Welcome to UnF*ck Your Brain. I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and founder of The School of New Feminist Thought. I’m here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you’re truly excited to live. Let’s go.

Welcome to this week’s Coaching Hotline episode where I answer real questions from real listeners and coach you from afar. If you want to submit your question for consideration, go to unfuckyourbrain.com/coachinghotline, all one word. Or text your email to 1-347-997-1784. And when you get prompted for the code word, it’s CoachingHotline, all one word. Let’s get into this week’s questions.

So, the first question is, “Since 95% of our thoughts are unconscious, how, besides meditation which is long-term, does one access and change the programming that started at seven or earlier?” Okay, so I just love brains because even in this question, why is it seven years old, right? Where we’re starting. Why are we believing that we can’t access the thoughts from seven years old versus 10 or versus four?

So, it’s true that most of our thoughts are unconscious, but the whole reason that we do thought downloads is that we bring our unconscious thoughts into consciousness, right? So, I don’t think it’s useful to think of unconscious as… it’s not like the bottom of the ocean that we can’t see or something, right? There’s no way to get down there.

I think unconscious just means that the thoughts are running, but we aren’t paying attention to them with our awareness, right? A lot of what we’re doing with thought work is we are using the part of our brain that can observe our own thinking to pay attention to it. We bring awareness to different parts of our minds or our bodies. And so, when we are trying to access our unconscious thoughts, we’re just bringing awareness to them.

So, I would think of it more as, you know how if you’re focused on something, you can often not hear background noise anymore, right? Music could be playing and you could hear the music, but then if you get into an engrossing conversation or you start working and you’re really focused, or you even are just daydreaming, you will stop actively hearing the music. But at any time, because the music is playing, you could just bring your awareness to the music, right? And then you would hear it again.

So that’s what I think unconscious thoughts work like. And the thought download every day is the best way to get access to them. That’s why it’s so important to write out your thought work, not just to try to do it in your head. When you write down your thoughts, it’s like bringing that awareness, but there’s something about the act of writing it down that really shows you what’s in there in a way that you don’t know before. I think it’s because you focus on it. When you try to bring your awareness to observe your own thinking, it’s easier to get distracted or start thinking about something else, right? Or just go in a circle.

But when you are writing it down, there’s some kind of flow there. I don’t know if it’s just because humans have now evolved, many of us, to use writing to communicate so much or if it’s… I don’t know exactly what the mystery is of why writing helps, but it does, which is why every creative writing class in the world has you do a free write to get your creative juices flowing. So, the thought download is why and is how you get access to those unconscious thoughts and that’s why it’s so important to do it in writing.

And I don’t think it matters what age the programming started because the point is you’re having the thoughts now, right? It doesn’t matter when they started. If you’re still having them now, they’re impacting you now. If you’re not having them anymore, they’re not impacting you and they wouldn’t be a problem.

All right, y’all, I know you’re as tired as I am of having the top podcasts in wellness or health and fitness categories be a bunch of dudes who don’t know anything about socialization and who are not taking women’s lived experiences into account. So if you are looking for ways to support the show and more importantly, make sure the show gets to more people, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. And bonus points if you include a few lines about the way you use thought work and self-coaching or anything you’ve learned from the podcast in your daily life.

Those reviews are what teach the algorithms to show us to more new people. It helps us get new listeners all over the world. And I’ll be reading one story from a recent review in each of these question and answer episodes.

Today’s review is titled, “Life-Changing,” and I can’t pronounce the string of letters that have been put in as a username. It says, “Take 10 minutes out of your day while driving, while cleaning, while getting ready. Just click any episode and give Kara 10 minutes to change your life. I guarantee you won’t stop after 10 minutes and six months down the road, you’ll find yourself in a completely new place that you’ve always wished you could be in.”

Okay, question number two for this week. “Hi Kara, I have been listening to your podcast since January and I’ve been trying to apply self-coaching to my life. I know you say to limit your focus to trying to improve one area of your life, but my self-talk is so negative in many areas (body, work, creative life), and it gets really overwhelming. How can I make progress?”

So, one reason I pick this… I think this is a great question. A lot of people have this question. I am going to answer the actual question. I also want to talk about this question because I want you guys to pay attention to how often you want to be confused.

I teach, “Pick one main thing to work on at a time.” Now, if you have multiple things to work on, what would be the common sense answer? You would pick one at a time, right? That’s what the teaching is. But our brains want to be overwhelmed and confused and not do anything. So we confuse ourselves.

When you guys think about being confused or overwhelmed, it’s so important to understand nothing outside of you confuses or overwhelms you. You are the only one confusing or overwhelming yourself. And confusion, in particular, is such an easy way to just not do anything. Honestly, with confusion, I don’t really even recommend baby steps. I’m like, just tell yourself you’re not confused. If I were not confused, what would I do right now?

So I just want you to watch out for that because whenever you’re learning something new, like thought work, your brain wants to be confused. And it will find, even if you understand 80% of what to do, it will find the one thing you’re confused about and then fixate on that for weeks or years, right, and hold you back.

So the answer to this is do one at a time, right? The problem inherent in this question is the idea that “it gets really overwhelming.” But it’s not overwhelming. Your thought about it is overwhelming. Your thought is, “My self-talk is negative in so many areas and that’s overwhelming.” That’s a thought. That’s not a circumstance. That’s not something that’s happening to you. That’s a thought you have. So you need to change that thought and stop thinking that.

That’s not just the weather that you’re reporting, right? But you think it is. You think you’re just reporting the circumstance that you have a lot of negative self-talk and it’s really overwhelming. But it’s not. That’s a thought itself, right? And so I would work on that thought because that thought is preventing you from implementing the very obvious solution of “just start with one.”

The whole reason that you can’t just pick one and work on it is because of your thought, “I have it in so many areas and that’s overwhelming.” So you got to work on that thought. That’s how you’ll make progress. And whatever thoughts come up about how you should do something else or shouldn’t work on it or there’s too many, you have to work on those thoughts. All right, my dears. That’s it for this week. I’ll talk to you next week.