The Resilient Mind - Stop Taking Your Thoughts So Seriously - Dr. Julie Smith

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

Dr. Julie Smith, a prominent clinical psychologist and bestselling author, has appeared multiple times on Steven Bartlett's Diary of a CEO podcast, sharing practical mental health advice on managing anxiety, stress, overthinking, and building resilience, with episodes focusing on detaching from negative emotions, handling rejection, and understanding the brain's threat response, offering accessible insights from her NHS backgroundTake action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠This episode is brought to you in partnership with Steven Bartlett for more inspiring videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO🌍 The Resilient Mind Podcast is a proud member of 1% for the Planet — building resilient minds and a resilient planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Stop Taking Your Thoughts so seriously with Dr. Julie Smith. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. Quite people always ask me when I do Q&As and stuff, they say, how do you build confidence? So when people ask you that question, Dr. Julie Smith, what do you say? How do you build your confidence? Yeah, so I did a video on this recently actually where we, I don't know what we were thinking,

but we used kind of balloons with a tube that went between the balloons. And it had this idea that if one of those balloons was confidence and the other one was vulnerability, if you're only ever willing to be with your confidence. So if you're only ever willing to be in the situations where you feel confident, then it can't grow. It can't sort of grow beyond that, let's say, in the pandemic,

being at home, you know, you're confident at home, you feel comfortable at home, but being outside, you feel vulnerable. And so it's really hard to go to the supermarket and it's really hard to go out to a bar with friends now. And if you're not willing to be without that confident feeling that you have when you're at home, then your confidence can't grow.

It's not going to grow sitting at home. And that's where in therapy we talk about, you know, the most important stuff is the stuff you do in between sessions in your real life. And so for anyone, you know, I often say to people, if there's something that you really want to master, but it makes you nervous, do it as much as you possibly can in manageable doses

because the thing that you do every day will become your comfort zone. So it will gradually become easier or you'll become more confident at your ability to do it. But the way that your brain works is through repetition. So the more you do something, the more your brain will get better at automating it for you. You talk about that same sort of the importance of repetition

as it relates to anxiety as well. And I guess maybe this is the answer to the question we were asking at the start about how to deal with all of this noise, maybe it's just doing more of it. Yeah. Maybe because it's getting used to the feedback and what it means and what it says about us and how to cope with it. Yeah, you kind of, you build up coping strategies for it over time, don't you?

The more you do it. It's probably a mix of that and making clear choices based on your values rather than your feelings about how much of it you want to have. How important is it to make decisions not based on how you feel right now? It's okay to do that sometimes, right? We all do it because we're human. But what happens is a lot of people will come to therapy when they've lost touch with their values for some reason.

Maybe life has sort of pulled them in a different direction. And they're not totally aware of that. They're just aware that everything just feels kind of meaningless or I just feel lost. And I'm not sure why I don't feel the way. I want to. And often when we act based on how we want to feel now or how we don't want to feel now, that's that short-term stuff that will keep us stuck in the long term. Whereas if you act based on values, you can live a life of meaning. It won't always be comfortable, but it will mean

something to you. And I guess when you're in the storm of a situation, the emotional storm of, I don't know, you've just found out that you've been cheated. on or something's happened and you're you fall into that red you know haze of just rage and jealousy whatever it might be the the question I guess from what you said we should be asking ourselves is like what are my values and how would um how do I behave in line with my deeply held values in this situation irrespective of the fact emotion is telling me to go and yeah run over that person with my car yeah absolutely emotions get such a bad rap don't they because they kind of um You know, we're talking about things like jealousy and people say, you know, I just could never get jealous because it's an awful emotion or something like that. And actually, the emotion isn't the thing to judge. The emotion is information. It's your brain's best guess at what might be going on around you. And your brain sometimes gets it right and sometimes gets it wrong. And it's your job to work that out. And so to look at emotion with curiosity, wow, I'm feeling really envious. What's that about? How can you? How can you?

I, you know, how can I work around this and work that out? And how do I want to then respond that to that? How, if I look back on this really difficult moment in a year's time and I feel proud of how I dealt with it, how would I need to deal with it to feel that way? Not easy to do in the moment because these moments happen quite quickly sometimes. And that's okay to make mistakes and then move on. That's probably a different subject. But the emotions get judged. But if we can look at emotions with curiosity instead, which is a lot of what happens. in therapy actually, is being able to notice whatever's in the room sitting where they're looking at it with curiosity rather than judgment. That's one of the things I've come to learn from doing this

podcast is this idea that we are not our thoughts and in fact that we can hold them out in front of us and analyze them for validity but we don't have to like directly associate or identify with all of our thoughts because I think we all go through life believing that the things that are being said in our minds are us saying them and are a reflection of exactly who we are And that's incredibly dangerous, especially in high emotional situations, right? Yeah, it causes people loads of problems when we think that the thoughts that pop into our heads say something about who we are or, you know, that we chose them in some way. And that's where this whole kind of, there's a lot of stuff online, isn't there, about, you know, only positive vibes and only think positive thoughts. And if you do that, you're setting yourself up to feel like a failure because it's not the way that human mind works.

And thoughts will pop into your head. and that's your brain offering up ideas, opinions, judgments, narratives, you know, memories, all that kind of thing. And it's what you do next with it, you know, and that's where people can really struggle with intrusive thoughts, for example. So they'll have a thought that feels bizarre to them or feels aversive in some way and then judge themselves for having had the thought and try desperately not to have it again. And when you try not to have a thought, you're already having it because you don't think

about whatever it is. And so, you know, you're just setting yourself up to fail if you think, if you're trying to control what thoughts come into your head. But if you allow them all to be there and then you choose consciously what to do with them next or how much time to spend with each one, then yeah, it's closer to winning. This is a two-part question. But have you found that people who have lower self-esteem have a more unhealthy relationship with failure? And then my second question to that is how does one go about building their self-esteem?

Is it evidence? Is it evidence based our self-esteem? Like even if the evidence is wrong, is it based on subjective evidence that we've acquired from our experiences? Well, do you know, there's been a lot more controversy around the idea of self-esteem more recently and the field. And, you know, self-esteem is based on this idea, it's your sort of evaluation of yourself. And so there was a lot of work done, like in schools and stuff years ago, around getting kids to think of what they were good at and what they could achieve and their strengths and what they liked about themselves. And, you know, high self-esteem can be lovely in that sense, but it's not always useful,

depending on what situation you're in. So it's not necessarily useful to think I'm great in a situation where I'm not doing great. You have to be honest with yourself. And so for me, a much more helpful way of looking at it is to look at it in terms of self-compassion. So your self-esteem can be low, but that doesn't mean that, you know, the story's over and things are awful for you. If you can have low self-esteem, and if you then treat yourself with compassion, you're essentially doing what's best for you. My kids are young, but let's say I had, you know, teenage kids and one of them wasn't

doing well in school, and so didn't want to get up for school in the morning because they felt like they were just, you know, a failure at school. So maybe their self-esteem around school was low. If we went with that, then we would say, okay, well, let's leave school then. Let's have a day off. Let's let's go with, you know, let's indulge this. Whereas self-compassion or showing compassion to someone in that way would mean, okay, what's the best thing in this scenario? So what's going to be most helpful to you and your future in this is probably working out what's going wrong and getting to school and tackling the problem, right? So, so yeah, self-esteem can be a sort of tricky subject, really, and that people put a lot into it, but it's one part of a bigger equation, I think.

I guess it kind of links back to the point about confidence, which is, is our self-esteem based on a bunch of evidence we've kind of collected from our experiences about the world? So I might have low self-esteem as it relates to going on dates because of some childhood rejections, whatever, and I took that as evidence that I am unattractive, and I've held that as part of myself story for the last 15 years, for example. I used to think, as you talk a lot about in your book, that as many people do, and as a lot of books have kind of promoted, that you could kind of just wake up in the morning and look yourself in the mirror and say, I'm a rock star, I'm going to be a millionaire, you are beautiful, you love yourself, and you could walk out into your day and just be that person.

but so clearly, and you'll know this from your, you know, experience in many years of helping people, that it just doesn't work. And I can say that something to someone, they can read my quote on Instagram, and I just absolutely know it's never going to work because there's some kind of evidence that they've accumulated over their life that is way stronger and opposes nice, fluffy words.

Yeah. You know, obviously words provide very little evidence for anything other than a prompt, I don't know. Yeah, absolutely. So your brain works, like a scientist with evidence through action. So, you know, if you want to start to feel better about yourself, essentially the best way to do that is through action and doing things that not kind of flood the system and make you feel really vulnerable, but something that feels a challenge,

but manageable, and then you get this little kind of step up. And there's something else that's a challenge and manageable and you get this step up. But yeah, certainly with, you know, words are powerful, but things like affirmations I talk about in the book, about how not to completely throw them out, but to be sure about how you're using affirmations. So if someone already feels lovable and they read an affirmation that says, I'm lovable, it'll probably make them feel quite good for a minute and they can soak that in and enjoy that. And it'll be kind of short-lived impact. If someone has, doesn't believe that, if someone has core beliefs that they're not lovable and they're trying to repeat, I am lovable, it can almost be detrimental because it sets up this internal argument

where your mind also chips in with the reasons that you're not and then you start kind of battling it out in terms of like, well, but what about this and what about that? And then you end up having, you know, you're in turmoil. So it can have a detrimental effect if that person is genuinely really struggling with low self-seam or low confidence and that kind of thing. So I think affirmation can be more helpful when they're instructional,

when they're about, you know, when this, do this, and it will help you get through this difficult situation. Like, you know, sports people use them and stuff like that. to help them get through high pressure moments. But in terms of turning around core beliefs, probably not so much. On high pressure moments, one thing that I did recently, which I thought was very interesting and got opened my eyes to a whole new world, was I did a breathwork session.

Have you ever done breathwork? Not a huge amount of it, but it's getting more popular, isn't it? Yeah. And I just got really intrigued by this idea that breath can have a really profound impact on mood, how we're feeling, and specifically as you write about it in your book, anxiety. Yeah.

Talk to me about breath and the role it plays and how we can use our breathing to make ourselves feel less anxious. Sure. So it's one of the, probably the first things that I will go through with someone because you'll get people who come along for therapy

and in that first, you know, it takes time, right? You have to get to know each other and they're trying to communicate their story and then a whole week goes by before you see each other again. And actually people often go to therapy when they're in a really bad place. And so they'll often be saying,

is there something I can do? in between sessions that's going to help me get through to next week. And so if that person is struggling with really high anxiety, that one thing that is very quick to teach that they can take away is something like a breathing exercise, because it's one of the quickest ways that we can, you know, slow the anxiety response. So if you're anxious, your breathing will be fast and shallow.

So kind of... And if you do that for long enough, you actually start to feel quite panicky. And that's because, you know, your heart and your lungs are connected, so your heart's going to start pounding to get all that oxygen around your body, and you'll kind of start gearing up into action. So if you can slow your breathing down, you can slow the whole process down. I think I mentioned this in the book.

I've certainly done videos on it is sort of box breathing or square breathing, where you just, you can, if you're out and about and you don't want anyone to really know what you're doing, if you're on a bus or a meeting, pick something like a door or a window or something. It's kind of box shape. and you start with the kind of bottom left corner and as you kind of trace your eyes up to the top corner you're just counting in as you breathe in and it's maybe like four seconds

and then as you trace your eyes across the top that will be a pause so you're just holding a breath for four seconds and then you come back down with an out breath of four seconds and then hold and so you're just kind of breathing in for hold for out for hold for and it's just one way of when you're out

to give you a visual focus that can help you to just monitor, okay, and now I'm breathing in, now I'm breathing out, because when you're really, really panicking, actually breathing slowly can feel really difficult to do. So you can use that kind of visual. But also more recently, some great research has been coming out about how to, kind of, it's helpful to extend the out breath. So if you can, it doesn't really matter what the numbers are. If you can make that out breath longer and more vigorous than your in breath, then that's going to help calm that response fairly quickly. When we're in high stress

situations or feeling anxious, our breath changes. And when someone explains it to me in scientific terms, I buy in. And the way he explained it to me from like, you know, if you're on 10,000 years ago and you're on the savannah of Africa and a lines running towards you, your body prepares you in many ways for that fight or flight response. And the problem is in the stimulated, stressful world we live in, we're kind of like living in fight or flight a lot of the time. Well, yeah, because you can't, you know, you don't have that kind of anxiety off switch, right? Or you can't directly choose to slow your heart rate. But because it's linked to other things that you can influence, you have to use those as avenues in.

to sort of slow the whole process down. And that's where, you know, we really underestimate things like breathwork and slow breathing because they seem too simple. Yeah. And, you know, like we want something complex or, you know. I want to pay for it. Yeah, exactly. And then we can kind of believe in it.

And actually we have the power to do some of these things that makes such a difference. And that's really where this whole thing grew out of was, you know, people saying to me in therapy, Why on earth has nobody told me this before? This is not rocket science. And it's changing everything. And this is brilliant. I want to tell everyone. I want to, you know, and actually there's a lot of the messages I get is people saying,

I've told my nan, I've told my auntie, and we're all doing it together. Thank you so much. This is really, you know. But sometimes they are just really simple things that you then don't forget. And once you've got that tool, you've got it then forever. You know, no one can take that from you. The importance of accepting your own. kind of mortality and the change that can have on you. What is your, what is your position on

this topic? Do you think it's important to understand that you're going to die and if so why? Yeah. And it's something I kind of got, you know, up to my neck and when I was sort of researching for the book and stuff like that because I included a chapter on grief and, and loss. And, and then I started to kind of read more widely about, you know, dealing with your own impendent. death and, you know, for people who have sort of illnesses and things like that when they know the death is coming. And so I just got really kind of into all that stuff. And there's some great work out there by some brilliant people around, you know, dealing with the idea that it's all going to end and the idea that that can be a source of meaning. It is a source of fear, right? Everybody

has to deal with that fear. But it can also be a source of meaning. in life today. So it can be a reason why you get up and you go with that value of enthusiasm today. Or it can be a source of, you know, that's why I get up and I practice gratitude or why I always tell my girlfriend I love her every day or whatever it is, that it can also be a way to live well. There's a book called influence, which, and one of the five principles of influence is this idea of scarcity. It's really a marketing book. It tells you how to make people believe things have more value. And one of the ideas in it is that you convince them that it's scarce, which is why if you've gone booking.com, it will say one hotel room left,

75 people just looked at this hotel, they're about to book it quick. And that convinces people that the thing is of more value. And I think for me, death does that. I actually have a sand timer over there, on that next to that little white head for that very reason. And I talk about it in my book a lot, because I do believe that most of us don't go through life actually believing or realizing that things are finite.

And once we do, we realize that they're scarce, then we will attribute more value to them, which means that every moment is so unbelievably more precious, and that can help you filter out, you know, the decisions you're making. There's so many studies been done when they interview people on their deathbeds and ask them about what really mattered. And I want to get to the point every single day where I'm making my decisions from the lens of deathbed regret, per se, if that makes sense.

I think that will probably keep me more in line with that, those values you talk about. Yeah, absolutely. And actually, it's an exercise that's done in acceptance and commitment therapy where you talk to people about, let's say, you know, you reach the ripe old age of 104 and you're sat in your armchair and you're looking back on the chapter of your life that is to come. What would it need to include for you to be looking back smiling and feeling like, yeah, did it right there. That was how I wanted it to go. So not necessarily what you would want to happen to you, but again, it's how you would want to live and the attitude that you would want to face life with. How would you answer that question? Me personally, if I can,

if I can touch people's lives with something that's positive in a world where you can, you know, your life can be touched by so many things that aren't positive, while at the same time still being the parent that I want to be and being present in my children's lives and being a positive impact for them, gearing them up for their own adventures, then, yeah, they'll be prickly to them. From your practice, what have you come to know

about the importance of relationships, whether romantic or platonic? You know, I don't think there is a therapy session I've ever conducted without coming to relationships at some point. You know, it is the fabric of us, isn't it? It's what we, it's what we kind of live for in many ways

and that's why I included it in the section around meaningful life because I mean I touch on it and it's such a huge subject that you know you could write reams and reams of books on our relationships because they feel so complex sometimes don't they right? We're constantly making mistakes and not getting it right and having to sort of you know re-evaluate and shift and no one again it's one of those things no one gives you a manual for it and yet when it's going right, life feels incredible and when they're going wrong,

everything feels like it's falling apart. And so, you know, I think it's an area certainly that I want to move into more and more because I see the value of it and I see how it just makes all the difference for so many people. You know, human connection is our sort of inbuilt stress resilience mechanism if you like so you've only got to if you're feeling something if you're feeling high in stress for example and you have a good quality human connection or contact with someone changes the way that your body deals with that stress i mean that's that's that's no tablet that's no nothing it's it's um it's how we're built and it's we're supposed to live in groups together and look after each other and and even in our kind of very individual

society where it makes us value other things and pulls us away, we have to keep reminding ourselves of what it means to be human being, I think. Although life doesn't give you a manual for how to navigate a relationship, social media at least sets an expectation of how a relationship should be, specifically a romantic relationship. And this causes a lot of problems, right? So we don't get the manual, but we get this expectation of perfection. And you talk about this and you, there's a section in your book about the relationship myths, which I was reading through. And the two that I really wanted to touch on was the first one you've kind of alluded to there, which is love shouldn't be hard.

And I, in my current relationship, we ended up actually breaking up because we encountered an issue. And I don't think the world at my very, very naive age of 24th, I think at the time, told me that relationships had issues. I'd only ever seen from social media perfection. So the minute my relationship was good, but, I thought it was disposable, right, because social media has made perfect look so normal. And I think sometimes that response from people comes out of our insecurity about what's right because nobody sort of talks about these things, well, they haven't historically.

And so nobody really knows if the way they're having their relationship is the same as anybody else. And are we getting it right or wrong? And so often there can be these knee-jerk reactions from people about, oh, that doesn't sound good because that's not what I mean. know to be true. And, and, you know, then it becomes, you know, diversity. It becomes sort of difficult for people to handle them, doesn't it? If your experience is different, am I? And then am I wrong? And people get really kind of upset about that. And this probably is destroying more relationships than we know, this ex, this social fake expectation of how it should be going for you, whereas, in fact, much of what I read about in your book and even this idea of having more

words to describe how you feel, treating these things in a non-binary way, but just like reflecting on how do I feel? Not has he ticked the box of sending me roses today, but how do I feel? Yeah. This seems to be a much better way to navigate through life. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And going with what you're dealing with at that point, rather than the world says we should be having dinner tonight and you should be buying me 10 roses. Therefore, we're getting this really wrong if if it's not happening. And there can be all manner of reasons why that might not be the case at any one point.

And that's okay, isn't it? But yeah, it's looking at if I'm not feeling loved, is it just about because I've set a standard and I've applied some standard to this other person that they're not fulfilling? Or am I feeling unloved generally? You know, is this one, is this the sort of last straw type thing?

That there's a buildup of resentment because I haven't been expressing my need. and then Valentine's Day feels like the valid time to do that because everybody else gets roses. You know, it's kind of, it's a difficult one. And how in your work, how often do you see that the relationships we have with others are just a reflection of the relationship we have with ourselves? Yeah, I mean, hugely, it can be really difficult when people, for example, when people become depressed and their relationship with themselves becomes very poor.

and, you know, they're talking to themselves in a poor way. They believe awful things about themselves. It can become really difficult for them then to sustain or manage their relationships in a positive way because they don't feel worthy of that relationship, for example. I don't know so much about, you know, people say, don't love anyone else until you love yourself and stuff like. Because, again, it's this kind of standard, isn't it? of like, I've got to be so okay with myself before I'm allowed to have a partner.

Life doesn't work like that. We all work on it for years, right? And there are times when it's really pushed to the brink and you're tested and, you know, your relationship with yourself deteriorates because something's happened. And that's okay to go through that journey. And you can go through it with someone else. But yeah, I mean, if you're struggling with you, then it's likely that you're also going going to be struggling in your relationship, which then has a knock-on effect to you again.

So it's sort of a bit of a cycle. Thank you for listening. Continue strengthening your mind by subscribing and listening to our other episodes.