This is the Mindset for Life podcast, a place for personal stories, coaching, neuroscience and my favorite positive psychology tools to master life, relationships and work. I'm your host. Bethanie Hansen. Welcome, welcome. I'm so glad you're here. We're going to talk about automatic thoughts and the 3 good things habit

We're going to talk about a positive psychology tool called "3 Good Things," a little bit of coaching neuroscience on interrupting your automatic thoughts to create new neural connections, and a story about seven good things on Monday. The theme of this podcast is about habits and windows where you can change them.

And really the problem is that we all have well-intended changes that just don't happen. For example, I have a box of things on the floor of my bedroom. Now, I'm not in the habit of just keeping a box here and there for no reason. I set the box there perhaps a year ago, and I thought, I'll go through the things in this box, and I'll deal with them, and I'll put them away and take care of them.

And then life happened, and a lot of things happen, then the box is still sitting there. I saw that box today, and I thought, what is it that keeps me from changing the routine of my day to stop and take care of this box? Why is my life so routine oriented?

What about you? Do you have routines and habits that you experience in your life?

I bet you do we all do. We get up in the morning and we do certain things. Then we go to work, or we go to school or whatever we're going to do, and we do certain things. Then when we get back to the home, we again do certain things, and then we finish out our day with habits of certain things that may or may not be the daily habit, but we typically live in habits, and our brains have habits too.

So, our brains have all kinds of habits that keep us from doing the things we think we want to do. Something else takes over, and we don't do the thing, or we do something else instead. I've always been fascinated with this, really.

I am amazed by the power of the brain to control everything we do. So, we have well intended changes that don't happen. And this happens for a lot of reasons. I've collected a little list of these reasons, in case one of these is hitting you right now, so you know, it's kind of a normal thing.
SELF SABOTAGE
So self-sabotage comes from a lot of things. One of them is fear of failure. Another one is fear of success. Imagine, what if I succeed? Others will expect me to keep performing at this level. I have to work harder all the time, or fear of failure, like, what if I don't do it just right, what if it's not perfect, I'll never be able to keep going. So, either way, fear of failure or fear of success, these things can really get in our way.

Not feeling mature enough, old enough, or wise or experienced enough to take on that task. Or maybe not even feeling enough ownership of the thing. So, we self-sabotage because we just don't think we're the right person to do it.

Maybe we lack self-awareness. We have these negative thought patterns, and we don't have any idea that we're thinking them. I know that happened to me yet again recently, when I learned something new about myself and realized I had been thinking a certain thing about myself for my entire life without even realizing it. A lot of this self-awareness has come up for me over time, but here I am, age 51 and continuing to learn that I have thought certain things since my childhood that just never came up before.

Or maybe another self-sabotage source is poor coping with pressure, like we have a lot on our plate, so then we end up sleeping too much because we're feeling down or overwhelmed, or sleeping too little because we think if we work harder, we'll get it all done. Then, we're exhausted and can't get anything done. Or maybe we're just feeling inadequate or eating foods that cause brain fog. Or other physical factors that keep us from being able to even function to ...