We have over 60,000 thoughts per day and half of them are negative.

Let’s talk about THOUGHTS, baby

Let’s talk about you and me

Let’s talk about all the good THOUGHTS

And the bad THOUGHTS that may be…

If you’ve been following along with me for a while, you know that your thoughts create your feelings. If you’re new here… listen up!

Your thoughts create your feelings!

Now that I’ve made that clear… what kind of thoughts are we having?

From what I can see, there’s a plethora of nasty thoughts out there. I keep encouraging folks to level up their thought game, but that can be easier said than done. Our brains are pretty frigging good at coming up with bad thoughts.

Here’s some of the crappy thoughts we’re having:

Let’s talk about Cognitive Distortion!

This is a fancy way of saying “Thought Error” or Brain B.S.

Basically, it means your brain is feeding you bullshit and causing you all kinds of negative feelings.

Here are some more fancy words for “my brain is screwing with me”:

• Catastrophizing
  • Aka… Worst Case Scenari-o-tizing
    • Everyone is going to DIE!!
• Polarizing
  • This is when we see something as either COMPLETELY negative or COMPLETELY positive, with no “in-between”.
    • If you go to the store without your mask, it means you like killing puppies!
    • Aka… all or nothing thinking
• Personalizing
  • Blaming or shaming yourself for whatever is going on.
    • Meme: “Ok, what did you do to cause this?”
    • Me: “I wished for more virtual networking events and fewer “in-person” events. OOOPS… My bad!!!”
  • Thinking that another person is doing something because they have (either good or bad) intentions toward you.
    • He’s mowing his lawn to make me look bad.
• Negative Filtering
  • All you ever see is the dark cloud. You never see the rainbow or the silver lining or the unicorns flying all around or that the dark cloud is the ONLY cloud in the sky and it’s only been there for, like, FIVE minutes…tops!
• Emotional Reasoning
  • Something “feels” good or bad. Many people call this “intuition” or “following your gut”.
    • I cannot tell you how much money is lost at poker using Emotional Reasoning, but there’s a reason casinos make so much money!
    • “I’ve got a bad feeling about this!”
• “Should-ing”
  • That thing we say when we think we did something wrong.
    • I shoulda known that was no moon!
  • It also works with “shouldn’t”, but it’s not as funny to say I’m “shouldn’t-ing” on myself.

Have you been indulging in these types of thoughts?

It’s okay if you have. 

Really!

It means your brain is working perfectly. It’s just trying to protect you from the dangerous world out there… 

HOWEVER… Remember above when I said your thoughts create your feelings? Yeah… that’s why how you think matters and why it’s worth the effort to change it.

Crappy thoughts = Crappy feelings

Ok… how do you have fewer of these “bad” thoughts?

You don’t want to hear this but you should journal.

I  know… I know… but guess what… you’re having crappy thoughts about writing right now!

So stop and take 5 minutes and write down everything that comes to mind about writing.

Did you write? Why or why not? 

Try it today and let me know what you discover!

Love, Sheila