Negative thought patterns can trap us in anxiety, frustration, and spiritual stagnation. In this episode, author and coach Bruce Colbert shares a step-by-step, biblical strategy to heal your mind and break free. Discover how Heart Intelligence—a scriptural key—can transform your thinking and unlock the life Jesus promises.

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Hey there, friend.

Welcome to the podcast today.

This is Brian Del Turco.

Jesus Smart X the podcast episode 341.

What if the key to overcoming negative thoughts isn't just in your head, but in your heart?

Today with our guests, we're unlocking a scriptural pathway to mental freedom and renewed thinking.

Welcome to the podcast.

What we're all about here is Jesus teaches us how to live smart.

He knows about human flourishing.

He has the future locked in for his kingdom, and we get to hitch a ride right into that horizon.

Today we're diving into something that quietly shapes everything.

Our thought, life.

Negative thought patterns can keep us trapped, bound up in anxiety, frustration, and just general stagnation in life.

But there is good news.

We don't have to stay stuck.

Author and coach Bruce Colbert, a great kingdom friend, brings a practical scriptural pathway to mental freedom.

It's what he calls heart intelligence.

It's a step by step strategy rooted in scripture to unlock the abundant life that Jesus offers.

We're going to get right into it.

Just in case you missed the previous two episodes, episode 340, from water to the best wine, Jesus upgrades the story.

And episode 339, Dr. Charles Stone.

From brain fog to clarity, it's a slower and sacred way to think.

Well, let's get to it.

Our thoughts shape our life.

And in this episode with Bruce Colbert, we're exploring how to break the cycle of negativity with a heart centered approach that you likely have never heard before.

Let's get right into it.

Yeah, it's definitely a place of stewardship.

And one negative thought tends to have a reinforcing energy to it because of the way thoughts work.

You have a negative thought and it immediately starts going downstream, manifesting into the physical, appearing in the physical.

The first place that happens in our bodies.

We have a negative thought, we feel it.

Then we have a thought about the feeling that we're having and it tends to be really circular.

So it's negative thoughts.

I have a lot of empathy for people with negative thoughts.

I've struggled with anxiety at times in my own life as well.

So I think everybody can relate.

We have a lot of head trash going on.

I think the.

Yeah, the.

I don't know how they measure these statistics, but 60,000 thoughts a day.

80% are negative.

80% out of 60,000 thoughts.

So that's like an 80 20.

But it's a bad 80 20.

Yeah, inverted wrong direction.

80 20.

And you know, there was a time earlier in my life where I was going through a crisis Bruce, just be vulnerable here.

I don't mind.

I've talked about this before, but I went for counseling, took a bunch of testing.

I was in clinical depression at that season, put on medication, Zoloft, and went through what's called behavioral cognitive therapy, which certain protocol and counseling.

They dealt a lot with this issue.

Thoughts, how our emotions kind of trail our thoughts.

Yes.

Right.

So if you're dealing with, like, depression, let's say in my case, there was probably anxiety in the mix, too.

You really got to get current.

You have to really become aware of how you're thinking.

You know, the scripting that's going on in your thoughts is.

Was killing me.

And, boy, we're gonna get into this now.

What motivated you to write this book, Bruce?

Is it.

Did it come out of your own story, out of personal struggle or in working with people?

You have a career where you've worked a lot with people.

You see that, the struggle out there.

Yeah, I think a couple of things.

You know, it's interesting that James Clear says in order to write the book, you need to become the book.

You know, you need to live the lessons that you're writing about.

And so that's certainly part of it.

I would say over the last decade, any more, more than any other time in my life, dealt with some.

Some anxiety issues as well as the normal negative thoughts that everybody has.

So that's the part of it.

The second part of it is just seeing the need that's out there.

There's.

Negative thoughts are a huge, huge problem, even within the Christian community, those who are Christ followers.

It's a huge problem.

Yeah, I agree.

So one of the things you start talking about immediately in your book is how thoughts get.

Give rise to things.

Yes.

And there's power in that, you say, but there's also peril.

Yeah.

I guess, based on how you're thinking and what kind of things are rising up.

Right.

Yes.

So what do you mean by this?

That, like, thoughts are seeds and, you know, we know the potential of seeds.

But how do thoughts give rise to things?

I think, you know, anytime we start delving into something like, okay, how do we address this problem of negative thoughts?

It's.

It's.

You have to step back and say, okay, how do my thoughts work?

And so that's where I came up with the framework that thoughts give rise to things.

Because what is thought?

Thought is primarily a spiritual activity.

So I believe, you know, we're made of two parts, spirit and body meant to work together.

But thought is a spiritual activity.

Where does that thought come from.

You know, you read all these crazy articles about the mystery of consciousness, etc.

Etc.

But thought is a spiritual activity, happens in the spiritual center of a man or woman.

And what we see, and the first evidence of this is when you have a particular thought, it begins to show itself in your body first, physically.

So, okay, like, what would be an example of that?

Yeah.

So if you are in a stressful.

Have a stressful thought.

Okay.

If you have a stressful thought, there are certain physiological reactions that happen in your body, like cortisol.

The stress hormone gets released, your blood vessels may constrict, blood pressure rises.

Those are all physical changes that have come from a spiritual activity, thought.

And the opposite can happen as well.

So we can.

We can be thinking about something pleasant and it can produce the opposite.

It can.

It can produce, you know, can release those blood vessels.

Release.

Feel good, you know, more oxygen flow.

More oxygen flow.

All these positive things.

Yeah, but eventually that's where it starts.

It doesn't end there, though.

Thoughts eventually give rise to things in the physical world.

And I go through a couple illustrations in the book.

For example, you know, building a bookcase.

Right.

So what you're essentially doing, if you're going to build a bookcase, you'd be looking at where you want to build that bookcase in your home.

What kind of.

What do you need?

And you're going to begin lowering that plan.

That's only in your head.

It's only spiritual.

There's no physical form to it.

And you're going to begin externalizing that thought in a process.

You might do an intermediary step where you create, where you draw out or sketch out a plan, Right.

Which is a mini model.

Right.

And then once you kind of have that in place, and then you're going to go in the other direction.

You're going to go to the.

Go get the lumber, and you're going to be.

You're going to.

You're going to take the lumber, which is a physical material, and you're going to begin raising that lumber up in a shape and a form that matches the spiritual activity.

And I think I probably should say, as man and woman, the biblical record is we are made of both the physical and the spiritual.

And that's first shown in Adam.

Right.

So God raises up physical materials, the ground, right.

And he breathes into it the breath of life, and he fuses the two.

So I think what I say in the book is a man who has made this way, does his work that way.

Okay.

Very Good.

Before we continue, let's talk about worldview for a second.

Because obviously if you have a worldview that we came from stardust and it's all by chance and that thoughts are, you know, this way above my pay grade.

This whole conversation about where does consciousness come from?

I've never gotten my head around that.

And I've never even really try to be honest with you.

But I know there's articles and books written about this.

And like, if you come from a worldview of we came from stardust and we are basically chemicals.

And when you have a thought, it's a chemical activity that's going on in your brain.

Right.

It's all reduced to the materialism.

Right.

The physical.

Right.

I mean, that is a different worldview than what you're talking about, aren't you?

You're in.

You're inferring a worldview that there is a spirituality to thought and that our thoughts are more than just chemical or neurological activity that goes on in the physical organ of our brain.

Yes, right.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And I think that's where a lot of.

A lot of mistakes about thought have originated from.

If you cut out the whole space, spiritual part of man, then we're really reduced to randomness and chance and biological function, which really doesn't make sense.

Not just from the biblical record, but from experience.

I think we know somewhere deep down inside of us we're not just random bits of matter that have come together.

Yeah.

That would.

That worldview to me would really be the body driving everything.

And that just doesn't make any sense to me at all.

So you're saying Adam and Eve being created in God's image, also have this capacity to think, to plan, and then to create and to breathe life into something not as God, but as an image bearer of God.

Right, right.

So if you look at the prime, once Adam and Eve are created out of both spirit and matter, and then God gives them, you know, the archetypical command to be fruitful, multiply, fill and subdue the earth.

So there's this.

There's this whole.

I think I heard somebody, it was Myles Monroe say, you know, be fruitful, you know, make, produce, multiply, reproduce, fill, which is distribution.

And then subdue is basically now you have a certain level of mastery over.

So there is this flow that God has given us, these fears of influence that we're to make things and we're to do things.

Just like he's a maker, just like.

Just like he's an artisan.

We're to Be artisans.

Just like he created a structure and then filled it.

Proverbs says, man, you know, make your house and then fill it with all good and pleasant riches.

So it's a.

We are to reflect the Creator in that way.

Absolutely.

I love that.

And I've heard that even that word subdue in the Hebrew means to like cultivate or to release the latent potential potential of God's creation or some aspect of God's creation that you're called to, to garden, so to speak.

Absolutely.

And that's where.

That's the power of thought.

Right.

And so what often happens is for a variety of reasons that we can talk about or not, we actually take that tremendous power of thought and we create a lot of bad things.

We think negative things and that produces a negative environment first in our bodies and then in the world.

And then it becomes a self reinforcing pattern.

Yeah.

Self defeating.

Absolutely.

It works against your calling, your design and your potential.

We become very unhappy.

It's a, you know, if you've ever had anxiety or significant worry or like you mentioned, you know, depression, it's not a pretty place to be.

It's very painful, Very painful, dark place to be in.

And you know, the psalmists talk a lot about these dynamics, you know, the emotions of depression and why are you downcast?

O my soul.

David would talk to himself, you know, and rise up and hope in God again.

I think in one of the psalms he repeats that three times to himself.

He's like working, he's rescripting himself.

So, so how did the physical and the spiritual work together then?

Bruce, you had, you had mentioned that you're saying thoughts are ultimately spiritual.

It's not just brain chemical reactions.

It rises higher than that to a spiritual plane, right?

That's right.

I mean it's, it's physical in the sense of our physical brain, but it are.

Now you would draw a distinction, right, between the mind and the brain?

Yeah.

And actually, I mean we can talk about this at whatever point you want.

But the Bible, it's interesting.

When I study the scriptures, the Bible speaks nowhere of the brain, nowhere.

Never mentioned a physical organ like a brain.

Never mentioned to the heart as the center of thought.

And I think that we can be tempted to say, oh, that's just what an ancient book says.

But I found some recent research that talks about how the heart itself has enough neurology to have its own kind of brain.

Your actual physical heart in that region.

Of your chest has enough physical neurology in it to have its own kind of brain a B, the heart sends more neurological information to the brain than vice versa.

Now you're saying the heart as our physical heart.

Right?

Yes.

Has neurological density around it and to it that is connected.

I understand there's quite a neurological connection to our brain from our heart and it informs our brain.

I believe it does.

I believe it sets the pace.

Sets the pace for our brain.

I believe it does.

You know, we.

And some of that's shown in the modern work about what's known as heart rate variability.

So heart rate variability measures, for example, the, the, the distance between the heartbeats and the more equidistant they are, or the more same the timing is.

Okay.

The better your state, better your state, the better your state.

And I don't, I haven't read the full paper, but I found a paper that talked about how the heart can know things by.

Before the brain does intuitively.

So I believe the brain is important.

I'm not trying to say the brain is important.

I mean, the brain is very sophisticated.

It's able to just really build things out.

Right.

And take things.

I mean, it's able to analyze.

But the heart, like this phenomenon called thin slicing.

If a woman, if an elevator door opens up and a woman standing there waiting to get in, and there's a guy in there and her heart of immediately tells her not to go in.

It's called thin slicing.

I believe it's intuition.

Yes.

Don't do it.

Right.

Your heart has just picked up something, Right?

Yep.

You haven't had time to take it through your prefrontal cortex and analyze it and think about it, but.

Right.

Is that sort of what you're talking about?

Even though I, I believe instinct and intuition.

And so if, again, if you start with what the scriptures say.

The scriptures talk about intention, desire, even emotion coming from the heart, originating from the heart.

So I think in my hierarchy, if I had to draw a hierarchy, I would say the heart is in charge and the brain is a servant of the heart.

Wow, that's really good.

So it's actually in verse.

We often think of, oh, the brain's in charge and the heart is just kind of like this emotional place is how we refer to it in common.

But I believe based on what the Bible says and modern scientific research, that the heart is actually in charge and the brain is the servant of the heart.

So you're saying the heart is setting the pace.

Yes.

And maybe even the sort of the vector or the direction of the brain.

Interesting.

So talk more about that.

This connection between the Physical and the spiritual and how they work together and maybe how practically we can avail ourselves of that.

Yeah.

So, you know, the model is that, again, the.

What, the.

What does the spiritual bring as a whole?

The spiritual brings meaning, energy, direction, and purpose.

Right.

So it brings those sort of things, but meaning, energy, direction and purpose need a place to physically express themselves.

Themselves.

So as that's lowered, then what we find the physical does is it supports and expresses the spiritual.

So it would be similar to a rider on a horse.

Right.

So a rider on a horse, a good rider on a horse, is going to provide a direction.

It's going to determine where you're going.

It's.

It's going to be leading the show.

But a guy on a horse is going to go a lot further and faster than he would on his own legs because he's on a horse.

Right.

So the physical is the tool that supports and expresses the spiritual.

And so they live in this kind of dependent relationship between the two.

Okay, very good.

And you're saying that heart intelligence, you know, we hear about IQ recent years, we've begun to hear a lot about eq, like our emotional intelligence, which I would think is an expression of heart intelligence.

Yeah, you could look at it that way for sure.

Eq.

So.

But the ancient wisdom of heart intelligence, are you drawing from like, proverbs or Psalms or what?

Where's that coming?

Prophets.

When?

I started to break this down when I was researching for the book, and I have quite a lengthy section in the book showing all of the different functions that are attributed in the heart.

And, you know, let me just pull up.

You know, for example, you know, Genesis 6, when he talks about Abraham, not, excuse me, talks about Noah and the state of the earth, it says every intention and thoughts of the heart.

Right?

So there's intention and thoughts that are mapped to the heart.

You know, where do we store important knowledge?

Deuteronomy says, know in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you.

Emotion happens there.

You know, Elkanah said to Hannah, why do you weep?

And why do you not eat?

And why is your heart sad?

So there's thinking, there's emotion, then there's all this spiritual.

We know that hearts can be hardened, Right.

Scripture talks about that with Pharaoh.

But we also know that God gives.

Us a new heart, too.

A new heart.

God, it's the place that we meditate.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart.

Heart be acceptable to you.

We believe with our hearts.

Yeah.

Romans 10, we believe Romans 10:9.

Yeah.

You know, we believe in our heart.

We say things on our heart.

I said in my heart.

Come now, I will test you with pleasure.

Enjoy yourself.

Ecclesiastes says, okay, wow.

So there's just.

So is this like a Hebraic contrast with, I don't know, Greek or Western thought?

The idea of the contrast between the heart and the mind, or the thinking process as we normally think of it?

Here in the west, we're dominated by kind of Platonic Greek thinking.

Right.

And so it's interesting when.

When you look at Greek philosophy, first of all, they don't even really talk about a spirit.

They talk about the mind, but they primarily talk about the mind in terms of reason.

So just setting aside the heart for a minute, the whole model of Greek thinking is that thought and particularly reason.

Right.

So they.

They.

So much so that they painted God as the ultimate thinker.

That's the main thing that they said it would say about God is he is the ultimate thinker.

Yeah.

So that.

And then what came down really out of Greek thought is that kind of the opposite, that the physical and the spirit, or the.

The physical and the realm of.

Of thought, as they put it, were opposites.

And so they were constantly trying to escape.

They saw the physical as an imperfect thing.

So how did Plato say it?

The forms, the invisible realm of forms.

Forms or ideas.

Ideas.

And then the real practical world, what did he.

Imperfect realm of the physical, the physical.

Imperfect realm of the forms.

Freedom would come from a Greek way of thinking, of escaping the physical and relying purely on thought and the physical dragging down thought, which is, again, the opposite of what we've been talking about.

Whereas the God worldview redeems the physical and wants to see this integration of thought and physicality, Right?

Absolutely.

And God made creation and physical matter good.

It is good.

He made it good.

Genesis is clear.

You know what?

This world is not going away.

This earth, it's going to be refined.

Refined and renewed.

It's going to be a new heavens and a new earth.

So this escapism to get to heaven, we don't even hardly understand what.

It's not an eternal church service in the sky.

That's not God's vision.

It's a renewed earth, a renewed heavens, and our continued stewardship and involvement with Him.

Anyway, that's a much more inspiring horizon, I think, than an eternal church service in the sky.

Yes, exactly.

Or even worse, a combination church service.

Rest home.

Yep, that's right.

CS Lewis said, I think God creates created matter.

I think he likes it, you know, or something like that.

I think he likes it.

I do.

And so the Greek thought, and maybe, I don't know, today stoicism is very popular.

Does that.

That's a lot of mental stuff, isn't it?

Stoicism or some of that heart too.

Yeah, I've done a lot.

You know, I did a little bit of reading on stoicism, and I'm not going to capture the nuance of it exactly.

I think there is some value in separating ourselves from the emotion of the moment, but stoicism almost sets emotion completely aside.

And one of the things I write about in the book is that emotions are actually gifts.

They're not things to be avoided.

Now, emotions shouldn't run our life, right?

We should be taking stewardship of our thoughts so that the positive emotions follow, but emotions should not be suppressed.

I think it's a very unhealthy way to live life.

And so the two things I think about it is obviously pleasant.

Emotion is a gift from God, right?

So joy, you know, vibrancy, happiness, well, being, those are all gifts.

And then negative emotions.

I like to look at negative emotion as a bit of a gauge to tell us you're thinking it might be headed in the wrong direction.

So it's kind of an alarm system, kind of a canary in the coal mines.

So if I'm stressed or anxious, one of the things that I've taught myself to do is to say, okay, what kind of thinking has produced this emotion in me?

Okay.

And emotions are vital to move us.

Right.

Like love.

If a young man has love for a woman, it moves him in her direction and it can create a marriage and a family.

Yeah.

I just think of the.

When you start talking about stuff like that, I start thinking of, you know, Chaim, you know, the.

The heap life.

You know, if you look at the Hebrews and the way they talked about life, you know, it's.

It's.

It's.

It's joy and it's sorrow.

Yeah.

What is the phrase again?

You know, for like Fiddler on the Roof.

Right.

To life.

Right.

So their.

Their mentality is leaning into abundant life.

Leaning into life, leaning into emotion, leaning into, you know, positive emotion.

And a negative emotion is not something to be suppressed.

You know, it's like, about as effective as suppressing going to the bathroom.

You know what I mean?

It's something to be.

It's something to be.

It's an experience that you're having, and so you're in a much healthier place.

For example, in my case, if I'm feeling anxiety.

I could try to tamp that down, right.

Or I could try to medicate that.

Or I could go grab, you know, a whiskey to try to tamp that down and run away from it.

Or I could even try to distract myself from it.

But what if instead I got curious?

Huh?

I'm feeling anxious.

I wonder what that's about.

I wonder where that's coming from.

So getting you to really get in touch or in tune with your.

Your life, what's happening?

By the time you're having an emotion, you better feel it.

You better go ahead and feel it.

At that point, the thought has already created the emotion.

You might as well feel it.

Feel it, get curious about it, go back to your thinking and say, hmm, you know, what have I been thinking about that I'm so anxious.

Sure.

Use it redemptively.

Absolutely.

I love that.

So let's talk about stewarding our thoughts then, Bruce.

Like, what do we do?

You're.

You.

You mentioned in the book Mastering the Five Types of Thought.

Just quickly.

What are those five types?

Sure.

So the.

The five.

The five types of thoughts really begins with.

And again, is, first of all where we're playing, where we're placing our attention.

Right.

So what am I almost in a spotlight analogy?

Where am I placing my thought?

We have.

We have a choice about what we think about, about what we give our attention to.

Right.

So Scripture even encourages certain places to place our attention.

So in Philippians 4.

Eight, you know, think about what's honorable, think about what's true, think about what's commendable.

It's an imperative command.

Right?

It's a command, take action.

The first place of stewardship is just attention.

What are you thinking about?

Yeah, you know, if you're thinking about the 22 negative things going on in your life, you're going to get negative results.

And they're both at a macro level.

I can be thinking about the fact that it's raining outside, or I can have multiple thoughts about what that rain is doing.

Oh, the rain's getting me wet, or the rain's watering my garden.

I can have all kinds of different aspects that I can place my attention on.

And again, we get to choose.

Brian, you get to choose what you think about every day.

Right.

So you could be thinking about, you know, I'm not gonna put thoughts in your head, but we get to choose what we place our attention on.

That's the first one.

Attention.

Attention.

Okay.

Another type of thought is something that's more automatic.

Well, let me go to A meditation.

So when we place our attention, then what we can do is we can meditate on that thing.

And so that's a process of thinking about it repetitively, repetitively.

Like a rehearsing, a reviewing.

Like rehearsing, reviewing.

I can think about the rain.

I can think about it's watering my garden.

I can think about how the plants are doing.

I think about the fruit that's going to come from it.

And I can follow that thought train.

And even from just an anatomical.

Is that the right word?

Level.

I'm understanding they used to think the human brain was sort of set by the mid-20s, right.

But neurogenesis now and plasticity, they realize it's a lifetime potential.

So if you're reviewing and meditating, you're actually rescripting, aren't you?

You're deepening neurological connections that make it easier for you to think that way moving forward.

You 100% got it, Brian.

That is again, the process of thought specific, becoming things.

And I think this is a large part that the brain plays, is when we think a thought over and over, the thought.

The brain is not so much a producer of thought as it's a reflector of past thought.

So what happens is you're.

You are greasing the groove, okay, as you set it for a future thought.

If you think a thought enough times, what your body has designed to do is create an efficiency.

Ah, nice.

And efficiency.

So.

And that efficiency is very useful.

You know, you think about writing a book, you're kind of a wordsmith, you know, I like that efficiency.

So, you know, you don't want to have to expend the same.

If you've locked in a good thought, don't.

You don't want to expend the same amount of energy every time to have that thought.

Thanks for listening to Jesus Smart X the podcast with Bruce Colbert today as our guest.

This is part one.

There's going to be a subsequent episode which will finish this conversation.

It's rich.

There's a lot to it.

Remember, our thoughts are powerful, but in Christ, we are empowered to steward them.

Well, if this episode encouraged you or brought something new to you, pass it along to someone who needs it.

Be sure to follow the podcast so you don't miss what's next.

And hey, if you'd like to dive deeper, check out the show notes for more [email protected] that show notes page will be up in just a day or two from the initial day of release of this episode.

Let's keep leaning into everything Jesus has for us.

Because life in the kingdom is smart and it's complete.

Let's get together again in the next episode.