 They always come to me and they say, can you stop my overthinking? How do I stop my overthinking? I'm like, your brain's doing what it's supposed to do. The problem is you're just thinking about the wrong thing. Today, we're going to be talking about how to break your addiction to your negative thoughts and your negative feelings. And if you have negative thoughts, I want you to realize if you have negative thoughts that perpetuate and they continue to keep happening, there's a pretty good chance that you actually might be addicted to your negative thoughts. Now come along with me on this journey. I'll explain to you what I mean by this, but here's the thing. If you're addicted to your negative thoughts, you can want to be positive, but you could be addicted to the negative thoughts. And I'll explain to you chemically why that works and how it works in your brain and your body. But just think about this for a second. Most people who are alcoholics, my father was an alcoholic, so I saw him. He didn't want to be an alcoholic, but he couldn't stop being an alcoholic. And so you can want to break your addiction and to be positive. But have this negative spiral that happens inside of your mind. And so, you know, if you look at being addicted to something, let me explain to you what I mean by that. If someone is a alcoholic, right? They have had alcohol every single day, every single day for a while. And what happens is their body becomes chemically dependent on it. And so the lack of that chemical being there puts their body into a state that doesn't feel good and they want to feel better. So therefore they have to go for that. And this could be, you know, drugs. This could be alcohol. This could be food. This could be calories. This could be sex. This could be work. It could be caffeine. I mean, there's many, many, many things that people are addicted to in this world, but negative thoughts is a part of it. And let me explain to you how someone can be addicted to negative thoughts. So your thoughts, whenever you have a thought inside of your head, there's something that's a messenger, a chemical messenger that goes from your brain to your body that's called a neuropeptide. A neuropeptide is a chemical messenger from your brain to your body. When it goes to your body, your body then creates hormones, which are chemicals inside of your body to make your body feel a certain way. And then those, your body feels a certain way and your body goes back up to your brain and says, yep, we're feeling this way. Like for instance, if I were to talk about, um, the one person in your office who pisses you off, right? You can think about that person and literally just a thought can make you feel differently in your body. You could be having a great time and then somebody, you know, brings up Nancy and accounting as you guys all know, we always talk about Nancy and accounting and she is just always on your ass about stuff and you don't like Nancy and accounting. And you could be having a great time, but the thought of her starts to make you feel different because the thought sends a chemical messenger or neuropeptide to your body. Your body then creates hormones to feel a certain way. Let me give you a complete opposite example of that. You can have a sexual thought and that sexual thought can send different neuropeptides to your body, which create different hormones and then turn your body on the way that it needs to be to, you know, do what needs to be done. Right. So when you talk about this, you literally can realize that a thought can change the internal state of your body, but the thought happens, the neuropeptides are sent. And then the hormones are created hormones or chemicals inside of your body. So if you have had negative thoughts over and over and over and over and over again repeatedly every single day for years and years and years and years and years, your body is starting to actually become addicted to the cortisol and the adrenaline that are released from having those negative thoughts. And so without those negative thoughts being there, without the cortisol and the adrenaline being there, there's an absence and your body doesn't feel right. And so when I talk about this and the reason why this is important is because you start to realize, Oh man, I actually might be addicted to my negative thoughts. I might be addicted to my negative feelings. I might be addicted to the release of the adrenaline in the cortisol and everything that happens. There's a good possibility that it might be. And if you just look at, I'm not saying like you need to go to a rehab center or something like that, but the first part of it is the awareness. You need to develop the awareness that it could be a possibility for you. And if it is, no big deal, we can work through it together. And I'm going to talk to you about it today. But the first thing and the most important thing is just become very aware that this is an absolute possibility for you. And if it is, the awareness is the first thing. And after you're aware, now you can start to work through it because you can't work through anything without the awareness first. Let's talk about how to stop because probably you're out there and you're like, Oh yeah, this is a good possibility. It might be addicted to negative thoughts and feelings. And if you're not addicted to negative thoughts and feelings, there are other things that you might be addicted to, you know, and one of the things for me that I realized that I was addicted to for a long time was stress. And I didn't realize it, but stress was actually pushing me forward and I became addicted to it. And then when I heard about people be addicted to stress, I was like, Oh my God, I might actually be one of those people. So, you know, as I'm talking about this, you might be addicted to negative thoughts and feelings. You might be addicted to stress. You might be addicted to a lot of different things, but we can start to, as I'm talking about, just kind of put yourself in this place and see how you can work through it. Okay. So let's talk about how to stop. Number one is to be intentional. Be extremely intentional in everything that you do. The thing that people don't realize is that you literally have to brainwash yourself to be positive. We are naturally quite negative. And the reason why is because our brain are problem solving mechanisms to keep us safe. Our brain wants to keep us safe at all points in time. So it's constantly looking for threats. That was great for a hundred thousand years ago, but me sitting inside of my living room right now inside of 70 degree air conditioning, fully fed, have all of the water that I need, completely fine, don't need to worry about anything. My brain is going to search for things that are wrong, AKA negative in my space to try to keep me alive. If I were to not leave my house and get my food delivered and stay here, I could literally never leave my house again, completely safe. Nothing would ever happen to me. And I would never have any potential danger that could ever come at me. But my brain, the amygdala is still looking for that danger. And so I always say a brain left up to its own devices will usually go negative. And so first off is to be intentional and realize that, hey, if I have been negative for a while, my brain might naturally go that way or maybe even my parents are that way. And I also learned it. How can I be very intentional with every action that I take to make sure that I'm not going to be negative anymore, to make sure that I'm going to start my day off on a positive note with the intention of I'm going to be positive. And anything that comes up that is negative, I'm going to push it away and I'm going to work through and I'm going to figure it out. You literally have to create a brainwashing routine for yourself in order to get through this. So the first part is to just be intentional. One of the biggest reasons why people don't do what they want in their life is just the lack of intention. They wake up and they just kind of just see what happens. They wake up and they're just reactive all the time instead of being reactive, let's be proactive and be proactively positive. So that's first thing is the intention. The second thing is to catch your negative thoughts. They're things called ants, automatic negative thoughts. We all have automatic negative thoughts at some point. And I've said this before many times in my podcast, but I have thoughts and I have no idea where they come from. And I'm like, I would never think that I would never say that, but it comes up in my head and I'm like, where the hell, who the hell did that come from? Like it doesn't feel like it's my thought, but it just somehow pops up. I'm like, well, I don't know where that came from. I don't judge myself for it. I'm just like, yeah, that's not my true self. No, no, where that came from. And so with automatic negative thoughts, you've got to become aware of when they pop up and you've got to become more self aware and you've got to be able to take yourself out of the jar of your head so that you can read the label. So if you take, you know, if I'm, if you're inside of a pickle jar and you're trying to read the label, you won't be able to read it, but if I take you out of the pickle jar, you can then see the label. It says, oh, I was in a pickle jar. Same way with your brain. When you're inside of your brain, it's weird. Things are weird. You're, it's abstract. It's hard to understand, but if you take yourself out and look at yourself as if you are another person, imagine that you're a psychologist looking at your patient, you just happen to be the psychologist in the patient at the same time and you look at it and you're like, uh, yeah, that person's having some negative thoughts right now. Okay. What tips would I give that person to stop those negative thoughts? So the first thing is that when you have these negative thoughts, you catch them, you've got to have the self awareness to change them as soon as possible and whatever that negative thought is to stop a negative thought, you stop it and then immediately go to three positive thoughts. One of the things that really put people down a lot of stress and anxiety with thinking of the future and thinking of what could go wrong and all that stuff is that if you sit there and you think to yourself, like, for instance, oh my gosh, inflation is happening in the United States, right? Okay, we have inflation. That means that eventually, and you could just think the thought of, okay, we have inflation coming up in the United States, then you can immediately go down a negative spiral and it can just spider web itself into all these other places. Oh my God, if we have inflation, that means that all the money in my bank account is not going to be worth as much as it is now. That means that all of the food that I normally buy, all of the gas that I normally buy, all the cars, the electricity, everything, the water, everything I normally buy is going to be costing more. So my money is going to be worth less and all the food and money and all the food and the water and everything, the gas and the electricity is going to cost more. How am I going to feed my kids? How am I going to pay my bills? How am I going to get out of it? They could just go and spiral. The thing is that you have to stop the negative thought because negative thoughts can have momentum once you get one of them. And now that your thought has now created that fearful hormone, that cortisol and that adrenaline inside of your body, now that you're thinking and feeling the same way, that momentum gets stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger. You've got to click yourself out of it and you've got to be able to realize, okay, yep, I'm going through some negative right now. Okay, I can focus on the negative stuff and then I was going to keep me spiraling down that negativity or I can go ahead and focus on something that's great right now. What do I have to be grateful for? Oh, I have this and I have this and I have this. And what happens is instead of spiraling off down the negative side, what if I can teach myself to start to become aware, bring myself out of the negative side and to start to spiral down the positive side instead? I'm going to spiral down that side. I want to imagine if you just woke up and you're like, Holy shit, I'm just so grateful for this and this and this and this this. How amazing would it be to just be thinking about all of the amazing things in your life all of the time? It'd be great, wouldn't it? Like when people come to me and they're like, Hey, Rob, how do I stop overthinking? I'm like, the problem is not that you're overthinking because your brain is always going to be thinking. The problem is that you're overthinking negative stuff. Nobody's ever come to me like, Rob, I'm so fucking happy all of the time. Like I feel amazing. I can't stop. I don't. I can't stop overthinking all of the stuff that I love and all the stuff that I'm grateful for all the stuff that I'm happy. I can't stop. Can you please make my my positive overthinking stop? Nobody's ever coming to me that way. They always come to me and they say, Can you stop my overthinking? How do I stop my overthinking? I'm like, your brain's doing what it's supposed to do. The problem is you're just thinking about the wrong thing. You've got to catch the brain and you've got to move it down a different way. That's the thing that you have to realize is that you just you can't just decide one day like wake up and go, You know what? I'm going to be positive. I'm just I'm just going to be positive today because eventually something's going to go down the negative. It's something that you just you have to work at. It requires work to do this. Like you just can't wake up and be like, You know what? I'm going to be thin today and then just you're automatically thin. That'd be ridiculous for us to think it requires work because habits of the way that you the actions that you did or didn't take or the food that you did or didn't eat in your past has now gotten you to the weight that you want to change from. So now you've got to take all of these years of of bad habits and reverse them into new habits. Same way that if you have had negative negative negative thoughts all of the time in your head and then it boils up and you go, Oh, I want to change. It's not like you can just immediately change the same way you can't be immediately thin. It's like you've now you've got these bad habits that need to be reprogrammed and work through all the time. And that's where the intention comes in. You can't just have one positive thought and then your brain is rewired. It's about being intentional about constantly finding the positive. And I'm not saying this is important. I'm not saying just ignore the negative. What I'm saying is whatever negative exists, it makes it really easy to work through that negative. If you can come from it from a positive standpoint, it makes it easier to work through negative things in your life. If you have positivity, it's just simple. So the way that it goes and that's what everybody wants. And so how can you start to look at everything? I'm not saying once again to ignore the negative. I'm saying focus on the positive and then you can work through the negative much easier. You have to be intentional literally all day, every day, all day, every day until you wake up one day and you realize, Oh my gosh, I do feel different like I get so many messages from people all of the time. People send me Instagram messages all of the time. I've been listening to you every single day, working on my mind, listen to you every single day, working on my mind every single day for months, for months, for years, for two, three, four, sometimes five years, people send me messages and they're like, I'm a completely different person than I was. I have fully rewired myself into a different person. That wasn't me that did that. They just happened to listen to podcast. They took the action and put in the work. It's like, if you go to YouTube and start watching people that are doing fitness videos, that's not going to make you fit. But if you follow what they teach and you do it enough, it's eventually going to make you fit. Right. So it's like they put in the work. The work is required. It just doesn't happen overnight. You have to realize that. And, you know, another thing to think about is that helps a lot of people. So start to try to identify where these negative thoughts or feelings might have come from. Like where did you learn to be? They have these negative thoughts. A lot of times it comes from people's parents. Maybe your mom was negative. Maybe your dad was negative. You know, if you have negative thoughts around money, maybe your mom talked about money a certain way. Maybe your dad talked about money a certain way. In a program, you say whether if you look outside and I say, what's color, what color is the sky? Everybody in the English, English language is going to say, it's blue, right? But you only say blue because you were taught it was blue. It's just not that is like it is blue. Everybody knows that. And so you go, OK, what are what are some other things that you've been taught throughout your childhood that you are just as sure that the sky is blue? Like money is hard to get money is hard to work through people screw you over. Negative, negative, negative. Maybe that's something that you just learned from seeing your parents talk that way. And sometimes it helps to be able to figure out where it came from. Because when you identify where it came from and you identify where it is and how you continue to do it right now, then it makes it much easier to decide how you're going to work through. And it'll help you become more aware of the situation when it does happen because I'm going to be honest that you're not just going to get rid of all those negative thoughts, they are going to still keep popping up. Mine still pop up. And I'm like, where the hell did that come from? Right? But now that I see it, I have actions, I've strategies that I've built over years to work through these things. You guys have heard me say before, like one thing that I hate is sometimes like a negative thought or a judgmental thought will pop in my head about somebody that I don't even know. And I'm like, I don't even know where that came from. I don't know that person. I have no reason to judge them in any sort of way. But what do I do? I immediately make myself in that moment, find three positive things about that person and say it in my head. And I have to identify them before I can move. Like, so that's just the strategy that I built up over my time of doing it. But really what it all comes down to is identifying it and being intentional. The same way that maybe, hey, if someone goes to Alcoholics Anonymous, you've got to admit that you're an alcoholic first and then you can start working through it. So maybe we look at and say, hey, maybe I am addicted to negative thoughts. Maybe I'm addicted to negative feelings. Maybe I am addicted to these things. And now that I've at least admitted it, now we can start to work through it. And if I start to work through it, it requires me to be intentional with my mind, with my thoughts and with my actions every single day, because it's got to be important to you. Because if it's not important to you, it's not going to change. You know, when it's when something's important to you, you'll find a way. When it's not important to you, you'll find an excuse. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. If you want to learn even more about Master your mind, click right here and watch this video as well. It is the most powerful thing in the world. And rarely do I ever talk about this. But I should talk about this more and rarely I almost never hear anybody talking about this.