[MUSIC PLAYING] DERRICK CARPENTER:
This is going to suck. I'm making a complete
fool of myself. I'm not smart enough. I don't work fast enough. I'm not attractive enough,
not extroverted enough, not funny enough. I don't even know why they
hired me in the first place. I'm just curious how
many of you in the room, or those are you remotely,
have had a thought, something similar to those negative
thoughts I just shared, recently run through your mind. Yeah. So negative thoughts are part
of what it means to be human. We all have them. We all feel inadequate, and
doubt ourselves at times. Many of us are really
skilled at imagining those catastrophic,
worst-case scenarios that are going to happen as a
result of the choices we make, and all of us sometimes
worry that other people are thinking the worst about us. Negative thoughts can
sometimes be helpful. And, I think, at times
they can motivate us. They can get us to at
least roll up our sleeves and dig our heels
in, to pay attention to a threat or a problem
in our environment that we otherwise might miss. But sometimes negative thoughts
are just flat out unhelpful. And then they can
even be painful. Sometimes I think our
negative thinking really gets us to pass up
opportunities where we otherwise might grow and learn. And I think, at the
worst, negative thinking can sabotage our success. And I think one of the things
about negative thinking that really makes
it toxic is that it operates in the privacy
of our own minds. If we let it, it causes
us to struggle in a way that we can easily do alone. Just like every
person I know, I've struggled with negative
thinking through different parts of my life. Perhaps one of the
biggest of those times was when I was around 19 or 20. I was a graduate of a
public high school, used to being top of my class,
and then all of a sudden was in an environment at an
elite East Coast college, just trying to stay afloat. I was on the rowing team
when I was in college. And during my junior
year, my coach noticed that we really
weren't winning our races. Actually, I bet he
probably noticed this before my junior
year, because we had been losing for a long time. But this year in
particular he decided to do something
different about it. He introduced us to a handful
of techniques in psychology. He taught us to meditate. We tried out different
exercises in visualization. We read a bunch of
sports psychology books that taught us how to
get our mindsets in sort of an emotional state
for peak performance. The goal of all this stuff
was to get us to row better, and to ultimately win races. So that upcoming
season, our rowing team lost all of our races. But I noticed that there
was something inside me that was beginning to
change a little bit. Every time I went to the
boathouse for practice, our workouts seemed just
a little bit easier. I mean, they weren't any
easier, but they just felt more manageable to me. And even outside the boathouse,
when I was just getting ready for exams that were coming
up, or had to write a big term paper, I was noticing
that the stress I felt leading up to those
was just a little bit more manageable. And I actually started
implementing some better study habits, I think, as a result,
for the first time in my life. And when I was going to class,
I noticed that I was actually able to focus a little
bit more sharply on what the professors
were saying to me. So there was
something about what my coach did in those
interventions that allowed me for the first time in
my life to take control over my own thinking. And to be honest, I
personally just fell in love. In the decade and
a half since then, I've spent my entire
education and career learning and teaching people the
skills of positive psychology. So again, I'm really
curious about, what does it take to be the kind
of person who exhibits optimism and resilience? And how do we teach
those abilities to people who maybe
don't do it as naturally? So what I want to
share with you today are a handful of
techniques that should bear from the science in how
to overcome negative thinking and build optimism. I'm just going to
say up front, we're going to cover a lot
of different things. There's a handful of different
skills and strategies we'll talk about today,
partially because this is not a one-size-fits-all approach. I think some of the
strategies we'll discuss might work great
for some of you, and there just not going
to work at all for others. So I think one of the keys here
is to just digest this stuff, and maybe play around and
experiment, and ultimately find what works for you. OK? Before we talk specifically
about negative thinking, I just want to review how
our minds work in general. So the cognitive
model really made popular by Aaron Beck,
a psychology professor and therapist at the
University of Pennsylvania back in the 1960s, laid out
this basic operating procedure for our minds. So there are external
events that happen to us. Things are happening to
us all day every day. You know, we come to
a talk over lunch. We get a text message
from our friends. Our alarm goes off
in the morning. And there are
significant events that happen across our lives, too. We get promoted. We get married. You name it. So in response to
those events that are happening all
day every day for us, we have, on the right side, a
set of behaviors and emotions-- responses to these things. Our emotions can be
all over the board. Maybe sometimes we feel
ecstatic or amused by something. We might feel irritated. Maybe we have feelings of
bittersweetness in reaction to things. And our behaviors can
take infinite forms. We can reply back to our
friend a funny one-liner. Maybe we spend the rest of our
day sulking and complaining. Maybe we recognize an increased
heart rate and breathing rate that's getting
us ready to take immediate action
on something that's happening in front of us. The cognitive model
makes the assertion that all of those responses,
the emotions and behaviors that show up as a result of
what's happening in our life, are not directly coming
from the events themselves, but are coming instead
from our thoughts. So how are we
interpreting the world and what's going on around us? So let's just say on Friday of
this week you come into work, and your boss asks you
to take on an extra task. It's an external
event, something that's happening to you. And you might think to
yourself, what a jerk. She knows I'm too
busy to do this. And if that's the way
you're thinking about this, you're going to have a set
of emotions and behaviors that follow from that. The same thing might happen to
somebody else, who might think, I'm the only one that she
trusts to do this right. And I think you can imagine that
the emotions and responses that are going to follow from
that kind of thought are going to be quite
a bit different, even though the event itself
was exactly the same. Now, psychologists have
done a lot of research to help us understand the
ways our thinking really work. So one of the things that
Marty Seligman, who's done a lot of work in
this cognitive model, also at the University of
Pennsylvania, has researched, is how people respond in
their thinking to adversity. So when a bad thing happens
to you in your life, do you tend to focus on the ways
in which you maybe contributed to this bad thing happening? Or do you focus
on how much effort it's going to take to
deal with this thing, or maybe how it's
going to just ruin your plans for the
upcoming weekend? Or are you somebody who tends
to focus more on the resources that are at your fingertips-- who can you turn to for support? Or, what are the
things that you can control to make this bad
situation a little bit better, or if not better, at the very
least more bearable perhaps? And this dimension, how we
think about bad things happening to us, is what psychologists
define as optimistic versus pessimistic thinking. So this is a spectrum
of thinking styles. All of us have a tendency
to probably think more on one side or the
other, but we may also vary depending on the
situation or the event at hand. But generally, when we look at
pessimistic thinking styles, when a bad thing
happens, when we're thinking like a
pessimist, we tend to see adversity as threat. We immediately focus on
what's going to go wrong, how this is going to hurt us. Whereas an optimist is much
more likely to see opportunity. They might label adversity
as a challenge that should be risen to, an
opportunity to prove ourselves, and how we can overcome it. Pessimists are more likely to
notice and expect the bad just generally. So when a pessimist is reviewing
how the last week has gone, they're more likely to
just stop and focus more on the bad things, on
the stressful things, whereas an optimist is better
at noticing and expecting the good, so reflecting
on the things that are maybe the more
fortunate parts of what's happened recently. And pessimists,
in their response, are more likely to
ruminate, to just have negative thoughts that
are spinning around and around without taking action, getting
stuck in a pattern of thinking, to isolate themselves. And when they do act, pessimists
are more likely to act in a way where they're
misapplying their effort. They're not really tackling
the source of the problem. Whereas optimists are
more likely to act on what they can control,
to find those little nuggets and spaces where they
can do something. And where there are things
that they can't control, they're more likely to accept
that and move on from it. Now, why does this matter? So there's a lot of
research on the difference between having a pessimistic
versus an optimistic thinking style. I mean, first off, being an
optimist tends to feel better. It leads to more positive
emotions generally. But there are a lot
of research studies that I think break down the two
major categories through health and success, where
optimistic thinking styles do a lot for us. So first off, on health,
a handful of studies have shown that
optimistic thinkers tend to live on average about
seven to nine years longer than the most pessimistic
thinkers, a huge difference. Optimistic thinkers tend to
have stronger immune systems. So they've done
studies where they've brought people into a room. They know whether you're more
optimistic or pessimistic, and they actually
sprinkle into the room a rhino virus, something that's
going to give you a cold. And what they notice
is that the folks who think more optimistically-- I think you have to
sign some waivers first to take part in that study. The optimistic thinkers not
only get sick less frequently, but when they do get sick,
the duration of their illness is shorter. And I think some of the
most profound results in the power of optimistic
thinking come in studies on cardiovascular health. So there have been
a number of studies looking at things like risk for
heart disease or hypertension. And the general form of
these studies is like this. They take a group of people,
maybe men in their 50s, for example, who are
otherwise fairly healthy. And they track these folks for
a period of time, say 10 years. Along with the tracking,
they know, again, who the optimistic and who
the more pessimistic thinkers in the group are. And when they compare the most
optimistic to most pessimistic, they tend to find
rates about two to three times more
cardiovascular problems, so diagnosis of hypertension,
actually having a heart attack. And when I say two
to three times, I'm literally saying
it's 200% to 300% increase in your
risk of developing cardiovascular problems as
a result of having a more pessimistic thinking style. On the success side,
they've studied everything from productivity to
educational success. It turns out that
optimistic thinking styles are a better
predictor of college GPA than your high school GPA. So when they account
for that, you tend to do better in school if
you're an optimistic thinker. They've done research studies
with insurance salespeople, where the most
optimistic of the group have sold about
88% more insurance, almost double, than the
pessimistic thinkers. And there was a neat study done
of an elite college swimming team, athletes who were trying
out for the Olympic trials, who were asked to swim their
best event by the coach. And the coach was in
on the research study. All the athletes didn't know. The athletes swam their best
event, and when they finished, they were given the time. But the coach tacked on
just a little bit of time, so they were given
false feedback. Basically enough
that the athletes felt like it was a
failure experience, but not so much that
they didn't believe it. They bought in, like,
wow, I obviously didn't swim that as
well as I thought I had. So they gave the
athletes about 30 minutes to go rest up, sit
in the locker room, do whatever they were going
to do in their own heads and thinking, and then
come back and try again. And the most
pessimistic athletes ended up swimming
about, I'm saying, 1.6% slower, which may
not sound like a lot, but in the world of
elite swimming, that's the difference between winning
a race and not even being close. The most optimistic
athletes not only swam faster than
the pessimists, they swam faster than they had
on their first attempt by a slight margin. But basically, you would ask
them to swim their hardest 30 minutes ago, and
these optimistic thinkers perceived a failure. And there's something about
the way an optimistic thinking style works, that that failure
turned into fuel, where they were able to get
back in the pool and actually swim a better
event on their second try. So there's clearly
a lot of reason to have a more optimistic
thinking style. Now, I'm guessing there's
some of you thinking, wow, I'm a pessimist. I guess I'm totally
screwed here. That's not at all true. It turns out that, in terms of
different psychological traits, this thinking style of
pessimism to optimism is one of the most learnable and
teachable traits in psychology. So if you see yourself
as maybe being more on that pessimistic side of
the spectrum, that's fine. You can learn to do
what an optimist does in response to adversity. And the rest of the skills we're
going to talk about here today are ultimately about, how
do you take the skills that natural optimists
use to handle and face negative thinking? So there are four
main strategies that I want to
review with you guys, and just share some tips about,
that optimists use to fight their negative thinking. First is to assess,
to take a look and evaluate the negative
thoughts before we let them control their
behavior; to distract ourselves, literally just to divert our
attention to something else; to combat the negative
thoughts, to tackle it head on and fight back against it;
and to distance ourselves from our thinking altogether. So to just start off,
assessing our thoughts. Is this negative thought
something to overcome? So I think it's really
important to know that not all negative thoughts
are created equally, right? Some negative thoughts
are really helpful for us, and absolutely necessary for
us to navigate in our world. Let's say you get an email
tomorrow morning that reminds you that
you were supposed to send in a contribution
for your team yesterday, and you had totally forgotten. You might think to
yourself, holy crap, I completely forgot about that. My team must think that
I'm not pulling my weight. I need to get this done ASAP. I mean, that's a
negative thought. It doesn't feel
comfortable to imagine that your team is
seeing you as somebody who is not pulling your weight. But hopefully the
guilt or anxiety or whatever you feel as
a result of that thought is getting you to
immediately focus on getting that thing
done and emailing it out. So there are absolutely times
when our negative thoughts are cueing us in to what
we need to focus on, and helping us take action. I think there are also a lot
of negative thoughts we have, and the ones that sound
much more like the "I'm not good enough," that
really aren't helping us in any productive way. And I think a lot of
these thoughts that aren't helping us are at times
when we view the events that are happening to us in
that cognitive model, and our thoughts
and interpretations about those events are a little
bit twisted or distorted. We're not seeing the world
completely accurately. So I want to just talk through
a few of these common patterns in which we distort our
interpretation of the world, and we're not seeing
things accurately. So cognitive distortions
is a term in a list also develop by Aaron
Beck, the father of cognitive behavioral therapy. He found these
commonalities in ways that our thinking
tends to go awry. The handful I have up
here are just a few. There are many others. But these, I think,
illustrate the ways in which our distorted thoughts
can really get in our way. So overgeneralization is
when we take one event and we assume that everything
else is going to play out just like that. So maybe it's your
first day on the job, and you have a few awkward
social interactions with people. And you start to
think, I'm never going to make a friend here. That thought is not at
all true, you're just taking your experience
on this first day, and now blowing it out to assume
what the rest of your career is going to look like
here at this company. All or nothing
thinking, where you're doing a very black-and-white
division of the world. Either things are
one way or the other. There's no gray. Let's say you're in
a performance review with your supervisor,
who tells you that you're meeting expectations. Your response to that is, if
I'm not exceeding expectations, then I'm failing. And again, that's
not at all true. There's a huge, huge gap
between failing and meeting expectations. And perhaps exceeding
expectations is something that,
by definition, should be a little bit more rare. Disqualifying the
positive-- so you pass your boss in the
hallway and he tells you, you're doing a great job. And you think to yourself, you
know, he's just being nice. There were people around. He had to say that. You're taking what
is a good thing, a piece of positive
feedback, and you're finding an excuse to
throw it in the trash, to completely disregard it. Mind-reading-- when you're
making assumptions about what other people are thinking. So let's say you're
in a meeting, you contribute an idea,
and nobody comments. You think to yourself, they
must all think I'm an idiot. You have no idea
what they're thinking or why they're not responding. You're making assumptions. Emotional reasoning is when
we take our emotions as fact, and let that color our
assessment of a situation. So maybe a new employee
is brought onto your team, and you're meeting them
for the first time. And for whatever reason, you're
in a really good mood that day. And so you're more
likely to conclude that this person is
competent, somebody you're excited to work with. If you had met that person
on another day when you just happened to be in
a bad mood, you're a lot more likely to
feel like they're not going to be a good
member of the team, and you're going to
dread working with them. And personalization
is when we tend to blame ourselves for the
negative things happening around us. So maybe you noticed
that your boss seems like he's in a bad mood today,
and your immediate thought is, this is all my fault.
It must be something that I did to upset him. But again, you have no evidence
to say that that's at all true. So I think it's
important to acknowledge these distortions, these
inaccuracies in our thoughts. And I think the
best way that we can do that is, when we
catch ourselves stuck in negative thinking,
to just start off by asking these two
very simple questions-- is this true? And is this helpful? In all those distorted
thoughts, in many cases they're not true at all, and in
most cases they're not helpful. If your negative
thought is true, if you really did do
something to upset your boss, and that's why
he's in a bad mood, and if thinking about
that is helpful, if it makes you feel
maybe a little guilty, and leads you to
go and do something to repair the
relationship, then that's probably a perfectly good thing. You don't want to fight
against that negative thought. Just listen to it, and
let it motivate you. But in situations where our
thoughts aren't true or aren't helpful, or in many
cases, neither, then I think we need to do
something else to start to push that
negative thought away and to divert our attention
to something else, which is the rest of these
strategies we'll talk through. So first off, to distract. Is focusing on this thought
right now in my best interest? These set of strategies
really work best when you catch
yourself ruminating. So if you're the
kind of person who does get stuck focusing
on negative thoughts, this allows you to just
shift your attention to something else. One way that really works
to shift your attention is to get into what
psychologists call flow. Flow is a state where you're
fully immersed in an activity. You feel like time
is passing by, and you're not even noticing it. If you guys have ever been
doing a hobby or an activity, and you feel like
it's been 15 minutes, and you lift your
head up and realize it's actually been
an hour and a half, likely you've been
in a flow state. Psychologists define
flow by activities that require us to meet at
fairly high level of challenge, but where we also have a
fairly high level of skill to meet that challenge. So you can see how, when
we're in an activity that forces us to be fully present to
keep focusing on the next step to move forward, we're
not thinking much, we're just engaged
in the activity. Rock climbing tends to be one
of the stereotypical examples people bring up, and you
can imagine a rock climber on a wall who has to focus so
intently on maybe just shifting their weight a little bit, and
finding that next handhold. There's a rock climber I've been
following a bit more recently, Alex Honnold. If you have seen it, he has
a new movie out right now. He free-soloed, which means
he climbed without any ropes whatsoever, El Capitan
here in Yosemite, a crazy, unprecedented
feat in rock climbing. And Alex Honnold calls what
he uses psychologically as this mental armor. He talks about this fact
that, when he's climbing, he's really in the
zone, and that there's something protecting his
head from thinking too much. He's not self-evaluating. He's not thinking about how
insane it is, what he's doing. He's just fully engaged in
the activity in the moment. And those kinds of activities
are a really great way to shift our focus from negative
thoughts to the activity. Now, I just have a list here
of things like work, exercise, art, music, games,
hobbies, different ways that hopefully you
can get into flow when the challenge meets your skill. So I would hope
for a lot of you, there are aspects of
your work where you're able to get into a flow state. Maybe if you're a
software developer, and you're deep in code,
trying to solve a problem, you're likely to
be in a flow state when you're really fully
immersed and engaged in that activity. So I'd just encourage you to
find some ways for yourself, to think about ways that you tap
into flow states in your day. A second way to distract is
to build positive emotion. So negative emotions
by definition, especially negative emotions
like anger and anxiety, what they do to us is
they narrow our focus. They bring our attention
onto a problem. And positive emotions
literally do the opposite. They broaden or field of
view, and make it a lot easier for us to step back
from those feelings like we're stuck in a
rut of negative thought. I love the picture of the
baby, perhaps as a way just to generate some positive
motion in itself. Things like humor,
confidence, ways to tap into those kinds
of emotions, I think, are really fairly easy for us. I've got a handful
of YouTube channels that I go to when I know
I need a good laugh. Or if I can think
about a situation when I felt
particularly confident, and just reflect on it, put
myself back in that space, and let that emotion
come back to me. That can be a
really effective way to fight back some
negative thoughts. And gratitude, in
particular, is an emotion that has a lot of
research showing its benefits for our well-being
and our mental health. I think there's a lot of
opportunity for all of us to recognize how much we
have around us to truly appreciate, and to acknowledge
the opportunities that maybe we take for granted. And gratitude is so simple and
straightforward, yet powerful, that I actually want to
give you guys all a chance to just try this out and
practice this skill right now. So what I'm going
to do is, first I'm going to ask you
guys for a moment to reflect on the question,
who am I grateful for? So whoever this is
that comes to mind, maybe somebody that did
something nice for you this week, or
maybe somebody that just had a significant
impact on your life, who are you feeling
grateful for today? Once you identify
somebody, I'd like for you to turn to somebody
else in the room, and just share who you came up with, and
what it is about this person that you're feeling
grateful for. If you're watching this
and joining remotely, and you have somebody else
you can turn to and talk about this with, that's great. If you're by yourself,
maybe just take a minute to grab
a pen and paper, or pull up Notepad
on your computer, and just write
down your thoughts. I'm want to give you
guys about three minutes right now just to talk
quickly, and share your moments and personal gratitude. I always hate shutting
down those conversations, but I hope that in just-- I mean, that was
two minutes maybe worth of thinking about
somebody you're grateful for, and then just taking a moment
to share and talk about it-- that I'm hoping that you guys
all feel some of that emotion, and how it can really
shift your focus if you're feeling in a bad mood,
or maybe focusing a lot on negative thinking. Gratitude in particular
is a really great strategy to use at night. If you find yourself
ruminating on negative thoughts and trying to fall asleep, just
recounting maybe some people or some things that you're
grateful for from the previous day can help you calm your
body back down a little bit, shift your emotions, and
help you fall asleep faster. A third distract strategy
is to focus outward. So I think just to,
ideally, take yourself out of your negative thinking,
focus on helping somebody else. If you know somebody
who could use a hand, or just needs somebody who will
listen to them for a moment, I think that can be one
of the greatest ways to just get out
of your own head. I think a specific way
that you can practice focusing on other people is
to use what UCLA psychologist Shelley Gable calls active,
constructive responding. So what she researches is
moments where people around us have had something
good happen to them. They have some good news they
want to share and talk about. And that when we
engage in those stories and listen actively, and ask
questions, and ultimately help them relive
that experience, re-experience the emotion,
that we both walk away with enhanced well-being and
a strengthened relationship. So I think it's one way just to
try to get out of our own heads a little bit, is to focus
a bit more on finding the opportunities to help
other people re-experience their good news by
responding in a way that's active and constructive,
and allows them to re-experience that moment. So distraction
techniques are OK when we need to just shift our focus. But a lot of times our
negative thoughts, I think, are requiring a little
bit more than that. So sometimes we need to combat
them, and ask ourselves, is this negative thought
worth taking at face value? So one way we can do that
is to prove it wrong. And this is literally
just drawing from the massive research in
cognitive behavioral therapy. It's about taking
thoughts that are untrue, and finding a way to argue
back against them by searching for the truth, and providing
the evidence to do that. So if early this morning
you gave a presentation, and now you're just
walking around thinking, that presentation went horribly,
but you don't have any evidence backing that thought up. It's just there. It's the way you feel
about how things went. You might be well served to
prove that thought wrong. And one way you can do that
is to just literally flip the phrase around, and to argue
the presentation went well because-- and to fill in the blanks. And to identify
whatever specific, vivid piece of evidence you
have to argue against it. And so you might think back
to the presentation and say, you know, this
presentation did go well, because three people came up to
me afterwards and had questions to ask, and they were obviously
engaged in what I had to say. Or maybe this
presentation went well because I stuck to my
plan and I communicated the issues clearly,
concisely, and people got it. Whatever it is, finding a way
to really pull on that evidence can help us prove an untrue
negative thought wrong. One thing to be aware of
is the confirmation bias while you're doing this. And the confirmation
bias is just a psychological tendency
that plays out for all of us all the time. It operates in a way that it
maintains the beliefs and world views that we currently have. So when you're
thinking to yourself, the presentation didn't
go well, and you're endorsing and believing
that as your starting point, all the evidence that
supports it not going well is going to be
much more salient. Like, you're going to
remember the two people who spent the whole presentation
on their phones, and you're not thinking at
all about the other 10 who were engaged and
nodding their heads and looking like they
were totally getting it. Or you might focus completely
on the one person who got up and left the
room right away, rather than the three people
who came up and had questions for you. So when you're trying
to find the evidence against your thoughts,
to recognize that there's this tendency pulling you
constantly towards why your negative thought is true. So you have to put it in
a little bit extra effort sometimes to find that
evidence against it. But I do think that the
more you practice this, the better you can get at
fighting that confirmation bias and thinking flexibly. Another way we can combat our
thoughts is to reframe them. Sometimes our thoughts
aren't exactly things that we can prove untrue. Maybe you have a really
long to-do list when you get into work tomorrow,
and you just think to yourself, this is going to suck. All right. Maybe we can't prove
that is untrue, exactly, but it's probably
not going to help you get through your to-do
list to focus on that thought. So one thing that I like
to recommend to people is to imagine somebody
who you admire for their optimism,
somebody who is constantly seeing silver linings in
the things around them. And imagine for a
moment, how would they be thinking about
this situation? For me in particular, my
wife is my model of this. Whenever I'm stuck in this "I
see all the dark clouds" stuff, she really does a good job
at helping bring me back towards the silver linings. So she might help me to
see that, you know what? You have a lot on
your plate today, but it's an opportunity to
prove what you're capable of, and you're probably going to
learn a lot along the way. And when you go through
your day thinking about, what am I going to learn today? Rather than, how is
today going to suck? You notice very
different things, and you show up in
completely different ways. So I think it's
important to acknowledge, when these thoughts
aren't helping us, how can we reframe
them in a way that makes them more productive? Lastly, and perhaps one of
the most powerful strategies we can use against
negative thinking, is to distance ourselves. Now, these techniques generally
are a little bit harder. They often require a little
bit of practice for them to be really effective. But when you do
practice them, I think they can probably be the best
approach we have to conquering negative thinking. And we must ask
ourselves, should I let this negative thought
determine my response at all? Does this not even matter? So the first way to
think about distancing is to just let the thought pass. If any of you are
practicers of a meditation, meditation is exactly
about allowing a thought to come into our awareness
and then pass it back away. In Buddhist philosophy,
there's this concept of us having this monkey
mind, that when we actually tune into what our minds
are doing all day long, we start to recognize that
these thoughts are just flitting everywhere out of control. And we often aren't
even aware of it, because we're just engrossed
in taking the thoughts as truth and living our lives. So this picture that I have up
of a lifeguard chair on a beach is one that came to
me when I was first learning to meditate, and
back with my rowing coach back when I was in college,
that I just started meditating, and after a while I
saw myself climbing up in this lifeguard-chair
type thing where I could see below me, just far
enough away, my thoughts, that were playing out,
doing their crazy things. But I myself was actually
just a little bit separated from those thoughts. And that started,
over time, to give me a little bit of perspective,
that I could acknowledge that thought as being
there, but it's not me, and I don't have to let it
drive my behavior or my emotion in the moments. To be frank with you,
I think it took me time to really build that. I mean, for the
first time I did it, it felt like that
lifeguard tower didn't even have any rungs to
get up to the top. It took time for that to
become something that I was able to switch my mindset into. But after a while,
it was something that I was able to do
outside meditation. That just in the moment
of thinking negatively, that you start to recognize
that you can observe those thoughts as just
thoughts, and they don't have to drive your reactions. Mindfulness practices
are very similar, where we don't
necessarily have to be mindful and observant about
what's going on in our minds. We could go and have
lunch, and practice having a mindful lunch, where
we're just really noticing the sensory perceptions
while we eat, and what does our food really
taste like and smell like? But allowing
ourselves to just be an observer of our
experience, and that can give you that same distance
over time if you practice it. And ACT is an acronym for
acceptance and commitment therapy, which if you're
interested in this line of thinking, they're
very similar. Where the philosophy
behind ACT is that we allow our thoughts
to come into our awareness, but not dictate our response,
that our choice of behavior is different than the
thought showing up. A second way we can
distance ourselves is to just write
about our thoughts. There's a lot of research
on expressive writing, and how just putting
our thoughts on paper generally can help us deal with
stress and improve our mood. In particular, when people write
about adversities or challenges in their lives, the
ability to just find meaning in those experiences
becomes a lot easier. And I think the basic
idea here is just by putting your thoughts
on paper, getting them out of your head, you're able to
just step back that little bit, and to reflect on
them in a way they can help you process and find
different interpretations. One way in particular that
you guys might try to write or journal,
especially when you're stuck in a pattern
of negative thinking, is to do what we call a
self-compassion letter. Where what you do
is, just imagine that you're writing a letter
to a good friend of yours who's being too hard on themselves. But the friend that
you're writing to is actually yourself. So you might write it
in the second person. "I think you should be
aware that you're being too hard on yourself lately. You've been doing
a really good job." Whatever that is, to write
yourself a letter that engages the emotion of
compassion and forgiveness for yourself. And they've done
research on when people go through
experiences of failure or have an adversity,
where things don't go well, the people who can feel
a sense of compassion for themselves do much
better at working through it, and approaching another
adversity much better. Finally, I think maybe
just one of the most subtle and interesting ways
we can distance ourself from negative thoughts
is just to act anyway. And one of the
meditation teachers who is really popular
in psychology, who studied meditation in
the West, is John Kabat Zinn. And he talks about how
we are not our thoughts. And I think if you take
that notion far enough, and you recognize that whatever
we're thinking in a moment doesn't necessarily have to
drive at all how we behave or how we show up. And I think that this
Vincent van Gogh quote, "If you hear a voice
within you say, 'You cannot paint,'
then by all means paint, and that voice
will be silenced." It's one that carries a lot
of weight when we're trying to overcome negative thoughts. I've always found, I think
one of the maybe cruelest practical jokes
of our psychology is that when we're trying
to do something that's a little intimidating, and
maybe brings up some fear or anxiety for
us, a lot of times what we're wanting to feel
in that moment is confidence. In reality, the way
our psychology works is that we do the thing, we
prove to ourselves that we can, and the confidence
comes after the fact. So that over time we can
build confidence and grow, but in a way, our
ability to just find a conviction to act anyway-- like, yeah, I'm afraid. Yeah, I don't want to do
this right now, but I can, and I will. And then at the tail end of
it, that confidence and belief in yourself starts
to come over time. So just to review, we've got our
strategies of assess, distract, combat, and distance. As I mentioned up
front, no one of these is going to work
perfectly for all of you. So I think experimenting some,
and finding the ones that really do help
you in the moment, is an individual experience. And you may have to
play around a bit to find those that do help. I want to punctuate that all
of these strategies we're talking about are ways you
can manage thoughts yourself. And if these help
and they get you far enough down the
field towards avoiding your negative thoughts and
feeling the feelings that come from them, that's fantastic. But you absolutely
do not have to fight all of your negative
thinking on your own. If these strategies alone
are not helping you, I just want to make a very
clear statement that there are resources and people
who are wanting to help and are willing to help. I know here for you folks
working at Google and YouTube, you've got folks
in EAP, or people at [? Go Mental Health ?] who
can be these resources when maybe you've tried
some of this stuff, and it's not working
on its own, or at least who can help you apply some
this stuff in a way that does work better for you. So I just want to
encourage everybody who's listening, if
you find yourself stuck in negative thinking,
you don't have to go it alone. I do want to share with
you guys some of what Happuify has to
offer around this. So Happify is a platform
where we teach and take you through a lot of the skills
and strategies we've just discussed, where
you can practice and begin to get a
facility with all of these different ways of
enhancing your well-being, avoid negative thoughts, to be
more productive in your work, you name it. So you guys can go to
GoHappify, and you'd be brought straight
to this sign up page. And I want to walk you through
the site for a minute or two. If you were to click
Start Your Journey, you would just get an
initial assessment here that includes some questions-- "Do you have a hard time
bouncing back after adversity?" A few other assessments
of your psychology. And based on your
assessment, we're going to recommend some tracks
for you right off the bat. So you'll see that "Conquer
Your Negative Thoughts" is a track that I created
a few years ago, where basically everything
we've talked about today is embedded in this track. If this is one you wanted
to select for yourself, you could go
through and practice all of these skills
in a guided way. And again, if you
click on a track, these tracks are developed
so that they take place over about a four-week time period. They're chunked into
four different parts, to make sure that you're taking
on a sizable piece at any given time. So if you were to jump
in to start Part 1, you'd see a few activities
there on that activities list, things like Uplift
or Smell the Roses. An activity like
Thanks, Thanks, Thanks is one of the first
ones you'd see here, which is an exercise of
gratitude similar to what we just practiced together. We're just asking you to
think about three good things that happened to you today and
why you feel grateful for them. And then you would
just fill this in. You can also just explore
our tracks openly. So you don't have to do
the recommended ones. And we have featured
tracks, and we also have tracks blocked
out by category. So you notice things like
Health and Well Being and Relationships. We have a category
on Work and Money, that if you were
to click in there, you'd find all kinds
of tracks on how to be a more mindful
leader, how to develop grit, how to feel more
energized about your job. And again, all of these
tracks are four-week courses that take you through a variety
of positive psychology skills to move you towards these goals. A few other things you just
would find on Happify's site, in addition to the
tracks, is what we call Happify Daily,
just a content media post on stories and videos, which
are just good news things. If you're in that
place where you want to distract for a
moment and find something to uplift you, there's
plenty of things here on Happify Daily that will
just put you in a better mood, and remind you that there's
plenty of good in this world despite not always seeing it. We have a community page
with different forums where you can go in and
just chat with other folks about your struggles,
your successes with these different activities. And you can also share posts
with the community at large. There's an Instant Play section,
where, even outside of a track, you can just go in and
do these activities. If you were to click on Guided
Meditation, for example, these are all meditations
that are embedded in different tracks
throughout the site, but you can just go in directly
and choose a meditation. And you'll get one of
the leading facilitators in meditation, people like
Sharon Salzberg, for example, will guide you
through a meditation towards a specific end. You can just play around
with these freely. There's also games
on the site that have been designed to help
enforce the psychology interventions. So things like Uplift
is a game where you're trying to
focus on balloons that have positive words rather
than negative words, and your score is going to
increase over time if you're able to pop the
balloons with positive and avoid the ones
with negative. So just subtly
training your mind to focus more on the
good than the bad. And there's a
assessment section, you can keep track of
your happiness score. And you can also follow
your assessments over time, and track your well-being. I do want to just
say, in closing, that negative thoughts are
part of our human experience, as I said up front. I don't think our goal in any of
this stuff is to stop ourselves from thinking negatively. I mean, we're humans. These thoughts are
going to arise for us. And no matter what we
do, at times they're going to get in our way. But to find just
small ways where we can acknowledge
that we're not alone, we all think this way
at times, and that, when we're really
finding ourselves stuck, that we have plenty
of strategies, or hopefully plenty
of people in our lives that we can turn to who
can help us through it. So I wish you guys the
best of luck with it. Yeah, And do you guys
have any questions, too, before we close? I'm happy to do any
Q&A for a few minutes. AUDIENCE: I have kind
of a silly question. One of the techniques
you talk about in terms of letting thoughts pass
is to write it down. Is there a difference
between writing it down in paper and pen and
writing it down electronically? Because I'm
thinking, it might be nice during the workday,
if stuff comes up to just, on the computer, since
I'm there already, to write it down there. But I don't know if you
have any thoughts on that. DERRICK CARPENTER: Yeah. So I think-- I'll answer twofold. I think the process of writing
down your thoughts in any way is going to gain you some
distance and some ability to reflect. But I will say that
most of the research on the power of journaling
and writing really does take place with a
pen or pencil on paper, where you're not only
just writing the thoughts, but you're literally
creating the words on a page. And I think that, if
for no other reason than it's easier to
type on your computer, then grab a pen and
a piece of paper. If you don't have access
to it, I think still writing is going to help. But by all means,
I think to do it on paper is probably
going to serve you better. Yeah. Sure. AUDIENCE: I'll ask a
question from the Dory, and then if anyone in here has
another one we can do that. "With current proliferations of
meditation like Headspace and G Calm, is there a risk of users
with anxiety or mental health issues, mild or severe, not
addressing issues and instead suppressing them via
meditation as opposed to approaching them with
trained professionals or at least CBT apps at home?" DERRICK CARPENTER: Yeah. It's a fantastic question. I think that the
answer ultimately may be dependent person
by person in context. But I will just highlight
again, that first strategy I talked about was to assess. Where before we do any
of these other things, I think it's important to
look at the negative thoughts for just a moment, and
to say, is this true? Is this a helpful thought? Is there something here that
I need to put my attention on? Because if, in many cases, our
negative thoughts are trying to give us messages to act
and respond in a certain way, if all we do is turn that aside
and ignore it, then absolutely, we can create problems
that we're not addressing. But I think when we acknowledge
that our thoughts aren't true and aren't helping us,
that generally, meditation is a fantastic approach
to help us manage anxiety and some of those thoughts
that are really just getting in our way. AUDIENCE: I have three more
Dory questions, but yes. AUDIENCE: So if we want to
become more of an optimist, what would you say
is the first step? Like, how would you start? DERRICK CARPENTER: Yeah,
it's a great question. There's a lot of
research specifically on how optimists think, and what
they do in adverse situations. But I think just
flat out, the key is that optimists identify
what they can control. So I think to practice
thinking more like an optimist, the next time you find yourself
in a situation that's maybe frustrating, or maybe
you're feeling impatient, maybe feeling anxious,
to train your mind to immediately focus
on something you can do to improve the situation. Even if it's, at
the very least, just internally, to
improve your emotions and how you're feeling-- that what an optimist does is
finds those points of control and leverages the
heck out of those. So I think that alone
is going to get you pretty far in terms of shifting
your thinking to a more optimistic style. AUDIENCE: OK. Another Dory
question, "How do you balance managing
negative thoughts without settling or
accepting situations that you should not be? For example, if in a
bullying work environment, or an unhappy
personal relationship, such as a marriage,
you definitely want to manage thoughts,
but you may want to maintain your standards." DERRICK CARPENTER: Yeah. I think this just goes back to
the skill of assessing first. If you're having
negative thoughts that are honest and true
thoughts about a very hard situation you may be facing-- the situations in life
aren't always easy. We all acknowledge
that as human beings. If you're in a
situation that's not healthy for you, the negative
thoughts that are bubbling up around that are, I think, a
clear message that's telling you, you have to do something. So those are not
the thoughts that we want to fight back
against or try to avoid. I think the more that
we can tune into those and allow them to guide
our responses, the better. AUDIENCE: OK. Last Dory question
is, "How can people relieve stress and
dread about things that are or feel truly unchangeable? For example, a project that you
know you cannot finish on time, an exam you know you are not
prepared for, a deadline that you just realized you missed
that will adversely affect you." DERRICK CARPENTER: Great. Yeah. So I think this
goes back, again, to what an optimistic thinking
style is really about, acknowledging those
things we can't control, and letting those things pass. Now, first off, I think
in those examples, something like a test you're
not feeling prepared for-- by all means, even if
the test is in an hour, an hour is a lot of
room to do something you have control over. So I would say an
optimist, first and foremost, wouldn't
let that thought go. They would do something
to prepare themselves as much as they
could in an hour. But if it's something you
really don't have control over, I think the skills
of distancing, to write about it
and journal about it, or to find a mindfulness or
meditation practice where you can just let these thoughts
come into your awareness and then acknowledge,
I can't do anything about this, whatever
emotions are coming up around this are there, but I'm
just going to let them pass. And again, shift
my attention more towards what I can do
to improve my situation, to get myself into
a healthy place. Thank you guys very much. [APPLAUSE]
