.
And really that's what negative thinking does to all of us when we're aware of it. And I really wrote back to her and said that [00:02:00] awareness is huge. Okay, when we can be aware of the stories and the thoughts that we have in our mind, we then have the ability to change things. choose a different response.
So my question to you, and I really want you to ponder this, how many hours a day do you spend in stressful thinking? One hour, six hours, 12 hours. So when I ask people this, they will say, Oh, maybe an hour. Okay. And the reason is, is that We've become so accustomed to our level of negative thinking that we don't notice it anymore And we only count the times when it gets really really bad like when your head is really noisy That's when you notice your negative stressful thinking But if I was to ask you how many hours of the day of your waking day Do you spend in a quiet peaceful mind?
and when I ask that question to people they go Oh, I don't know You're lucky if it's an hour. Okay. So that means all the [00:03:00] other hours, let's say the other 15 waking hours of the day. You're spending in stressful thinking, okay, because it's one or the other. You're either in stressful negative thinking, or you're in a peaceful, calm, pleasant state of mind.
there's only the two options. So scientists found three minutes of negative thinking will create a biochemical imbalance in the brain, as detected through fMRI scans. And they found that if this continues for 30 minutes, we actually start to switch off healthy genes, which eventually switches off. On unhealthy genes, but we get a flood of glucose, which then floods insulin, which triggers, body fat and inflammation and higher cholesterol.
We get more prone to fatty liver, metabolic issues. And we also, our body releases a whole lot of neuroepinephrine, which this hormone creates a lot of anxiety, okay? And if we get anxiety about anxiety, then this all starts to become much, much worse. You
So what type of negative thinking am I talking about? I [00:04:00] know that you're going to recognize these. Number one is the worry
the what if scenarios. What if this happens? What if I run out of money? What if this happens in the economy? I remember during the lockdowns, my mind went wild with possibilities of what could happen as we were locked down and it created an enormous amount of stress for me.
But Most of my scenarios that I imagined never happened. And so I've had clients that I had a client, she was so worried for her children that it caused panic attacks where she'd have to be hospitalized until. She realized that her thinking and her worry was not keeping her children safe. All it was doing was restricting their life.
Another client who was a business owner said her worry was important because she said, how else am I going to, you know, foresee problems that could happen in the business and then put a mitigation plan in place to prevent those problems from happening. And this sent her into a high level of anxiety and stress.[00:05:00]
And did she stop any business problems? Absolutely not, because we can't predict the future and what's around the corner.
Our mind works very well in the present moment. It doesn't do well to resolve problems that we've completely made up, but we don't catch ourselves, right? So the worry is all of that stuff that could happen, may happen, but isn't in this very moment right now. Not five seconds from now, but right now.
The other one is guilt kind of beating ourselves up for past mistakes, carrying around this guilt for what you said, what you did, why you did it, analyzing how did I do that, right? And what we really have to understand as human beings, we make mistakes. That's how we learn. We learn from our mistakes and we really have to cut ourselves some slack.
Number three is resentment, holding onto anger and past hurts. Now, this is a really big one. I see people who do hold onto resentment for things that have happened in the past. I see people that have had. Trauma in their past, but have really kind of pushed through and, uh, kind of live these amazing [00:06:00] lives, right?
So it really depends on where your thinking is at around that. Number four, another common type of negative thinking is upset, right? So I'm upset with the way my life is going. Why am I in this place? I don't want to be here right now. I want to be further along. Why aren't I further along? Why is this happening?
That kind of thinking is very stressful. The next type of thinking is very common. Which looks constructive, which is over analysing. Over analysing situations, work scenarios, problems, relationships, whatever it is, right? So I once had a client, she said she'd go to bed at night time and she would analyze the day and what was she needed for the day ahead.
At night, when she was in bed, and she felt like that was the best time for her to do that because she felt like it was so productive. And all this is, is another type of negative thinking which deludes us into thinking we're doing something constructive but all we're doing is creating a lot of stressful thinking.
And the final one is unresolved grief, so not coming to peace with past losses in our life. Now out of those, [00:07:00] Types of negative thinking, I'm sure you recognize all of them, let's be honest. But the main ones that I see in my clients is the worry, is the guilt, resentment, upset and overanalyzing.
So I want to give you this scenario. If I worry six hours a day, okay, if I spend six hours a day in my head with worry while I'm working, right, not really noticing, but my head is really busy, what is going to happen to my mood? It's going to go down. if I do this for 10 years and not notice that it's a problem, I'm going to progressively get depressed.
I'm going to become irritable. I'm going to feel disconnected from others. I'm going to distance myself from others, right? I want to withdraw a little bit. So I'm going to feel disconnected. My tension levels go up, right? My body is under a state of stress. I'm going to get panic attacks. I'm I'm going to get panic attacks, from little things that happen in my life.
I'm also going to get body pain, right? My body is going to register these six hours of worry a day through the [00:08:00] hormonal changes that are happening in my body. I'm going to get tension. I'm going to get headaches. I'm going to get gut pain. I'm going to get gut bloating. I'm going to get IBS like symptoms, right?
I'm going to have sleep problems. I'm going to have, you know, Generalized pain. Now if I'm worrying six hours a day, and I'm being, you know, six hours a day is not a lot from what I hear in my work, right? I see a lot of people that worry 12 hours a day, and they've been doing that for 10, 15 years. And eventually we start to get memory problems, we get fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, burnout.
We get brain fog, we get weight gain, we get cholesterol, fatty liver, autoimmune issues from all the immune down regulation. And We go into burnout.
So am I surprised to see someone who is burnt out or has high cortisol when they've been in stressful thinking six hours a day for about, you know, ten years? Or even six hours a day, or ten hours a day, or fifteen hours a day, even if it's for a year or two. I'm not surprised to see that person feeling burnt out or having high [00:09:00] cortisol.
I'm also not surprised to see them not loving their business or their career anymore. That they lose their temper really easily with their team or their colleagues. They're not present with their partners or their children, right? They feel miserable. They're disconnected. They want to be distant. And it diminishes their success and their health.
So I'm not surprised to see that outcome. But I'm also not judging here, right? Because you're so right. I'm speaking from a place of experience. I have 100 percent been in this place. And so I'm not talking about judgment. I'm talking about awareness because as soon as you can see who is creating these symptoms in you, who is creating the suffering, right?
It's you and it's me. We are, we are creating our own suffering. Yes, things are happening in our life around us, but the stressful thinking, the negative thinking that's having a downstream effect on our body, we're doing that. Because we don't understand that, impact of living in our heads and [00:10:00] dwelling on things, okay?
And we also couldn't tell the difference between what needs our attention in life and what is just noise. What is just noise, noise, noise, noise, noise up in our head? What's, how do we tell the difference, right? And we tell the difference by the way that we feel. And this is probably one of the biggest distinctions that I want you to take away because we are always going to have negative thinking coming up and then The problem with negative thinking is that it looks like information.
It looks like, Ooh, or I don't feel good. Ooh, something's not right in my life. Okay. And to be fair, we have been taught that you look around your life. What's not working. What's not okay. Make some changes. But really our feelings are coming from what we're thinking. And that's how we gauge where we're at, right?
Is your thinking peaceful? Do you feel contentment in your life or do you feel stressed? Do you feel insecure? Do you feel tense? It's not [00:11:00] information about how your life is going. Right? It's information about where your thinking is at.
there'll be a point where you recognize that, yeah, my thinking is out of control because I don't feel good. I feel stress. I am so winding myself up, right? For me, I say to myself, don't go down that rabbit hole. Don't go start thinking that, okay? Don't go down there.
Because what we have a tendency to do is we like to complete that thought. We like to see it all the way through to the end. And we feel like, okay, once we get to the end, we're going to feel better and we're going to have that situation sorted. But there is no end. Because the more your thinking revs up, the more the hormones are released, which creates even more anxiety and panic.
So there's no end, okay? So at that point it becomes a choice. when there's enough space in your mind, you will see a choice. I don't want to follow that thinking. That doesn't take me anywhere except To feel miserable and lower my mood and create more stress and anxiety. Okay, we do have that choice when we see it, okay, and we can pull back and [00:12:00] go, Well, I'm not going to follow that and let's see how the day pans out.
So I want you to comment below if you've got the option to do that. How many hours a day do you spend in stressful thinking? Or how many hours a day are you not in a peaceful, quiet mind? Let me know in the comments below.
