YANSS 60 – How to turn your fears and anxieties into positivity and productivity with cognitive reframing

Reframing is a psychological tool that just plain works. It’s practical, simple, and with practice and repetition it often leads to real change in people with a variety of thinking problems.

It works because we rarely question our own interpretations, the meanings we construct when examining a set of facts, or our own introspections of internal emotional states. So much of the things the anxiety and fear we feel when anticipating the future is just the result of plucking from a grab bag of best guesses and assumptions, shaky models of reality that may or may not be accurate and will likely pan out much differently than we predict.

DownloadiTunesStitcherRSS – Soundcloud

This episode is brought to you by The Great Courses. Get 80 percent off Understanding the Mysteries of Human Behavior presented by Professor Mark Leary along with many other fantastic lecture series by visiting this link and ordering today!

This episode is sponsored by Wealthfront, the automated investment
service that makes it easy to invest your money the right way. Visit this link to to get your first $10,000 managed for free.

This episode of You Are Not So Smart is also brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio. For a free trial and 10 percent off, go to Squarespace.com and use the offer code SOSMART.

Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.

tom_uniformIn this episode, we meet Tom Bunn, a former commercial pilot who uses reframing to cure people of their fears of flying and Robert R. Morris, a startup CEO who is developing a social network to crowdsource mental health in which users reframe others people’s fears and anxious thoughts and in the process learn to reframe their own fruitless cognitive loops in their daily lives. RobertRMorris_BW_200x200

After the interview, I discuss a news story about how humanizing slot machines can encourage people to empty their pockets at casinos.

In every episode, after I read a bit of self delusion news, I taste a cookie baked from a recipe sent in by a listener/reader. That listener/reader wins a signed copy of my new book, “You Are Now Less Dumb,” and I post the recipe on the YANSS Pinterest page. This episode’s winner is Marion Low who submitted a recipe for Hertzoggies. Send your own recipes to david {at} youarenotsosmart.com.

Links and Sources

DownloadiTunesStitcherRSS – Soundcloud

Previous Episodes

Boing Boing Podcasts

Cookie Recipes

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet

SOAR

Koko

Slot machines are more addictive when we see them as having human-like intentions

Photo Credit: http://bit.ly/1jOHlFI