Breaking the Cycle of Negative Thinking with Dr. Matthew Sharps

Good day. This is Dr. Jana Price-Sharps with Mind Pilot. INTRO Today we have a guest. He has been a frequent guest on this podcast. His name is Dr. Matthew Sharps. We're going to talk about why is it that we tend to focus on the negative? Because human beings do. And the problem is, if you're a first responder or a combat veteran, you probably do it even more than most people. So we're going to talk a little bit about why that might be. And then I'm going to give you a few pointers of maybe shifting that just a bit. So, Dr. Sharps, welcome. Thank you. Can you talk a little bit about why our brain is wired to focus on the negative? Yeah, the brain is more or less a device for coping with the world. And the fact is, you don't have to cope very much with chocolate layer cake. Okay. You're kneading it to use the brain through most of human history as a survival device. And so there's a tendency to look at the problem and say, okay, this is what I'm going to solve. This problem is I'm going to get food, this is how I'm going to get shelter, etc.. One of the great difficulties, of course, is that there are many things with which you can't cope, negative things which simply keep going on. And therefore, you'll find people taking this relatively natural concept of, okay, here is a problem. I have to deal with it. But then, since it can't be dealt with, then going over and over and over it to the point that it can be highly problematic. Does that increase when people are under stress and therefore very high on that stress arousal curve? Well, certainly people are going to tend to focus more on the things that stress them. But there's an interesting factor that we often see under high stress. It's referred to as a perseveration and there are several uses the term, but it basically means that you are quite literally mindlessly going over and over the same thing again. It doesn't mean you're being stupid. What it means is you're not really focusing on the fact that I'm thinking about the same thing again and again and again. Now, if that's a stressful thing, will increasing that increase in the frequency and intensity of our thoughts, so to speak, is then going to increase the stress, which is going to lead to more of that kind of rumination and a positive feedback effect. And there are several specific psychological mechanisms that can contribute to that. Can you go over those? Yeah. Well, let's consider, for example, first responders or active duty personnel. They deal with some pretty nasty things. Okay. Whether it's law enforcement, the fire service, ambulance rescue, whoever, they're they're doing some pretty nasty things. Now, that means that when you're on duty, when you're at your station, when you're talking to the other people around you, your conversation is going to immediately gravitate to the negative. You're not thinking a heck of a lot about how wonderful everything is. You're thinking about your job, which by definition in all these cases deals with emergencies. Well, that means that what is available to you is primarily negative, and the availability heuristic operates a heuristic as a mental technique that usually works if it's done right. Okay. So there are heuristics that you use in everyday life to make things work better. Anybody who's ever cooked in the kitchen has specific techniques they tend to use that usually work well. The availability heuristic operates when what is available to you seems to take up an awful lot more of your consciousness than may in fact be reasonable. Our first responder is living in the same world that everybody else is, but with a much higher availability of nasty things to think about and remember and then talk about. And so, I mean, as a first responder, I mean, start seeing the world through the availability. Horrific as a quite fabulously dangerous place. Now, there's another factor here, too. It's called the representativeness heuristic, and that one's a little harder. So the definition doesn't really make much sense when you hear it. Okay. It's where I make a decision based on how representative the situation seems to be of its category. Now, it's almost impossible to make sense. And without an example, something I'll do with students, I'll feel okay. Suppose I blind myself. A blindfold should blindfold my sufficiency and I'm then going to haul around in a circle with a flowerpot full of marbles and fling some marbles up in the air. And I'll say, What's the probability of, you know, maybe all 17 or 37 marbles on the floor as opposed to exactly ten or 20? Everybody goes, yeah, 17 or 37. It's obvious, but it isn't the probability of any group of marbles out of 100. It's one in 100. The probability of getting ten is exactly the same as the probability of getting 17. When I then explain that people go, Well, we don't know. That's not how you said it. So I started recording how I it and then playing the recording back and Son of a Gun, That is it. Now what's going on? Do I really need to be whirling myself in a circle, putting on a blindfold? No, but that contributes to the idea that this event is a random kind of thing. It represents right representative to theorist, it represents randomness. And so therefore it seems like 17 is a more random kind of thing than exactly ten. Now, how would this apply to, for example, first responders to military veterans? What's available to them is the ruminative thought and conversation with their colleagues about bad stuff that's available, but it starts to appear to represent the world at large. So it looks to me like, okay, I'm going into the situation. What does it represent to me? Take the old movie Mary Poppins, okay? Most of all, that represents happy childhood memories, etc., etc. to a first responder, all that happy golden sunshine. If they're firefighters working in the Sierra in summer, that happy golden sunshine is pretty damn miserable. The temperature temperature gets up to 110 for as Mary Poppins goes, rescue workers are people who have worked in the world of rescue or fire. And we wonder why the hell did these stupid parents put their children in the care of a manifestly irresponsible woman who takes them dancing on the roof and believes in talking penguins? Something seriously wrong here? Mary Poppins probably requires medication, but that's the first responder. Or for the emergency room doctor, for example. Average person. No good that they're on the roof. Good talking penguins. Not a problem. What is represented here for the average person of a given topic, given system of thought can take on a completely different and wholly negative aspect to the firefighter, the law enforcement officer, other first responders. And then with the availability of that kind of thought, both in their own mind and of course, in conversations with colleagues, which tend toward what they deal with, which is emergencies that can start to give a picture of the world. Nobody suggesting the world of the first responders is wonderful, happy place. They deal with emergencies, but it can start to look even worse than it really is. And that can be very, very hazardous to mental health and to just having a decent, happy life. So is it fair to say that now of tendencies become habit patterns, that people don't notice, people around them they notice, but those people may not notice that they're doing that? absolutely. You're talking about the concept of mental set, essentially habits of mind. And yeah, I think it's probably fair to say that most people operate with a whole variety of his mental sets. A lot of people were aware of them. Well, excuse me, sir, without being aware of them at all. Okay. You have certain habits the way you do things, how you speak to other people, etc.. Those are based to some degree and culture or subcultural area of what what you're expected to behave, if you're expected to behave in a certain way at work as opposed to at a party. We have a mental set. We have what are referred to as scripts, ways of looking at and thinking about the world. They tend to be relatively automatic. Yeah, if I say to a group of people what you have for breakfast five weeks ago on Tuesday, have most of them have no idea, okay, which did you do first on that day? Get out of bed or have breakfast? Everybody knows they got out of bed first. That's the script. But now and I'll do this for my glasses, I'll say, okay, here's a guy who does it the other way. Every day he gets served breakfast in bed. He has breakfast before he gets up. They rich or poor, everybody gets rich. Okay. Here's a guy who had breakfast in bed today only. Okay? But he's poor. Is he sick or will not be sick? The point is, nobody ever thought about those questions. They're kind of stupid questions, but everybody immediately knows the answer within that cultural matrix. Everybody immediately knows the answer. We have all these automatic programs that are running in our minds all the time without really much in the way of conscious awareness. These scripts were offered to a psychologist or I can able to this. The scripts are a very good example. When people get more and more stressed, do they adhere to the scripts more tenaciously? That's a difficult question because it would depend on the setting. But in general, the answer is a qualified yes. You run into the concept under stress of automatic pilot. I one of the great and truly tragic examples of that was about 50 years ago, over 50 years ago, with the new hall incident where officers, law enforcement officers were surprised, essentially ambushed by extremely heavily armed adversaries. And one of the officers was found having attempted a full six round reload of his weapon, rather than putting in the water two rounds, which would have allowed him to deal with his his adversary quickly enough. He died. Now, why do people do that? Well, because that was back in the days when officers had revolvers with their six rounds. It was very standard for range masters in training to require you to have a full load in your weapon. It made everybody safer for specific reasons. Well, this is what we believe happened at the new hall incident. Officers basically began to do the full six round reload in the middle of a gunfight. And there are many other examples of that in both military and law enforcement service. So, yeah, there's a tendency under stress to go back to your training, to go back to those ingrained habits of mind, of those ingrained habits have to do with negativity, negative thinking, with reference to the availability and representative representativeness. Excuse my representativeness heuristics. It is absolutely possible that under higher stress you're going to go with your relatively automatic ways of thinking, of ways of dealing with war. That would be very different for a first responder than they are for someone who, you know, is in sales or some other occupier nation where there's an expectation of at least the appearance of happiness. That makes sense. So if somebody wanted to begin to shift their attention away from the negative, is it fair to say that they'd really have to focus on that for a while because their brain is still going to be pulling them back to those old scripts. Not focusing on the negative, but focusing on the fact that that is their habit of mind? Yeah, I don't you know, this is not really my area. I'm not a clinician, but I don't see another way to do this other than to have what we talk about in virtually every field field of training. Having a prior explicit feature intensive. In other words, you look at the details of this prior framework and think, if it here, I've been covering this situation, what is my usual way of dealing with it? Now, that's not enough to say, you know, how am I going to stop being like that? You have to have the explicit the term. We use this feature intensive. The specific details of this is the course of action. I am going to take to reduce unwarranted negativity. Now, you'd have to be completely mad to tell first responders, no, you're dealing with the horrible things, deaths and fires and homicide. Just be happy that that makes no logical sense. That would be bizarre. But to reduce the unnecessary stress of seeing these things as more universally negative as representing the universe as it is, rather than these specific aspects of my professional world I have to deal with. I like that planning behavior, and I usually, when I work with first responders, I will talk about, okay, for instance, what are you going to do this weekend? Well, we're going to go to, I don't know, major amusement park with our two kids. Okay. Is that fun for you know, I hate it. I get really overwhelmed. There's a lot of people there. I start monitoring everybody. I monitor my family. I am very hyper vigilant. And then I tend to make everybody miserable around me because I'm always saying we need to go over here. We need to go over there. This is dangerous. This is dangerous. And so nobody can just relax. okay. Okay. Now, being aware of your environment is important. And that's a good thing about being a first responder. You've been trained to do that. However, are there times when you're starting to get overwhelmed, you're starting to get overstimulated that maybe you can, I don't know, walk away and go into the bathroom and and take 2 minutes and just kind of cool yourself down, is there? And there's not a lot of quiet places at an amusement park, but is there a quiet place where there's not a lot of people that you can sit on a bench and just kind of chill out? And a lot of times they have found places like that. I had one guy, he he made a deal with his wife and he said, look, if I start getting overwhelmed, I'm going to go back to the hotel for an hour and then I'll come back to the amusement park. I don't want to ruin your weekend. I don't want to get angry and start, you know, kind of yelling at everybody. So if I find myself starting to get too amped up, I'm going to take those breaks. But I think that knowledge that you have a tendency to do that, that maybe your training has taught you to do that and now it is really impacting your relationships. That's important information. And a lot of times I have found clinically anyway, that people can begin to make a plan. So if they know that there's a typical way that they react, they can make a plan of how not to react that way or how to reduce that reaction. Does that make sense? Absolutely. You can think of another example I've known many first responders who have a tremendously negative reaction. Often they're shouting and yelling and screaming to the kids, going to the swimming pool with the kids going to the beach. And what you generally find is those particular first responders have dealt with juvenile drownings. But now the reaction of everybody else about what? No, we're having a wonderful live the beach. We're always going, what's wrong with you? Well, often the first responder won't know. The first responder is going well. I don't know. I just don't like the situation. I don't know what. They may start to come up with reasons they're not making anything up. But you may, with the mind, seek logical connection and think, well, you know, I don't know. It might be dangerous for not quite sure how you want up sounding very strange. Well if that first responder can become aware now what happened here? I've had these specific incidents dealing with the tragedies of juvenile drownings. That's what's making me behave this way. You can start then. And this is where the therapist who really gets it understands first response. First responders reality can be helpful because they're the solutions that are very idiosyncratic. It depends if you're more of a mental imagery, more verbal version, what have you. There's all these various factors that can come in there. But at the end of the ultimately, ultimately, what you're going to want to do is reroute those reactions, but you're not going to be able to do that unless you're aware you have those reactions and what they do for you. A lot of times what seems like rage is actually coming out of anxiety. And fear for the other people. Exactly. But spouses of children may interpret that as, you know, unreasoning rage rather than having its source in, you know, what appears again, through the availability and representative heuristic, this body of water represents danger to meet other people, represents recreation or cooling off. To me, it represents danger because what's most available to me were these horrible situations where you without going into any detail, where you found, you know, children who had died of drowning incidents or similar water related claims. And that's what's available to you. And it's not terribly surprising you're going to have those reactions. You have to be aware of the bases of those attractions before you can start to change the way the brain is eroding that information. One of the things that I encourage people to do is over the month kind of keep a few short notes, document it, and if you find there is a particular place that you get angry, you get irritated, there's maybe a place in town, a store or, you know, around a particular person smells or whatever, start keeping track of that, because a lot of times it only requires subtle changes so that that place areas smell whatever is no longer able to trigger you. But you have to be aware of it. You have to realize, okay, yeah, there was a shooting there five years ago. That's why when my my wife and my children are are standing in the parking lot too long, I started screaming at them, you know, But I did respond to that shooting five years ago. So I get why I'm doing that, you know? So does that mean you go, Yeah, we have all the time in the world. If it's a dangerous area and if it's not what I'm saying, but I am saying maybe you make a plan with the family before you go to that parking lot. Maybe you talk to them about, hey, you know, there's been some things that have happened in this particular area when we get there, can we just, you know, get out fairly quickly and get inside? Maybe that's what you do. Maybe you think about, okay, what are what are some things that I can do to mediate this? Well, maybe we don't go there after dark. Maybe because during the middle of the day, you know, what are some things that we can do that will make it more pleasant for you and more pleasant for your family. So if you have a lot of feedback from your family and they keep saying that you're focusing all the time on the negative, think about some things that you can begin to add in that are positive. And that's going to be different for every person. It doesn't mean you're going to put on rose colored glasses and think the whole world is wonderful, but it could mean doing some things that you enjoy and getting some distance from the things that are very negative, that you have been responding from cooling down the system and keeping the system cooled down is so very helpful with these kinds of situations. At any rate, there's going to be a lot more about this later. But thank you for joining today. Look, it's up on YouTube, on Instagram, on Facebook and we look forward to seeing you again. This is Dr. Jana Price-Sharps from Mind Pilot. Don't forget to subscribe.