527. What to Do with Persistent, Unwanted Thoughts

What is different about people who are overall successful, accomplishing the things they want to in their lives, and the ones who generally can’t or don’t or won’t? What about people who are for the most part happy, content, and people who just seem to be dissatisfied and unhappy? What’s the difference?

How about people who are overall confident, who feel good about themselves, and people who, in general, seem to be very insecure and constantly nervous or worried about what other people think? What is the difference? Well, there are lots of differences, but one thing that all successful, happy, and confident people have that those who are lacking in those things don’t have is an attitude or a mindset that leads to what they want.

If you have listened to me for any length of time at all, if you are certainly a client in my program, you absolutely know this. And even if you’ve been following anyone else talking to you about self-help and wellness and mental and emotional strength, then you know the power of your thinking, of your mindset, of your attitude. But what about when we have those negative thoughts that we know aren’t serving us, the persistent ones that come up over and over again, that don’t generate the emotions we want, that we know aren’t going to lead to happiness, confidence, success, or any of the other things we want in our lives? What about when they won’t go away?

That’s what we’re going to dive into today. This is episode 527 of Better Than Happy, what to do with persistent, unwanted thoughts. Let’s go.

Welcome to Better Than Happy, the podcast where we transform our lives by transforming ourselves. My name is Jody Moore. In the decade-plus I’ve been working with clients as a Master Certified Coach, I’ve helped tens of thousands of people to become empowered. And from empowered, the things that seemed hard become trivial, and the things that seemed impossible become available, and suddenly, a whole new world of desire and possibility open up to you. And what do you do with that?

Well, that’s the question… what will you do? Let’s find out.

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On this live, interactive Zoom call with me, you’ll get a taste of the power of this work when applied in real life. You can participate, or be a silent observer. But you have to take a step if you want to truly see change in your life… two steps, actually. Head to JodyMoore.com/freecoaching and register. Then you just have to show up. Your best life is waiting for you. Will you show up for it? JodyMoore.com/freecoaching. I’ll see you there.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. Happy whatever day of the month it is for you by the time you listen to this. It’s mid-August for me. Got to love August, right? Weather’s nice, summer’s winding down, back-to-school vibes in the air, new Taylor Swift album coming soon. I mean, life’s good, right? Couldn’t get much better than this.

I want to talk to you about this topic today because a lot of the work I do when I’m coaching, those of you in my coaching program know this, but even if you’re a podcast listener and you haven’t heard actual coaching, you know that I’m constantly talking about choosing your thoughts. And that our thoughts are something that we have agency over. As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we talk a lot about the concept of agency. 

We happen to believe that it was part of God’s plan for us here on earth was to be able to make our own choices. But agency does not just extend to our actions, although it does apply to our actions. What am I going to do or not do? But it extends far beyond that to what I’m going to think and what I’m going to feel, which is actually going to drive my actions. So it’s an overall who am I going to be, is how I like to think about agency. The most important component actually being what am I going to focus on because that’s going to again drive what I do or don’t do and how I do it.

So that is really at the root of the work that I do is helping people get their mindsets into a useful place. And useful is personal, it’s subjective. But I want you to think about, let’s take a parent who is in a grocery store. This is just a scenario I’m making up on the spot, so stay with me. I want you to imagine like a mom in a grocery store, and she’s got a toddler that’s having a little tantrum. You know how toddlers do this? 

I remember this well, even though it’s been a minute since I had a toddler. I remember the middle of the grocery store tantrum, right? Where everybody’s looking at you. Maybe you have a cart full of groceries that you have to maybe even abandon, which is such a shame after all that work of gathering them up, especially with a toddler with you. Or maybe you don’t abandon it, but there’s certainly a long pause put on the grocery shopping. And you have decisions to make now about how to handle this situation.

Why is it that some moms are able to stay calm and patient, which by the way, I don’t know if that’s the right way. I don’t know if you should yell at that kid or what. I’m not a parenting expert. I’m just saying for me, I personally prefer to stay calm because it just feels better to me. I don’t like having a tantrum when my toddler’s having a tantrum. Most people, I would say, would probably agree that’s not ideal. At any rate, how is it that some moms are able to stay calm, you know, maybe talk them through it, maybe give them a minute, maybe just like let the strangers around look on and have their own judgments and opinions and don’t let it get to you because that’s just the way people are, right? 

Whereas others are, like I said, having a little tantrum about their toddler’s tantrum. They’re yelling at the kid. They’re maybe getting aggressive a little bit with trying to, you know, grab them or force them into the grocery cart or whatever. They’re telling them to knock it off. You know, I’ve seen it not uncommon, unfortunately, that the mom is swearing at the kid even. And we got two people having a tantrum here in the grocery store.

And I’m not saying this with any judgment, by the way. I’ve definitely been the mom who is not the ideal in so many situations, I can’t even count. And even in a grocery store, I’m sure I’ve not behaved my best with a toddler with a tantrum. But my point is that one person seems to be able to handle it and navigate it with a little bit more grace and peace than another person who seems to be struggling a lot. And that person who is struggling a lot has a valid reason for it. That’s why I just want to reiterate, this is not about judging anyone, but what is the difference?

Now, in the world of traditional academics or research, we like to point to studies, right? We like to do studies. So we will study things like people’s upbringing, maybe their socioeconomic status, maybe their education level. We might even study their health history or things like that. We often study parental patterns. Have they experienced some kind of mistreatment at the hands of their parents? We will study generational things like this that happen, right? We study even trauma and how it affects people. And this is all good and useful. I’m all for all of that. But what is missing there is that the main difference, even if all those things have somewhat of an influence on what’s going on. I would definitely agree that all those things can be influential in our lives. But they ultimately don’t choose for us who we’re going to become.

What does that is what’s happening in our minds. It’s literally the stories that we’re operating from, the thoughts driving us, who we believe we are, what we believe about the world, what we believe about what other people think of us, and whether or not we think that’s dangerous, whether or not we have a solid connection with ourselves. All of these things happen in our minds. They’re very difficult for scientists to study because it’s hard to get into someone’s mind. We can see brain patterns, we can interview and ask people questions, but it’s hard to really pinpoint what’s really true. And our thoughts are slippery, as Byron Katie says. So we can have lots of thoughts, even lots of contradictory thoughts about the same subject. So I might have thoughts like, I’m a good person, I’m doing okay. And at the same time, I also believe that I’m a mess and there are things that I should hide from other people and be ashamed of.

So it’s tough to study this, but it is the biggest difference between somebody who’s able to behave how they want and someone who’s not. Now, I gave one example there in a grocery store, but we could go on all day. How about the entrepreneur that’s able to be successful, that’s able to execute the things that they’re learning? I’m not talking about like the natural born genius that is just a huge risk taker and will do whatever it takes. I’m talking about like the average person who isn’t necessarily born a salesman or a marketer or a business person, but is able to learn and execute and is able to keep going and doesn’t give up versus another similarly average person who also pursues the same path but can’t stick with it, gives up, gets frustrated, lets it get to them to a point that it’s not worth it. What’s the difference? The difference is what’s happening in their minds. It’s the thoughts they’re operating from. It’s the stories driving them.

So this is again, what I’m constantly trying to do here on this podcast is to offer you thoughts that might serve you about all different kinds of topics that come up in your life. So then that leaves us with the question, well, can we really choose our thoughts? I say that a lot. I’ll say to clients especially, why are you choosing that thought? Why are you choosing to think about it that way? And I purposely use that word choosing because their initial reaction, and I can sometimes see it in their face and sometimes they literally say it out loud is, I’m not choosing it. It’s just what is true to me. Like they think they’re just observing what’s true, right? Or it doesn’t feel like an option. Like, I don’t know how to not think about it this way.

I was just coaching a woman the other day who’s got some resentment towards her husband for the way he shows up. And any one of us listening to her description would agree like he could do better, this guy that she’s married to. And when we talk about like the way you’re thinking about him is what’s creating your resentment. And by the way, your resentment is you punching yourself in the face, or sometimes I like to use the analogy of hugging a cactus, right? It’ll be like, what if we didn’t think that your husband should be different, that he should, for example, be really interested in what you have to say? Because she’s telling me that he’s not. What if we didn’t think that he should? And she’s like, well, that’s not what a marriage should be like. That’s not the kind of marriage I want to be in. She’s hugging that cactus even tighter. She’s holding on tighter to that thought.

And so I might say something, why are you choosing to believe that? Why are you choosing to believe that about marriage or about your husband? And I know it doesn’t feel like a choice, okay? So, here’s the thing. I don’t think we can choose all of our thoughts actually. I don’t think that we have that level of control over our brains. According to the Mayo Clinic, we think about 70,000 thoughts a day, and those are happening very quickly and a lot of them at once. And there’s no way, as far as I know. I don’t know, maybe there’s some very enlightened people who can, but I certainly am not able to. My guess is most of us are not able to really filter every single thought that’s going to come into our heads.

This is the benefit, I’ll just add, of practices like meditation and stillness, is that you learn to slow down the thoughts and slow down the barrage of even especially unwanted thoughts, which gives you more control. If you think about a car going really fast, if you suddenly had to make a turn or stop it, it would be harder than a car going slow. So when you can slow down your brain from time to time, not all day, of course, but when you’re meditating, et cetera, it’s much easier to have control over your mind. Anyway, I digress. Back to the unwanted thoughts. So thoughts will come into our heads all the time that are either unwanted, not useful, just negative, or even sometimes downright alarming. And an extreme example of this is OCD, which is a very common condition that a lot of people have, and I’m not qualified to speak to something at that extreme.

But I’m talking about the normal everyday thoughts. I don’t know, maybe every day, at least weekly, I have thoughts that I’m like, where did that come from? Definitely daily, I would have to say actually, now that I think about it. Thoughts that are just negative, not useful, not going to create what we want. So what do we do about those? That’s the question I want to address today. It’s a question that one of you sent in and I thought it was such a good question because we all know the advice is to not go to the land of not. I know I used a double negative, but here’s what I mean by that. If I say to you, hey, whatever you do, don’t think of a school bus, what just happened in your mind? You just thought of a school bus, right? Because our brains cannot filter out something like that. All they can do is focus on something.

Okay, let me say that again. Our brains are not very good at, well, they literally can’t unfocus on something that we’re thinking about. Like me focusing on it by telling my brain not to focus on it is a focus on it. And so it doesn’t have the capacity. It doesn’t really hear or understand “not.” Okay? So, there’s a couple things I’m going to recommend. First thing that we can do is focus on something different instead. Okay? So instead of saying, don’t think of a yellow school bus, I might say, notice black trucks. All day today on the, when you’re out driving around, I want you to notice black trucks and white minivans or whatever, right? If I gave you something different to focus on, then immediately in your mind when I say that, you picture it.

But if I told you, I want you to just get a feel for how many big black trucks are there in your neighborhood or in the city where you live or how many people drive minivans? Again, we don’t usually say it in this way, but if I were in casual conversation saying something like I said to my husband the other day, I feel like there used to be cyber trucks all over and now I hardly ever see them. And it’s just interesting because of the politics of Elon Musk and everything, right? So I wasn’t making a commentary. I was just saying I feel like I don’t see as many cyber trucks as I used to. And my husband said, I disagree. I feel like I still see them just as much as ever. Okay, so now my brain is kind of focused on like noticing how many cyber trucks there are.

So that redirect to a different type of vehicle gets me stopping thinking about yellow school buses. Now, I know this is a dumb example because who cares with cars, but you can literally apply this to any area of your life. Okay? Let’s talk about physical pain even. When I have physical pain that I can’t get rid of, like a stomach ache or something, and I’m trying to treat it and it’s just not going away and it’s feeling intolerable, that becomes a very prevalent thought in my mind. My stomach hurts. I wish it didn’t hurt. When’s this going to stop? I wish this would go away. This is so hard. I can’t, right? All of those thoughts that come up.

And I want you to think about, do those thoughts make your stomach feel better or worse? I know very well that they’re making me feel worse. Even if they don’t make my stomach ache worse, now I have a stomach ache and a lot of self-pity or fear or resentment or whatever. Not a huge problem, but just not really very useful, okay? But instead of going, don’t think about your stomach ache, don’t think about your stomach ache, I will sometimes get still and get into the other parts of my body. 

And I will think, my arms feel good. My arms don’t hurt. My head feels good. My legs feel good. My chest feels good. I can breathe easily. I will even try to go in and like feel, if I can feel my heart beating. I like to close my eyes and picture what does it look like in there? What might be, it’s probably really dark in there. But like what might be happening in there? And so I’m just feeling and experiencing and thinking about all the other parts of my body in order to shift my focus away from the stomach that’s hurting. You see that? You can do this in your family.

Maybe you have a child that you’re worried about, that’s struggling. What does the brain want to do? It wants to hyper fixate on that struggling child. It wants to think about that child more than any other child because this feels useful to the brain. Sometimes it is useful to pay more attention to the thing that seems to be, person in this case, but a thing or a person that is struggling, right? Sometimes that is useful, but only to a certain extent. And then it becomes not useful because we now start having a big problem about our kids having a big problem. Now we have two people with big problems. But how do you stop when you’re just worried about your kid? Well, you can just think about another kid.

Think about one of your kids who’s doing well, if you have more than one. Or shift topics that you’re thinking about. If your kid is struggling in school and it feels like the only thing you can think about, redirect your mind to thinking about how your child is doing in sports where maybe they’re thriving or at their job. And if your brain’s like, I can’t think of one area where they’re doing well. Okay, then think about a different person. Think about someone that changes the way you’re feeling, that changes your focus, that changes your mood. Now, I think that we feel like this is too easy and this is irresponsible and this is just me ignoring a problem. And in most cases, as I dive into this with clients, it is not any of those things. It is not you ignoring a problem. It is actually kind of easy. It is such a relief. It’s sort of that like, are you sure I’m allowed to just not think about that child? I could just think about the one that’s doing well?

Again, I’m not saying we never think about them. I’m not saying we’re not trying to help people. I’m saying that having this obsessive focus on the problem is not serving us and you can think about a different child, a different person or a different part of that child’s life and it helps tremendously. You start feeling a little better. Do you know what happens when you feel a little bit better, even just a little? You start having new ideas you hadn’t had before. You start having more useful conversations with the child or with other people about the child. You start noticing things that could be solutions. Like, it’s so ironic. As soon as you don’t need the child to do better for you to feel a little bit better, you suddenly find ways to help the child do better. That’s it. It’s really very simple. It’s shift your focus away from the problem area and towards something that is easier for you to feel better about.

Okay, so literally, think about something different. It can be somewhat related to the current thought or not, doesn’t matter. Here’s the next tip I want to give you. Go to sleep. Okay, this is a tip I learned from Abraham. Abraham says that when we sleep, we sort of reset the momentum. Here’s what I mean. Ever notice how when you’re feeling worried or down or negative about something, everything else gets on your nerves too? Right? That’s called momentum. So if I’m feeling negative, then my brain wants to stay on the path of negativity. That’s the direction it’s headed is towards negativity, you might say. And so it prefers to just stay that way.

And it’s hard to interrupt that pattern and redirect, although you can absolutely do it. It’s just, you know, the default is to stay in that same pattern. Same thing if you’re feeling positive. If you’re feeling positive and excited and uplifted and happy, it’s tempting to stay on that path, although it’s easier to go from positive to negative than from negative to positive because of the weight our brains give to negativity. But still, you get what I’m saying, right? So this is why if you just got, I’ll just give some life examples. I remember one day getting a text message from my husband who was the sole income provider at the time saying, “I just got called into my boss’s office. I think I’m going to get fired today.”

Okay, so all the thoughts come into my head. I’m feeling a lot of negativity, a lot of fear, a lot of worry. I’m constantly like wanting updates. I’m trying to figure out how to get more information, which I can’t, of course. And my brain’s freaking out a little bit. Now my kid comes downstairs and does something that kids do, like dumps a box of cereal onto the kitchen floor. How do I react? I freak out about it. I get really upset about it. I’m like, this is, oh, just one more thing and maybe I yell at the kid or snap at the kid and I’m just like irritated, right?

Okay, negativity breeds more negativity. Now, let’s take a different scenario. Let’s say I just got news, this happened to me once too, this was exciting. I wish this happened more often. I just got news that I was part of a class action lawsuit for something I purchased years ago and they’re sending me a check for $6000. I had no idea this was going on. Obviously, I must have signed something at some point. But they’re sending me a check, $6000. Okay? I’m like, what? Good day. Thank you. Excited, happy, feeling good. And my kid comes downstairs, hypothetical example here, right, and dumps a box of cereal on the kitchen floor. What do I do? How do I respond? How do I feel about it?

I laugh. I take a picture and post it on Instagram. I think of a funny caption to go with it. I tell my husband later how funny and cute our kid is and that they dumped a whole box of cereal and we both laugh about it. Okay? So this is because of momentum. It’s not because in the moment I was like, I’m going to choose to be happy and laugh at this. It’s because I already had positive momentum, or vice versa. It’s not because I was like, this child is the worst, I’m going to teach them a lesson. I think me getting mad will be the best parenting move here. No, it’s because I had negative momentum.

So again, Abraham says that when we go to sleep, we stop the momentum. Okay? It interrupts the momentum pattern. Notice how you have dreams. Now, sometimes I feel like my dreams kind of correspond with whatever momentum I had going to bed. But at any rate, when we wake up in the morning or after a nap, yeah, that’s right. I’m telling you should take more naps, my friend, if you need to. There you go. Just tell them Jody Moore said you could. When you wake up, you have a clean slate.

Now, the brain kind of wants to pick up wherever it left off, right? I don’t know about you, but depending on how hard I’ve been sleeping, sometimes my first thought is, wait, what day is it and what do I have to do today? And what needs to happen this morning? And then it’s like, oh, yeah. And that oh yeah, that remembering of whatever it is, whether it’s like this, oh yeah, this is going to be a good day. I’m looking forward to today. I like what’s on the agenda today, or, oh, yeah, all right, I got to do a bunch of stuff I don’t really want to do is me just picking right back up and hooking right back into whatever momentum I might have had previously. So you do have to be conscious when you wake up.

This is why morning routines are so powerful. This is why people like to do their scripture study and prayer along with like sometimes mornings being the only time we can fit those things in. But they say that a morning routine, whether it’s, I’ll tell you what, I’m not a morning person. I know that’s just a thought, but I don’t like waking up early in the morning. I don’t really do it. I don’t get up at 5 a.m. and do all that stuff. 

But I do let myself do what I want in the morning. And what I like doing in the morning is taking a shower, putting on some makeup, doing my hair, and I like to listen to something really uplifting. I try not to just get on my phone when I wake up, start scrolling. No, it’s the worst thing for me that I could do. I like to put in a podcast or an audio book or something uplifting and motivating and inspiring. And what that is changes based on what’s going on in my life. At the very least, some fun music that I want to listen to. And I take my time with getting myself ready.

Going outside can be really useful, getting grounded. Like there’s literal science behind grounding by touching the earth, but there’s even like a mental and psychological component to nature for us. So whatever it is for you, going to sleep can interrupt the momentum, okay? So this is a gift that we get every day because we go to bed every night, hopefully, mostly. But you can also give yourself that gift when you’re really struggling. Just lay down and take a little nap, and then wake up with intention, intentionally reset the momentum of your mindset.

Okay, now that one, that little tip is more about like moods or momentum of emotions, if you will. I want to speak lastly to what the way this question was asked of me was what about those persistent, unwanted thoughts? And so my interpretation of what they mean are those weird random thoughts that show up in your head, right? That you would kind of be embarrassed if other people knew you had them. Like some of them sound really crazy. I remember there’s a big, huge river that flows through downtown Spokane and there are a couple of like walking bridges where you can walk over it. And I remember walking over that bridge thinking like, I could jump into that river and die. And not that I wanted to die. I wasn’t depressed. It wasn’t coming from a desire to take my own life, but it was kind of this weird compulsion. 

I don’t know if compulsion’s the right word. It was just a thought. But it scared me. Having that thought scared me. I was like, why am I even thinking that thought? Right? Do you ever have a thought like that when you’re driving down the road? Like if I just did a quick turn of the steering wheel, I would crash and kill myself and everyone in this car. I don’t know. It’s weird. We have these weird random thoughts like that, or I do. I don’t know what your sound like. That’s what some of mine sound like.

I’ve coached people on this a lot, people who say things like, I have an ex-boyfriend that I haven’t even seen in years and I’m very happy in my marriage, but I keep thinking about him. And then I feel bad for thinking about him, and that makes me think about him even more actually. And then it becomes this scary thing. Like, I got to hide this because what does this mean? And you know, how would my husband feel if he knew I was thinking about this other man? And it becomes this big thing.

So those are the types of thoughts I want to address with this next one. And this has been the most impactful thing as I’ve coached a lot of people on this, including myself, is to not make it a big deal, to not resist them, to not be afraid of them, to not make them mean something big and dramatic, to just let them be there. You don’t have to attach to them. You don’t have to act out on them. You don’t have to even believe that they’re true, but I just kind of like to be curious about them. I’m like, huh, okay, that’s interesting. Like, the brain does some interesting things, right? It offers up some bizarro thoughts.

And whether this is like some of the examples I just gave you that are really bizarre thoughts or the other time this comes up a lot is when I see people who are really working on changing their story or their belief system about a person or about themselves in some way or about maybe bodies in general or about money or some kind of a topic, right? That they’ve really been working on their overall story and belief system around this topic, but the old thoughts keep creeping back in. 

And even though they’ve developed some new beliefs that are serving them better, that they really do believe with intention or even sometimes without it, they go to those new beliefs, they still notice the old ones coming online. And then they start telling me, I don’t know why I’m still thinking that. I don’t know why that still keeps popping into my head or why I sometimes still feel this way that I don’t want to feel about this topic. And I would say, because you’re a human being with a human brain.

And some of those thoughts you’re really practiced at thinking and you’ve been gathering evidence for them for so long. And so to think that they would just disappear is kind of doesn’t make sense, right? Like they’re still floating around in there. They’re still available to you. You haven’t forgotten them. You also haven’t completely disproved them. You’ve just built some evidence to include some also better, more useful thoughts. But that doesn’t mean those old ones don’t still rattle around in there. And then your brain offers them up to you at times. Remember, your brain thinks it’s protecting you. It thinks it’s taking care of you. It thinks it’s creating your best life, and sometimes it is. A lot of times it is. Every now and then, it’s misguided and it’s not.

But the more we’re afraid of it, the more we’re mad at it. Remember like we talked about the school bus example in the beginning, the more we’re actually focusing on it. The whole thought, I don’t want to think about this thing is us thinking about the thing. Okay? So again, this is really powerful when we’re coaching because sometimes people will say to me, I’m so tired of thinking about, you know, how my adult kids are mad at me. I’m just tired of ruminating on it. And then they want to go on and tell me the whole story about the adult kids and why they’re mad at them and what happened and what they said and what how this they tried this and this isn’t working. And I’m like, it seems to me like you do really want to think about this a lot.

Because if you don’t want to think about it, the solution isn’t to make them all happy, fix some kind of problem, et cetera, or tell yourself not to think about it. The solution is to think about something different. So if you don’t want to think about how your adult kids are mad at you, my question is, what do you want to think about instead? That is not an easy question to answer, right? But when it, you’re working on that and it comes up, right? Maybe you redirect that energy into something more useful, some kind of a goal or a project or some service you want to give or something, right? You redirect your thoughts and your energy to what you do want to grow and expand in your life. But then every now and then your brain’s like, but don’t forget, some of your kids are mad at you and that sucks.

Okay? And you don’t have to get mad at it. You don’t go, oh no, I thought I was done thinking about that. Here it is again. You just go, oh, yep, still have that happening. It’s okay. It’s okay that I’m thinking that thought. You see what I’m saying? I’m not saying it’s okay that my kids are mad at me, even though it is. But that’s not what I mean. I mean, it’s okay that I still believe that on some level. It’s okay that I’m still thinking that at times. It’s so okay that still comes up for me as relevant information. It’s an interesting story. And maybe there are some useful pieces to it. But overall, overall, it doesn’t need to control me. And it’s not the only thing I’m thinking about. It’s not even the main thing I’m thinking about because I redirect my brain to what I want to be the main thing I’m thinking about. Okay?

Let’s go to the old boyfriend example, because this is probably the most common one I coach on, is like an old boyfriend or somebody that they work with that they kind of had a minute of a spark with. And they’re like, oh no, no, I can’t think about this person. I don’t want to be unfaithful. And we all know where that goes, right? I’m like, okay, but you’re making it very powerful by thinking that it’s scary. Scary things are big and powerful. But if you’re just like, oh, that’s my human brain, being attracted to someone else or having memories of someone else or having thoughts about someone else. Okay, I’m not scared of it. It doesn’t mean I’m going to run out and cheat on my spouse or leave my spouse. We don’t have to be scared of it. It’s not going to take you over if you just notice it.

And I always used to say because in my old house, my office was like in the front of the house and there was a sliding door in the back and I was like, I just imagine those thoughts like kind of come in the sliding door in the backyard. They come through the house, they come right by me and I’m like, oh hi. And I don’t like grab it and sit with it and fondle it and attach to it, but I also am not like, oh my goodness, get out of my house. I just notice it and then it kind of goes by and it goes right out the front door. And it’s not powerful. It’s not a big deal. It’s just being a human being.

Now, if you do have what you think might be more like OCD or some kind of really compulsive thoughts that require clinical intervention, by all means, go see a clinical specialist. That can happen at times. But for most of you listening to this, that is not the case. You’re fueling it when you’re afraid of it. But if you just notice it and let it pass on by, it’s not dangerous at all. It’s just a human brain doing what brains do.

All right, thanks for joining me today, my friends. I will see you next week for another episode of Better Than Happy. In the meanwhile, have a beautiful week. Take care.

Oh wow, look at that. You made it to the end. Your time and attention is valuable, and I don’t take it lightly that you made it this far. In fact, it tells me you might be like me; insatiably curious about people and life and potential and connection. Maybe you have big dreams but a small budget and no time. You’re tired, but bored. You’re content, but dissatisfied. Sound familiar? Come to a free coaching call and see for yourself what’s possible: JodyMoore.com/freecoaching to register. That’s JodyMoore.com/freecoaching.