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

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Thank you for listening.

Steven

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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

you guys. Have an amazing day. Bye.