psychiatrist betrays
This habit damages your brain more than you think
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We often think that what our mind is thinking doesn’t make much of a difference. It’s just thoughts… However, they have more influence than we think.
Are you big on putting yourself down too? “Well, you did a great job again,” you might think when you make a mistake. “You’ll never get it right, what’s the matter with you?”. When we constantly think bad things—especially about ourselves—it actually weakens certain areas of our brain.
dr Daniel Amen is a psychiatrist and brain specialist who shares mental health and brain health tips on his Instagram account. A video is about how much we harm ourselves with negative thought loops and above all a bad view of ourselves.
“You can’t do anything!”: How bad thoughts about ourselves damage our brain
Negative thoughts inhibit activity in our cerebellum. The cerebellum, called cerebellum in Latin, is a part of our brain that is responsible for controlling motor functions. It coordinates our physical movements, but also our speech and thought processing as well as the ability to speak.
By cultivating negative thoughts and putting ourselves down, we damage our cerebellum and can even contribute to the fact that our speech center and our thoughts are even more disturbed and we make more mistakes as a result – a vicious circle. We put ourselves down because we can’t do something and we don’t think we’re good enough – and so indirectly we can really help make things less successful for us.
So it’s anything but a stupid calendar saying that we should believe in ourselves and have a positive image of ourselves. This is because we promote healthy activity in our cerebellum, which in turn ensures that our motor skills and our language center function well.
Study shows: Negative thoughts and brooding can increase the risk of dementia
One Scientific research by University College London (UCL) was even able to prove that constant negative thinking, worrying and brooding can increase the risk of brain diseases such as dementia. The study involved 360 people aged 55 and over.
Using surveys and brain scans, the research team found that the participants who had more negative thoughts had weaker memory, general receptivity and a poorer language center. The risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia was also increased in these people due to certain protein deposits in the brain.
Escape the spiral of negative thoughts with mindfulness
So if you’re the type of person who likes to put themselves down and tend to have negative mind loops in general, then it might be good to work on this habit. Because doing so will damage your brain a lot more than you might think. Of course, it’s not about falling into toxic positivity and just pushing away every negative thought. But watch carefully what thoughts come up when something is not going the way you like it. By looking at them from a little distance, you might eventually be able to stop being so caught up in the negativity.
Sources used: instagram.com/doc_amen, alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com, ucl.ac.uk