today I'm going to teach yall how to think your way to happiness now this may sound absolutely insane because you may have heard research about what determines whether people are happy so for example there are studies that show that if you make $100,000 a year or more then that correlates with happiness people who are in sexually fulfilling relationships are more likely to be happy but there's a big fundamental problem with the research we have on happiness which is that it tells us who is happy not how to become happy so if you're sitting there reading this research right that says okay I need to make six figures and I need to have a sexually fulfilling relationship you can't really wake up one day and say hey I'm going to make six figures today and I'm going to find a sexually fulfilling relationship the problem with the research on happiness is it doesn't show us how to actually become happy and that's what I'm going to share with youall today hey y'all I want to talk for a second about HG coaching a lot of people wonder why do I need to sign up for coaching can't I just DIY it can't I watch another YouTube video and you're right you can absolutely do those things which is why we offer those resources but one thing that I found is that people who try to do things by themselves take a really long time to do it and my experience has been that the earlier that you get your life together the better your life will be so coaching is designed to not help people treat Mental Illness but discover things like what you want out of life what's holding you back how to conquer procrastination and how to find motivation and I have worked with each and every one of our coaches I work with them for 8 weeks to make sure they're of the highest quality and they really represent what we offer at HG so if yall are interested check out the link in the description below now it may sound kind of bizarre but it turns out that the most important thing that you can control for your own happiness is actually your thoughts now this may sound surprising because isn't happiness about emotions because if I'm depressed and sad all the time and I wake up and I feel ashamed of myself and I'm so depressed and it's hard to get out of bed it's hard for me to be happy right that makes perfect sense so isn't it about emotion well it turns out that if you look at research on Psychiatry and Psychotherapy that emotions are a big part of it but if you really look at what we do in Psychotherapy it's not just fixing emotions in fact the goal is to decompress emotions so that you can help your patient start to think clearly and the real change that we see happens when our patients start to think clearly and think in a healthier way now that may sound kind of confusing because you're kind of saying what does that mean to think in a healthier way how do I do that so let me give you all just a simple example let's say I go through a breakup this is a fact and since there's a breakup my body has all kinds of physiological attachments there's less oxytocin maybe I get a drop in my serotonin level all kinds of stuff is happening to me physically and emotionally but whether I'm happy or not after the breakup depends on my thoughts so if after the breakup I start to think to myself oh my God I'll be alone forever my partner will be able to move on because they're better looking and everyone is interested in them but I'm such a POS and no one's ever going to want me those thoughts are going to keep us in a very unhappy place on the flip side if I am resilient and if my mindset is different and let's remember what is mindset it's actually thinking if my mindset is thinking I can think things like hey you know this relationship was really important to me it's sad I'm going to grieve and it's going to hurt for a while but we grew up into different people we've been dating for four years and we have different views on life so it's like it's okay for it to end now I appreciated it why it while it happened and while it hurts it's probably best for me in the long run same situation same physiologic response two different modes of thinking and if we look look at the evidence-based practice of psychotherapy what we find is that cognitive reframing which is literally changing your thoughts is the most effective or one of the most effective coping skills that you can teach someone as a therapist just to contrast that people who Focus exclusively on emotions tend to actually stay stuck so we even have research that shows that people who focused on emotion focused coping which means that I'm going to just manage my emotions all the time I'm going to manage my emotions all the time don't actually fix their problems it's the people who are able to make cognitive shifts and look at the world in a different way that are able to fix their problems as well as become happier and for some reason as a society we've sort of lost sight of how to think and how important thinking is so we're going to teach all a little bit about how to cultivate the right thinking so let's start by understanding the precise sequence of thinking emotions and being unhappy so thankfully we have research on this where people have done even things like brain scans and what we've sort of discovered is that the sequence of events that lead to unhappiness start with thoughts so what usually happens is I have a thought so the cognitive thought happens first and following the thought is an affective change which means an emotional response so I will think to myself oh no I going to be alone after this breakup and the second I have that thought I will feel an emotional reaction that thought will bring the sadness out and if you pay attention to your own experience you'll find that usually negative thoughts start first and then they will activate emotions and then the emotions will spur more thoughts now this is when we get into things like thought Loops right so I start to think to myself oh I start with I'm going to be alone forever and then I feel sad and then the sadness breathes more negative thoughts I start St stalking them on social media I start you know sitting around and like listening to sad music and there's some kind of like affective change emotional change that then propagates further thoughts and youall may have experienced this negative experience of a thought Loop where you can't stop your mind from thinking and when I worked with patients who have thought Loops like this what they want more than anything else is to just stop thinking and instinctively they know that the thinking is the problem and this is why they reach for things like substances or video games or technology or whatever any kind of distraction to shut off the thoughts this is why people will drink a lot of alcohol before they pass out because I need to stop the thoughts I need to stop the thoughts and why do we reach for those kinds of things because we haven't been trained at how to cultivate the right thoughts and it turns out that the scientific evidence mirrors people's experiences that if we really look at the origin of mental illness it starts with a thought then there's an emotional response and then there is this really important step called a per peration or a rumination of thoughts and when the perseveration and rumination which means we keep thinking the same thing Rises and Rises and Rises that's what eventually leads to Psychopathology or mental illness so thought emotion more thoughts that we can't break out of mental illness and so how do we fix this situation it turns out that we've got one really interesting option which is if you look in the history of the world in my opinion and I'm not an expert in all historical you know things everywhere I think the yogis did a really fantastic job of figuring out how to cultivate the right thoughts so they came up with this practice called Mantra or Mantra and what they would do is they would engage with a particular thought over and over and over again now mantras traditionally were chanted but it turns out that chanting a mantra actually weakens its power if you look at some some of these old texts on Mantra what you'll find is that the yogis will say any mantra that's chanted if it is whispered under your breath the power of the Mantra increases tfold so instead of saying things out loud we actually want to repeat Them Softly to ourselves this is what the science of montra says and it turns out that there's a very fascinating neuroscientific correlation for this so when we say things out loud this is something called phenotyping and it actually happens from the cerebellum so it actually happens in a primitive structure of our brain kind of in the back of our brain and if you look at sort of the subjectivity of saying things out loud what you sort of find is when you're speaking you're not really paying attention right the two are sort of opposite you can go up and give a speech and you're not really paying attention or listening to what you're saying you can't listen and speak at the same time which is what makes socializing so damn hard because you'll say something and hey did I say this already did I not say it I wasn't really paying attention and that's literally because the cerebellum where phenotyping happens where speech kind of operates is sort of short-term memory and so the the point of that part of our brain is we're going to put some information in and then we're going to send it out for the purpose of communication so here's what's really interesting when we subvocalize which means we say things under our breath it actually activates a completely different part of the brain and serves a completely different purpose it activates our frontal loes especially our orbitofrontal cortex now this is kind of weird right so when we say things out loud we're activating this part of the brain and when we say things subvocally we're actually activating a completely different part and what is this part responsible for so the orbital frontal cortex and our frontal loes are responsible for directing our Behavior they're responsible for controlling the other parts of our brain and so it's kind of interesting but when we subvocalize things it's not temporary and short term and go kind of goes out of the mouth and doesn't accomplish anything when we subvocalize things they actually sink deep deeper within us and so if you think about the people that you know that are very vocal about their positivity and their thoughts right they're like he like I'm going to be positive and the world is great and I'm going to advertise on social media I'm going to tell everyone be positive be positive be positive they all turn into passive aggressive narcissistic like content creators and influencers who are talking crap all the time about positivity but the moment they get upset by something and I guess I'm guilty of as well they rail at everyone else and all the positivity goes out the window you may know these people who have all this false positivity that they're advertising all the time we even have a term for it which is virtue signaling I'm going to signal to the rest of the world that I am good in some way and that will be a substitute for actual virtue and it turns out that the yogis were spoton that when we subvocalize it actually sinks into our mind and starts to shape our thoughts more and and you may have sort of notied this when you mutter something under your breath who are you really talking to you're talking to yourself and it's kind of sinking further in and it turns out that when we subvocalize it actually shapes our thinking much more profoundly than saying something out loud now the next question kind of becomes okay so even if we use this technique of subvocalization to implant things into our mind how do I go about cognitively reframing how do I start thinking different things things for myself and so this is a simple exercise that I give to my patients and I can share with you as well so the next time you're in a situation which feels bad and your thinking is in the wrong kind of space what I want you to do is pretend that you are talking to a friend of yours or a younger sibling or something like that and try to be as encouraging and compassionate as possible what would you say to this person if they were going through the same situation you were going through and this is where you know you'll you'll much more likely to be more forgiving be more encouraging and be more compassionate so you can even write down whatever you would say to that person and kind of make a list of it or think through what you would say now this is where we're not really taught how to think and this is where a lot of people will trip up because when you try to say the alternative the other part of your mind that is thinking negative thoughts will start to fight it right so then you get this battle between your mind where there's a part of you that's trying to be positive and a part of you that is consisting in negativity and then there's conflict and then you kind of end up losing right because if it applies to you this kind of how this looks so you'll let's say you got dumped right and so you tell your friend hey like y'all grew into different people y'all grew apart it's okay you're a good person you'll find somebody else that's you'll say to someone else but then your mind will be like nuh-uh right that's for other people in our case I'm socially stunted I've been with this person so long I don't even know how to date I've gained 20 pounds and now I'm unattractive and I don't have an online dating profile and your mind starts arguing with you and then what we try to do is we try to fight that argument we try to have the positivity win this the whole thing is completely stupid and idiotic and we don't need to do it at all we can bypass the whole damn thing through subvocalization so this is the main thing that we forget or we miss is that you actually don't have to argue with yourself you don't have to convince yourself of anything you don't have to say anything to the negative part of you you do not have to win with these thoughts all you need to do is subvocalize them and this is how we literally inject positive thoughts into our mind where they will start to live this is what subvocalization does now this may sound bizarre because you're saying well hold on a second but I have all these experiences and I have all these thoughts are you saying that I can kind of sub vocalize and literally change my mindset honestly in the best expertise that I have and based on all of my understanding of the literature yogic practice for about wow 20 years now I think that's what's going to happen and there's some really interesting clinical evidence to support it and that comes from schizophrenia so this is a little bit heavy but I want youall to understand this when someone has schizophrenia the thoughts in their head become a reality right so they have delusions so what is a delusion is a thought in my head which I think is real but it's not real and so I've had patients with schizophrenia literally jump out of third story Windows because the thoughts in their head were so powerful that that's what they thought they needed to do to survive so I know it sounds kind of heavy but what we sort of know is that in schizophrenia the thoughts that they have are very shaping for their lives now here's the Wild Thing people with schizophrenia sub vocalize all the time there are studies which will analyze the electrical activity of the tongue in patients with schizophrenia and what they found because when you subvocalize is you have tongue movement that's very very minor so you're speaking under your breath so it's not rapid tongue movement that's how you can tell if someone's sub vocalizing you can measure tongue muscles and so when these researchers actually looked at subvocalization in schizophrenia what they found are a couple things people with schizophrenia subvocalize a ton and furthermore the more that they subvocalize the more powerful their distortions of reality so literally there is a correlation between how much people with schizophrenia subvocalize and how much their thoughts will shape their reality now the good news is that this is true of all human beings that as we subvocalize we activate our orbitofrontal cores we activate our frontal loes we take whatever those thoughts are and we start to implant them and the other thing to keep in mind is it's not about an argument and letting logic rise to the thought top that's not what we're talking talking about here what we are talking about is the implantation of positive thoughts so I know it sounds insane but it turns out that our thoughts are actually the source of our happiness the very first thing that happens is a thought which then triggers an emotion which then triggers a thought Loop which then leads to mental illness and it turns out that you can implant positive thoughts fingers crossed here through this technique of sub vocalization definitely works for manra and me and the people that I've taught it to In terms of chanting this and that sort of changes their mindset it changes the way that they look at things and once you change the way that you look at life it allows you to live life in a healthier way so as crazy as that sounds I strongly encourage youall to try it and check it out and don't give up on thinking as a source of of happiness because if you stop and think about it what you really find is that when we stopped trying to think our way to happiness is really when we've like lost the the opportunity to think our way to happiness right because we gave up on that battle and that's why people are so unhappy today because we've surrendered our most powerful tool which is our thoughts now if y'all are interested in more stuff like this different kinds of yogic and meditative thought control techniques highly recommend youall check out Dr K's guide there's a guide to meditation which will teach you some there's a guy to ADHD and doing stuff which also teaches a lot about thought control and how to cultivate the right right thought in the mind so yall can check that out for more info if you want good [Music] luck