Go ‘F’ yourself… wait.

Just how powerful are thoughts?

Let’s look at 2 experiments. In the first experiment school children were given two plants. They were told to compliment the first plant and to insult the second. A month later the compliment plant thrived, and the insulted plant was dying.

A similar experiment by Dr. Masaru Emoto found him saying thank you to one jar of rice, calling a second jar an idiot, and ignoring a third. Jar #1 fermented and gave a pleasant odor, jars #2 and 3 rotted.

Train- Building muscles and Minds since ‘22.

What others say about us has a huge effect, but I can’t think of the last time I called someone an idiot to their face. Actually wait, I did it this morning. Picture a quiet, serene city street, 5:45 am. I not so elegantly try to put something in a trash barrel and knock it over with a LOUD boom.

‘You idiot,’ I said. To myself. For dropping a barrel.

The person who insults us to our face most often is… ourselves.

While there may be ample evidence that from time to time I act like an idiot study after study proves that negative thoughts NEVER improve outcomes. So why do all of us have so many negative thoughts? Why are we such idi…. Caught that one.

Psychologists call this the negativity bias. We are trained to scout for and fixate on threat. Why? Because we are wired to survive, and the world is filled with things that can kill us.

Can we evolve beyond this? Yes. But it’s going to take some work with those usual suspects: Meditation, gratitude, self compassion and yes, physical activity and exercise are all proven to help us overcome negativity bias, but In the words of Gordon Morton, ‘Familiar hells are preferred over strange heavens.’