Guy Reams (00:00.482)
This is day 36. Label and tag the thought.
You know, you can have these persistent negative thoughts that hang around for a long time. You may not even recognize it's happening, but if you stop and pause and think about what you're thinking about at any given time, there's usually a persistent negative thought that is just pervasive in your throughout your day. If you keep letting these negative thoughts accumulate,
then you start feeling a lot of anxiety and stress. It's amazing how we'll let these little thoughts just hang with us forever. And they'll just keep thinking about them over and over again. We'll keep going through it in our mind. And it's just a negative thought that keeps eating away at us. Sometimes the negative thought becomes so bad that it warps or twists your reality. Because you've been focused on it so much, you're not seeing reality for what it is.
You start to attribute anything that's bad happening in your life to the negative thought. When I was a young boy, there was a movie by a Stephen King novel called Gremlins, and they made a movie about it. Of course, the movie terrified me. Nowadays, I watch it, and it's kind of laughable.
Stephen King was playing on this idea that people would call anything that went wrong with your vehicle as a gremlin. there's a gremlin in there. So people had labeled the negativity that was happening with their vehicles or cars or kitchen appliances, whatever it was, as a gremlin.
Guy Reams (01:45.23)
This brings up a very interesting thought that I had today about a particular negative thought I was having in my head. And I started thinking about how could I better deal with that negative thought than letting it just dwell on, letting me just dwell with it. So the first thing I came up with was that I should label, identify and label the thought. Just like in that Stephen King novel, people would label things that went wrong with their car as a gremlin.
I could label things that go wrong, the thing that I'm thinking about with a label. I can give it a name. Like this negative thought is now whatever, right? So instead of thinking about this failure or this thing that went wrong in my life, instead of thinking about it as this obtuse thing that I have to think through, I can now create a character of it, right? It's now the dragon or it's now the...
It's now the Hydra or it's now the Great Worm or it's the evil gnome or whatever it happens to be, you can create something that represents that in your mind. Labeling it, acknowledging it and labeling it will now clearly identify it, which will allow you to step back from it and not be consumed by it. You can now look at that thought as a thing, as an object.
And so when it comes to visit you again, you know exactly with whom you are dealing with. So labeling the thought is pretty important. Once you've done that, and you've created an image around that thought, you can now interact with it in a very real way. For example, you can challenge the thought. You can ask yourself, you know what, is that thought real or is it based on facts or is it based on assumption? Are there evidence that contradicts this object?
So you can really start to think about how you can weaken that object where it won't have as much hold over you. I don't know if you've ever done this, the thought of a, like when I was a kid, I hated scary movies. My mother and my grandmother would take me to scary movies all the time. And I hated scary movies. The thought of going to a scary movie was far worse than the actual scary movie itself.
Guy Reams (04:04.536)
Have you ever noticed that like you'll watch in a movie and your adrenaline's pumping because something's going to jump at you or whatever. And then once it happens, it's like not that bad. And so you're like, that wasn't a big deal. So once you're able to logically establish a character for the problem, it'll now weaken its hold on you. You can now also start to reframe this thought.
So for example, instead of now saying, geez, I always screw up like that, or I always do that, or this is such a problem that I'm always causing, or I'll never get this done. Instead of these fatalistic phrases that you might use when describing this, you now can describe, because you've labeled and created this negative thought as a separate entity, you can now describe it in different words. So instead of saying, you know what?
I always fail, you can say that object there, that thing, that gremlin is the thing that causes me to fail and I'm not going to let that gremlin take advantage of me again. So you can isolate the problems that you have away from you and treat them separately so you can stop being so fatalistic in your thought. Once you're able to take thoughts, label them, identify them,
and put them out of your mind, you can now sit back and just observe the world around you. And whenever that thought comes back, just attribute it to that character that you made, that gremlin, that whatever you've come up with, right? And so what I do when I'm trying to just allow myself to chill out for a while, I just observe something that's happening around me, like a leaf blowing along the road or...
Or like in my backyard, I like to watch this one hummingbird go around my backyard. So I just sit there and watch the hummingbird. And anytime negative thoughts come up, I just put them into the object that I've created. That way, they lose their intensity. And now I can observe on it with a detachment. And I can lose myself in whatever I'm observing, right?
Guy Reams (06:27.168)
Another great thing you can do is you can make these these negative thoughts that dwell with you more ridiculous and funny. Like you can dress that object up in funny clothes or put it in funny circumstances or lock it away in the closet or, you know, pretend like when you're when you're exercising, pretend like you're beating it up. It sounds like gimmicky and silly, but it's actually work. So I'm telling you.
You treat this negative thought you're always having as a thing, and you just always visualize yourself beating that thing. Eventually, your brain just kind of figures it out, or more importantly, starts to counterbalance that negative thought with something more positive. And so I've always noticed that if I label, identify the thought, and separate it away from myself, then I'm able to engage in a more proactive and meaningful way.
So anyway, that was my thought. I think it would help. you know, obviously there are times when there's a negative thought that comes up that really is important. Like there's a reason why you're having a negative thought because you're doing something stupid or there's something happening in your life you really need to address. I mean, that does happen. So in that case, if the negative thought is something really bad, like, geez, I can't pay the bills this month or
or I need to come up with money to do this or whatever it is and it's really stressful to you.
It doesn't help you to sit there and worry about it constantly. So rather, what I try to do is, well, there's something that's legitimate worry. Like I have to deal with it. I like to put it into an object, like I described, but then I like to set aside time when I deal with that thing. Like I'm going to deal with that negative thought on Monday from 8 to 10 a.m. That's when I'm going to deal with that negative thought.
Guy Reams (08:30.574)
That way when I'm on the weekend and I'm sitting there and that negative thought comes back up again, I can say, no, that gremlin, I'm dealing with that gremlin on Monday at 8 a.m. And so setting aside time to deal with real problems can be helpful as well. At least I've discovered. Anyway, that's all I have, thanks.