(Part 2)
According to neurologists at the Cleveland clinic, The Human mind processes up to 70,000 thoughts per day. That’s about 48 thoughts per minute. Which means that by the time you finish watching this video, your mind will have processed over 100 thoughts.
Processing all these thoughts does not mean actually thinking or dwelling on them, as that would obviously take more than 1.2 seconds per thought. Most thoughts come and go and don’t cause us to think about them.
The interesting thing is that our mind cannot think about more than 1 thought at a given time. For example, it cannot think about a negative and a positive thought simultaneously.
Another interesting fact about the way the mind works is that it likes certainty. Therefore, whenever a thought comes in, which the mind chooses to think about or dwell on, it goes through a process of either confirming or disproving it.
Here is a cool analogy for it; think of the mind as a really good lawyer. A good lawyer can argue convincingly for or against the same topic. To do so, they research precedence to build their argument. Our mind goes through a similar process. It scrolls through our life’s past experiences and interactions to either confirm or disprove a thought.
So, a negative thought that makes us feel bad, is the outcome of the mind successfully pulling previous experiences and interactions to confirm the negative nature of the thought and a positive thought which makes us feel good is the outcome of the opposite.
The problem is that the human mind has a natural tendency to give more weight to negative experiences or interactions over positive ones. Psychologists refer to this as negativity bias, and it causes us to focus on one negative thing instead of a mountain of positive things as it builds supporting evidence.
By understanding this, we can do a number of things whenever a negative thought pops into our mind:
1. Think about things that disprove the negative thought, essentially arguing against your mind.
2. Think of 3 things you are grateful for in your life and write them down on a piece of paper.
3. Do a deep belly breathing exercise. The mind cannot think about external thoughts and be aware of the body at the same time. Since the mind will always prioritize to focus on the deep breathing (since its own life depends on it), you will distract it from thinking about the negative thought.
By practicing these exercises as well as meditating regularly, you’ll gradually increase your thought control capability. As a result, you’ll trigger a whole positive chain reaction that will change your destiny as I’ve shown in the previous video: From thoughts to Destiny.
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