This episode is all about how our thoughts, especially the negative thoughts and the impact they have on our lives. We have over 6,000 thoughts per day! 80% of those thoughts are negative. What impact do you think that has on how you experience the world?
This episode provides you with a 20-minute routine that can reduce negative thinking, calm your mind and create cognitive band width.
This episode is all about how our thoughts, especially the negative thoughts and the impact they have on our lives. We have over 6,000 thoughts per day! 80% of those thoughts are negative. What impact do you think that has on how you experience the world?
This episode provides you with a 20-minute routine that can reduce negative thinking, calm your mind and create cognitive band width.
Welcome everybody. You're listening to episode 69 of the winning edge coach podcast.
The podcast that aims provides you with the tools, tactics, and techniques to create a winning edge mindset, to allow you to live the life you are meant to live.
This episode is all about our thoughts, especially negative thoughts and how they impact on our lives.
What if I told you you had over 6,000 thoughts per day, and what if I then told you 80% of those thoughts were negative?
What impact do you think that has on how you experience the world? In this episode, I want share with you a 20 minute routine that can reduce negative thinking, calm your mind and create cognitive bandwidth before we get started.
It was Gandhi that said "a man is, but a product of his thought what he thinks he becomes". Let's expand on that statement a little bit. According to a team of psychology experts at Queens University in Canada who have developed a never seen before, way to detect when one thought ends and another begins, they estimate that the average human will have about 6,200 thoughts a day.
Fred Luskin, of Stanford University from his research believes that 90% of those thoughts are repetitive. And the last bit of research I want share with you is according to the national science foundation, around 80% of those thoughts are negative.
In other words, we have 4,464 repetitive negative thoughts every day.
So if we take Gandhi's statement that a man is but the product of his thoughts, what he thinks he becomes. What impact is that negative mental noise having on the way you experience the world? What do you think those thoughts are attracting into your life? If every day on average you are having 4,464 repetitive negative thoughts.
How do you think that shapes your world are those negative thoughts pushing you forward or dragging you back? Are they attracting into your life? The things you do want or the things that you don't want.
I want to introduce you to a simple 20 minute technique that can help to reduce some of that negative mental noise.
It's called the brain dump and at its most basic level, brain dumping entails dumping all your ideas worries, lingering questions and to dos from your head onto paper or another medium with the objective of clearing your mind and reducing tension worries and anxiety, a brain dump can be done in the morning or in the evening. The benefits of a morning brain dump is that it creates clarity and can improve focus. The evening brain dump quietens the mind and relaxes your brain. Ready to sleep. Doing a brain dump of your mind can be helpful when you want to stop that constant swirl of thoughts that are running around your mind. I'm gonna talk you through my six steps to doing a brain dump.
First step, find a quiet place where you're not gonna be disturbed. Turn off your phone. Any other devices that are gonna disturb you and have a piece of paper and pen at the ready.
Now, this is the important thing. This is my first rule of doing a brain dump. Use a pen and paper. Don't use your phone. Don't use a laptop. Don't use a computer or any other digital device. Use a good old fashioned piece of pen and paper. Why? because I still think that the act of writing is hard wired into us. It's an evolutionary trait that we've developed over hundreds of thousands of years and the link between the hand and the brain is inseparable. And you will get so much more from a brain dump by using a pen and paper.
Step two is set a 20 minute timer and start writing and just whatever comes into your head, just write what you're obsessing about what you want to clear from your mind, what you don't understand, what you want to free, what questions you have, what you've got to remember to do, whatever comes into your mind.
Just write it down. Unedited, punctuated, just dump, as it says, your thoughts onto the paper. For this exercise you only need one piece of paper.
If the paper gets full, you just re-orientate it and just squeeze in what you need to get down. Just keep writing. Doesn't matter about punctuation. Doesn't matter about spelling. It doesn't matter about order. You just dump everything on to the one sheet of paper.
When the timer stops you stop. So at the end of 20 minutes, you put the paper down and stop.
Now, this is where my brain dump technique is slightly different than maybe some other, other brain dump techniques out there. Normally at this stage now you'll just discard the paper and move away. I feel it's important from what you've written to extract any to dos. So anything that was on your mind that you've got to do, you just extract from that from the list and transfer it to your to do list.
Everything else you ignore, but anything that's a to do, you just move to a holding list as it were that you will use to organize yourself, organize your day.
So, and that's it. Once you've done that, that piece of paper can be thrown away. And as I said, the morning brain dump brings clarity and focus helps you to go into your day with a clear mind. And if you're in a creative profession, that can be very beneficial. And in the evening it helps to quieten your mind an aid sleep. So it could be part of your end of day routine to do a 20 minute brain dump just to get out what's in your mind. So you sleep more soundly, but it's 20 minutes well invested every day.
Give it a go. Let me know how you got on