Switch on Your Brain

I’ve been reading such a fantastic book recently. I bought it for myself for Christmas. I’d been watching Caroline Leaf youtube videos, and finally decided I needed to try some of this “brain detox” stuff she was talking about.

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Like any detox, it was quite nasty at first, and then it was quite wonderful.

The nasty part is that to begin with,  you need to learn how to become aware of what you’re truly thinking. Sometimes, negative, critical, stressful, or fearful thoughts just whip right through our heads without us taking enough notice of them to even be aware of what we’re truly thinking.

I was a bit shocked when I began to record my thoughts. I had no idea there was so much junk going on in my head. I just hadn’t ever stopped to notice. According to Dr. Leaf, it takes three weeks to get rid of a negative thought. Pick one, and just work and work and work at replacing it with something positive. The steps in her book are incredibly helpful, and I can honestly say I have experienced very positive changes since doing my first round of detox.

Dr. Leaf recommends taking 10 minutes a day to write down what you’re thinking, and then replacing the negative thought with Scripture, or some kind of positive thought or action. The first week, it seemed as though all my thoughts were negative, in some form, when I sat down to record them.

But during week two, I began to see positive thoughts popping up about things I used to think negatively about, and when week three rolled around, my original negative thought was gone. I just wasn’t thinking about it anymore.

The pull to return to old, bad habits is strong, but the longer a person resists, the stronger the new thought patterns become.

Another thing I love about this book is that Dr. Leaf shares how important journaling is – but not your basic, writing in straight lines kind of journaling. She says writing employs both the right and left sides of the brain, but the more colorful you make it, the more artistic and all over the place it goes, the happier both sides of the brain will become. It’s so much fun!

And it’s what inspired my work of art that I shared during one of my photo challenges:

I have missed pencil crayons! It feels good to be coloring again.:)

To learn more about retraining your thoughts, you can check out Dr. Leaf’s books or Youtube videos.