Our thought processes are affected by what we experience around us, and it’s normal to experience both good and bad times. However, when negative thinking becomes the norm, it can contribute to mental health problems including social anxiety, low self-esteem, and even depression. To avoid falling into that pattern, let’s explore the science of negative thinking and how you can develop a more mindful relationship with your thoughts.

Negative Feelings Are Natural

Our thought processes are intimately connected to the way we feel. When you’re feeling content, your thoughts tend to reflect this. In times of happiness, you may be more satisfied with your career progress, perceive your personal relationships as more secure, or have a better body image. Conversely, if you’re anxious or unhappy, you may notice that negative thoughts start to emerge. This could include feeling stressed about work, worrying about your appearance, or questioning the loyalty of your friends.

The Science of Negative Thinking

If you regularly experience negative thoughts, this cognitive distortion can sadly worsen an already poor mental health, leading to low mood, poor self-esteem, and anxiety.To make things worse, a bias towards negative thinking will increase the likelihood that you’ll spend time ruminating on mistakes or dwelling on things that didn’t go as well as you had hoped. Negativity bias, or the propensity to focus on negative experiences, can cloud your judgement. Decisions will appear more complex than they truly are, which will make it harder to know how to handle difficult situations.

Negative Bias

<ul><li>Recognize negative thinking when it arises.</li><li>Ask yourself if the thought is truthful or helpful.</li><li>If the negative thought provides no value, shift your focus by rewiring your thought patterns.</li><li>Manage negative thinking by changing the way you respond to it and control how much impact it has.</li></ul>

The Principles of Managing Negative Thoughts

<ol><li>Create distance from your thoughts: Pay attention to your automatic thoughts and label them as subjective thoughts.</li><li>Start a thought diary: Journal down the date, the time, the event that triggered an emotion, and the resulting negative thought.</li><li>Use de-catastrophizing techniques: Negative thinking often leads to catastrophizing.</li></ol>Ask yourself: <ul><li>What am I worried about? Is it likely that my worry will come true?</li><li>What is the worst that could happen if my worry comes true?</li></ul>

How to Transmute Your Negative Thoughts

Once recognised, negative thoughts can be managed to reduce the impact on your emotional wellbeing. This in turn will break the cycle of negative thinking. By paying attention to your thoughts and interrogating their validity you can prevent cognitive distortions from skewing your beliefs and impacting your mental health.

The Bottom Line

When negative thinking becomes the norm, it can contribute to mental health problems including social anxiety, low self-esteem, and even depression. To avoid falling into that pattern, let’s explore the science of negative thinking and how you can develop a more mindful relationship to your thoughts.

Stashed ideas

The psychology of negative thinking

Our bodies undergo many extraordinary metamorphoses over the course of our lives. We grow, go into puberty, and many reproduce. Behind the scenes, the endocrine system works to arrange these changes. This system regulates everything from sleep to the rhythm of your heartbeat. The endocrine system needs the interactions of three features to function:<ul><li>Glands</li><li>Hormones</li><li>Trillions of cell receptors.</li></ul>

The endocrine system causes changes in your body

You have hormone-producing glands in your body,<ul><li>three in your brain, </li><li>seven in the rest of your body. </li></ul>Each is surrounded by a network of blood vessels from which they extract ingredients to make hormones. These are pumped out in tiny amounts into the bloodstream.

Glands and hormones

The hormones need to find a set of target cells to bring about a specific change. Receptors - the special proteins inside or on the cell's surface - help hormones find their targets. The receptors recognise specific hormones as they move past and bind to them. Once this happens, the hormone-receptor combination triggers effects that can increase or decrease specific processes inside the cell.

Hormones and receptors

The two thyroid hormones, namely triiodothyronine and thyroxine, travel to the body's cells and influence how quickly those cells work and use energy. In turn, that regulates everything from breathing to heartbeat, body temperature, and digestion.

The thyroid and the two hormones it produces

Both men and women have estrogen and testosterone but in different amounts. In men, puberty starts when the testes begin secreting testosterone. That triggers the development of the sexual organs and causes the voice to deepen. In women, estrogen secreted from the ovaries helps the body develop, makes the hips widen and thickens the womb's lining to prepare for menstruation or pregnancy.

Hormones during puberty

Hormones can influence the production of certain chemicals in the brain, such as serotonin. When chemical levels change, they can cause the mood to change. That doesn't mean that hormones have unlimited power over us, but they often drive our behaviour and make us slaves to their effects, for example during puberty. However, the endocrine system regulates our bodily processes, it does not control us.

Fluctuation of mood

Disease, stress, and diet can disrupt the regulatory function, changing the way the cells respond, such as in diabetes. <ul><li>Diabetes is a common hormonal disorder where the pancreas secretes too little insulin - the hormone that manages blood sugar levels. </li><li>Hypo- and hyperthyroidism occur when the thyroid gland makes too little or too much thyroid hormone. Too little thyroid hormone cause a slowed heart rate, fatigue, and depression. Too much thyroid hormone causes weight loss, sleeplessness, and irritability. </li></ul>

Disrupting the regulatory function.

Check out our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/teded View full lesson: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-do-your-hormones-work-emma-bryce Over our lifetimes, our bodies undergo a series of extraordinary metamorphoses: we grow, experience puberty, and many of us reproduce. Behind the scenes, the endocrine system works constantly to orchestrate these changes. Emma Bryce explains how this system regulates everything from your sleep to the rhythm of your beating heart, exerting its influence over each and every one of your cells. Lesson by Emma Bryce, animation by Daniel Gray. Thank you so much to our patrons for your support! Without you this video would not be possible! Michał Friedrich, Arlene Spiegelman, Doug Henry, Alick Au, denison martins fernandes, Hashem Al, Daniel Nester, Richard A Berkley, Benjamin Chan, Dee Wei, Abdallah Absi, Dominick Biolsi, Denise A Pitts, Pi Guanghui, Doris, Kurt Almendras, Raymond Lee, Nicolas Silva, Tsz Hin Edmund Chan, Melvin Williams, Eric Monarrez, Tirath Singh Pandher, Athena Grace Franco, Terry Minion, Ian McPherson, Mauricio Basso, Kelvin Lam, Jamesbo87 , Tara Frost, Karlee Finch, Chumi Ogbonna, Barthélémy Michalon, Lefty McGoo, Lucas Pincerato, Prefer Anonymous, Mohamed Elsayed, Ankur Deshwal, Pawan Kumar, Amin Shahril, Mihail Radu Pantilimon, Chris Thompson, Derek Drescher, Karisa Caudill, Diana Habashneh, Zhong Ming Zenny Tan, Christina Salvatore, Brady Jones, Todd Gross, Alexis Hevia, Heidi Stolt, Daisy Trujillo, Robert Seik, Coenraad Keuning, Charles A Hershberger, Alan Wilder, and Laura Cameron Keith.

How do your hormones work? - Emma Bryce

Looking at the example of Uber, which upended the taxi services a few years ago, your business is not safe even if you are already making nice profits and the future looks bright.
After all, even protected monopolies eventually get disrupted. What you need is to make sure you can stay profitable in the years and decades to come.

Disruption Is Inevitable

The key to profitability is to recognize what businesses are and do from the perspective of the whole economy. Businesses formulate strategies to position themselves with respect to each other and thereby earn profits. So the economic context matters, because it is within the economy that you run your business. 
In the startup phase, the entrepreneur tries to find and populate a “gap” that allows the business to become profitable. But the same is true for the existing business, which must continue to consider its positioning to stay profitable.

Profitability Is To Meet The Future

Profits are rewards for a job well-done. But to maintain profitability, your sight must be set to facilitate future value. After all, the line of production that you’re considering today will not be instantaneously available to your customers. 
The value they get from the goods and services you set out to produce will without exception happen in the future. In other words, profits indicate you did something right. But profitability is a matter of meeting the future.

Staying Afloat And Thriving

The key to profitability is to imagine how you are contributing to making consumers better off.
In our advanced economy, with two-thirds of all spending being business-to-business (B2B), your customer may not be the consumer. But the consumer is the user of the final product and therefore the one that determines its value. The consumer, therefore, determines also the value of all contributions in the supply chain, albeit indirectly.

The Consumer Is King

To stay profitable over time, look beyond your customer and consider your contribution to the value of the final product. Even if your customer does not recognize it, you should meet the opportunity and innovate to offer your customer an upper hand.
If you make your customers thrive, your business thrives. The key is to think about the consumer whether or not you serve them directly.

Staying Profitable Over Time

For lasting profitability, entrepreneurs should focus on contributing to consumer value. This applies to business-to-business too. 

How to Maintain Profitability in a Changing Market

Randomness, chance, and luck influence our lives and our work more than we realize. Because of hindsight bias and survivorship bias, in particular, we tend to forget the many who fail, remember the few who succeed, and then create reasons and patterns for their success even though it was largely random. Mild success can be explainable by skills and hard work, but wild success is usually attributable to variance and luck.

Fooled by Randomness: The Premise

Many systems we move and live works in linear fashion mean in sequential form, usually in one line, with every day of your work you move closer to your promotion, when you go to school you move closer to graduation, with every savings you do, you move closer to your retirement same lifestyle, and so on.Because of all these events we think that life is linear, or sequential, but that’s not the actual fact.

Life isn’t fair, Which Is Great

We need irrationality to make certain decisions.If we make every single of our decisions based on rational reasoning then we may not be able to survive or we will cease to exist. Not every decision or choice can be easy, some choices can be indifferent like there can be some choices whose outcome will neither make us feel better and will not be able to make us feel worse. If you want to invest money, by thinking rational like the market can go down or can go up, by thinking this way you won’t be able to make a proper decision, unless you are being slightly irrational.

We need Irrationality

Randomness is not all bad it’s harmless too, we people need to use randomness in a better way so that it can improve our lives in better way, there are some fields which can’t work without randomness such as art, poetry, humor, books etc., author says that without randomness there will be no beauty in art there will be no joy, happiness in these things, author says that in some situations randomness is good, author says that we can’t let randomness fool us, but the right kind of randomness is good.

Enjoy the Harmless Bad Randomness

Random irrational thinking can be harmful or harmless, and we must understand that harmless randomness and irrational behavior thinking will help us to make our lives better but irrational behavior attitude or randomness which is harmful will only destroy our lives. We must develop a stoic attitude and understand the difference between good and bad randomness.

The Stoic Attitude

<ul><li>As much as we want to “keep it simple, stupid” … It is precisely the simplification of issues that are actually very complex, which can be dangerous.</li><li>Mild success can be explainable by skills and labour. Wild success is attributable to variance.</li><li>Every man believes that he is quite different.</li></ul>

Stand Out Quotes

It’s better to value old, distilled thoughts than “new thinking” because for an idea to last so long it must be good. That is, old ideas have had to stand the test of time. New ideas have not. Some new ideas will end up lasting, but most will not.

New Vs Old Ideas

Randomness means there are some strategies that work well for any given cycle, but these cycles are often short to medium term successes. The strategies that work for a given cycle in the short term may not be the best for the long run. They are suboptimal strategies winning over a randomly beneficial short term cycle.The same can be said for setting big goals, following a fad diet, chasing an extreme training protocol, and so on. Unsustainable and suboptimal for the long term. Evolutionary traits that are undesirable can survive for a period of time in any given population.

The Real Meaning Of Randomness

The ratio of undistilled information to distilled is rising. Let’s call information that has never had to prove its truth more than once or twice, undistilled. And information that has been filtered through many years, counter arguments, and situations is distilled. You want more distilled information (concepts that stand the test of time and rigorous analysis) and less undistilled information (the news, reactionary opinions, and “cutting edge” research).

The Need For Curating Information

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American Essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst, whose work Focuses on Problems of randomness, probability and uncertainty. Fooled by Randomness deals with the fallibility of human knowledge, This book is one of the 75 smartest books of all time for its work on the way humans perceive randomness. The author has come up with various ways through which humans assign meaning to a series of independent random events.

About The Author

The World isn't what it seems. This book provides a glimpse of the hidden green code of the Matrix.

Contends that randomness and probability have a large impact on life, claims that people regularly fail to recognize that role, and tells how to differentiate between randomness in general and the financial markets in particular.

Fooled by Randomness

<ul>
<li>The Yoga posture or pose is called Asana in Sanskrit.</li>
<li>Yoga has thousands of body postures that are practised according to one’s proficiency and body type.</li>
<li>Yoga Asanas slow us down and connect us in breath, body and mind. Practising increases strength and flexibility while improving balance.</li>
<li>Yoga has many different kinds like Hatha Yoga, Ashtanga Yoga and Kundalini. Each Yoga is an entire thesis on the science of body and mind.</li>
<li>It has a unique and profound impact on one’s mind and body.</li>
</ul>

Yoga Asanas: A Primer

The Yoga Sutra, an ancient yogic text written by Patanjali many centuries ago lists the eight steps for the Path To God.1. Yamas (the moral values2. Niyamas (the ethical values),3. Asanas (the postures),4. Pranayama (breathing exercises),5. Pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses),6. Dharana (concentration),7. Dhyana (meditation),8. Samadhi (spiritual absorption).It says the Asanas should be steady, not painful, and one should not try advanced ones too soon.

The Yoga Sutra

Yoga Asanas have Sanskrit names that describe the appearance of the bodily posture, like:<ul><li>Downward Facing Dog Pose: Adho Mukha Svanasana, with a posture that looks like a stretching dog.</li><li>Triangle Pose: Trikonasana, making a triangular shape.</li><li>Hand To Big Toe Pose: Utthita hasta padangusthasana, where one has to extend a leg upwards and grab the foot with the hand.</li></ul>

The Names Of The Asanas

What Are Yoga Asanas?

One of the common pitfalls for the newbie runner is to start from doing nothing to relatively heavy training in a short period of time. If you're not giving your body lots of time to build up your running, you might be in for a stress fracture.
Going with "too much, too soon, too fast" is not getting enough rest. Not just sleep but rest for your bones and joints too. When you start running, run for half as many days as you don't.

Doing too much, too soon, too fast

Those who successfully run with some regularity are prone to fall into the trap of running the same route and pace that works for them. Doing the same thing every day will not help you build fitness.
For variety, most runners also build short, fast interval workouts into their training schedule.

Doing the same run every time

Many beginners run their normal distance too fast.
Every workout serves a specific purpose. Experienced runners run in this ebb and flow of stress and recovery. They ensure they are taking it easy on their recovery runs, but the hard runs are rather intense.

Always running moderately hard

A common mistake for beginner runners is choosing the wrong footwear. They often choose for colour or style instead of the right fitting shoe. It is recommended to go to a running shoe specialist. Try out three or four different shoe manufacturers to see how they fit before you make a choice.

Choosing a shoe for its looks

Training plans and running programs are a great way to keep you disciplined, but you should not prioritise the schedule over how you feel on a day. There will be days when running the hard workout will do more harm than good.
Unfortunately, the only way to know when you should back off or push through with your scheduled workout comes with experience. The general rule of thumb is slight fatigue or soreness is good, pain or tightness is not.

Ignoring your body

So you want to start running? Make sure to get off on the right foot by avoiding these five common newbie errors.

Health

Beginner Running Mistakes to Avoid

<ul>
<li>Billions of people relish coffee every day, in various forms, making it one of the most popular beverages in the world.</li>
<li>Caffeine, the buzz-giving ingredient in coffee, is a natural stimulant found in tea, cacao and coffee beans, and affects the brain and the central nervous system. </li>
<li>This psychoactive drug dates back to the first brewed tea, back in 2737 BCE. A little later, coffee was discovered by a shepherd in Ethiopia, who noticed that coffee beans gave a jolt of energy to his goats.</li>
<li>Coffee is consumed by up to 90 percent of the North American population every day.</li>
</ul>

Everything About Coffee

The caffeine in your coffee goes into the bloodstream and travels to the liver, where it is broken down into various compounds. 
It affects the brain by blocking the neurotransmitter adenosine, which otherwise makes us tired or sleepy. It also promotes the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine, resulting in an alert, focussed brain after about an hour of intake.

What Coffee Does Inside Us

Apart from natural sources like seeds, nuts or beans, caffeine is found in espresso, tea, energy drinks, chocolate (and chocolate milk), among other foods.
It is also a part of over-the-counter drugs for cold and pain and in weight loss supplements.

Sources Of Caffeine

<ul>
<li>Studies show that a moderate amount of caffeine intake improves alertness, mood, short-term recall and reaction time.</li>
<li>Drinking 2 to 3 cups a day lowers the risk of suicide and depression. It also reduces the risk of brain ailments like Parkinson's and Alzheimer’s.</li>
<li>Caffeine increases metabolism and allows us to burn a few more calories every day while increasing endurance.</li>
<li>It helps turn fat into fuel, providing an increased tolerance to fatigue.</li>
<li>Coffee beans and tea leaves contain other bioactive compounds that also provide several benefits.</li>
</ul>

Caffeine: Mood Booster And Energy Giver

Coffee intake lowers the risk of heart disease and stroke. It tends to increase blood pressure to a small degree in some people.
People who drink coffee in large quantities have a lower risk of type-2 diabetes.
Other benefits of coffee consumption are:
<ol>
<li>Protects against liver damage.</li>
<li>Reduces the risk of premature death.</li>
<li>Significantly reduces the risk of liver cancer.</li>
<li>Protects against skin cancer and multiple sclerosis (MS) to a certain degree.</li>
<li>Protects against gout disease.</li>
<li>Helps in our gut bacteria.</li>
</ol>

Coffee And Health

Coffee is addictive and excessive intake can lead to restlessness, anxiety, irregular sleep and heart issues. It can cause headaches, high blood pressure and migraine in some people. It is also advisable to avoid coffee with certain medications.
The recommended maximum dosage of caffeine(not coffee) is 200 to 400 mg per day. It is to be noted that drinking above 500 mg of caffeine in a day can be fatal. As one teaspoon of coffee contains approximately 50 to 60 mg of caffeine, the per day maximum intake should be 7 to 8 teaspoons of coffee powder.

Side Effects Of Coffee And Dosage

Caffeine is a natural stimulant consumed throughout the world. This article reviews caffeine and its health effects, both good and bad.

What Is Caffeine, and Is It Good or Bad for Health?

During WWII, the U.S. military realized that if fighter pilots didn't get sleep, their poor decisions had dire consequences. Their mishaps included errors that resulted in their being shot down--or shooting down guys on their own side.Helping combat pilots get good rest fast became a priority. So the military brought in naval ensign Bud Winter to develop and test a scientifically designed method of "teaching" sleep. After just six weeks of practice, 96 percent of pilots could fall asleep within 120 seconds.

"Teaching" Sleep

<ul><li>Get into a comfortable position, wherever you are, like a bed, or a couch.</li>
<li>Close your eyes.</li>
<li>Relax your facial muscles, all of them, as it sends a signal to the brain that all is well. This makes your breathing slow and deep. </li>
<li>Drop your shoulders, and let them completely loose. </li>
<li>Feel your legs go limp, sinking and getting heavier, both of them, one by one.</li>
<li>Turn off your brain for 10 seconds, just like rebooting an iPhone.</li>
<li>Avoid thoughts at all costs. It is just 10 seconds, so anything from visualizing something or chanting will do. If you drift towards thoughts, you will start to activate your muscles automatically.</li></ul>

Combat Pilots Sleeping Hacks

For most of us, getting enough sleep isn't a life-or-death kind of thing. Sure, we might make poor decisions, but our being sleepy at the marketing meeting tomorrow is not going to get someone killed. During WWII, though, the U.S. military quickly got hip to the fact that if fighter pilots didn't get sleep, their poor decisions had dire consequences.

Want to Fall Asleep Faster? Military Pilots Use This Hack to Sleep Anywhere in 2 Minutes or Less

Many of the fad diets we follow today share similarities with fad diets followed in the 20th century.
Early 20th-century diets emphasised low-carb and no sugar. Evidence suggested a link between obesity and mortality, causing people to focus on regulating body weight.

The diets today are similar to diets of the 20th-century

Wiliam Banting, an English undertaker, invented a diet in 1863 to help him lose excessive weight. The diet appeared in many health manuals and magazines and recommended people follow a high protein, low carbohydrate plan.
This diet set the trend for other popular diets at the time, such as the dry-diet that stated users should drink one pint of fluid per day, no soups, sauces, or alcohol, and to avoid pastry, puddings, white bread, potatoes and sugar.

The Banting diet

The feminine ideal of the New Woman in the 1920s with her slim, androgynous outline and increased spending power may have pushed the popularity of diets. Home weighing scales became common, as well as diet plans and books.
Avoiding carbs was central to many popular diets. Other diets, such as the salad days or fast-day diets, focused on limiting calories.

The popularity of diets

Slimming diets decreased in popularity during wartime and rationing but thrived in the years that followed - all to have a slim, beautiful body.
As before, low-carbohydrate approaches dominated, such as the crash diet, the third-day diet, and the daffodil diet. In the 1960s, the focus was on limiting portion sizes and consuming small amounts of calories.

Slimming diets in the 1950s and 60s

Popular weight-loss regimes were talked up as self-help tools for the emancipated woman. Success and inner balance required control of the body through dieting and exercise.
The link between fitness and health caused fitness studios to become popular. Low-fat foods were emphasised. The famous F plan diet emphasised eating high fibre and low calories. At the end of the 20th century, diets such as the Atkins diet returned to Banting's emphasis on lowering carb intake.

Weight loss regimes in the 70s and 80s

Research shows fad diets may lead to weight gain and disordered eating, but fad diets continue to be popular despite this knowledge.
Modern diets such as keto or paleo share many similarities with the low-carb, calorie-restrictive diets. While the appeal to fad diets is understandable, a balanced diet and exercising is still the best way to maintain a healthy weight.

A balanced diet and exercise is key

20th-century fad diets didn't look all that different from those popular today.

Low-carb, no sugar, no fat: the fad diets popular in the 20th century

<ul>
<li>Tinnitus, the ringing or noise in the ears is annoying, and most of us experience it temporarily when we hear a loud noise. </li>
<li>Aspirin and other anti-inflammatory drugs also cause it to appear. </li>
<li>Chronic tinnitus, the one that lasts for more than six months, is a problem experienced by 50 to 60 million Americans.</li>
<li>Most cases are a personal noise experience, though other people can also hear the sound in some cases. Tinnitus is a diverse kind of problem and is more likely in older people.</li>
</ul>

Tinnitus: Non-Stop Ringing In The Ears

The problem of tinnitus happens when our ears hair cells get damaged due to ototoxic drugs or loud noise, and the brain circuits do not receive the expected signal, stimulating abnormal activity in the neurons.
People notice their tinnitus problem in places with low external noise. About 10 percent of tinnitus patients cannot bear the sound due to its volume and seek professional help. There is no cure for tinnitus, though some minimizing is possible.

No Masking The Noise

<ul>
<li>Most people who have chronic tinnitus also have some degree of hearing loss.</li>
<li>The inner ear, and the middle ear can get damaged due to ageing, ear wax, heavy medication or extremely loud noise.</li>
<li>Most people with Tinnitus have the problem originating at the cochlear nerve level, making it ‘sensorineural’.</li>
<li>Stress and insomnia are other common side effects of Tinnitus.</li>
<li>Drugs like certain antibiotics, Aspirin, anticonvulsants, and antidepressants can spark or worsen the ringing in the ears.</li>
</ul>

Hearing Loss And Tinnitus

It is a good idea to minimize being around constant loud noise or use earplugs/earmuffs. For those who are experiencing tinnitus, the following options are worth noting:
<ol>
<li>Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT): A way to change a person’s awareness and behaviour to make the ringing sound less annoying.</li>
<li>Tinnitus Retraining Therapy (TRT): A similar therapy with advanced tools that are placed in the ear to mimic the ringing sounds.</li>
<li>Masking: Hearing aid like devices that emit low-level white noise to mask the ringing sound.</li>
</ol>

Managing Tinnitus

Tinnitus is sound in the head with no external source. For many, it’s a ringing sound, while for others, it’s whistling, buzzing, chirping, hissing,…

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Adalynn
@adalynnh

The psychology of negative thinking

How do your hormones work? - Emma Bryce

How to Maintain Profitability in a Changing Market

Fooled by Randomness

What Are Yoga Asanas?

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Adalynn @adalynnh

The psychology of negative thinking

How do your hormones work? - Emma Bryce

How to Maintain Profitability in a Changing Market

Fooled by Randomness

What Are Yoga Asanas?

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Adalynn
@adalynnh