#173 I Don't Want to Think This Way Anymore

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Have you ever felt bogged down by negative thoughts, even after making a conscious effort to be more positive?

Here's the thing: Constantly battling negative thoughts might be the very obstacle preventing your growth.

Our brain, with its prime directive to ensure our survival, often resists change, even if it’s for the better. It favors familiarity and will try to deter you from paths that might demand more energy or potential risk.

So, what if we took a different approach?

What if, instead of fighting these thoughts, we allowed them?

Sounds counterintuitive, right? Dive into this episode to uncover the power of embracing all your thoughts and unlocking a transformative mindset shift.

Referred to in this episode:

Bob Newhart – Stop it

 


 

Read full transcript below:

 

0:00
This is Laura Lummer, the breast cancer recovery coach. I'm a healthy lifestyle coach, a clinical Ayurveda specialist, a personal trainer, and I'm also a breast cancer survivor. In this podcast, we talk about healthy thinking and mindfulness practices, eating well, moving your body for health and longevity. And we'll also hear from other breast cancer survivors who have reengaged with life, and have incredible stories to share. This podcast is your go to resource for getting back to life after breast cancer.

0:37
Hey, hey, hey, hello, welcome to episode 173 of the breast cancer recovery coach podcast. So happy to be here today. So many exciting things going on. And if you haven't yet heard one of those is the five day sugar challenge. So this show actually will come out on Friday, January 14. And the sugar challenge begins on well, it opens on Sunday the 16th to allow people to do the prep work and print out anything they need to and get familiar with the member area because I like being able to prep yourself and get ready for the week. And then we jump in on Monday, January 17. So you have until 11pm Pacific Time Sunday, January 16, to join the five day sugar challenge. So please go to the breast cancer recovery coach.com forward slash sugar, you will be so glad you did. I know that we struggled so much with eating habits, we humans, and there are ways to easily and painlessly change our eating habits, especially when it comes to sugar. It is amazing. The transformation that I see when I go through this challenge when I coach people on nutrition. And they begin to see like a light comes on. And they see certain thoughts that they tell themselves are keeping them in this position where they feel stuck or they feel powerless, or they feel like food has power over them. And this last week, I recorded some coaching sessions, I had some amazing lady, some of my members who are willing to be recorded, be open, be vulnerable, and talk about their challenges with sweets and Ford slash snacking in their lives. And to see them get it in a coaching session is unbelievably transformational. It's so powerful. So I'm so thrilled that I have these coaching sessions that I can offer in the challenge for people to see. And this time, in the five day sugar challenge, we actually wrap it up with a live coaching session. So there's been a ton of stuff added and changed and updated. And I'm so excited about it. And I want you to have the support you want to have, one of the most common things that I hear from women who are struggling with diet is I really want to change my diet, because they have a belief that changing their diet will have an impact on their health, that will have an impact on the risk of recurrence. And that's not wrong. And yet they say to me, but I haven't done anything about it. And in fact, many times instead of not doing the things that they want to do, not what they're told to do, not what they're supposed to do. But making the changes they want to do isn't happening. And instead of that they're actually going deeper into behaviors they don't want to have. The good news is, we can change that. So please join me in the five day sugar challenge. If that resonates with you, if there's a dietary change, that you're feeling stuck with something you really want to change to help yourself feel better about yourself and about your healthy lifestyle. Come and join me the five day sugar challenge the breast cancer recovery coach.com forward slash sugar, you will be so glad you made that choice. Okay, so let's get into the show. Something that comes up often for me in coaching sessions. Kinda reminds me of this skit that I saw many years ago. I'm sure you can find it on YouTube. In fact, I'll find it on YouTube. And I will put the link to it in the show notes for this episode. It was probably one of the funniest Bob Newhart skits that I had ever seen. Now it's unrealistic, but it's comedy. It's funny. And basically, he's playing the role of a psychiatrist or psychologist, some kind of counselor. A woman comes in, and he gives her five minutes. He says they won't need more than five minutes. And she tells him what her problem is. And he says, Okay, are you ready for the solution? And she's all yours, right? Yes, yes, yes. And he looks at her and he says, okay, stop it. Why would you think that why would you tell yourself that stop it. Basically she says I have an irrational fear of being buried alive in a box.

5:00
And so he tells her stop it, stop thinking that. And so the skit goes on. And she brings up other things that she's thinking, and he continues to offer her stop it, you know, it's not working, stop it. And it's very funny to watch. But

5:17
it also relates to us in real life. And here's how there are a lot of times when we become aware of a thought.

5:27
And we say to ourselves, I'm so stuck here, I keep having this thought. And it reminds me like even coming up in the sugar challenge. And during the coaching sessions, some of my clients recognize the thought, and then they will follow up by saying, I can't stop thinking this, or I keep having this thought, or I don't want to think like this, but I keep doing it. Now, I could say, Stop it, stop thinking that that's basically what they're saying. They're saying, I want to stop thinking this. And I can relate to that. Because I said that to myself, I will have thoughts and they'll say, Why am I thinking this thing? It isn't serving me, I don't want to think this. But what's really happening when we're doing that, is we're getting very caught up on the thought. We're resisting thinking of certain things. So I'm going to give you an example. This past a couple of days ago, I had my three months CT scans, and the thought comes up. What if they don't come out? Okay. Now, that thought has lost a tremendous amount of power for me, because I've intentionally worked on it for some time for a long time, right? But the thought is still going to come up. It's okay, that that comes up. Because it's normal. It's a normal human brain thing to offer a person who has cancer or who has had cancer and is getting a CT scan.

6:57
But I don't resist the thought anymore. I thought that the right thing for me to do first, before I dug into the real work, was to say don't think that don't think that thinks something else thinks something else. But the truth is, when that happens, when I think something else, I'm just resisting that thought. So I'm creating actually more

7:22
agitation, more irritation, because I'm telling myself, I shouldn't be thinking that is the fight not to think it, that becomes a problem. So what are you supposed to do? Do you just sit around telling yourself negative things that scare the hell out of you all day long? Do I keep saying oh my god, there's a weird pain, I must have cancer? No, that's not at all what you do. Even when it comes to the other things in our lives, like for instance, our children, our spouses, our neighbors, someone that we work with. And we want to have a different kind of a dynamic there. We want to feel differently, we want to feel, or we want to think differently about that person or about that relationship. It's unrealistic to expect that the thoughts will not come up, that were based on past experiences, previous engagements, previous traumas, with this person with this experience, they're going to come up because that's how our brain works. Our brain works off of offering us information on past life experiences or delusions of future ones. But what you want to learn to do is to not give so much power to that thought. So when it comes to the Bob Newhart skit, the stop it part doesn't come with stop thinking that because you don't have control over what pops up right over the random thoughts, the unintentional thoughts that pop up. But you do have control over whether or not you're going to run with them over whether or not you're going to keep thinking them over whether or not you're going to keep putting energy into them. Keep giving more awareness to them. Keep saying to yourself and others around you, I just keep thinking this thought I just keep telling myself this thing. So what do you do in this situation? What do you do when you know that you have a thinking pattern that is not serving you in fact, it's creating fear, it's creating anger, it's creating resentment, it's creating resistance to creating the life that you want, what do you do?

9:35
Well, you let yourself think it

9:38
you let your brain offer it to you

9:41
and then you choose something different. So, the first step in that is making a decision. Right? What is it that you want to create in your life? This last month in my memberships, we are working on reframing failure. And in reframing failure, that means that

10:00
We're looking at what we want to create this year in our life, and then coming up with 25 things that we're willing to do, and potentially fail at, in order to achieve this thing we want in our life. And part of what comes up when we do this exercise is resistance to trying new things, or the expectation that old habits and old behaviors will go away. And then the concern like, Well, what happens when I think this or what happens when I do this? Again, I'm trying to change behavior. But what if I do it again, then you'll do it again.

10:31
And that's it. Right? You won't resist it. When the other thought comes back up, if you say, Listen, I've made a decision this year, I am going to work on reducing the amount of fear I base my decisions on.

10:48
That's a big step, your brain all of a sudden is not going to stop offering you fearful thoughts. And so that's okay, you go into your life, knowing my brain is going to offer me these things. But I recognize that these thoughts are not producing results I want or that I'm happy with in my life. So instead of fighting and getting very stuck, you know, I've talked before about the fact that we get so stuck on the problem, that we think we're solving it, and we're not. So when I have clients come to me, and they tell me, I'm stuck, I'm stuck, I'm stuck. A lot of times they're very aware of what they're thinking, you know, in one of the sugar challenge interviews, it was just awesome, because she could see that she was thinking, I deserve to have this treat, even though she did not want to be bringing these foods into her body. So she knew what she was thinking. But she was stuck because she didn't want to think that she had already accomplished so much in the way of creating a healthy diet. She thought she was past these cravings and these urges or allowing herself to get into these urges. So where the stuck part comes in, is glomming to the thought,

12:06
right, and looking at the thought and saying, I don't want to think this, why do I keep thinking this? Why do I keep telling myself this, and boom, you've got one foot in quicksand. And we all know that the more you resist quicksand, the deeper down you go. But if you can stop for a sec, and you can say, Listen, cookies are good. And the thought of I deserve that is going to come up. But I don't have to believe it. I don't have to go with it. I'm doing three months, CT scans, the thought of more shit, something bad might show up is going to come up. And it may have truth to it. But I know it doesn't serve me to put my energy into that thought and run with it. So I allow it to come up. I notice it. There it is again. And I say Okay, move on. Because you know what, there's just as good a chance that the results will be exactly what I want them to be.

13:07
You know, one of my mentors has said before,

13:11
she thinks very positive, she is always trying to set the example of what is possible. And so she thinks really big things, right, she believes she can accomplish unimaginable feats of success in her life. And people will say to her, You're delusional, although she has already achieved many, many, many incredible successes. But people will say you're delusional, or they have said it right along the way while she was trying to prove that she could achieve these things. And what she says about that is yeah, I am. And so are you. And so is everyone. Because any story we tell ourselves about the future that hasn't happened is a delusion that we get to choose. Do we want a delusion that's going to make us feel like shit, and keep us down and unhappy and miserable and judging ourselves? Or do we want a delusion that's going to empower us, that's going to make us feel amazing. That's going to give us hope. That's going to make us feel like we can accomplish the things we want to accomplish in our life. We can have the future we desire in our lives. And I love that way of thinking. But you can't move forward into that way of thinking when you're stuck fighting old thoughts. So let me give you another example.

14:40
When you start a new physical training routine, when you decide that you're going to hit the gym, you're going to train your body, you're going to do cardio, you're going to lift weights, you're gonna play pickleball whatever it is, you get out there, and you start

14:55
and you want to perform at a certain level. But your boss

15:00
He hasn't been trained to do that yet. And so you may fatigue, you may run out of breath, you may not be able to lift a heavy weight. And then you judge yourself, and you say, ah, ah, I just can't do this, or I'm so out of shape. And if you stick there in that mindset, while you're trying to train your physical body, if you keep looking at what your body can't do, and you keep judging it, and you keep focusing on what you can't do, you will lose the motivation to continue to do any kind of intense physical activity to stick to your program to stick to your routine. Because focusing on what you can't do, or what you don't like, what you want to be different that keeps coming up, is not ever going to make you feel inspired and motivated, encouraged, it's going to feel depressing and disappointing. So it's very important to recognize your small successes, it's very important to see where you're starting. And it's very important to understand, I won't be able to do as much when I first start, because it requires time and energy to train my body before it can perform at the level that I want it to. Alright, so you go in knowing, I'm not going to be able to lift, you know, benchpress 200 pounds, I'm not going to be able to do a dumbbell curl of 20 pounds, I might start with three pounds, right? And you don't look at yourself and say stupid body, you're not strong.

16:27
And we can't do that with our mind. We can't look at our emotions and say dammit, mind, you should be better than this, you shouldn't still be thinking those thoughts. Because you have to work on conditioning it and improving it. And so even in the example of a physical activity routine, there will be times when your body is tired, and you will look at your body and say, You know what, today, I'm tired. It's not just a lack of motivation I can put myself through, I truly can tell that my body needs rest today. And you give your body some grace, and you give it a day off and you allow it to recover. You don't fight it. You don't say dammit, body's too tired, you shouldn't be tired, right? You have to learn to accept where you are. And it's the same thing. When we're working on recognizing thoughts that are creating results. We don't want thoughts that are keeping us stuck in fear thoughts that are keeping us stuck in anger, in resentment in confusion in in decisiveness. And we're fighting the thought itself. Why do I keep thinking that stop thinking that why can I stop thinking that? And so the practice here is a look, I thought that again, there it is that thought never gets me anywhere. So you know what, I'm not going to stop the thought. I'm going to stop running with the thought. I'm going to recognize the thought doesn't serve me that is going to keep peeking. It's going to keep nodding its head at me. But I'm not going to nod back anymore. I'm going to make a decision that when this thought comes up, I will allow it. And then I will choose something that serves me better. So this is not only particularly important when it comes to changing our food and our nutrition habits. But anything that's happening in our life, like I said, if it's a relationship, if it's a job, if you go to work, you're like listen, I need this job. But every day I go to work, I'm miserable with this job, I want to like my boss more. But every time my boss walks in the room, the thought of what a jerk my boss is pops up, I need to stop thinking that, well, why? Maybe your boss is a jerk.

18:38
And so your brain is gonna say man, your boss is a jerk. And you can say, I know my boss is a jerk. But I'm gonna manage my mind around that because I don't want to be miserable every day that I go to work. And in doing that, in letting go of that in allowing your thoughts to come in, in training yourself to not empower the thoughts that don't serve you. You can make a tremendous shift in your life and you relieve so much pressure from yourself. You take so much pressure off of yourself. And you give yourself the grace to have a human brain and just acknowledge that that's the way it works. But as you practice this and as you practice allowing thoughts to come recognizing them and then to choose a different thought that serves you better more than fight a thought that doesn't serve you at all, then those thoughts that don't serve you at all become weaker and weaker, and less and less frequent. Trust me, I know this, I know this for myself, because I've done this and I know this because I work with my clients to do this. And it's amazing. And it's also very simple. So don't give it less credit than it deserves this practice this practice of allowing the thought of noticing a thought of checking in to see whether or not that thought is going to create the results you want in your life and then working on and conditioning your brain to choose something else. It sounds very simple, right? But simple doesn't mean easy. So recall, just like

20:00
training your physical body takes consistent effort of showing up every single day to support the physical shape, you want to be in the same thing with your mind. So this is a practice, you won't do it one time, and it'll be fine. You won't do it two times and the old thoughts will go away. So it's something that you want to stick with, be consistent at, and try to stick to one thing at a time, really focus on one thing because it takes quite a bit of mental energy. So if it's fear, if it's anger, if it's holding on to something in the past, whatever it is decide, this is the thing that I'm going to work on. And then here's a practice that I have to help me find more relief from the suffering and the results I don't like in my life. Here's a way to move towards the results that I do want. Alright, I would love to hear your thoughts on that. I would love to hear how that works for you. I would love to hear any questions you have. So come over to my Facebook page, Laura Lummer, the breast cancer recovery coach or Instagram the breast cancer recovery coach, and let me know your thoughts and let me know how this works for you. And join me in the five day sugar challenge the breast cancer recovery coach.com Ford slash sugar and you will be amazed how we will work through these thoughts in relation to the food choices you make. Enrollment closes 11pm Sunday January 16 And then we jump in on the 17th I hope I see you there. I will talk to you again next week and until then be so good to yourself and expect others to be good too as well. Take care

21:38
you've put your courage to the test laid all your doubts

21:46
your mind is clearer than before your heart is full and wanting more your futures

 

 

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