‘Unhelpful thoughts that are not True’.
This was my response to a question posed inside a LinkedIn group asking: ‘What’s standing in the way between you and the person you most want to be?’
I’ve realised over my young years that unhelpful thoughts get me into all sorts of trouble with myself. Usually there’s nobody else involved it’s all my own doing. It stops me from moving forward, it stops me from staying in the moment, I overthink stuff and arrive at conclusions that are never reality.
Where does this come from?
How does this manifest?
How can I change it?
It’s as a consequence of years of self-programming that we do to ourselves, repeated thoughts that are not true become truths in your own reality. The more you think of something the more it gets hard-wired in our neural pathways. Tony Robbins has an acronym for it, NAC, Neuro-associative conditioning.
There is also another famous saying, which sums up what happens in your brain when you continuously think the same untruths.
Imagine each thought is a neuron, maybe a new one or likely an old one, because you’ve been thinking this stuff for a while. So when you think that thought a neuron fires with another neuron that then concludes it is the truth. Very likely it’s not, but you’ve just created that connection. Repeat the same thought over and over and those neurons fire over and over too.
‘Neurons that fire together wire together’.
Once wired together it’s very hard to get them apart. The same process that wired them together needs to commence to unwire them. So repeated thoughts of the opposite of the untruth are needed in order to lose the wired connection and create a new neural pathway instead. For example, the untruth of ‘I won’t amount to anything’ could be replaced with ‘I am perfect as I am in this very moment’. Repeat that thought over and over and eventually the other one will one day stop appearing in your thoughts. It sounds great in theory doesn’t it? Doing it is a much harder thing.
Happy thinking!