The One You Feed - Mini Episode #5- An Open Letter to the Jackass Who Left Us a 1-Star Review

Episode Date: August 31, 2014

Eric starts to respond to a negative review and uses as it a way to explore the negativity bias and steps to work with it. Some of our most popular interviews that you might also enjoy:Kino MacGregorStrand of OaksMike Scott of the WaterboysTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, it's Eric from The One You Feed, and I am back with another mini episode. It's been a while since I did one of these, so I'm excited to be doing it. I got a new piece of recording equipment, and I am excited to try it out. Today's mini-episode is going to be called, An Open Letter to the Jackass Who Left Me a One-Star Review. Pretentious? I'll show you pretentious. How about you trying to do a podcast, pal? These are the comebacks that have been running through my head since I looked at our iTunes reviews the other day. There are 265 or so five-star reviews,

countless wonderful comments, but every few hours, this one negative comment keeps popping back into my head. My neck hurts, and it seems to be all that I can think about, never mind that the rest of my body feels fine. I had a good day at work, but what I remember at dinner is the one annoying meeting. Sound familiar? We have a hardwired bias towards the negative. Millions of years of evolutionary programming have designed us to be hyper aware of threats. Our brains are getting an amazing

amount of stimulation every second. If you think about it, we've got countless nerves sending signals, the eyes taking in so many different colors and images, and a non-stop barrage of sounds that arrive via our ears. The brain has to prioritize, has to decide what to raise to conscious attention, and it is wired to choose things that it perceives as a threat. Why? Well, for most of our history as humans and our human ancestors, avoiding threats has been priority numero uno. If we missed a wolf, good or bad, sneaking up on us, it could be the end of us. Much better to be hyper aware of negative stimuli than to get eaten while we're savoring dinner. It's hard to fathom how minuscule our recent history as humans who have been relatively safe is

compared to the millions of years that it took us to get here. It's easy to think that we've been mostly safe for hundreds of years, so why haven't our brains caught up with us? Well, evolution just doesn't move that fast. Let's be generous and say it was somewhat safer for humans starting in around 1500, although I'm sure that there's been lots of people burned at the stake in the interim who might challenge that view. But that means we have about 500 years of time for our brains to start to relax a little.

Humans and direct human ancestors have been around for about 4 million years. So for about.0001 of our history as a species, we have been in a position where we could relax a little bit on the tiger watch. However, as Noah Levine said in one of our interviews, this may be good for survival, but it's not very good for happiness. Being on constant alert for threats means that we have a tendency to focus on the one bad review out of 260, the small headache, and that one negative interaction during the day. And in addition to our biological predisposition, how we are raised, who we surround ourselves with, and what we watch on TV all help to subtly affect that default perspective. So what can we do? We had Dan Harris on the show and he talked about a process he learned from Tara Brock called

RAIN as a way to deal with troubling thoughts. So I'm going to walk through that with a slight twist on it towards what I'm talking about and see if this is helpful for anybody. twist on it towards what I'm talking about and see if this is helpful for anybody. So the very first thing to do is to recognize. We've got to recognize that we're defaulting to the negative. This is the most important part. If we can just see that there's a bias at work, we can start to question it. As soon as we can start to question, then we've woken up out of these habitual patterns. We may still have a long way to go, but without awareness, there's no possibility for change. The second step of RAIN is accept. So it's okay.

It's not your fault. We are wired this way. Maybe you can see things more positively. Maybe you can't right now. But it's important just to accept that we are thinking negatively and that it's not our fault. And then we can start to investigate. That's the I in RAIN. We can start to ask ourselves questions like, what's the source of the negativity? What's the stimulus? Is it something that needs addressed? We have these negative and fearful reactions for a reason.

We need to see what it's trying to tell us and then decide if the message is useful. When my head hurts, it could be a simple headache that I'm going to need to deal with, or maybe some jackass who wrote a bad review also just threw a rock at my head. Is there something else I can put my mind on? What are my other options? Is there a positive interpretation I could use instead? In the example of the guy who left me the review, I could focus on all the other positive reviews instead. Better yet, I could focus on how I feel about the show, not what others think. Can I divert my brain to something else, maybe totally unrelated? I divert my brain to something else, maybe totally unrelated? Can I listen to music, watch a video, read something? Sometimes I simply can't seem to stem the tide of negative thinking by changing my perspective to something positive. So sometimes I simply have to go into diversion mode for a bit.

But what I want to do is stop the negative thoughts from continuing to dig deeper grooves in my brain. In neuroscience terms, I want to stop those neural thoughts from continuing to dig deeper grooves in my brain. In neuroscience terms, I want to stop those neural pathways from getting stronger, from continuing to wire together, and so that I continue to default to the negative. And then the final step in RAIN, the N, is non-identification. It's to recognize that voice is not us. We're so used to assuming that voice is who we are. But once we realize that it just runs and it runs and it runs, we can start to treat it like a radio or a TV. If what it is telling us is helpful, we listen.

Sometimes it's just on in the background, and sometimes we need to change the channel. There's a higher part of ourselves that can recognize these default habitual patterns. This higher self does not need to be an abstract spiritual foo-foo idea. It could simply be that the more recent part of our brain, the frontal cortex, is where more of our better human qualities live. That's the part of the brain that we want to use. That's the part that we need to engage to help us break out of sort of this default habitual pattern. A couple of last thoughts on this. First is if your brain is anything like mine, this is not a one-time thing. Hell, it's probably not even a one million time thing. You'll go through this process over and over and over.

I can tell you that rewiring the default patterns of the brain is possible. It is possible to move the needle on our default perspective so that it's more positive. Happy all the time bullshit? No. But real progress in a good direction. The other thing is, this is far easier to write about than it is to actually do. We have decades of conditioning, believing that voice and not questioning it.

This does not go away quickly. You can go to BuzzFeed if you want for the one silly trick to always feel good, because you're not going to find it here. The single most important step is the recognizing. That split-second shift where we remember that we have a degree of control in where we focus our attention and how we interpret a situation is where the action is. That's where we can make real positive and powerful change. So I hope that this interview was interview. It's not an interview. I hope that this monologue was helpful to you in some way in potentially dealing with some of the negative situations that your brain finds itself in. So thanks so much for listening.

I continue to get great comments from all of you. We love to hear from you. Thanks so much for being listeners of the show and talk with you soon. Thanks. Bye. Thank you.