HealthyGamerGG - Make Your Morning Routine Work For You | Productive and Healthy Habits

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

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And so what I tend to do is I have these negative thoughts. And throughout my day, I push them to the side. I push them away. I push them away. I push them away. And so the moment I wake up, I haven't built any barriers yet. So what happens? They come flooding back into my mind.

First thing in the morning. Does anyone have a morning routine to start the day? I get bombarded with negative thoughts. The moment I wake up, I get bombarded with negative thoughts. Does anyone have a morning routine to start the day off? We're going to talk about is what to do if you wake up in the morning. morning and you're bombarded with negative thoughts. So the first thing to understand is that early morning awakening and a very, very high amount of negative thoughts first thing in the morning are the

most, is one of the most specific signs for a mood disorder in especially a depressive episode. So let's explain that for a second. What do I mean by specific signs? So in medicine, we have certain things that are sensitive and certain things that are specific. So things that are sensitive are things that people are likely to have if they have a particular disease. But they're not very specific. So I'll give you all an example. Let's look at something like concentration difficulties. Concentration difficulties are not specific to depression. So if I have difficulty with concentrations, I could have a major depressive episode. I could have ADHD. I could be high on a substance. I may be physically ill. I may have schizophrenia. There are all kinds of reasons why I would have

difficulty with concentration. So that's not a specific sign for depression. Early morning awakening and especially having lots of negative thoughts early in the morning is pretty specific. Even low mood throughout the day, for example, can be common in grief or can be common in things like even cancer, for example, physical illnesses. But specifically waking up very early in the morning, we're talking 4 a.m. 5 a.m. 6 a.m. with a mind that's running very, very high on negative thoughts. It's like you wake up and you're bombarded. with negative thoughts can actually be a specific sign of depression. So when I'm evaluating patients for depression, one of the things that I'll ask them is like,

okay, so you're feeling sad and down about yourself and things like that. What time of the day do you feel that? And the more they feel it kind of first thing in the morning, especially if they wake up at 5 a.m., that makes me really concerned about a clinical illness. So if you fall into that camp, I'd highly recommend that you get clinically evaluated. That being said, there are a lot of people who wake up first thing in the morning with a lot of negative thoughts. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have a clinical illness.

There are other reasons why we kind of do that. So now what we're going to talk about is understand a cup a little bit about what's going on in the mind when you wake up with negative thoughts and what to do about it. So sometimes we worry about stuff. And when we worry about stuff, it's kind of hard to deal with it, right? So I don't know if this kind of makes sense. But worrying about stuff doesn't necessarily solve problems. So if I'm anxious about something and I'm thinking, oh my God, like are people going to invite me to the party and they're not going to invite me to the party? I can think about it.

I can think about it. And at the end of those thoughts, let's say an hour later, has my anxiety been resolved? Have things been fixed? No, they haven't, right? So worrying about things in the moment sometimes doesn't actually fix problems. If it did fix problems, no one would have anxiety, like, or everyone in the anxiety would have perfect lives. Because worrying about stuff, if it actually fixed stuff, like, that would be great. The first thing to understand about worrying and especially worrying first thing in the morning is it doesn't necessarily do anything.

So why do we do it? We do it because our brain is concerned about a couple of things. It's warning us about a couple of things. or sometimes we have negative self-aditude, so we're thinking negative things about ourselves. And then normally what happens, or not normally, but what happens nowadays is when we start to have negative thoughts, we tend to distract ourselves from them.

So since thinking about them doesn't actually solve the problem, what we end up doing is distracting ourselves. This becomes easier and easier with the availability of technology. So once I start browsing social media, I can distract myself from my negative thoughts, I can watch something, I can play something, I can do all kinds of different stuff to distract myself from these negative thoughts.

And when I distract those negative thoughts, what happens to them? They actually go dormant. They don't get fixed, right? So if I lack self-esteem or I'm worried that people aren't going to invite me to a party and I spend four hours playing a particular video game, at the end of those four hours, those thoughts come back. And so then what happens if we think about our days, our days become filled with distraction.

So now I'm going to play games for four hours. I stop for a second, the negative thoughts come back, and now I need to do something else. So I distract myself in another way. I distract myself in another way. Sometimes I distract myself with work. Sometimes I distract myself, I even will socialize, right? So even if I feel like I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life and I have a group of buddies and we're all going to go out drinking tonight, I can go do some fun stuff, but I never deal with the problem. And so what I tend to do is I have these negative thoughts and throughout my day I push them to the side.

I push them away. I push them away. I push them away. And so the moment I wake up, I haven't built any barriers yet. So what happens? They come flooding back into my mind. First thing in the morning. So how do we deal? with this, what should we not do and what should we do? So the first thing to not do if you wake up with negative thoughts in the morning is use any kind of technology. So it's so easy because tech is so good at this stuff. Suppression of our amygdala and our limbic system, which is our emotional circuitry, our fear center. So social media, memes, video games, Reddit, whatever. If I watch some kind of technology or engage in some kind of technology, it'll suppress my emotional circuitry. The worst thing about a lot of social media is that even if it suppresses,

your circuitry in the short term, over the long term, it actually worsens your mental health. So there have been studies that show that the more time you spend on social media, things like Facebook or Instagram or Reddit or whatever, the worse your mental health becomes over time. And that taking a break or reducing your social media or technology usage improves mental health over time. Now, the challenge, though, is that's overtime, right? I'd put it to you this way. Let's say that there's even data that shows that, for example, having two drinks a week, Two alcoholic beverages a week correlates with improvements in mental health.

And some people are really confused by that. They're like, how can drinking help with your mental health? And it turns out there's a confounding variable. What kind of person drinks two drinks a week? What is the setting in which you have two drinks a week? It's almost always social. So once a week, I'm going to go meet up with a friend. I know my limit, so I'm going to have like two beers with dinner.

We're going to hang out for a while and then we're going to go our separate ways. I'm going to go to bed on time. It's not like we're out there getting hammered. So two drinks a week actually correlates. with social activity, and that's what's responsible for the improvement in mental health. And if we go to 10 drinks a week, 12 drinks a week, 15 drinks a week, then our mental health gets worse and worse and worse. And social media in that same way, when we use it temporarily, if I'm having a really rough

week, and I spend two hours a week playing video games to kind of distract myself, kind of cool off a little bit after a tense day, that can actually be helpful because I want to suppress those emotional circuits, because the rest of the week I'm actually dealing with my problems. But as technology uses rises and rises and rises, even though it's suppressing in the short term, it can make things worse than the long term. So if you have negative thoughts first thing in the morning, most important thing is don't slip into technology usage. Because what that's going to do is push it away and then it'll come roaring back later. Second thing, and this is going to sound kind of weird, is don't try to fix the problem when you're feeling bad. And y'all may be kind of confused by that.

You're like, what do you mean? Don't. Isn't like, when am I supposed to like fix the problem? So let's understand this is really important. So let's say I've got negative thoughts. And I wake up first thing in the morning. And here are my four negative thoughts. And so what we can do in the mind is we can engage with negative thoughts.

Right. So let's say I'm, let me just trying to find something like an example. So let's say that I wake up in the morning and I think to myself, no one really cares about me. Okay. So that's this thought. And then what I do is I start thinking, okay, no one really cares about me. And then I start thinking about it, well, like, or I'm feeling really lonely. Let's say, let's say I'm feeling lonely.

Okay. And I start thinking about this thought of loneliness. And then I think, okay, well, like, if I'm feeling lonely, why don't I go and socialize? Let me call up a friend of mine. But if you're in a negative frame of thought, if this is the mindset that you're in, when you think about solutions, what does your mind actually say? Oh, people don't want to invite you, right? And you're like, oh, like, and so even though you can try to solve the problem, it's kind of like the more you engage with your negative thoughts and you start arguing with yourself. and like the negative thoughts grow and grow and grow.

And then let's say like you fight that thought for a little while. And you're like, oh, no, I don't want to trust that. People really do love me. Let me text someone. So you text someone first thing in the morning. Hey, you want to hang out this weekend at 9 a.m. And then they don't respond in 15 minutes. Then how do you feel?

They don't care about me. Does this make sense? So oftentimes what we'll discover is that when you have negative thoughts first thing in the morning and you engage with them, these thoughts, the more you engage with them, the more they actually start to spiral. and then you're kind of stuck in this like negative thought loop where you're spiraling in negativity. And this is the key thing to understand. So when you wake up in the morning and you have negative thoughts, you want to fix them.

But I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but in that frame of mind, you can't effectively fix them. If that worked, we wouldn't be in this problem in the first place. In fact, engaging with those negative thoughts and trying to fix them in that moment actually makes things worse because you wake up and you think through that stuff, you think, you think, you think, you think, and the more time you spend thinking, the worse that you feel until eventually, what happens is you hit the state of cognitive exhaustion where you're like, ah, and you get out of bed and you go grab your phone and then you distract yourself, you push all the negative thoughts, you push them to the side, and now we're going to focus on this

stuff in the middle. We're going to focus on this stuff in the middle. Okay, there we go. We're going to focus on the stuff in the middle with distraction. And then the second the distraction stops, the thoughts are going to come rushing back. So oddly enough, don't try to fix things. That's the second thing to be careful about. Third thing is avoid substances. So this is, this kind of goes back to this distracting thing and is almost in the same vein as, you know, avoiding technology, but be careful about things like getting high first thing in the morning and like getting high when you're feeling bad and like drinking and stuff like that because it's going to just create more problems down the line, especially because substances are more likely to put you into a negative

frame of mind where you can actually spiral. So then the question is, okay, if I shouldn't use technology, don't try to fix the problem and don't use substances, what should I do? First thing you should do is go for a walk. So this is key. When we're in this frame of mind where we've got some weird thoughts, the right move is to not engage with them and let them spiral. But what we actually want to do instead is kind of let them fizzle out. So we don't want to distract ourselves by pushing them to the side, but when we go for a walk or there are other things that you can do, so what I would say is go for a walk or clean something, there's this weird effect when we clean things or when we go for a walk. is that like the thoughts don't we're not really pushing them away we're sort of letting them be there but

we're not engaging with them and i don't know if you all have experienced this but like when you clean stuff and when you go for a walk your mind will start to wander so what sort of happens is the energy and the mind starts to kind of like dissipate you start just naturally thinking about like other stuff so now you've got two thoughts left that are bad but then you start thinking about other things right and then you've got like two kind of neutral thoughts and then as you keep walking what's going to happen is you're going to get one bad thought and then a couple good ones. And then eventually that bad thought will go away. And then you're just kind of like thinking about, okay, what do I need to do today? And the key thing there is that in this moment, you haven't

engaged with the thoughts. You can kind of think through them a little bit. You're not going to try to solve them. You're just going to let whatever. You're going to let them kind of like, it's almost like, I don't know if you all have seen like a dog shaking off water after it's been in the rain or whatever. But like that's kind of what we're doing in our mind anytime we clean or anytime we go for a walk. The third thing to do with negative thoughts, assign a time to deal with them. So remember, we said, we don't want to fix them now, but sometimes we have to address them. But what we want to do is approach them from a clear head and methodically.

So this is like literally what happens in therapy. So what's really cool about therapy, and I've seen this change a lot, is that sometimes I'll notice a shift in my patients, where they learn that they can take their negative thoughts. They've got a box over here. They wake up in the morning with negative thoughts. here's day one, here's day two. And then let's say here's day three when their boss gets mad at them. And what they actually learn over time is they're like, oh, okay, like, I'm feeling bad right now.

I'm going to talk about this with Dr. Kay on Thursday. Next day they wake up, they're like, I feel this way right now. I'm going to talk with Dr. Kay about this on Thursday. I'm feeling this way right now. I'm going to talk with Dr. Kay about this on Thursday. And then what happens when they come into my office is we're like, cool, okay, let's break these walls down. Let's let all that crap out. We're going to let it all out, and we're going to kind of deal with it methodically, one at a time.

And so what we can almost do is compartmentalize dealing with our problems. And the key thing that when you assign a time is that when you're clear-headed, you can actually fix stuff. Do you'll get that? The biggest problem here is that when we are emotionally active and we're not clear-headed, it makes it even harder to fix the problems. Even though the problem seems so in our face, when we let it set it down, put it aside, and then approach it with a clear-head, suddenly things become so much easier. And so one of the biggest advantages of therapy is, is sure you can have a clinician who's trained in a bunch of stuff, and that's fantastic.

Don't get me wrong. It's a great evidence-based intervention. But half of the advantage of therapy is just learning how to compartmentalize and then approaching problems in sort of a calm way. And the nice thing about a therapist is that you've got someone there who's going to keep you from spiraling and guide you in hopefully a productive manner. But the major principle here is that assigning a time to deal with them. So then when I'm feeling pretty good about myself, maybe before I have lunch,

I'm going to sit down with a piece of paper and I'm going to like think through those thoughts. I'm going to try to some of them. I'm going to pick one thing. Okay, people don't like me. Okay, and then let me try to socialize. Okay, let me send a text. And then even in that moment,

you're going to kind of acknowledge for a moment that, okay, like, if I send a text, they may not get back to me right away, that's okay. Do I need to find? And then when they don't, when they don't respond, if you're kind of really in a clear frame of mind, do I need different friends? Instead of it suddenly being,

if they don't respond to you, it's not a shortcoming of you. It could be a shortcoming of them. But when you're in this negative headspace, and there are people who are neglectful of you in life, it's never their fault. Because in this negative headspace in your spiral, it's always your fault.

And so when you have negative thoughts first thing in the morning, I'd say very simply, clean, go for a walk. Don't use technology. Don't use substances. And don't try to solve the problems. Instead, assign a separate time where you're of clear head to approach whatever your concerns are.

And when people do this, something magical starts to happen. It may not happen overnight, but over time, you'll have fewer and fewer and fewer negative thoughts in the morning. Because when we engage, I don't know if this makes sense, but when we engage with the negative thoughts in the morning, we actually ramp them up. Do you all get that? Like one thought leads to another thought leads to another thought. Like this grows. When I start thinking these, then grows and grows and grows and grows and grows and grows and then I feel overwhelmed. Then what happens is if I'm engaging with my thoughts in the morning, okay? So I'll draw one last thing to illustrate this.

So I have four bad thoughts. And then I engage with them. And it becomes five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, whatever. And now here's the key thing. When I distract myself and I push all these thoughts to the outside of my mind, how many are left? And now tomorrow morning when I wake up, how many thoughts, negative thoughts am I going to have? I have more than what I started with, right? And then I'm going to engage with these.

I'm going to create more and more and more and more and more and more and more. And then I'm going to have more of the next day and more of the next day because I'm spending all this cognitive energy. nothing is actually getting fixed. So don't engage with your negative thoughts when you're a negative frame of mind. Set it aside for later. And honestly, when people start doing this, when you start controlling

how and when your mind thinks a particular way, that's when your mind starts to get purified. And last thing, just to keep in mind is, remember, we started that sometimes early morning awakening is actually a sign of a clinical illness, so I'd recommend getting evaluated if you fall into that category.

If you found this video helpful, check out Dr. Kay's guide. We've spent hundreds of hours writing and filming to help people understand their mind so that they can build the lives that they want. So check out the link in the description below.