Snippet 26: Cognitive Biases That Are Giving You Anxiety (And How To Avoid Them) - Dr Julie Smith
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We talk about like anxious thought patterns. We've kind of alluded to the idea of catastrophizing. There's a few other things that...

I think you talk about in the book around personalizing, overgeneralizing, labeling. I wonder if we can just go through some of these for people who might not be familiar with them. So what is personalizing? So personalizing is that thing that we all do. I mean, all of these biases are human and normal, right? So they're not pathological. They are your brain taking a quick shortcut to help you come up with an explanation for what's going on.

and possibly help your survival, but do that really, really quickly. So, you know, the idea that your brain only has certain information to go on.

So let's say you're walking down the street and you see someone you know on the other side of the street. So you wave and you say hi. And you feel like they've seen you, but they don't wave back. And then your brain goes straight to, oh, that thing I said the other day must have offended her. She must hate me. Everyone must be talking about me. I'm so awful. What was I thinking? How could I say something like that? And you go down this kind of spiral. Yeah.

And if you kind of get the bird's eye view from that scenario, we could sit down here and scribble out 10,000 reasons why that person might not have smiled. But you go down this hole of kind of self-loathing. And so you're taking an event that could have lots of explanations or could be fairly neutral and you're making it about you and often in a negative way that is kind of painful or hurtful to you. So you kind of personalize stuff. Nice.

And I guess kind of understanding these is like, if you understand, oh, I'm personalizing there or I'm catastrophizing. It's again, helpful to hold the thought at arm's length. Yeah. And just being able to kind of even label a thought as personalizing is still one possible version of that reality, right? She might hate you, but also she might not put her contact lenses in. Yeah. You know, it happens. And so it's acknowledging that when you've personalized something,

You can just be free to consider something else and or what you're going to do about it next and or acknowledge that you tend to go down that anxious route of thinking that the worst is happening and it's down to you. And that is your brain doing a good job. Again, it's not like a fault in the system.

Because that is quite a big psychological threat. If you feel like your friendship group or your community is not safe or accepting of you, then...

historically that is a risk to your survival. You know, we live in groups, we live in communities. So, you know, back in the day, if you were rejected by that community, your chances of survival were pretty drastically reduced. And, um, and probably still today, you know, the effects of loneliness are not to be snuffed at. So, um,

It's your brain trying to keep you safe, but it's not always the best reflection of reality. It's just the quickest response from your brain that goes to the thing that's probably going to help you to survive the most. Nice. What are the mental filter filters?

So I did a video on this actually, where I use like a big tray, like a big colander type thing. And I put kind of different sized beans in to show kind of different types of thoughts. And mental filter is often, you get this a lot with depression actually, where the good things that happen, for example, or thoughts about things that could actually make you feel a bit better, tend to get filtered out and kind of disregarded and left.

And then what you're left with to focus on is all the stuff that makes you feel worse and the negative stuff. So I think in the old, it's an old video now, but, um,

I think in the video I used the example of, let's say you make a video and you're scanning through the comments and you're going past hundreds of really positive comments and you're looking for that one person that doesn't like you. And so you're filtering out, you know, on the screen, you're filtering out all the positive thoughts that could help you to feel good about your content. And then you zoom in on that one thing that makes you feel worse. And I did that myself. I noticed in the early days where I was kind of looking through comments

and I was kind of scanning quickly through these really nice comments looking for anyone who, you know, didn't like it. Noticing that was the mental filter in the moment just allowed me to go, no, we're not doing this. Okay, put the phone away. And so it's actually more, you know, labeling it and noticing what bias it is, it's actually more powerful than you think because it just allows you to kind of trip out of the downward spiral. Yeah, that's so good.

I was interviewed on a big podcast recently and the interview came out about a week ago. And I find myself going back to that YouTube video and looking at the comments and sorting my newest, because I've read all the comments on that video. And I'm like, you know, I'm so curious. And I find myself doing this as well. I'm like, yeah, nice comment, nice comment. I'm like, oh, that's the one. And I saw one last night where it said something like, oh, you know, Ali Abdullah is just a scammer or something like that. And I was like, that's the one. And then I realized, wait a minute, like,

who just skipped past like 18 oh my god this interview was incredible Ali is so articulate he's such a humble guy what a nice guy oh my god so helpful best interview ever and I just faux fixated on the one that was like Ali Darza scammer this is what I'm going to think about for the next 48 hours yeah

Your mental filter. Yeah. Again, just having that terminology to be like, and the visual of just like, oh, okay, yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. This is a game that we're not going to play. So thank you very much. Yeah. It just enables you to see through it and to see where it's going to take you. And yeah,

then to make the choice about whether you go with that or whether you don't. And sometimes you will, and sometimes you kind of do something different. Hey friends, thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this clip, then click here for the full unedited episode. And if you liked that, then do please consider subscribing to the channel. It means a lot, a lot. Thank you so much and have a great day. Bye-bye.