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Useful Thinking is a weekly practice for your mind, hosted by clinical professor and mind coach Laura. Each episode works the fundamentals of how your brain actually operates: your mental patterns, your identity, your limiting beliefs, your subconscious wiring. You'll learn practical tools to direct your attention, filter out the noise, and think with more clarity and power. This is mindset work for people who want science-backed strategies for real personal growth. Think of it as a gym for your mind. Show up weekly and master the one skill that will impact every other area of your life.
Hello, and welcome to useful thinking. I'm Laura. This week, I want to talk about something that I'm sure many of you have heard the saying. What you resist persists. The more you push against something, more it pushes back at you.
Speaker 1:So today I want to dig into this. Is it actually true? And if it is, why? And most importantly, what tool can I give you to help you move through that feeling of resistance every time it shows up? And before we get into that, I want to take a moment to recognize everything you're doing here.
Speaker 1:Every episode that you show up is a gift you give yourself. It is an investment in the way you think and the way you think shapes everything you see in this world. The way you think determines what you believe is possible for you. It guides how you are going to move through all the spaces that you occupy. The way you think lets you tap into the very specific power that sets humans apart from every other species, which is the ability to actively construct your own thoughts to pick up the Legos.
Speaker 1:If you've been listening for a while here and to build something rather than just playing with the toys you were handed. I know I say versions of this every week, but it bears repeating because the kind of commitment you're making by showing up to listen to an episode that isn't necessarily built to be flashy and fundamentally entertaining, that is a real commitment. There is so much attention in our world for people who make dramatic declarations. And there's very little recognition and attention in our current climate for people who are building a daily or weekly habit. They're building something that is going to compound over time.
Speaker 1:And that's you a year from now. Your thinking is going to be in a substantially different place than it is today, because that is the path I'm paving on this podcast. That is the path I'm paving for you. And it only works for the people willing to show up and walk the path. So thank you for being one of those people.
Speaker 1:Okay. Now let's set our intention by the end of today's episode, you're going to understand why that saying of what you resist persists, why it works the way it does at a biological level. And you're also going to walk away with a very specific sequence you can use the next time you feel resistance building up within you, especially around the small everyday stuff that eats away so much of our energy. So, like I said, you have probably heard that phrase, what you resist persists. Gets thrown around a lot, especially in the personal development world.
Speaker 1:And it gets taught as some kind of universal law that the energy you put out comes back to you and that resistance creates more of what you don't want. I'm not here to argue against that. Actually, I think there's a lot of validity in that, but I want you to look at it in a different way today. I want to look at why resistance persists at a biological level. So first let's get clear on what we mean by resistance.
Speaker 1:I am not talking about the kind of resistance you feel when you're going to be doing something difficult, like starting your workout or doing some kind of difficult, demanding, hard, complex task. That is a different thing. We will talk about that in a different episode. The resistance I'm talking about today is the kind that you feel toward what's happening in your life right now. The things that show up that create an automatic internal protest, the complaining or getting irritated, getting defensive about something, catching yourself in mental loops about how unfair something is or how it shouldn't be this way.
Speaker 1:Shouldn't have to be like that. Why is this happening to me? I can't deal with this right now. All of that is resistance. Talking about the part of you that saying I'm resisting the current moment.
Speaker 1:I'm resisting what is showing up in my world right now. And to understand why that kind of resistance creates more pressure, we have to go back to something I've touched on already. And that is the concept of time, your brain, which is the biological structure and your mind, which is the philosophical structure. They handle time completely differently. Okay.
Speaker 1:The mind is able to build entire constructs. Time itself is a construct created by the mind. The mind invented calendars. Right? The mind is what is able to think about our past, our childhood, or imagine our future.
Speaker 1:It can predict outcomes, make plans, anticipate things that haven't even happened. So the mind is the part of us that can mentally travel through time endlessly. It's very unique human capability and it's incredible. Your brain, on the other hand, the actual biological structure does not work that way. Your brain only has one time zone.
Speaker 1:It only operates in the present moment. Whatever's happening right now is what your brain treats as reality. What's happening right now, as far as your brain is concerned, is what you have decided to do for the rest of time. Because that's what time is right now. Your brain doesn't experience this thing I'm doing is temporary and will end in ten minutes.
Speaker 1:Your brain experiences things as this is what we're doing. Period. End of story. So when you think about it from that angle, brain time versus mind time, when you resist what is happening, when you internally insist that this current moment shouldn't be happening to you, even if you have all kinds of valid reasons why you're giving your brain an instruction that it's biologically incapable of executing. Let me put it this way.
Speaker 1:If I told you to walk outside, turn left and keep walking until you reach yesterday. Just keep going until you get to yesterday. The brain is going to hear that instruction. Your brain is a very faithful executor of commands. It's a loyal little servant, and it's going to try to figure out how to get to yesterday because you asked it to do that.
Speaker 1:You said if we turn left and keep going, we're gonna get to yesterday. And when it can't locate yesterday and you keep getting more and more frustrated because you don't see yesterday, it doesn't give up. It keeps trying. It searches even harder and it loops on the problem. It pulls more and more of your attention into this impossible task.
Speaker 1:And that is exactly what's happening every time you resist what is. You're telling your brain, make this not be happening. And your brain takes that instruction and it tries to execute it, but it can't because the thing is happening. The thing is right here right now. So it keeps trying harder and the harder it tries, the more attention loops into the thing you're trying to push away.
Speaker 1:Okay. That's the biology behind what you resist persists. It is your brain doing exactly what brains do faithfully attempting to execute an instruction that has no execution path. And the harder you push the instruction, the more the brain dedicates its resources to it, which means more of your mental and emotional attention is hostage to the one thing you're trying to push away. So the way out is not to push harder.
Speaker 1:The way out is to stop giving the impossible command. So here's what that looks like in practice. The first move is what I call pulling out the welcome mat. When something irritating, frustrating, unfair, annoying, when that lands in your awareness, instead of mentally protesting it, you put the welcome mat out. You say, I've got a very special visitor treat it like some kind of VIP or bigwig is coming to your home and they have a special delivery just for you.
Speaker 1:A message they would like you to consider. You're going to welcome your guests. Not because you have to fake, like you love this thing that's happening. We are not talking about that. It is because it signals to your brain that you acknowledge what is happening.
Speaker 1:This is happening. And you tell your brain, yes, I see it. Here's the welcome mat. Come on in. Now your brain doesn't have to waste a bunch of resources trying to follow a command that would be impossible to execute.
Speaker 1:So the welcome mat is not this resignation of, I guess this is just how my life's going to be now. And it's not a fake positivity either. It's just welcoming what already exists into your space. There's really no other option. It's there.
Speaker 1:So go ahead and invite it in. It's there anyway. Step one is just to acknowledge that. And that alone often dissipates a lot of the charge behind it. I like to use a welcome mat because it's kind of funny and the mind loves symbols and humor is a very powerful emotional discharge button.
Speaker 1:Now you get bonus points. If you can go really overboard, get really emphatic in your mind, rolling out a red carpet for this thing you were resisting. The more of a big deal you can make out of welcoming it, the faster it's going to diffuse. And the quicker you free up all that biological energy your brain was spending on an impossible task. The moment you stop trying to make the thing not be happening, you have a whole pool of energy available for something useful.
Speaker 1:We love that word useful here. Let me demonstrate this on something small because I'd much rather you practice this on the small piddly stuff in your life. Then try to muscle it on the big emotional, heavy things. And the great thing about that is if you can do this with the small stuff, the bigger stuff starts to unwind on its own. The tangles that create all of those larger emotional responses will start untangling.
Speaker 1:If you just focus on the little stuff, because the mechanics of it all are very similar. You can build the muscle doing these smaller, easier reps. You're just going to do it a lot more. The little things happen to us way more than the big things do. So build your muscle on the little reps.
Speaker 1:And then when something big does land, your muscle's going to be there. It's a lot easier too. So let me give you an example from my own life. As you know, I'm a clinical professor and like anyone in a university, which is a large institution, you know, you deal with policies and policy changes. It seems like they're always rolling out some new policy.
Speaker 1:We just had a new policy on how we're going to document things, change the procedures and these decisions get made at an administrative level that feels completely removed from what's actually happening on the ground in the, in a clinical setting, a real life clinical setting. And that creates friction because the people creating the policies are removed from the day to day. And the people who are doing the day to day are removed from the rationale behind the policies. So this is the kind of thing that depending on the week could easily burn a couple hours of my energy, especially when we're in a faculty meeting going over this kind of stuff. Get in a whole mental loop about how administrators in general don't understand the work we do about how this new way of documentation is going slow everything down, about how it's gonna impact our ability to teach our students.
Speaker 1:Okay. And if I let that loop run, it gets louder because my brain is now dedicated to the task of make this policy not be happening. And that task is impossible to complete because the policy change is here. So I put out the welcome mat. Okay.
Speaker 1:The policy is happening. It's in my life right now. Welcome. Welcome to my life. Big change that I don't understand.
Speaker 1:And then I go through a sequence of questions. I'm going to share that sequence with you because you can use this on anything. First question is, is there anything in this situation that is actually mine to own? Anything that belongs to me? And then I ask, is it worth my energy?
Speaker 1:How likely is this thing to actually impact me three months from now? Or let's zoom out five years from now. Will this thing that is irritating the loving life out of me right now actually matter to me in the scope of my life five years from now? And that question alone has saved me more time and emotional bandwidth than I can describe because most of what we resist in the moment, because of the brain, the brain is just thinking now, now, now this is happening forever, forever, forever. I mean, it's not thinking long term.
Speaker 1:So that question allows us to slip out of brain time and use our mind to gain some perspective. And then I ask, do I want to take action on this? Or is this something to release? And then finally I ask now that I have this energy back because I'm not resisting it anymore. I've got this new energy.
Speaker 1:What's the next useful thought I can carry into this moment? I cannot tell you what your specific next useful thought should be, because I don't know what situations you're in. I don't know the mechanics of how your particular mind is operating. That is something I work on with clients a lot in one on one coaching. We figure out exactly the right thoughts that plug them into their own sense of agency and power, because that's what a useful thought actually is.
Speaker 1:A useful thought is not an affirmation that says I can do this. Right? The definition of a useful thought is one that reconnects you to your own sense of agency, to your own sense of power, to your own energy, and to your own ability to move forward. That's what makes a thought useful. And when we resist what is, we lose our sense of agency and power.
Speaker 1:We become someone things are happening to. A useful thought is the one that's going to put you back in the seat of someone who chooses what happens next, of the situation. So for me, in this policy example, one of the useful thoughts I landed on is this is not even going to last long enough to impact me because honestly, in five years, these policies will have been rewritten at least three times. So why am I going to spend any amount of my energy mentally wrestling with this? I'm not.
Speaker 1:I welcome it. I run my sequence. I land on something useful. I also ask myself if I'm so irritated by these policies that seem unfair or not well thought out, if I'm that activated by it, then I should be willing to switch my job basically into one of creating policies. If it's that important to me, then I should be the one who is making policies, writing policies.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna laugh as I've been saying that because I cannot even imagine a worse job for me than thinking up policies. Right. But that's what you're really saying. If it's so important, then I should leave what I'm doing right now and go into policy creation work and policy monitoring work and policy communication work. Right.
Speaker 1:And that is not how I want to be spending my time. So that's another way that you can look at that. That's a useful thought to me. No, thank you. No, ma'am.
Speaker 1:That is not how I would like to be spending my time. So thankfully there are other people who do love that. I am sure there are people out there listening to this that say, you know what? That sounds like a great job. Okay.
Speaker 1:So thank, thank you. Thank you to all those people who want to do that. For me, I want to put all my attention on how I can empower myself and my students. So your particular useful thought might be completely different than that. It might be something about your own capacity or your values, the things that really matter to you, or about who you're set on becoming.
Speaker 1:The point is it needs to activate you. It's not supposed to soothe you into just begrudgingly going along with something or accepting it. It's going to plug you back into your own power. So here's your practice for this week. Start to catch yourself in these moments of resistance.
Speaker 1:Again, I don't want you doing this on the giant emotional tangles of your life. Work with the small stuff, the traffic. I'm hitting a red light. I'm already running behind. I welcome Matt.
Speaker 1:Thank you. I see you. Yes. We're stopping. In fact, I give a welcome mat to every red light on the rest of this journey.
Speaker 1:Give me all the red lights you want. It's happening. Right. Or the annoying requests that you get from your boss out of left field, the thing at work that doesn't make any sense. Look at the minor frustrations that are pulling at your attention.
Speaker 1:There's so much of that diverting our energy. We don't need to deal with the big tangly, stuff. Okay. And when you catch those things, put the welcome mat out. If you can roll out the red carpet, put the flowers out, put the good towels out.
Speaker 1:Welcome to my home. Acknowledge that it is here. Put a spotlight on it again, not because you like it or agree with it. None of that has anything to do with this. You're putting the spotlight on it because you're done giving your brain the impossible instruction to make it not be happening.
Speaker 1:That's the whole loop right there. And then you're going to run the sequence. What about this? If anything is mine to own, is this worth my energy? How likely is this to impact me three months from now or one year from now, five years from now at the end of my life, will I care?
Speaker 1:Do I want to take any action on this or do I want to release it? And what is the next useful thought I can carry forward? Okay. So if you start doing this with the small stuff, you are going to notice in a few months time that the big stuff in your life starts untangling and unwinding all by itself. Because like I said, the underlying mechanism is the same.
Speaker 1:The underlying mechanism is resisting what is already there, whether it is a policy change at work or something much bigger. The brain works the same way, and you will have built the muscle on the easy reps. That's what I got for you this week. I hope that was good. Let me know if this landed for you.
Speaker 1:Let me know if that was helpful. And if you want to keep training, up on Substack, I'll put the link in the show notes. There's an article there every week you can read. That's designed to help you think in ways that empower who you are. And again, I will say a real genuine thank you to everyone who has been reaching out and letting me know that you're listening your mind and what you do with it is the key to everything else in your world.
Speaker 1:Thank you for sharing it with me. I'll see you next week.