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hey this is Leo for actualised org and let's talk about negative thoughts all right in this quick self-help segment I am going to cover negative thoughts what they are set your expectations for how they work and give you some techniques that you can use to cope with them deal with them eliminate them all right so negative thoughts or as many of us call it automatic negative thoughts because that's what it is we don't realize is how many of these thoughts you're actually having and how unconsciously and spontaneous interests automatically you're having them throughout that your day so whether it's a negative thought about your girlfriend or boyfriend negative thought about what somebody did to you while you were driving to work or negative thought about having to go to the gym or negative thought about what's going to be happening to you next month when you can't pay the bills you know your mind is really really good at taking your greatest fears and projecting them and catastrophizing them and just creating the worst possible case scenarios and then putting them right before your eyes and just like BAM flashing them right for before you so whatever your greatest fears are in life chances are that you're having a lot of negative thoughts around that fear and I do usually tend to find that it's one or two main fears and this is probably something like an issue that crept up and kind of stuck with you from childhood or early adulthood and these things tend to be centered around for example the fear of failure maybe you have a fear of whining a poor and homeless maybe you have a fear of not winding up in a good relationship and being lonely and dying miserable and unloved maybe you have a fear of really getting rejected by somebody if you put yourself out there whether in a relationship or maybe in a business context maybe you have a fear of like failure in going and trying some sort of goal and then not succeeding at it and then having everybody point point fingers at you and say well we told you so we you couldn't do that and so we have a failure of of that kind of embarrassment or humiliation so there's many different types of core fundamental fears but whatever it is it's going to be like a filter that you look and filter your whole day through and this will have tend to happen again and again and again so one first step to starting to eliminate negative thoughts is to become very conscious become very aware of when you are having negative thoughts and what is the topic that is revolving around I guarantee you that you will be shocked if you have not done this exercise spend the next few days spend the next three days just be very aware about what it is that you're thinking and what you might want to do practically is for five minutes every day for five minutes randomly three times within your day just stop for five minutes and ask yourself what am I feeling right now and what am i thinking and what you'll notice is that if you're feeling negatively if you're feeling anxious or stressed or worried or overwhelmed you're going to notice that there's an Associated thought with that and that thought is going to be some sort of negative automatic thought that you might not even realize that you're having it might be something like well I'm feeling overwhelmed right now and the reason I'm feeling that way is because I'm thinking that oh I've got a hundred things that I need to do before the end of the week or if I don't do that then something bad will happen right and that's usually where your brain fills in your subconscious mind will fill in that blank with your worst imaginable fear you might think that well if I don't get all this stuff done this week then I might get fired and I might not be able to pay my mortgage and then though the bank will repossess my house and then I'll wind up on the street and I'll never be able to recover from that and I'll be homeless and poor for the rest of my life so maybe that's what your brain is projecting in into your into your mind or maybe it's something like well if I don't get all this stuff done then my spouse or my boyfriend or my girlfriend will think less of me and they won't love me anymore and maybe they'll leave me and then I'll not ever be able to replace them and get into a good relationship so I'll wind up alone and miserable and nobody will ever want me because I'm unlovable and I'm not successful in their eyes so maybe it's something like that right become aware of that do a little bit of analysis and spend the next three days really tracking your negative thoughts and maybe recording them and in fact I'll tell you make a list make a list of all the negative thoughts you're having throughout the next three days and just see what are the categories are they based around money are they based around relationships and people are they based around humiliation fear of failure something else maybe your diet maybe your how you look maybe your level of confidence in your life maybe the things that you think you can can't achieve start to notice that because awareness is the first step and honestly you're not going to be able to eliminate your negative thinking in a week that's not going to happen all of us have negative thoughts it's totally natural it's the human condition our mind is geared this way our mind really has a lower self and higher self the lower self is literally physically in your brain you have a reptilian brain that part of your brain that evolved when there were no humans on earth that part of the brain that evolved when we were still mammals and even before mammals when we're really at the reptilian phase this was millions of years ago because then there was no higher consciousness thinking there were no such things as ideals like beauty and excellence and truth and there were no goals what there was was just fight-or-flight response survival of the fittest and in that kind of ecosystem your brain or your reptilian brain the brainstem the lower part of your brain really evolved to ensure that your survival is taken care of so when your survival is threatened everything else in your life shuts off nothing else can take priority you can't honor values like beauty and honesty and love and truth and excellence you can't honor these types of values and you can't honor those types of goals and towards them in your life if you're worried about your physical survival for example or if you're worried that you're going to be humiliated and ostracized or if you're worried that you're not going to be loved so these fundamental fears are grounded in your reptilian brain and your reptilian brain is more powerful than your prefrontal cortex and your your more mammalian and your more human brain so the prefrontal cortex is where you get your conscious thought from and there we have these bigger ideals we have these goals we have these visions for ourselves we have this amazing life that we want to live we have the contribution that we want to make to the world but to make that to actually honor that in your life what you need to do is you need to kind of quiet your reptilian brain and make sure that your reptilian brain is kind of a is mellowed out it's calm and it's not too overstressed and that means taking a look at the negative thoughts that you're having and it's not going to be that easy to recondition your reptilian brain to stop having these negative thoughts because you've got like a lifetime of history of of having these negative thoughts so you have these negative thought habits that you really need to start to reshape and then of course even then your reptilian brain is still always going to be very sensitive to any kind of dangers in your environment or perceived dangers so the way to start is through awareness but then of course you can build in habits that will help you to reshape your negative your negative thought patterns one way to do this is to do affirmations and I have other videos that talk about how to do affirmations effectively there are some important tips about how to do affirmations but doing just five or ten minutes of affirmations in the morning is a really effective way to eliminate negative thoughts another way to eliminate negative thoughts is with meditation meditation is all about quieting the mind and shutting off shutting off all that chitter chatter that's going on especially the negative chitter chatter and just quieting your mind and being happy in the moment and I got other videos to talk about how to really do with meditation effectively as well but setting up a meditation habit can be a really powerful strategy for eliminating negative thoughts other ways to eliminate negative thoughts is to have something creative that you're doing in your life have your life be not focused on yourself but be focused on other people and not in the sense that you're a mother Teresa type person but in the sense that there's something you want to contribute something that you're doing that's outside of yourself so maybe you are really interested in some sort of cause like you have a charity that you really like to contribute to and that's important to you or maybe your family is your cause or maybe your work is your cause maybe your church is your cause or some other organization or maybe your cause is maybe you're like a scientist and your causes to discover something new to add something to humanity to do something to do something positive right maybe you're an inventor and you want to create something that's going to help people out maybe you're a business maker you're an entrepreneur and you want to make some sort of business that's going to have a positive impact on the world right so focus on that rather than just sitting alone in your room dwelling on yourself and your own thoughts because that tends to be just like a negative spiral of pit and despair that you go down whereas if you start focusing your attention outward and you start giving and you start focusing on what you can be doing then all of a sudden you reverse that trend and you start moving upward alright so those are my thoughts on negative thoughts negative thoughts are really a pernicious thing and you want to start to get a handle on them and it's really it is a deep topic and there's a lot of more advanced techniques that I cannot share with you in this quick self-help segment so I'm going to refer you to my site for those but I'm going to wrap up here so go ahead share your comments I want to hear what you guys think about this please like this and share this and then of course check out actualized org for more advanced personal development videos just like this where we talk about issues like mastering your emotions success personal development mastery negative thoughts all different techniques involved with meditation and doing journaling and various exercises to get this part of your life really really handled and you can subscribe 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