- After the death of my father,
just getting through the day was tough enough.
I'd recently launched a new business
that had totally thrust me out in front of people,
the last place that you wanna be
when you're grieving, right?
Well, on top of my emotional pain, I had physical pain too.
At nighttime, my entire body would be in agony.
I could barely move.
My doctors believed that during the day
I was able to keep it at bay but at nighttime
when I let go of the structure of who I was,
my body went into physical shock to try and heal itself.
Whichever way we deal with a devastating setback
or ongoing pressure that feels like
it's just never gonna let up,
we must comprehend that whatever we do and however we behave
we're creating and establishing new neurological pathways
that either teach us to continue to stay that way
or break the pattern and choose a different path.
Those pathways simply become stronger and stronger
the more that we go down them.
The more that you grieve,
the more that you establish it as a behavior
on how to react when something goes wrong
subconsciously or not.
Your mind takes on the identity of a wounded person
and that's how you start to behave
but thankfully, you have a choice
when you're aware of what you're doing.
Take the negative, wounded path or the path of strength.
Now, I eventually did choose the second one
when I became more consciously aware of what was going on.
To do so, before I gave up,
I had to apply a few simple strategies.
This included three daily habits.
The first one, every night before I went to bed,
I'd write a list of 10 things I was grateful for
for that day and more importantly,
what I was looking forward to for the next.
This is simple and it's designed to retrain your brain
to look for the good when it had spent a considerable
amount of time ruminating on the bad.
Secondly, each day,
I'd revisit a list of my past achievements,
everything from buying my first home
to reaching a fitness goal.
I'd remind myself that I was more capable
than I'd give myself credit for
then I'd add something else to that list for the day.
These were goals that if I was a 16 year old
looking at what I was yet to achieve
would get my 16 year old self excited about the future
thereby once more disrupting certain thought patterns.
And finally, and this is my favourite,
I took on a sad song and movie diet
and it's exactly as it sounds.
I removed any triggers that would send myself
back into a spiral of negative thoughts and behaviours.
The easiest and fastest thing you can do to break a pattern
when you're in the midst of negative emotions
is hitting play on some music
that you used to listen to as a teen
that would make you smile.
For me, yeah, I admit it,
it may have been the Spice Girls or Britney Spears but hey,
I'd love to see what your favourite song was back in the day.
Anything that sends you back to a time
in which everything was okay is by far one of the best ways
to interrupt those negative patterns.
Keep this up for a while and you'll begin to not only forget
what it was that you were worrying about
but you'll also uncover the psychological resources
that you need to keep going when you feel like giving up.
(upbeat music)