Emotions Are Signals
Some scholars proposed when negativity bias occurs, try shifting to a moment of gratitude and savoring on good experiences. The practice of expressing gratitude can boosts dopamine and serotonin which gives you positive feelings of pleasure and happiness. The act of savoring – taking 15 seconds to stay with a good experience – also help rewiring the brain by self-directed thinking which stimulate more neurons that fire and wire together, leaving a stronger trace in good memory in the brain. [1][2][3][4][5]
However, Dr. Caroline Leaf and other researchers addressed that if the negative emotions and thoughts are not addressed and handled, but suppressed and ignored, things will only get worse [6][7][8][9]
“Anxiety, depression, burnout, frustration, angst, anger and grief are emotional and physical warning signals, telling us we need to face and deal with something that’s happened or is happening in our lives”
When we embrace negative emotions as warning signals process, find the underlying cause(s), AND then manage this by processing and reconceptualizing our thinking results in a significant improvement in bodily inflammation, cellular health and biological aging.
Feeling bad is not unhealthy if we learn how to manage our thought-life.
5-step Detox Toxic Thoughts
Journaling is a very useful tool to process our mind and detox our toxic thinking. Dr. Leaf proposed a 5 Simple & Scientific Steps to Detox Trauma and Toxic Thinking in her book “Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess”:
1) GATHERING AWARENESS
Getting deliberate awareness of your feeling, perspective, behaviours.
2) REFLECTING
This is a deliberate, focused, conscious process in asking, answering & discussing to try understand why you have those warning signals & what do they mean.
3) WRITING
After the first two steps, our brain already developed structures genetically. By writing them out, it helps you to get control of the process, helps you to externalize the internal stuff. As we become aware and start reflecting of what happened, we already weaken the toxic thoughts – the proteins in the brain. When something is weakened, we can start changing it. The thoughts become malleable.
4) RECHECKING
Rechecking what you have written and how your thoughts & feelings have changed. Then start to analyse what just happened.
5) ACTIVE REACH
This step ends the work of the whole process. This can be positive affirmation, action & statement for yourself to say few times during the day to keep you anchor in the safe mental state.
Dr. Leaf explained this 5-step technique
Example: how to stop the worry loop
Let’s listen to Dr. Leaf explaining this 5-step technique to detox our mind and the example of using this technique to stop the worry loop!
(Duration of the whole podcast is around 23 minutes)
Podcast 237: 5 Simple & Scientific Steps to Begin Detoxing Trauma and Toxic Thinking from Your Mind