Can you think positive when your brain is built with a negative bias? Just think positive is the worst advice I ever gave, and I gave it for twenty years.
Can you think positive when your brain is built with a negative bias? Just think positive is the worst advice I ever gave, and I gave it for twenty years.
Information hits three minds. The instinctual one asks if you are about to die. The subconscious one checks what you did last time and repeats it. Only then does the human mind get a look in, and by then the decision is often made. Your subconscious is not being negative on purpose. It is repeating patterns because they kept you alive. It is why the person who takes the threat seriously survives the forest and the one who shrugs does not.
One thing to try: Treat thoughts like trains at a station. You do not have to board every one. It takes about ten refusals before the mind gets it.
In this episode
(2:57) Two types of electricity, and why that matters here
(4:07) Fight, flight, freeze, or make a mess of it
(5:20) Ask me the capital of England and watch the relay
(6:48) When the subconscious gives up and passes it on
(9:04) The unique thing in the shop that three people are wearing
(10:09) Focus on a negative thought and it repeats the pattern
(11:45) The one with the machete comes before the doughnuts
(14:13) Thoughts as trains, and choosing not to board
(15:17) About ten times, like training a puppy
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
How do you think positively when your brain is built with a negative bias?
Not by trying. Just think positive is the worst advice I ever gave, and I gave it for about twenty years to anybody who would listen.
The heart of it
You cannot change a thought once it has arrived. You can decline to ride it.
Your subconscious sends more of whatever you gave weight to, and it does not sort by good or bad.
The negative bias is not a fault. It is the reason your ancestors survived the forest.
It was easy for me to say. I am a positive thinker by default, so my subconscious hands me cheerful thoughts all day and I stood there wondering why everybody else did not simply do the same.
Here is what is actually happening. Everything you encounter passes through three minds.
The instinctual one, which is enormously fast and does not consult you. It drops the hot tray before you have an opinion.
Then the subconscious, which opens a filing cabinet and asks what you did last time. Faster than you, slower than the first, and running almost everything.
Then the human mind, which only gets a look in when the other two are stumped. That is why an absurd question stops somebody in their tracks. Neither of the quick minds can file it, so you get handed over to the slow one, and suddenly the person is present.
Now the useful bit. Your subconscious is a pattern machine. It is why you never notice a particular coat until you buy one, and then see three in an evening. They were always there. It just did not know you were interested.
So it sends thoughts it believes you want. Ride a negative one and it notes that as a hit and sends more.
And the weight is the signal, not the flavour. A strong bad feeling and a strong good feeling are marked identically: important, send more of these. Which is exactly why a break up plays the same painful scene on a loop.
One small thing to try
Treat thoughts as trains coming into a station, and decide which you board.
A thought arrives. Ask one question: is this taking me anywhere right now? If not, let it leave without you.
It will come back. Your subconscious is stubborn and you may have to decline the same train twenty or thirty times, like training a puppy. Eventually it stops sending it.
And the second half, which does more than the first. Do not pour emotion onto the ones you do not want. That is what marks them as worth repeating.
Questions people ask
So positive thinking is a myth?
The instruction is. You cannot convert a thought any more than you can turn tea into coffee by objecting to it. What you can do is train which ones arrive, and that takes weeks rather than a decision.
Are negative thoughts bad?
No. Round a fire in the dark, the one who says stop, be quiet, what was that, is the one who saves everybody. The cheerful one who says never mind gets the group eaten. Be glad you have both.
How long does this take?
Longer than you want. Ten refusals of the same train is nothing. Somewhere past that it gives up, and then you notice your default has quietly moved.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
In this episode
overthinking · acceptance · mindfulness
Read the transcript
One of the most stupid pieces of advice I've ever given, and I've given it to so many people, probably
over the space of 20 years, I've probably given it to tens of people. And that advice is, just think
positive. Just be positive about it. Look for the positive in every situation.
how
I was so, so wrong
it's Okay for me. I'm a positive thinker. My subconscious mind bombards me with positive thoughts. It's okay for me
to think positive and to look for the positive in situations. So I just, I was just looking at everybody
and thinking, just think like me. Be like me. Why are you Why are you not like me? And I
would look at them as if to say it's that simple, you know? So on today's podcast, I'm going to
talk about why it is not that simple to just think positive and what I've learned about it and what
we can do about it. Because we can do something about it. I'm Steven Weber and this is Stillness in
the Storms podcast. And it's a podcast that will just help you to have a little more ah in life
when things are going badly wrong. It puts you in control, the driver's seat, instead of allowing
for the universe or the weather or everything else to be in control of how things are going in your
life. But just before we get on with the show, I just want to tell you about a new app
that I found. It's called good pods and it's awesome. It literally, it's. It's like Facebook
for podcasters and podcast listeners. You can literally follow your favourite friends. You can
follow your friends, you can see what podcast they're listening to. You can comment, you can share your podcast. And
not only that, you can keep an eye on, like my podcast, Stillness in the Storms. And you can interact.
It's just brilliant. It's called Good Pods. It's available on Android and on. What's the other phone uh
Oh yeah, itunes or I Apple or something. Back to thinking positive, then. Here's the thing.
You cannot change a thought and this is one of. This realisation is
literally life-changing
You cannot change a negative thought into a positive thought, a positive thought into a negative. You cannot change a
thought. A thought is A tangible object when it is, after it has arisen.
It's like, right, A thought is electricity and chemicals in the mind. I'm not a neurologist. I'm not going to
go down that route too much, but bear with me just a moment. You know, there's two types of electric
Dc. and Ac. I don't know the difference. Direct current and alternating current. I don't know what they both mean.
I have no idea. One's direct, one's alternating fine, but they're different, okay?
And they're different in ways that I don't know and don't understand. But when you turn a switch on and
that electricity flows through the cables, you cannot change that electricity. It's already there. You cannot go, oh, wrong
electric. You've then got to rewire the wires and you've got to then turn it off and then turn it
on to give a new one. Well, this is what we have to do with our thoughts, but it's slightly
more complicated in that We have what's called three minds. Now then, this isn't the brain. I'm not talking about
the brain, the different parts and the lobes. I'm talking about the mind. Now then, the mind it isn't really
separated into little parts, but the mind is more a collective of how it all works together. Now that you
have the instinctual mind. Nearly every single living thing has this. Well, as far as I know, they do. If
they got a vertebrae, if they got a brain, they have this instinctual mind. It's the fight, flight or freeze,
or just fuck things up. Fight, flight, freeze or fuck things up that's Sorry if
children are listening to this, but yeah, that's the. That's my four F's.
Anyway, I back I I digress. You've got the instinctual part of the mind that's incredibly quick. That has nothing
to really do with us. You know, that's when somebody makes you jump from the eye and you turn around
and you jump, or you drop the hot buns out the oven because it's too hot. Things like that. You're
not in control of that decision. It has. It's taken out of your hands, literally, you know, it's so incredibly
quick. And it'll tell your body or anything to react in such a way that it doesn't even consult you.
It doesn't go, hey, you know it should be duck. It just tells the body and. And this chemical
boom. It just does it. So it's the first mind, the instinctual mind. Then if it's. Everything passes through the
instinctual mind, everything, you know, even a conversation, somebody. So if I ask you the question, what's the capital of
England? Your instinctual mind goes, am I under threat? No, I'll pass it on to the
second mind, the subconscious mind. Then at this point, you're still not even aware. This all
happens within a few. Within a few milliseconds. So the subconscious mind then filters it and says, right, okay,
what's going on? And then it looks through a filing cabinet of everything that it's done before and if it
cannot come up with an answer it then tries to work it out based on what it already knows, then
this is slower than the instinctual mind, but still much quicker than the human mind, the third mind. So
the the subconscious mind is constantly looking through the filing cabinet of what did I do last time? Do I
already know the answer? So in every situation, whether there's a house burning, whether someone asks you what's the capital
of England? Or what do you think of Trump? Whatever the question, whatever the problem, whatever the problem be
on life-threatening conditions or experiences or imminent danger, the subconscious mind just looks
through the finding cabinet
and then if it doesn't find the answer, so if I say to you, what's um tiger plus five?
You're like, what? Subconscious mind goes hmm doesn't make sense. I'll pass that over to the human
mind. Then the human tries
to make sense of it, tries to make sense of the question. And this is, this is. Well, often when
you see people ask a really weird random question um like um how many gallons
of fuel did you put in your house today? You're like, what? Don't you mean car? Well, because your instinctual
mind, your subconscious mind doesn't know the answers it passes over to the human mind and the human just goes,
ah. And
this is what they do to confuse things. It's like the subconscious mind will carry on repeating the same patterns.
And Darren Brown did that. Is it Darren Brown? I think so. He did this to someone that was, ran
past him and took his um wallet out of his jacket or something like that. And he was running past
him and he looked up and goes, excuse me, why are all the walls in Spain only two foot tall?
And he looks at him and goes what? The
guy stealing his thing just stopped. I don't know if I got the question right, so please don't repeat this
um but you'll get the basis um
And it totally took the robber out of his subconscious habitable mind to the human mind. And then he said
to him, why do you want to steal my thing? What
do you mean? Oh? And he brought it to his attention. And this is what you do after the first
two minds doesn't know what to do with it. When, when you jump out of that habit,
you've then got the human mind in the end. But here's the thing, we're talking about positive and negative thoughts.
The subconscious mind is like A computer. And all it's doing is looking through its
pre-programming to see what response to give. And it's constantly looking at the world around it.
Like when you're walking down the street and you don't. You don't ever notice a certain top until you buy
one yourself. And then suddenly you notice it everywhere. Oh, that's really unique in the shop, you think, and then
you buy it and you go, really unique. There's three people out tonight wearing it. Well, they were out the
night before. But your subconscious mind didn't know you're interested in that top, so it didn't bring it to your
awareness. So your subconscious mind is aware of everything it's seeing everything it's hearing everything. It's got the intuitive
everything. It knows what's going on behind you and everything. It really does have
a massive amount of information going in, but we're only aware of a small fraction of it.
Like um you might not be aware of the air conditioner going on in your room right now. You might
not be aware of other things that are going on outside the car. If you're driving, you might not be
aware of a certain sound, the sound of the engine, until it makes an odd noise um The same with
sight. You're not really aware of everything. Your peripheral vision, if it's quite normal, it's only if it's abnormal, it's
like, oh, take a look at that. So your subconscious mind is just repeating the
patterns and habits of what you've always done.
So if you tend to focus on a negative thought, and if you have a negative thought and you get
on it and you focus on it, the subconscious mind says, I got it right, and it'll give you more
of them. And if you get. And if it gives you a positive thought and you dismiss it and go
oh yeah I don't believe in all that. It won't bother giving you any more. So it's bombarding you with
thoughts, what it thinks you want to ride on, what it thinks you want to go with. So that's why
we have um We tend to have a bias in one way or another. You're training your subconscious mind
on the flavor of thoughts that you want. So you can't change the thought once it's there.
That's impossible. Once the thought is in your mind, you can't change it, but what you can do is allow
it to just fade away again. You can allow room for another thought to come along and you can choose
to get on it it really is that simple. The other thing is about a negative bias. And I Just,
I do want to address this on the podcast because we do have a negative bias. Of course, I always
use the example of you've got two bears running towards you, one's handing you doughnuts and one's carrying a machete.
Which one is the most benefit for you to concentrate on?
Yeah, you want the doughnuts I get that, but you better sort the one with the machete first. And
if a group of you went into a forest and you were staying there in the middle of the night
and you've got all, all of you playing around, you're playing the guitar and you're enjoying it, and you're having
a good old knees up, you've had a few drinks, your marshmallows on the fire, and then suddenly someone hears
something in the background. Now then that happy positive person goes, oh, don't worry about it, it's fine. The negative,
miserable, biased, negative person goes, shh. Stop. Everybody stop what you're doing. Get the
bloody marshmallows off the damn fire. Shut the guitar up.
And everybody looks at him as a, you know, a real party pooper. You know, he may have just highlighted
a bear coming and he might have just saved all your lives, whereas the positive, happy person has just got
you all killed. You know, so, you know, we don't like the negative party poopers, but
they are the ones that are going to survive more things, Even in the Covid 19 era, you know, oh,
I'm gonna stay in. I'm not gonna go anywhere. They're gonna survive. The ones that, oh, I don't matter. It's
not gonna affect me, you know, I'm okay, Trump. Okay. He was lucky. He had the best of all medicines.
And he should. He's the president. I'm not saying he shouldn't, but he should realise that he has better medicines
than nearly everybody else on Earth. You know, I doubt even me in the Uk with the incredible Nhs would
have anything near the medication he had,
but, yeah, you can see how the. Oh, everything will be fine. Don't even worry about that. Can get us
killed. So that's why we have a negative bias it it Served us evolutionary. For evolutionary purposes, it served us
to stay alive. So don't. Don't dish your. Or don't be down on your negative thoughts.
You know, embrace your negative thoughts. They're okay, but the thing is you can recognise them and go,
well, do you know what? That's a negative thought. But that's not productive right now. And I don't have to
go with it that's the wisdom you can you have the wisdom to be able to choose which thoughts to
get on. Think of the thoughts as trains, you know, trainer thoughts. See what I did there? And you're
in the train station and you're sitting there and a train comes in, a thought comes in and you can
look at it and go, do you know what? Is this thought beneficial? Do I need it? Am I about
to be eaten by a saber-toothed tiger Is worrying about the meeting that I'm having in two weeks time right
now beneficial to me? No I'll get I'll not get on the train. I won't ride the train. So then
that train leaves the train station and you haven't got on it. And then your subconscious mind learns a little.
It learns that you didn't want to get on that train, then it might give you the same train again
hmm I think they made a mistake, I'll send the same train again. And then you go, yeah, no, I
really don't want that thought.
And it passes it out the station. And then after about 20 or 30 times, the subconscious mind is really
bloody stubborn and they'll keep repeating the same patterns. You have to literally tell it hundreds of times. So much
like training a puppy So after about 10 times of that train and you're not getting it on, getting on
it, the getting not getting it on with the train, getting on the train, it will eventually stop sending you
those trains. Now
you see where I'm going now I think you're ahead of me. If you choose to get on the trains
that you like, let's say you choose to get on all past or colored trains, guess what the subconscious mind
eventually is going to do? It's going to send you only pastel trains. Yes. So
you cannot change the trains. You cannot change the thoughts from negative to positive just the same as you cannot
change the t-shirt in different colour or the cup or the drink that you've been given into a different flavor
drink, you have to replace the drink. You have to choose to either suck that one up or go and
get another drink. And that's what we need to do with our thoughts. We need to treat them as thoughts
that come and go. Now our subconscious mind is thinking up thoughts right now to give you and it will
justify this podcast and it will give you all kinds of things. Oh, wow, that's brilliant ideas. That's amazing. But
then two days time it'll go, yeah, I'm still going to give you those trains, you know, and then you're
going to get annoyed by the trains. Here's the second part of the key to this. The more emotional
weight you put on each train, on each thought, the more important the subconscious mind thinks
it is. You
know, you don't have to have many dates with a particular looking person. If one of them that looked a
certain way really hurt you or smells a certain way really, really hurt you, you're never going to date them
again. Simply if somebody else comes along that even looks similar, you're like, look, I know you're not so and
so, but I can't date you because you smell the same as him. So if you give emotional weight to
a certain thought, it will put a bias on that. And it will. And it will, like mark it at
a 10 It'll go.
They really put a lot of weight on that. That was important. Now, notice I said about its importance.
It's not a bias either way. If you put a negative feeling on a thought, it doesn't see that as
a less important thought. A negative feeling is the same scale as a positive feeling. So if you put a
strong negative feeling, important. If you put a strong positive feeling, important.
So the idea is to not put emotional weight on the feelings that you do not want, on the emotions,
on the thoughts that you do not want. So if you just split up with somebody, and I know this
very well, because the moment you split up with someone, you suddenly think they're hanging from the chandeliers, they're doing
all the things you, you wanted to do. They are living the perfect relationship as what you want to do.
And of course that thought hurts. That thought really, really does run deep.
Hello. I'm just doing a podcast, Mitzi, and you know, if you want to join in, add something quite constructive.
Okay, the weight is important, but you've got to choose what weight to give things. So if
an emotion is a negative one, don't give it a strong negative emotion. Allow it to go as quick as
possible. Do not hold on to it. Do not get on it. Hello. So, yeah, that is how to
change your negative thoughts into positive thoughts. You can't. You've got to train your subconscious mind what thoughts to have.
And on that thought, check out good pods the app. Just look on the Play Store or the
Apple itunes um for good pods. All one word. So little yellow icon with headphones and
you can check out my podcast on it. There's a link below in the show Notes. Follow me and you'll
see what podcast I listen to. And yeah, it's pretty awesome. You've been listening to Stillness in the
Storm podcast with me, your host, Steven Webb. And if this helps you, if you've gone at any point during
this and gone boom, yes, I get it. Wow. I didn't know that. Leave a review
and share this podcast. Share it with someone. Share it with someone that perhaps has a negative thought pattern. And
perhaps instead of just telling them to think positive, you might be able to actually help them. Instead of dishing
out the same terrible advice I did for years and years. Just think positive does not work Take care. Love
