Reframing

We recently delivered The Hundred 2024 and it was another special weekend!

I personally enjoyed this year a lot more with one year of learning and a great job from everyone involved in making it happen. I am so grateful to all involved in helping us trying to change men’s health and wellbeing for the good of all.

I opened the weekend talking about behaviour change and the many variables that influence us all in wanting to either change a bad behaviour or pick up and stick to a good one.

One part of this talk focused on thoughts themselves. Research used to suggest we had 60-70000 thoughts per day but recent findings suggest its much less at around 6-7000. It really depends on what you call a thought.

What you may not know is that most of our thoughts are relatively throw away and are negative, automatic thoughts (NATs). ‘Did I pack my kit’ ‘how soon until lunch’ ‘this isn’t good enough’ ‘i am rubbish at this’ etc.

So if we know about 70% of our day is habitual (our hormones and neurology like this as it feels easy) and most of our thoughts are negative, it is easy to see from a psychological perspective, why we get stuck in behaviour loops and moments of feeling down or low can become a compounding difficult obstacle if and when we continually think or feel this way.

Thoughts shape feelings, feelings influence behaviours and the resulting outcomes from these behaviours. Constant self doubt leads to low mood and regressive behaviour. In the moment anger may lead to knee jerk reactions we regret later.

But great news – there are lots of exercises we can do to combat this and I want to give you two tools to work on if any of this resonates with you.

Firstly, we need to separate our thoughts from ourselves. Bare with me here. What I mean by this is you are not your thoughts, and thoughts are not facts. Just because its your voice, your thoughts on a situation – doesn’t make it so.

Now with so many negative thoughts, it is important we really focus on applying this to the ones that have an impact on our feelings and resulting behaviour. With lots of throw away thoughts, really focus on the ones linked to you either wanting to feel or act differently.

So for this week please just try and recognise what I have just explained. Try and just recognise and capture these thoughts when they occur. Nothing else. Just practice seeing them for what they are.

Like anything it may take some practice but try have some notes on 6-10 thoughts that you’d like to change or work on that impact you for next week.

Examples:

‘I need a drink’. I will train later/ make up for it’ ‘I have been good all day/ week’ ‘he/ she is doing this on purpose to piss me off’ ‘why does x always happen to me’.

Good luck

Joe