Why Your Worst Thoughts Arrive In The First 30 Minutes

0:00Hi, this is Monique Rhodes. Welcome to the In Your Right Mind podcast. This is a place where we're learning how to be happier by working with our minds. And every day I try and teach you something to help you be happier. I hope you enjoy today's episode. Why do I wake up with this constant negative loop of thoughts, self-criticism and regret, and then it comes back all day? That is a question from a student of mine. And I want to answer it properly because actually most of what's happening is physical and you probably don't realize it. So what goes on in the first half hour after you open your eyes, why your mind goes for self-criticism rather than anything else, and one thing to try tomorrow is what I'm going to help you with. So, you know that feeling, you're awake before you decided to be, there's no kind of gentle arrival, your thinking's already running, and often you're going to find that that thinking first thing in the morning or in the middle of the night isn't really very kind.

1:04And sometimes it's about today, the appointment, maybe the conversation you're dreading, but often it's much older. I don't know, something you said years ago, or maybe the years you gave to someone who wasn't good to you, there's an endless list of things that this could be about. I want you to know that there's nothing wrong with you, this is completely normal, and there's a decent physical explanation for why this happens. So, cortisol is a hormone, and most people know it as the stress hormone, and it is, but it actually has another job that you're probably not aware of. It's also the hormone that gets you up and going in the morning. So, the same chemical, and it's got two jobs. And in the first 30 to 45 minutes after you wake up, your cortisol climbs sharply, somewhere between 38 and 75% climb, with an average of about a 50% climb.

2:11And it happens in roughly three quarters of healthy people. So, that rise of cortisol isn't a reaction to anything, it's actually scheduled. And it would happen whether or not you had a single thing to worry about in your day. Now, from the inside, it doesn't feel like a hormone doing its job. It feels like being on edge is those something needs your attention. So, now think about what's actually available to you at that hour. If just waking up, nobody's spoken to you. Nothing's gone well today, because today hasn't even started. So, all of the ordinary evidence that you're doing all right is just simply not available yet. And what you do have is everything that's already happened to you in the past. So, your body feels alert, and there's nothing in front of you that explains it.

3:12And what happens is that our mind in that state goes looking for a reason. And what's the easiest thing for it to find is something from your past. Okay? Nothing from your past can be changed, and that's what gets picked over by your mind on cortisol. You know, I worked with a woman, and she told me she had two completely different opinions of her marriage, and they showed up at very different times of the day. She said that at half past five in the morning, she thought she'd wasted 20 years, and she'd been a fool to stay with her husband. But by about 11 o'clock with a couple of coffees in her, and a morning's work behind her, she thought her marriage was pretty good, but it just had some hard patches. So note that, there's the same marriage, the same woman, the same evidence, and she'd been taking the five-thirty opinion seriously for quite some years, because it felt more honest.

4:16It wasn't more honest. It was just earlier in the day, with a cortisol spike behind it. Now, the second half of the question I was asked, once you've had a thought, a few hundred times, what happens is it stops needing the morning chemistry to get going. It's practiced. All it needs is a quiet moment. You're on a drive, or five minutes before someone arrives. So when it shows up again at three o'clock in the afternoon, it's not new information, and nothing new has been discovered. It's a repeat. It's actually just a habit. I described it once to a woman as recognizing the ringtone. So I encouraged her to still hear the phone. She can't stop hearing the phone. She hears the ringtone. But I've just told her not to assume that the ringtone is important. And that's what we have to do inside our minds.

5:17So here's what I'd like you to try and it's small. For the first half hour after you wake up, you're allowed to feel whatever you feel. I'm not going to ask you to stop the thoughts because you can't. And if you try and stop the thoughts, it tends to make them louder. What I want to ask of you is you don't let the feeling turn into a conclusion. Those are two separate things. The feeling is one. The conclusion you draw from the feeling is the other. And the conclusion is the part that's following you around all day. Feeling not so great at six in the morning, it's uncomfortable. But if you decide at six o'clock in the morning that your life has been a waste, that's what ruins the next 12 hours. So nothing gets decided in that first half hour when you wake up. Not about your marriage, not about your choices, not about whether you've done enough with your life.

6:17And if it helps say it out loud, this is the six o'clock version. I'll see how I feel at 11. And the second thing is get out of bed. Lying still in the dark is the worst possible position for this. But if you get up out of bed, open the curtains, fill the kettle, move around for four or five minutes. This is going to change what's happening in your body far more than trying to think your way out of it. And some of you will be thinking, but some of those regrets that I think first thing in the morning are real. And of course they are. You've made mistakes. But so is every single person who's lived long enough to have a past. The question isn't whether those regrets are real. The question is whether at six in the morning with your quarters old climbing and nothing else to go on, is this a good time to be going through them? If a friend rang you at that hour and started listing everything she'd got wrong in her life, you'd tell her to go back to bed.

7:24You would never let her speak about herself like that. Someone else will say, Mark tried thinking positively instead and it doesn't work. I know it doesn't. And I'll let you off that. Arguing with those thoughts is hard work and you have very little energy for an argument at that hour. So you're not trying to win anything. You're just trying to decide. You're just trying not to decide anything yet at that hour. Here's one more thing about what turns up in the mornings. A lot of it will be about real situations. But notice how much of it is about the person you used to be and about the choices you can't do anything about anymore. And that makes sense when you think about it. Your past is easy to reach and completely fixed. So when your body wants a reason to feel on edge, that's the material that comes up first. And you might feel like the morning is when you finally see yourself honestly, that the rest of the day is a bit of a performance.

8:30And there's a little bit of truth underneath that. But I don't think that's what's happening. Your body's alert. There's nothing in front of you to explain it and your own history is the easiest thing to reach for. That's not clarity. It's just the hardest half hour of the day to think clearly in. So plenty of people get exactly the same rise in cortisol and they barely notice it. The difference is where they were sitting before they woke up and that can be measured. So you're not waking up to the truth about yourself. You're waking up to a hormone. See if you can wait until 11 before you believe any of it. Don't forget to do the happiness quiz. The link is in the description or go to iantend2behappy.com. As always, be kind. Take care. Go gently in the world.