The Blindboy Podcast - The Head to the Heart

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

4th Birthday episode. When trying to improve our mental health. How do we move new beliefs from our heads into our hearts ? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Greetings you ten-foot gobnets. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. This episode actually marks the fourth birthday of this podcast. We've been doing this podcast for four fucking years. I don't think at the time I thought I'd be doing this podcast for four years. I didn't think that this podcast would become what it has become. would become what it has become. I initially started this podcast as a way to promote my book of short stories. It was 2017, late 2017.

I'd just written a book of short stories. I'd never written a book of short stories before. And I was like, fuck, how do I go from being the lad in the rubber bandits who was making music to all of a sudden having a book of fiction how do I do that will people purchase it how do I let them know that the stories in this book are even worth reading so I said I'm gonna have to do a podcast and on this podcast I'm gonna read out some stories and then hopefully some people will hear it and then they'll say these stories aren't too bad I think I might try this book. So I did. I read out a few short stories on the first couple of podcast episodes. I thought maybe I was going to do about four podcast episodes back then and then the podcast got really popular really quickly

so I said fuck it I guess I'm doing a weekly podcast now and here we are four years later I think we're at almost 35 million listens. We've got listeners all over the fucking world. And there isn't really any signs of anything slowing down. The podcast continues to grow. It started off as kind of just a thing in Ireland, but now... Jeez, I'd say most of my listeners now are outside of Ireland. I don't really have an Irish podcast anymore I just have a podcast that people listen to all around the gaff and I have to say and I

genuinely mean this and thank you to everyone who listens to this podcast but this podcast has been the highlight of my career it really has been the highlight of my career and what feels so lovely about that is I've been serious about creating art or entertainment or whatever the fuck you want to call it I've been trying to have a serious go at creativity being my career since school since fucking school and that was 20 years ago so I've been professionally creative or at least attempting it for 20 years and this has been the utter highlight and what feels so fantastic is in my 20s I was part of a musical duo called the rubber bandits and we were semi successful I suppose it depends on how you define success.

I don't know. We managed to take creativity and art, which would have been something we were doing amongst friends, and then turn that into a thing we could do professionally at a high level, at an international level. And it was tremendous crack. But at the time I started this podcast four years ago I was ready to wind down I was genuinely like that was good crack there now the rubber bandits thing that's

run its course that's very much something for my 20s I think now it's time for me to to join the real world I went back and I did a master's degree And I was like. I'm going to try to become a college lecturer maybe. In art. Or I might go back and finish my qualification in psychotherapy. And become a psychotherapist. And that's what I was going to do with my 30s. Because I thought I'd gotten lucky. I thought I'd gotten lucky.

I thought the bandits thing was just. Wow. What a wonderful story that I can tell people about my 20s a bit like that episode of the Simpsons where Bart goes up to the attic and he opens up this box and it turns out that Homer was in this group called the B-sharps when he was in his 20s and it was popular for a while and then it fizzled out I thought that was going to be that was going to be, that was going to be me. And I was grand with that. I was totally okay with it. I was so grateful to, grateful to have fucking spent my 20s, like I said, touring and gigging and making music.

How much crack was that, especially during the recession? And then life just threw me a beautiful little surprise out of nowhere in the form of my short stories, which I didn't think were going to do well and this podcast and life just said hold on a minute your 20s was not the highlight of your creative career that was actually just a starting point now you've got a completely new career which is much better and more rewarding and wider reaching than the one you had in your 20s and you can actually earn a living from this one while doing what you love and that was one of the setbacks as well of my career in my 20s the nature of what we were doing meant that we were at the mercy of

television commissioners and the music industry so I could spend months writing a treatment and writing a script and coming up with an idea for a tv show or for a documentary and then I submitted to a commissioner and if one person in the tv station doesn't like it, it just doesn't get made, it's thrown in the bin. But that's still months of work that's unpaid. Or similarly with music, you spend months unpaid producing, recording a track, then you pump a load of your own money into making a video and if that doesn't get the views, if people don't like it, if it doesn't succeed in a mainstream fashion, then you're in hot water. So unfortunately, from a creative point of view, what you're forced to do is to compromise.

And you compromise by trying to make your work a little bit more mainstream. And when that happens, you're not being authentic to yourself as an artist, and then the work isn't enjoyable. you're not being authentic to yourself as an artist and then the work isn't enjoyable and I'm so glad that that's no longer a model I operate under because I've got the Patreon the Patreon means this podcast is listener supported so I have full creative control fully independent

and I have the space and time to fail and fuck up and only through having the time to fail and fail and fail can you create a piece of work that you're truly happy with that people will enjoy so thank you to all of ye who not only the patrons of the podcast but the people who are just sharing it and mentioning people that they like this podcast we wouldn't be celebrating the 4th birthday if it wasn't for ye simple as that wouldn't be happening

so thank you for believing in me I'm tremendously gracious and I remind myself of that every single morning I wake up so that's what this podcast's 4th birthday means to me a beautiful wonderful transformative thing in my life that confirmed to me that don't give up on your fucking dreams you can put them on hold there's no reason to invest

everything in your dream you can always have a plan b but never give up on them keep sticking at it keep trying if the thing that you're trying is intrinsic to your sense of self and being creative create an art of any description writing

that's intrinsic to my being and fuck it who knows in a year's time you know someone could change the algorithm for podcasts or whatever and I'm back in obscurity but who gives a fuck I'll get a different job

but I won't give up on creativity I'll be in a studio somewhere painting paintings or making songs or writing stories even if no one

sees or hears or anything I'll be doing it for the sake of it for the sheer love of making art so there you go happy fourth birthday to the podcast so I don't think I don't have anything particularly fucking special planned for the fourth birthday because I didn't know it was happening Acast reminded me I didn't know it was the fourth birthday at all but what I would

like to do this week again because I've been getting so many requests i've been getting so many requests from you recently the past month in particular to to do more mental health themed podcasts because there's something in the water i think what it is is right now is is the most normal society has been since the start of the pandemic in 2020. Like restrictions are eased to the point that we're 98% at normal life. And the confrontation of that is, I don't even know the word from it. I think overwhelming is the word. even know the word from it. I think overwhelming is the word. It's quite overwhelming right now.

Like here's a really bizarre experience I had this week. I was walking around Limerick City. Now I've been in Limerick City Centre a couple of times during the pandemic. But during the pandemic, especially during lockdown, our experience of

public spaces was defined by a heightened anxiety you're thinking about social distancing you're thinking about your masks you're thinking about keeping yourself safe and other people safe so that's how public spaces have been for us all over the past two years. And when you're in that emotional space, one of threat assessment, you're not in the present moment, which means you're not observing, you're not looking around you. So yes, I visited Limerick City Centre a couple of times over the pandemic, but I wasn't looking around me I wasn't walking around the city for the sake of walking around it this week that's what I did I was in

the city centre I was walking around I was people watching I was looking at buildings I was aware of my surroundings because I'm no longer in threat assessment mode things are a bit more normal I'm double vaxxed so are a lot of other people I'm still aware of COVID but it's not making me anxious anymore I feel safe so because of this my anxiety was lower and I was more visually observant and I started to look and I, the strangest feeling came up, came over me. Limerick has,

a slight Chernobyl vibe right now. Now, but what I mean by that is, is Chernobyl, we know Chernobyl as the place in Ukraine where there was a nuclear meltdown

in 1984 and it all had to be shut down because it was irradiated. But Chernobyl now is like a grown over city. It's full of leaves and weeds and wildlife and plants and trees. It's been reclaimed by nature. So when I was walking around Limerick City Centre the other day, noticing my surroundings, Limerick's kind of been reclaimed by nature a little bit.

Like two years of a pandemic, two years of hardly any activity in the city. Paint is peeling. Road signs are a weird kind of dark shade. Stuff needs to be, stuff needs a lick of paint. Weeds are exceptionally large there's weeds growing from the cracks in concrete that wouldn't exist because people would have walked over them so there's the subtle sense of the city being overgrown which is understandable because of two years of activity so i started to notice this but But the problem was, my body and brain couldn't register the two years having passed.

So I felt as if I'd come out of a little coma. I could see that two years had passed, but I couldn't feel that two years had passed. And that was really overwhelming, because I don't have a context for this. And then I started to get a little pang of existential anxiety where I was wondering about the nature of reality and what does time and the passage of time even mean or or being in a bar and you're looking around at the decor in the bar and it feels a tiny bit dated. It feels a little bit 2017. You know when you're in a bar

in Ireland and there's a bang of peaky blinders off it. I don't know how to describe that but it's like there's a bang of peaky blinders here. The barman's wearing a flat cap and you're there in the bar thinking wow this feels really outdated. But your brain is going how could something from 2017 feel outdated that was only two years ago it's 2019 then you go no it's not it's 2022 or what if I told you in a month's time 2017 was half a decade ago like even on the subject of style or fashion. Like how do we know what haircut we're supposed to have right now? You just pick up from 2019. Because over the past two years everyone was cutting their own hair at home. Like you're going to be watching Reeling in the Ears in ten years time and it'll show you 2020.

And all the politicians are on TV looking like a Jack Russell had a go at their head. Or music. You know, fashion, trends, music, they all had to exist over the past two years. Divide of social interaction. Like what big song would we have had there? That song Wet Ass Pussy by Megan Thee Stallion.

No one got to dance to that in a Stallion. No one got to dance to that in a nightclub. No one got to dance together and talk about their wet ass pussies. It's lost in the ether as a digital artefact. People have to dance to it by themselves at home on their own

and talk about how much they enjoyed it on the internet. And we're all going through that right now. It's quite stressful. Our entire perception of time has been fucked with i genuinely i couldn't with confidence tell you if two years has just passed i honestly couldn't tell you like the only way i can tell the difference between 2020 and 2021 is by what box set I was watching

on a streaming service so if I was watching Mad Men it was 2020 and if I was watching The Sopranos it was 2021 like do you know like the five days after Christmas where you don't

know what day it is. We've had that for two years and that's why when I walk around Limerick City Centre and see an overgrown footpath I feel as if I've woken up from a coma. The visual information says two years but my internal clock does not. It won't believe it. It won't believe the visual.

So when our sense of time and space gets fucked around like that, that can be quite stressful. And we don't really have a context for this one because I don't think we've lived through a pandemic before. But I can tell you what it's quite similar to, another quite stressful situation. If you've ever had a bereavement, if someone close to you has died

you'll know that there's that initial period of grief when the person dies and you tend to have a lot of support around you and people tend to keep you busy and you've got the funeral and people are ringing up and people are ringing up.

And people are checking in with you. And that really keeps you going. For like three weeks. And then people stop. Then that period is over. People aren't ringing as much. People aren't checking in as much. And now you're just left with the absence of that person.

But it fucks with your sense of time. And it fucks with your sense of time and it fucks with your sense of space because you haven't fully the person is gone but your heart, your brain your sense of space hasn't registered it so that's

when you find yourself sitting in your house and you're used you're autonomously used to that person coming in the door and then they don't or you're used to hearing

their footsteps but they don't exist and you're truly confronted with the physical absence of that person when your neural pathways in your brain are still wired to their presence, if you get me. And that's very stressful.

And returning to society after COVID is a bit like that. It's a bit like that. So this week's podcast isn't about confusion around time. The reason I'm speaking about confusion around time is because it's a common stressful situation that we're all going through right now. Quote unquote re-engaging with normality is something every one of us are dealing with right now. And it's a lot. And I think that's why so many people are asking

me to speak about mental health as a type of soothing quite a bit this month in particular because we're re-engaging with society. So what I want to speak about this week and something that's really important is what's known as making the head to heart connection. What do I mean by that? Let's just say you struggle with low self-esteem, which means that if you're being incredibly honest with yourself and you were to write down on a piece of paper, how do you feel about yourself? You might write, I'm a bad person. I'm weak. I'm defective.

I'm not as good as other people. They're real people. I'm not a bad person. I'm weak. I'm defective. I'm not as good as other people. They're real people. I'm not a real person. I'm a weak little piece of shit. So that right there, those are the type of opinions that you can have about yourself when you're suffering from low self-esteem or depression. But then you can learn, hold on a second. but then you can learn hold on a second

I just by being human I actually have intrinsic worth this business of me being bad or being a piece of shit there's no evidence for that that's not realistic in fact

I have intrinsic worth nobody else is better than me and I'm better than nobody else because humans are too complex to evaluate against each other. I have worth. Now those are very pretty words and they're very empowering words

and it's great to hear words like that and if you suffer from low self-esteem and you tell yourself, you know, if your internal dialogue is to beat yourself up a lot and to say to yourself, I'm a piece of shit, I'm useless, I'm worthless, everyone is better than me. If that's your internal dialogue all day, then hearing me say something there like, you've got intrinsic worth, no one's better than than you you're better than nobody else that sounds magnificent but it's just words how do you go from hearing those words and knowing

that like yeah that sounds right that actually sounds like a much better way to think about myself than calling myself a piece of shit but how do you go from simply thinking that actually sounds like a much better way to think about myself than calling myself a piece of shit.

But how do you go from simply thinking that to genuinely feeling it, genuinely feeling it to the point that you change as a human being? Because before you feel that, sometimes when you tell yourself that kind of rational flexible interpretation of your person sometimes it feels like you're lying to yourself so you can say to yourself all day long i have intrinsic worth i have intrinsic i i have worth simply by being human you can be saying it to yourself but deep down you still feel like a piece of shit how do you replace that feeling of feeling like a piece of shit with i'm okay i'm happy with who i am i'm comfortable looking in the mirror that's called moving something from your head to your heart and it's it's very similar

to if you were exercising let's just say you want to get into weightlifting what would you do? you might go onto YouTube and look up some weightlifting videos you'd look at someone and they'll talk about nutrition they'll talk about proper form, they'll talk about weights and you learn all this stuff about weightlifting but simply learning about it isn't going to cause you to become more physically fit They'll talk about weights and you'll learn all this stuff about weightlifting.

But simply learning about it isn't going to cause you to become more physically fit. You have to take that knowledge, apply it and literally pick up a few weights. And if you do that properly, you'll become physically fitter. Fucking self-help and psychology is the exact same. It's the exact same. So that's what I'm going to talk about. So first, we need to talk about what's called negative automatic thoughts. So when I was mentioning there the experience of having low self-worth or low self-esteem, what's going on there that your internal dialogue,

when you're presented with the question of how do you feel about yourself if you have low self-esteem your immediate reaction is I'm worthless I'm a piece of shit that's known as a negative automatic thought because a childhood Because of childhood experiences, moments of trauma, whatever, your brain has decided to make a very simplified neural pathway that causes you to have a poor opinion of yourself. Here's an example of a negative automatic thought. You're in the library at college, and while you're walking towards the door there's a waste paper basket on the ground that you don't notice

you knock it over slightly and you stumble and your face goes red and you feel embarrassment you run out of the library and then you're outside and you're fucking mortified and without thinking because this is a negative

automatic thought the first thing that comes into your head is I just humiliated myself in the library everybody saw everybody is judging me they all think that I'm a clumsy fucking wanker I'm humiliated I always do things like this. I'm never going into the library again. So that negative automatic thought is known as catastrophizing. When a triggering event happens to you, something that's a triggering event that is negative, and then you interpret that in the worst case scenario possible.

And the problem is because your brain has immediately jumped to the worst case scenario possible. And the problem is because your brain has immediately jumped to the worst case scenario possible. It hasn't let in any conflicting information. And now you begin to behave as if the negative automatic thought, the catastrophizing thought is reality. So just a tiny refresher on cognitive psychology. and thought is reality. So just a tiny refresher on cognitive psychology. So cognitive psychology would state that discomfort isn't caused by what happens but our attitude towards what happens. So in that situation you had an activating event. A. You fell over a waste paper basket. That's what actually happened in reality. B, your belief about that. Your belief is that was utterly humiliating. Everybody saw it and now they're all judging me.

And then C, the consequences of B. C is you feel humiliated and you withdraw socially. and you withdraw socially. So B and C are two very painful things there. B, you've made your mind up that everyone is laughing at you, you've made your mind up that you've been publicly humiliated. C, you now feel that way, and you've withdrawn socially. All the discomfort in that situation isn't caused by what actually happened,

it's caused by your by what actually happened. It's caused by your belief about what happened. But be there. The immediate feeling of humiliation, that's called a negative automatic thought. It was the first thought that jumped into your head and no other information was allowed in now if that scenario rings true with you then i'm guessing it happens quite a lot in your existence that you are prone to a negative automatic thought of catastrophizing so it means the next day you're walking down the corridor you're in college again you're walking down the corridor and you see your buddy and you wave at them

and they don't wave back they walk past you and then immediately you catastrophize your first thought is oh my fucking god they were either in the library yesterday or someone told them they're embarrassed

to even pretend that they fucking know me. They think I'm fucking pathetic. So a person who's experiencing these type of negative automatic thoughts would use cognitive behavioral therapy to challenge that situation. So like we said, human discomfort isn't caused by what happens it's caused by our attitude towards what happens so that person would try and challenge their attitudes so they'd write down on a sheet of paper I fell over in the fucking library and I felt humiliated and I felt like every single person was judging me so then you'd write down an alternative set of beliefs because the thing is, you're not in the triggering situation now.

When you're in a situation that triggers one of your negative automatic thoughts, you become emotionally flooded. So you don't have the cognitive capacity of your brain. You can't use critical thinking. But now you're at home and you're emotionally regulated, you're calm. You're thinking about what happened in the day earlier with the waste paper basket and you have your full cognitive functions to be able to write down, okay, here's some alternative beliefs about what happened today with the waste paper

basket where is the evidence that every single person in the library laughed at me there is no evidence for this maybe some people did see me and they just didn't give a shit they got on with their day they didn't care that's possible maybe got on with their day. They didn't care. That's possible. Maybe someone saw me fall over the waste paper basket and instead of thinking that I'm deserving of humiliation, instead they put themselves in my shoes and they felt I wouldn't like to fall over a waste paper basket. I hope they're ok maybe some people took a compassionate view of me falling over a waste paper basket maybe one person

did laugh at me and so what? what difference does it make? what evidence do I have that if I was to return to the library every single person would remember me as the person who fell over the waste paper basket I've no evidence for this

so the person would be writing this stuff down forming these alternative beliefs moving away from the negative automatic thought of catastrophizing so that's it, problem solved not necessarily that exercise has given that person momentary relief.

It's helped them along. But chances are, the next day or sometime that week, they're back to square one. They're walking down the corridor in college and they see their friend Jennifer and they say their friend Jennifer. And they say, what's the crack, Jennifer?

And Jennifer doesn't, they're not happy with the hello that Jennifer gives them. And then they immediately go, oh, fuck. Jennifer thinks I'm worthy of humiliation, too. She must have heard about what happened in the library. I'm such a piece of shit. I'm going to avoid Jennifer. And I might even be rude to her and they haven't entertained the multitude possible reasons as to why Jennifer gave a lacklustre hello

they haven't entertained that Jennifer might be going through her own shit and it has nothing to do with them so instead they ran with the negative automatic thought of catastrophizing and now they feel like shit for the rest of the day and they feel rejected and humiliated. And later on they have to go back to their sheet of paper and challenge the beliefs. So that

person needs to move those new beliefs from their head to their heart. They need their automatic thoughts in the moment, in a triggering event to become the new beliefs. And why is it so difficult to do that? Because these negative automatic thoughts such as catastrophizing, we form these things really early in life and they're patterns that work for us throughout life so you can't just re-pattern

overnight it takes hard work and i'm going to speak about that directly after the ocarina pause here is the ocarina of the Spanish clay whistle. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th, when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats

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podcast fully independent and no advertiser can tell me what to speak about or adjust my content in any way. And that's really important in this environment of big podcast, big corporate podcast and support not just this independent podcast but any independent podcast that you enjoy that's very important catch me on twitch once a week twitch.tv forward slash the blind boy podcast where i'm making a never-ending video game musical so just before the ocarina pause there, where I spoke about the hypothetical situation of a person falling over a waste paper basket in a library and catastrophizing that into a fantasy of humiliation. That's kind of a general overview

of cognitive behavioral therapy and cognitive psychology. And I've got a couple of those podcasts if you want to go back and listen to them in greater depth. But what we're talking about here is moving new beliefs from our head to our heart so that we're literally repatterning our brains like this is how a negative automatic thought works you learn at an early age and catastrophizing is just one example you learn at an early age and catastrophizing is just one example you learn at an early age probably from a

parent's behaviour, maybe your parents tended to catastrophize things maybe you grew up in an environment where there was a lot of stress if you grew up in a house where your parents are struggling to meet bills and your dad and your ma are consistently worrying about

fuck it, if we don't, the electricity's going to get cut off. There'll be no petrol in the car. What if that check doesn't come through? Where am I going to get the dinner for this Friday? If you grow up in an environment like that where there's a lot of panic and a lot of stress around certain situations, and you're a little child watching, you will learn that to catastrophize is an appropriate reaction to a catastrophizer. And then when you become an adult, your negative automatic thought for multitudes of situations is to immediately jump

to the worst possible conclusion. And this can cause you quite a bit of discomfort, sadness, social isolation, depression, anxiety. The list goes on. But when you learn to catastrophize at such a young age, the neural pathways in your brain there, they're quite strong. Your brain has decided to automate catastrophizing. And catastrophizing isn't the only negative automatic thought,

there's loads. Like earlier when I gave the example of the person with low self-esteem, that person was engaging in the negative automatic thought of labeling. Maybe you're going to sit in your driver theory test and you fail it. And after you fail it, you label yourself a failure. You're not a person who failed a test. You label yourself a failure. failed a test, you label yourself a failure. Another form of negative automatic thought is emotional reasoning. You feel an emotion and you don't question that emotion, you take it as the absolute truth. Classic example. Sometimes we wake up in the morning and the first thing we feel is a sense of dread or a sense of sadness. Sometimes you wake up with a negative emotion for whatever reason. Let's just say you wake up

with a sense of dread. Now if you're going through a stressful situation in life, if there's something causing you stress, waking up first thing in the morning and having a sense of dread or fear, waking up first thing in the morning and having a sense of dread or fear we can all kind of relate to that but if you engage in the negative automatic thought of emotional reasoning you wake up in the morning with a sense of dread and then you decide something is terribly wrong something is awful the rest of my day is going to be terrible

because why would I be feeling this sense of dread unless something awful is happening or is going to happen? And these are negative automatic thoughts. The first conclusion that we jump to that influences our beliefs around triggering events and that causes discomfort and they're usually rooted in childhood. And it's like.

I use the analogy of the field. Let's just say there's a shop beside your house. And between your house and the shop. Is a field. And you've created a little path in the grass. To the shop through the field. And every day without thinking of it. Like it's an entire field.

You can walk wherever you want. But every day without thinking of it like it's an entire field you can walk wherever you want but every day without thinking of it you just walk through that path in the grass that you've made every time and it's autonomous it's automatic that's the path that you take to get to the shop that's what a negative automatic thought is it's a well-worn path and it's your brain has made an automatic connection even if it's a bad one even if it causes you stress because that was the easiest thing for your brain to do so one day you decide instead i'm gonna walk across the field to the shop but i'm not gonna use that same path i actually going to make a new one in the grass. And you do, and the first time you do it, it's quite difficult, because the grass is tall,

and you have to put in that effort of stamping it down. But then tomorrow it's a little bit easier. And after a week, now that's your new automatic path, the new one, and the other one is grown over, it's disappearing. That's the process of moving something from your head to your heart you're literally repatterning your brain and how you do this it requires it requires two things we need to literally act in accordance with our new belief and we need to be able to tolerate frustration and discomfort those two things together in particular the tolerance of frustration the tolerance of frustration is really difficult that's where fucking growth happens so let's take it back to the waste paper basket in the library. How does that person actively work on themselves

so that they become someone who doesn't catastrophize? But what they do, and this is the more advanced stages of CBT, this can take a while. What they would do is we've discussed that they went home they went home and they took out their sheet of paper

and they formed alternative beliefs around falling over the waste paper basket so they wrote down on a sheet of paper what evidence do I have that every single person in the library was laughing at me? What evidence do I have that anyone was laughing at me? Maybe some people were compassionate. What's so embarrassing about farting over a waste paper

basket? I am a fallible human being. Human beings make mistakes and that's okay. There's nothing to be humiliated about. Why am I so embarrassed? So the person has written all this stuff down but just because they've written it down and in a moment of relaxation

they're able to critically think about the situation that doesn't mean they're not going to repeat the same shit tomorrow so what that person needs to do is they need to ask

themselves how would a person act if they weren't humiliated by falling over a fucking waste paper basket

this is where you need to get creative they start to create a little write a little script of I'm thinking of another person and this other person is in the library and they're walking towards the door

and because they're a fallible human being they accidentally trip over the waste paper basket and people look up and stare but the person isn't fazed by this they don't mind being the centre of attention they're actually okay with the fact that people have looked up it's quite natural that you'd look up

if you hear a noise such as a waste paper basket falling over so what does the person do they slowly and calmly pick the waste paper basket back up they pick the carton of orange juice that fell out

the few bits of paper they put them back in the bin they place the bin back to where it was and they calmly leave the library and everyone else gets back to their work and they've now written out a scenario of

a character in their head who behaves how they would love to be able to behave in that situation but it's terrifying so what are they going to have to do and this is the scary part to be able to behave in that situation. But it's terrifying. So what are they going to have to do? And this is the scary part.

This is where the frustration tolerance comes in. This person is going to have to set themselves a little bit of homework. They're either going to go back to the library, or they're going to go to a different library or they're going to manufacture a similar situation whereby they're in a public setting and they do something fallible. They drop something loud. They're in the canteen and while they're queuing they drop their tray and the fork makes a big loud noise and everybody in the canteen looks up and for that moment they become the centre of attention

or they do the same thing with the waste paper basket and what they're risking here is they need to put themselves in a situation where they are the centre of attention the thing that fucking terrifies them and they have to tolerate the discomfort and frustration

of other people's eyes on them and while people are staring they need to calmly pick up the tray, put the fork back or fix the fucking waste paper basket. And it'll be really, really difficult.

But if they can do that, if they can literally act like someone who doesn't catastrophize, or doesn't feel humiliated, once they do that, they've made a genuine step towards repatterning their brain. And they're going to walk out of that situation feeling a little bit more confident. And they're going to walk out of the situation. Possibly getting a little bit of a buzz.

And wanting to do it again. Like I used to do this shit with. With my agoraphobia. I used to gradually walk into the middle of crowds. Because the idea and thought of that was fucking terrifying so I would walk not right into the middle of a crowd but I'd get myself into a crowded area

surrounded by people it would feel terrifying but I'd remind myself that ultimately I'm safe and I would sit with the terror and fear I would sit with that discomfort I'd really sit with it in that crowd and then I'd walk out and it would take so much energy out of me but I'd feel empowered until eventually after a couple of weeks I was without any fear walking right into the middle of crowds and getting a buzz out of it getting a buzz out of doing something that fucking stifled

and terrored me a few months previously and right there I'm retraining neural pathways in my brain I'm literally walking the new path to the shop and changing my fucking brain. What else would the person do who struggles with catastrophizing? So we've spoken about the waste paper basket. The other thing they catastrophize is when they greet a friend. If the friend doesn't greet them back in a way that they deem appropriate their negative automatic thought is to catastrophize

and assume that the other person hates them or is rejecting them in some way so how do they challenge that the next time they say hello to someone and if the person isn't exuberant or if the person is in a rush,

they might go to that person later on in the day. They'll find that person and they'll say to them, earlier on when I said hello to you in the corridor, you seemed a bit off. Are you alright? Are you okay? Is anything going on for you? Now what's important about that is they're not going up accusing the person of being rude or any shit like that because the person is entitled to not say hello but what they're doing is they're using empathy and that's

going to be terrifying because you have to remember earlier on in the day this person catastrophized and made their mind up that their friend didn't like them so by going up to them later in the day and asking that friend how they are they're in their minds risking rejection they've made their mind up this person definitely hates me

and that's why they didn't say hello properly earlier they fucking hate me so the thought of going up and talking to that person is terrifying because they think they're going to get rejected so therein lies the frustration tolerance tolerating the frustration of making a genuine connection with someone

who didn't give you a proper hello earlier and doing it from the context of compassion and empathy asking them how are you what's going on you seemed distracted earlier is everything alright with you and you do that

your confidence grows and you re-pattern your brain until eventually the next time you're met with a triggering situation, your negative, or sorry, your automatic thought is no longer the negative one. It's an automatic flexible thought, an automatic rational thought, and you grow towards becoming the healthy, happy human being that you deserve to be.

Just like lifting weights. You looked at the YouTube video. You learned about lifting weights. You looked at the person lifting weights. You imagined yourself lifting weights. And then you went and lifted a lot of fucking weights. And now you put on muscle. It's the same shit. What if you have a negative automatic thought that in social situations you must be liked? People must like you. So you end up in a situation where when you speak to people you're continually trying to impress them.

That you can't leave a social conversation without feeling as if you've impressed the person you've spoken to what would you do in that situation what what frustration would you have to tolerate well you'd practice having conversations with people where you say the least amount of words possible and you try your best to let the other person do most of the talking so the next time you meet someone you're not telling them about yourself you're not talking about achievements you've had you're literally trying your best to go how are you how was that for you how did that feel and try and have a conversation where it's mostly the other person talking. Sit and deal with that frustration.

Like one thing I sometimes struggle with is the fear of failing. Especially when it comes to creativity and art. Because I was raised, when I was a little child, if I exhibited any skill in drawing or painting or music, I received quite a bit of praise from the adults around me. And I internalized that praise as a form of self-worth. And then I, as an adult, materialized the mistaken belief that I am only a good person when I create good work. And if I create work that's bad or fails then I'm

a terrible human being and I deserve to punish myself and I deserve to feel like shit so that as you can imagine isn't very helpful for my fucking life because what it can mean is procrastination if I'm terrified of failing because to fail means being a bad person then I'll avoid trying because why would I try when the risk means hurt so what I try and do is like as in my behavior to repattern my brain, I deliberately seek failure in creativity. I make failure part of my process. One example of this is my Twitch stream.

So I do my Twitch stream once a week and I make songs to a video game to a live audience and I fail all the time I fuck up non-stop I make songs that are shit and sometimes I make songs that are good but within an hour I make some woeful shit while people are watching I fail continually because the reality is you simply can't have a creative success unless you have a shit ton of failures you have to fail, fail, fail, fail

and through that attempt and through trying then one out of every ten attempts will be a success but you have to tolerate the frustration and pain of failure so I turn it up to 11 I fail continually while people are watching so that I can completely remove the fear of it and most importantly so that I can remove my mistaken belief

that making a shit piece of art means that I'm a bad human being because what happens when I fail on my Twitch stream what happens when I decide to write a little song and it's out of time

or I get a wrong note or simply the song just isn't catchy or isn't good. What happens? Fucking nothing. People move on from it. One person might call it shit.

Ultimately people move on. No one gives a fuck. No one gives a shit. No one thinks any less of me. And this idea that I have that it makes me somehow less of a person. That's just a construct from my childhood. That's a misinformation. And that's me actively, actively moving something from my head to my heart.

Going from thinking something or having a hunch about something to deeply feeling it as being true. I'll tell you a wonderful example of this that exists already in culture. The no makeup selfie. There's so much pressure on places like Instagram and women in particular to live up to unrealistic beauty standards or to have perfect makeup all the time that a trend exists where someone will just post a photograph of themselves without makeup and if you're the type of person who you know you might delete a selfie if you feel it doesn't get enough likes or the concept of

uploading a photograph of yourself where you're not happy with how you look, if the concept of that fills you with terror, then posting the no makeup selfie is a wonderful example there of repatterning your brain. belief and you're tolerating the frustration tolerating the frustration of having a photograph of yourself online that might possibly have caused you a sense of terror so that's how we move things from our head to our heart through actions through actions and experiments in reality and most importantly sitting with frustration sitting with discomfort that's where the real fucking growth happens it's the person who's afraid of spiders holding a spider in their hand and every second of that feeling like a fucking hour

like that's the thing with this growth. When you challenge something. When you're trying to bring a new belief into reality. It feels like an hour. Like that person who takes the risk of falling over the waste paper basket. And then going fuck it. I'm going to turn around. And I'm going to put that waste paper basket back.

Even though everyone saw me trip over it. I'm going to put it back paper basket back even though everyone saw me trip over it I'm going to put it back while they're all still watching me that's going to feel like an hour even though it might only be 20 seconds but within that time that's where growth happens, that's where the brain repatterns, so that's all

I have time for this week I hope that was helpful for you and it made sense I'm conscious that I told that entire thing kind of I didn't go in depth about CBT because I've done that before in other podcasts and I didn't want to completely retread the basics of CBT so I hope if you've never heard any of my CBT podcasts that that actually did make sense to you, if not there's about 3 or 4

CBT podcasts around the earlier episodes, go back and listen to them for the rest of you I hope you enjoyed that, I'm going to sign off now by playing an advert right, but after the advert I'm going to come back with this new segment that I'm doing which quite a lot of people are enjoying which is fantastic I'm loving the feedback for it

people were very disappointed that I didn't do it last week so what I started doing is I come back after the advert and I speak about and play a song that I made on my live Twitch stream and I put it after the advert because I'm conscious that like not everyone's into music not everyone wants to hear someone fucking making music so if you're not into that don't bother if you are into that come around after the

break dog bless rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m you can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game, and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. So we're back now after an algorithmically generated advert. generated advert so every week on twitch

twitch.tv forward slash the blind boy podcast I make I make music live I make up music on the spot

live to the events of a video game I wander around a digital environment a fully formed digital environment and I use that environment as inspiration for songwriting I wander around a digital environment, a fully formed digital environment,

and I use that environment as inspiration for songwriting. And I do it to a live stream audience. And what I'm trying to achieve is the sensation of flow, the condition of flow where creativity happens. It's a very playful space. And as I mentioned earlier, failure is a huge part of that process. So I might go on stream for maybe an hour. I'll do five songs.

They're all kind of... I literally make the entire thing up on the spot. So I don't know what note is coming next. I'm just having fun. I'm being playful. Out of five songs, maybe one or two will be good and the rest won't be good but each week I come away with one song that I'd be quite happy with so the song I'm gonna play now I was wandering around a video game called Cyberpunk 2077 which is a game that's set in the year 2077 in the future it's not a great game

but it's visually quite nice and I find that it's it's not a bad game to write songs to because the visual ambience of the game it inspires it can inspire music in me and what I like about Cyberpunk is because of all the neon lights

and the colours in the game it naturally makes me create music that's kind of funky and sexy so I was wandering around the digital sex district in this game so it's this neon district full of sex shops and sex workers and I'm just wandering around and then I came across this sex shop window and there was two mannequins in the window and they appeared to be doing a sexual act but the sexual act wasn't

clear and it looked like the mannequins were actually trying to do shits into each other's arses. That's what it looked like in the moment. And I didn't, I didn't question. I didn't question it. I just went with it and said, right, I'm going to write a song called shit into my arse. And I'm really happy with this song musically musically I'm incredibly happy with it it's really catchy unfortunately it's called shit into my arse that's the nature of this

but as a songwriting project why this has value is like ok I can write a song called shit into my arse but I can take those lyrics away and I can write a song called shit into my arse but I can take those lyrics away and I can keep the music

and I can keep the melody and I can go at it again and change the lyrics into something that doesn't have anything to do with shitting into people's arses but in the meantime please enjoy shit into my arse and again what I find incredibly rewarding

about this process is when I'm playing this music over the podcast it's stripped of the visual information, you can't see my character walking around the video game, so the lyrics become detached to that and they now

take on a new meaning which I really thoroughly enjoy so this is shit into my arse I'll talk to you next week 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 Thank you. Future sex, yeah, future, having sex in the future Having sex in the future, hell or life, having sex in the future What's the crap with you, Mr. Future Cowboy, will you have some sex with me? Do you wanna have some sex in the future? Future sex, future sex, we're gonna have a lot of sex in the future Mmm Future sex, future sex

We're gonna have a lot of sex in the future Having futuristic sex We're gonna have a lot of sex in the future Future sex in the future In the future we have sex like this Do a shit unto my arse Do a shit into my arse, do a shit into my arse And I'll shit onto your arse Let's both take shits on each other's arses

In the future, let's shit into my arse Shit into my arse in the future Do a big shit into my arse And then I'll do a big shit into your ar, and then we'll shit into each other's houses, then we'll go into a flying car. Hey future lady, will you shit into my house? What are you doing later on, will you shit into my house? Don't let her run with your shit into my house I don't want no food today I'm trying to find someone to shit into my house Culture, we have a lot of sex

We do a lot of shits into each other's houses Culture, we have a lot of sex We do a lot of shits into each other's arses Culture, we have a lot of sex We do a lot of shits into each other's arses Culture, we have a lot of sex We do a lot of shits into each other's arses Culture, we have a lot of sex We do a lot of shits into each other's arses Arses Shit into my arse And to each other's asses Asses

Shit into my ass Shit into my ass in the future Do a big shit into my ass And then I'll do a big shit into your ass And then we'll shit into each other's asses Then we'll go into a flying car