Podcast: Master Your Mind: Understanding Your Brain's Negative Patterns

Transcription of Podcast

Dr Orlena (00:01.656)
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to Fit and Fabulous with me, Dr. Orlena I hope you are feeling amazing today. Okay, big eek. It's my birthday this week and I am going to be half a century old. my goodness. Anyhow, I'm off to Pisa with my family, which I am super excited about. I'm going with my kids and my brothers and sisters and my parents are coming. So it's gonna be super, super fun.

Positive brain is crucial for managing stress and challenges.

Today I want to talk a little bit about positive brain. Now I know that we have talked about positive brain before, but it's a really big important topic that is worth coming back to and coming back to and coming back to. Now this is a little bit more of a deep dive. Last week we talked about stress and obviously positive brain is part of understanding stress, but we can look at positive brain in a way and use it really to approach any problem

that happens in our lives. And one of the reasons I really thought it's worth diving into this a little bit more is because I'm in this Facebook group that I totally, totally love. And I see so many people in this Facebook group with various problems in their life. And let's face it, we all have various problems in our lives. And I look at these problems and I think, my goodness, it would be so much easier for you to sort this out if you understood how positive brain and negative brain works.

Recognizing negative brain patterns can help in personal growth.

And I will tell you from my own personal life, well, let me just backtrack a little bit. Number one, the human brain is hugely negatively wired and we often don't really see that. And I can say from personal experience that, my goodness, yes, I used to get into negative brain. And even though I have this amazing framework, I still get into negative brain. It's not like anybody turns off negative brain forever and ever and it never comes back. But when you're aware of it, you really have the tools to be able to go,

Wait, I understand, I'm making this worse for myself. Now, how did negative brain turn up for me? my goodness, in so many different ways. Just negative brain is any time you're complaining about something or going, my goodness, I don't like this. And we moved to Spain, my goodness, I can't even think now. Like 14 years ago, sometime, some time ago, over a decade ago. And when I first moved here,

Dr Orlena (02:21.354)
it was a big shock for me. So I say I accidentally gave up my clinical career. I didn't really mean to never go back to clinical medicine. I thought it would be much easier for me to pick up my training here and that wasn't the case. And I used to get really, really frustrated with my children, with work at the time I was trying to do stuff on the computer and my husband would say, just go and code it. And I was like, I don't know how to code it. It's really difficult. And

I would get into this negative brain, this cycle of, my goodness, it's all awful here and my life shouldn't be like this. I think one of the big thoughts I used to have was my life shouldn't be like this. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Now, when we look at negative brain, and we're gonna dive more into negative brain today, so by the end of this session, you'll understand a lot more about negative brain. But when we look at negative brain, it can tell us stuff that is the truth, like,

Some things are awful, some things are unfair, but it's not a helpful way of being. It's much, much better, much more productive, much easier on your life if you can let go of negative brain and step into positive brain. You can get so much more done, you can manage whatever is going on, and you can deal with life basically. And from...

My own personal story in the last couple of years, understanding how negative and positive brain is has really helped me, even though before that I was doing coaching and understanding, you know, a lot about psychology and things like this, but this framework of negative brain really helped me. My middle son was really unwell a few years ago. He had something which transpired to be this illness called functional neurological disorder, which is a little bit like ME, but with extra.

extra symptoms, like he walked like he was drunk basically and he had lots of pain. Thankfully he is much much better now but he had six months off school and we were in and out of hospital the whole time and it was a really really difficult phase of our life and having this framework of positive brain and being able to work on my positive brain helped me get through that and I think if I hadn't have had that I would have found it way more stressful, like it was stressful but way more stressful and

Dr Orlena (04:44.162)
far more difficult to cope. Then another personal story, my children have this horrible, horrible genetic eye disease called choridemia, which is a huge blow to me and my family. Side note, if anybody wants to donate to Choridemia Research Foundation so that we can get some gene therapy and hopefully my children won't go blind in their lives, I have a Facebook fundraiser, which I will leave a link for in the show notes. You know when it's your birthday, they say, you can do a fundraiser. And I've already raised over 400 euros

for that, which is super exciting and watch this space because I'm hoping to do more fundraising for research in that particular area. But you know what? Having this diagnosis, yeah, it's a bit of a bummer. It's not great. Nobody wishes something like that on your kids or your family or anything like that. But I can either go down what I call this negative plug hole and really get stuck in, it's not fair and it's awful and all of this stuff. Or I can let go of that and step into

Do you know what? My kids are going to lead an amazing life despite the fact that they have this visual impairment, which is gonna get worse and worse unless some miracle happens and we get some treatment to help them. There's nothing actually imminently on the horizon. So I can either be a negative brain and sometimes I see myself slip into negative brain. Sometimes I think, my goodness, I hate this. But most of the time I pull myself out and think, no, you have to focus on...

helping them, moving it forwards and really just dealing with life on a day-to-day basis. So, whatever your problem is, whether it is stress at work or dealing with family issues or somebody who is unwell or even your health and wellness, obviously this really ties into health and wellness.

Why? Because it is so much easier to make changes from a place of positive brain than it is from a place of negative brain. Now, obviously this is something that we incorporate into our group coaching. And so if you're interested in doing this work, then obviously book a call and we will chat. Okay, let's start off thinking about what is negative brain? Negative brain is basically your brain saying, I don't like it.

Negative brain often stems from survival instincts.

And if we think about this, this stems from times when we lived in danger, when danger was all around us and it was much better for our brains to be negatively wired than positively wired. So for example, you're walking around, you see a little tail that is sticking out of a bush and you see, you think, okay, that's a little kitten's tail. That's fine. Positive brain is, I'm going for the happiness feeling. it turns out to be a tiger. Ooh, lights out. That's not great.

Now, if you do it the other way around and you're negatively wired and you're constantly looking for danger and you think, my goodness, it's a tiger and it turns out to be a kitten, there's no big deal. So the human brain is negatively wired for survival instinct. Now, the other thing to really understand about the negative brain, well, two things. First of all, it's very easy to see negative brain when it's really, really strong. So I'm really cross, I'm really stressed, really frustrated. I can see that.

But what we don't see is the mundane frustrations. We just think of those as frustrations. I'm a little bit irritated. my goodness, I'm stuck in traffic. Or, my goodness, my kids haven't washed up their bowl. Or something small has happened. That's still negative brain. It's still having, not to the same extent, but to a minor extent, it's still having the same consequence on the way that you think and on your body. So how do you recognise it? Because basically it's saying,

I don't like it, I don't like it, I don't like it.

Dr Orlena (15:34.318)
So the other part about the negative brain is it is really blinkered. What do I mean by that? Well, have you ever noticed how if something goes wrong, instead of just thinking about it for a little bit and letting go and moving on, it goes over and over your brain. Your brain starts to get obsessed by whatever this thing is. It's almost like a limpid. It latches on and it's like, oh my goodness, this thing happened, this thing happened, this thing happened.

That's what I mean by blinkered. Your brain is really focused on whatever the negative thing is. And this makes sense because if you're running away from a tiger, you don't want to get distracted by other things. However, what that means in real life is that we basically get obsessed by whatever the problem is. whatever you're doing in a day, you might be working, you might be seeing patients, you might be seeing customers, you might be doing, I don't know, a hundred jobs a day and you do 99 of them amazingly. And one of them, something happens, a mistake happens or it's not great.

somebody's upset and your brain obsesses about that one negative thing. 99 amazing things, one thing that didn't go so great and your brain is obsessed by this thing. And what you really want is for your brain to be able to process that quickly. So you go, okay, this wasn't great. Center, process, move on and enjoy the rest of your day and get on with celebrating those other 99 amazing things. So that in a nutshell is negative brain.

Now, you might be thinking, okay, but that just sounds like normal brain. What about positive brain? What is positive brain? Well, positive brain, and again, I think if we all stop and think about this, we know what positive brain is. If you've ever heard of that flow, being in flow, that is positive brain. Positive brain is where we make a decision and we feel contentment about that decision. You might feel a little bit of fear depending on what the decision is, and you take action.

because you're from positive brain.

Practicing positive brain techniques can lead to better outcomes.

So let me give you an example in the terms of health and wellness. Perhaps you're looking to lose weight.

Dr Orlena (17:40.02)
and you have tried and tried and tried and tried and so many things haven't worked for you and your brain is in this bit of a negative rut where it just goes nothing is gonna work, nothing is gonna work, it's too difficult, it won't work for me, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That is your negative brain giving you a whole load of excuses as to why it isn't going to work. When you step into positive brain,

you can go, okay, actually, I can make this happen. Yes, these things haven't worked before. I've learned something from these things.

I'm gonna do it in a different way. This is the plan I'm gonna have. I'm gonna stick to it and I am excited to get to wherever my goal is. And yes, there are gonna be obstacles, but I'm gonna keep going and I'm gonna keep going. So that's an example in terms of health and wellness. But it might be that, know, well, it's a conflict between you and somebody else. How does positive brain apply then? Well, if you're in negative brain, you're so cross because this happened and that happened and this person said this and that.

and know, however complex the situation is. When you're in positive brain.

You can take a pause, you can center, you can see the situation from different aspects, from what you're feeling, have empathy. Empathy is a really big gateway towards positive brain. So I can have empathy for myself, I can be kind to myself, which a lot of people aren't. I can really understand the situation from somebody else's point of view. That doesn't necessarily mean I agree with them or I condone their behavior, but I can see why they are in that situation. And then I can look at that situation from different

Dr Orlena (19:16.016)
points of view and we can come to some terms and then we can move forwards. So the thing about positive brain is

It doesn't necessarily make a situation so amazing, but it gives you the tools to be able to process that situation and then make a decision as to what you're going to do and then do it from a place of positive brain instead of a place from negative brain. And I think when we're making decisions about whatever it's making decisions about, this is really important to understand because we don't want to be making decisions from a place of negative brain. And so often we do.

because we're cross, we're upset, and we allow this negative emotion to drive our actions. And that's not great. Now, I'm not saying we don't necessarily have to feel that negative emotion. Sometimes we do feel that negative emotion, and that's okay. Actually, the more you strengthen your positive brain, the more quickly we get over those negative emotions. And so actually we do feel them less and less.

Okay, so let's just have a little think about negative brain. And really, the first step in this journey is to see your negative brain and understand your negative brain. And this takes a period of time, and it takes a little bit of bravery because we like to think that we're great and we do things really well, but actually, we all have negative brain. And seeing this negative brain can be hard sometimes. We don't want to admit that we're in negative brain.

So the first thing about negative brain is it basically says, I don't like it. I don't like this situation as opposed to just accepting this situation. Now I have negative brain about my children's eye condition. I don't like the fact that they have that eye condition. However, I can sidestep that a little bit and say, okay, I accept it. I don't really like it, but I do accept it.

Different patterns of negative brain

Dr Orlena (21:13.218)
So negative brain basically starts with, don't like something. And then there's a gentleman called Shirizad Sharmeen who has written a book called Positive Intelligence, which is worth reading. And he did some data analysis where he looked at everybody's negative brains and he looked at loads of people's negative brains. And it turns out there's different patterns. And we all have different patterns of negative brains. Now we all have, I'm gonna run through them in a minute. We all have all of these to some degree or another. And really to understand

as well, that sometimes these are our strengths. These are things that we have that do help us in certain situations, but in other situations, they sort of tip over and become negative when we rely too much on them and get into that negative brain. So we all have all of them except, well not except, we all have all of them and we have one to three that are stronger. And you might notice these.

as we go through them. So first up, have got stickler. Let me have a look. Let's go with avoider first. So avoider, you might recognize the avoider. Avoider is somebody who wants to avoid difficult and unpleasant tasks and conflict. Controller, a controller is somebody who wants to take control and basically,

take control of other people's actions, take charge of situations. And obviously in some situations, this is great, but not in all situations. A hyper achiever is somebody who really wants to do super well. Again, this can be really good in certain situations, but in some situations, it isn't great. So I will give you an example of this. I remember talking to one of my clients and she said, you know what? I've only lost one pound this week. And I thought about this and I was like, wait, isn't that your goal?

And she was like, yes, it is. And we had to laugh about it and we had to think about it, know, realizing that this was her hyperachiever, that although she'd set a goal for one pound a week, and it was great that she had reached it, secretly she had another goal for herself, which was more than that. And so she didn't celebrate her achievement because she thought she should have done more. Hyper-rational, again, really useful.

Dr Orlena (23:31.788)
Being hyper rational is somebody who can really look at figures and numbers and things like that. And that's amazing in certain circumstances. However, it's not useful when you are trying to deal with emotions. And I put my hand up and say, I'm a hyper rational person and my children have big emotions. And so they come and they say to me, I'm really upset because of this thing. And I go, okay, well, let's fix this thing.

And that doesn't work. Why? Because they've got these emotions. It's actually about the emotion, not so much about the fact that they want the thing fixed. It's too late. They've already entered into that emotion. So hyper-rational can be useful in certain circumstances, but it isn't always useful in all circumstances. Hyper-vigilant, somebody who is worried about danger.

looking out for danger. And obviously we need to look out for danger, but we don't need to be constantly looking out for danger. And I think having, you know, being a parent, I think we train ourselves to be hypervigilant as parents when our children, particularly when they're very little. And then as they grow up, we kind of have to let go of that hypervigilance as well. Okay, pleaser. A pleaser is somebody who...

wants to please other people. Now, it's great to please other people, however, it becomes a problem when you put other people's needs in front of your own. And that is the danger of being a pleaser. Somebody who's restless, somebody who can't focus on...

one activity, they just want the excitement of the next activity, they're always looking for something different to do rather than just sticking to what they're doing. A stickler, so a stickler is quite similar to a controller, but really a stickler is I want this done in a particular way.

Dr Orlena (25:13.164)
So I'll just give the example of my husband who is a bit of a stickler and he likes the washing up to be done in a particular way. So he's not like happy just to say, okay, you do the washing up, but he wants it to be done in the way that he wants it to be done. And apparently there are 200 different ways of doing the washing up. And in my mind, I'm just, I don't care as long as the plates are clean at the end of the day. So you can see the difference in how people think about things. And then lastly, we have victim. And this is, it's not my fault.

something happened and it's your fault. And I see this in my children a lot. A lot of them are victims like, mom, it's your fault that this happened. And I'm like, what do mean it's my fault that this happened? I didn't have anything to do with it. But you know, this idea of, no, I'm not taking responsibility. It's someone else's fault that I'm in this situation. So just, I'll just run through them again. Avoider, controller, hyperachiever, hyper rational, hyper vigilant, pleaser.

restless stickler and victim. And you might notice one or two or even all of them in your way that you do things. Now, it's not that you have to change your personality, but it's about understanding, my goodness, I see my avoider, my stickler, my pleaser coming out to play and really sabotaging my ability to be able to do something. So that is negative brain.

And as I say, the first step is really understanding it, really being able to see it and recognize it and just go, my goodness, I understand it now. And I do think this bit is a little bit like peeling off layers of onions in that, you know, it's easy to see when you get really stressed and really cross, but then there's this next layer down, which is, I'm just a little bit irritated and then go, my goodness, that's my negative brain. I hadn't really realized that was negative brain.

So let's have a think about positive brain and think, you well, if negative brain is so...

Dr Orlena (27:09.038)
prevalent, what is positive brain and how does positive brain, how do we recognize positive brain? Well, a really good way to enter into positive brain is with empathy. So being able to understand a situation from somebody else's point of view. And sometimes empathy really has to start with ourselves, particularly if you are one of these people who beats yourself up all the time, because for example, you have failed to lose weight and that makes you think that you are not worthy and

not capable of doing things or perhaps you beat yourself up because you ate something that you didn't want to eat and you get into this cycle of feeling guilty and beating yourself up. It's not helpful.

That's a negative brain and it stops you from making progress. And also it's just a nice way of being, is it? Let's face it, like you wouldn't do that to your friends, so why do you do it to yourself? So empathy really can begin with yourself and going, do you know what? I'm not perfect, but I'm doing my best, or I'm trying and I'm making progress and that's fine. So empathy. Another thing about positive brain is it really accepts a situation. Once you accept a situation,

and I think there are degrees of accepting a situation, but once you accept a situation, it stops being an issue.

or it stops being stress. So we could take an example of being stuck in traffic, which means you're going to be late for work. Once you've really accepted that, and obviously there are consequences, you're going to have to explain why you're late or if you had a meeting or something like that, there are going to be consequences. But if you just matter of fact about it, you know, this happened, I was late for work, there was nothing I could do about it, there was an accident, you know what, that's just it, I'm late for work, no big deal. As opposed to, my goodness, I'm late for work, I'm stressed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Dr Orlena (29:01.634)
Now.

Obviously, if we're looking at something more challenging, like your kids having a horrible eye condition, then there are degrees of accepting it. Like, I remember the first time I was told this, it was like this total bombshell had gone off. I wasn't expecting it in any way whatsoever. And it was almost like, yeah, I don't believe this. And it took me a bit of time to really, well, to begin with, when my, it was diagnosed when my son was in the middle of being really unwell, I just put it to one side and thought, I cannot deal with this right now because I'm dealing with so much

other stuff and over a period of time I've come to accept this is the reality of the situation. It's not great but I don't want to get pulled into that bleak blackness. I want to focus on the positive, living the day-to-day, how I can help my children, how they can lead a full life. So accepting things negates the stress of it. Not necessarily all the time but mostly. Now if you can't accept a situation

Positive brain allows for better decision-making and emotional processing.

You can learn from a situation and there's different ways of being able to learn or see gifts in situations. Now sometimes this is really hard when it's a situation like your son being unwell and you think I can't really see any gifts in my son being in well or my children having horrible eye conditions. But you don't have to always be able to see the gifts and I think one thing that's really helpful here is to look back on other challenges in your life and I have my goodness so many other challenges in my life.

And at the time, those challenges felt like they were a big disaster, they were awful, they were like, my goodness, the end of the world. But actually, you know what, I got through them. And now when I look back, I think, yeah, you know what, I did actually learn something in that situation. It strengthened my ability to be self-sustaining or to get on with things or to really focus on what I wanted. So when we look back, we can see, yeah, there was something, there was a gift in that situation.

Dr Orlena (31:01.75)
Now, if we bring it back to the present and think, okay, I can't see the gifts, but I'm open to thinking there might be some gifts that I'm going to look back and think, do you know what? Actually, there are some gifts. And I'm sure you've all heard of Christopher Reeves, who used to play Superman. Back when I was a child, I used to watch Superman and then he had a horrible...

horse riding accident and he was paralysed from the neck downwards. Now at that stage, I he didn't wake up the next day going, my goodness, that's the best thing that ever happened to me. Look, I'm paraplegic. No, that didn't happen. But by the time he got to the end of his life, he did say, do you know what? Actually that accident was a gift because it helped me see life in a different way.

Now that is the power of positive brain, the strength of him to be able to say, do you know what? This awful thing happened to me, but actually I can still make the most of my life and I still had a fulfilling rest of life. That's amazing. And it's not something that I think we would expect people to say, but that is what he said. So.

you know, even something truly horrible we can see gifts in, or we can just accept those things. And I really think that understanding that your positive brain, let's go of 90 % of the stress. Our human brains are so sticky for stress. We just want stress, stress, stress. Actually, when we let go and we step into positive brain, it just melts away and we stop.

going over and over and over what I call down that negative plug hole where our brain just goes round and round and round in circles churning over this. my goodness, this was really awful. And we let go and we learn to enjoy life and get on with things and solve whatever the problem is. So that my friends really is the framework of positive and negative brain. Now there's, when we talk about how you implement something in life,

Dr Orlena (33:03.694)
there is this statistic which is understanding something is 20 % of the work and implementing it is 80 % of the work. So for example, if you want to get stronger, you think, okay, I'm gonna go to the gym. 20 % is the information and understanding how to go to the gym and do these things. 80 % is turning up going to the gym every single week. And it's the same with healthy eating. Understanding what your system is gonna be is 20 % of the work.

doing it and sticking to it is 80 % of the work. And it's the same with positive brain. So I've given you an overview, the 20%, but it's really about applying it and doing it and keeping doing it and having the tools to keep doing it and keep seeing the world in a different way. And there's lots of different tools that you can use to keep yourself in positive brain. But this is the basics and...

Now you just need to practice, practice, practice, keep putting yourself back into positive brain. The first step is being able to see it and understand it and then reframe things and strengthen your positive brain so that it just becomes automatic, just like everything else. It's just another healthy habit that keeps you happy and healthy basically. Okay, my friends, I hope that was helpful. Have a lovely week and I will see you on the other side of 50 when I will be 50 and I don't know, three days or something.

Take care, goodbye.