The energy of thought | Penny Zenker | TEDxPSUBehrend

What would you say if I told you that you had the power to manipulate time? Would you believe me right? This is a scene from the movie The Matrix and this is where Neo the main character slows down time and dodges those bullets in a single moment, well critics he's not actually slowing down time but he is thinking and acting very fast , so it seems that time is slowing down. What I love about this scene is that he doesn't even know or believe that he's the one and that he has this power and then you know, right after the scene, Trinity, his fellow resistance member, tells him, you know you were so Fast as the agents, in the midst of disbelief, he puts a finger through the hole where the bullet passed through in his pants and said.

It's not fast enough, so this is a great metaphor for you because you have that power, you just don't know how to use it yet, like I said, it's not really about time, it's about managing the

energy

of our thinking, it's about create the unconscious. Aware because when we create awareness we open up options and opportunities and we actually dodge those bullets because you can't change your circumstances in most cases, but you can change the way you interact with them and that's what Neo is doing in this one. moment, Einstein said. that everything is

energy

and I believe that when you turn that statement around and turn it around, it is also true energy, it is everything, how energy flows through us and how we manage our energy directly dictates the quality of our life and manage our energy through

thought

s,

thought

s are energy, but Don't really believe it from me, take it from the scientists who have done study after study after study that say that our thoughts, our judgments and our perceptions directly impact our body and vice versa.

One of my favorite authors in this space is Kelly McGonigal. and she has written this book called The Perks of Stress. She is a health psychologist and through the book she tells people that stress is only bad for you if you believe it is. I know she's crazy right, she used to tell people that stress was bad for all of you. She passed the time and she told them that she would create diseases until she did the research. One study in particular that stood out to her and really changed her mind was that they tracked thirty thousand people for eight years and asked them about their cortisol levels, which is stress. hormone in their body, they measured, they asked them about the stress levels they had and also what they believed about stress, so what they got in their results was that the people who had a high level of stress in the last year were 43 percent more likely to die prematurely, but only those who believed that stress was bad for their health, those who did not believe that stress was bad for their health, actually had no greater risk of dying prematurely than those who had very little or no stress and then really What made this so much more impactful for me was that I had my own experience and it became real.

This is my son Ethan, he is 12 years old and last year, in January, he suffered an acute feeling of anxiety. He couldn't go to school. interact with his friends he couldn't function so we went to see a psychiatrist and in this first session we had she was helping us understand a little bit how anxiety affects the body and mind so she asked when we first got there . play a little game and go ahead and spin a couple of times so he spins and spas and then you know he was like that and she said that. Do you feel your heart racing?

Do you feel dizzy in your head and nauseous? in your stomach and he says yes and she said, are these the same symptoms you feel when you feel anxiety? and he thought about it and said yeah, she said, look when you feel it right now it's funny, but when you feel it when you go to school or when you go to interact with your friends it's debilitating and it only grows when you feel it and he says yeah and then I realized that it matters what you believe about stress and since it matters what we think about anything, another great example of how our thoughts impact our results is the placebo effect, from what some of you have heard talk about it, some of you may have experienced it, this little sugar pill that has the same biological impact as the real medicine. that is possible, it is possible because people believe that it will work, positive thinking leads to positive results, so the opposite is also true, negative thinking leads to negative results and that has a name, it is called the nocebo effect.

I know it well, that's why it is like this. critical critical that you know how to manage the energy of your thought so let's think and learn about thoughts our thoughts the National Science Foundation tells us that we have 70,000 thoughts a day 70,000 that's like one thought every second but here's the interesting part just 5 The percentage of those thoughts are new. Think about that, that means we are constantly 95% of the time repeating our thoughts over and over in our heads. Do you know what percentage of those thoughts are negative and the impact they have on us? your life and we all have these automatic negative thoughts that happen unconsciously, so things like you know, oh, that's good for them but not for me.

I can not do this. I'm not good enough. I don't have enough experience. strong enough I'm just not enough so self sabotage lives in the unconscious so what's going on right now? How are you judging me or what are you thinking about now? Are you still back in the Matrix? seventy thousand thoughts let me Google that and you're on your phone or maybe you shake your head in disbelief and say there's no way that's true about stress or maybe you don't like the sparkles on my shirt or the buckles on my shoes maybe that's how you're judging me and what I'm talking about is that our thoughts create our judgments and our judgments create our decisions and all of that happens in a split second before you realize this. moment and every moment so what about the critical moments in your life?

Are you aware of what you are thinking? Have you ever had a life or death situation or moment that would impact the rest of your life? Well, I would like to share it. with you and we will take you on a trip, so I was diving in Australia in the Great Barrier Reef and we were on an advanced diving course and I was very excited because in this advanced course you do a lot of different things than you normally do. So we were going to do a night dive and you know the ocean is like Las Vegas, there's activity day and night and it's very different during the day than at night, so I was really excited about tonight. diving and I was walking out to the dive deck that night and I noticed it was very cloudy and dark and very windy like you could feel the wind blowing and the waves were crashing against the side of the boat and the boat was kind of rocking and I thought yeah You weren't asking me what the best night was for a night dive, but you know I was anxious, but then I went down and heard the instructors talking about the safety of the dive and asking me if it was safe for us.

I dived that night and they proceeded to say okay we were going to do that dive but I couldn't get it out of my head that there was a question about safety and then everything seemed to magnify, the clouds seemed to come over me and the boat seemed to rock a lot more . I was really uncomfortable with this dive and luckily I was one of the first to enter the water and as I was standing there about to enter the water my heart was racing and it was so loud that it felt like it was in my ears and then it splashed.

I was in the water. Now I had to wait for nine other people to get into the water and those waves were crashing into me and pushing me further and further away. the area where they were jumping and then the waves kept crashing into my face and I was having a hard time breathing. I even had to put on my regulator which you normally don't put on until you go under the water so I was using precious air from my tank that I was going to need for later and then my goggles fogged up and I had to take them off and organize that and I I was getting further and further away from the group, I was hitting my arms and legs. and nothing was working, so the panic turned into fight or flight, so my thoughts crashed like waves.

I didn't train for this. This is dangerous. People die at sea. I could die. I could die. Remember earlier how I said that. Ninety-five percent of our thoughts keep repeating, just like it kept repeating in my head, that the fear was getting big and then I had this out-of-body experience, you know, do you ever experience yourself, you experience yourself and I saw that This death trance was not helping me at all and that realization is when the unconscious becomes conscious. Now I was truly aware that I had a choice: I could be the victim and give in to my fear and give up my power or I could be the victor and do This is a Great Adventure and then another part of me woke up and hit me in the face. and said, "This is pathetic.

This is not who you are. Take it back. Take a deep breath. So I did. I took a couple of deep breaths and with that, I was able to calm down and I could see that the turbulence over the water was due to the wind and the external elements and that under the water it was calm, so I made the decision to complete the dive and it was quite interesting. I returned relatively quickly to the group. It seemed that it was impossible before. Fear is like our kryptonite left Superman powerless when he was around and when I panicked in the water that night, I said As I grew in power, I gave in to fear, so by letting go of that fear, I let go of the resistance that was holding me back. return to the group, so I'm not saying that letting go of fear, anger, sadness or any other similar emotion will do it.

It will make it easier for you to do what you have to do but it will make it easier. I believe your experiences and challenges don't have to define you, but if you allow them, they will refine you. You have a choice and that choice. It always always begins with consciousness making the unconscious conscious and really then and only then do you really have the option to choose what this moment means and how you are going to interact with it and what I would like to share with you is about the ways in which I practice to create greater awareness and greater control over the energy of my thoughts, so number one is self-talk.

Did you hear me. I said I could die. I could die. Those words I was using right, that was actually as soon as I heard them. That negativity in those words was a trigger to break that thought pattern. Our words matter. A great example of this is Tony Robbins who did an interview with Nelson Mandela and said: Mr. Mandela, how did you survive 27 years in prison? Nelson Mandela got quite intense and said Tony, I didn't survive, I set him up. Wow, listen to the powerful use of words and the energy of those words, so what do you feel when you sit? survival you feel aggressive you feel angry you may feel hurt this would lead to a very different experience than if you were preparing for something what you feel when you are preparing you feel calm controlled with purpose very different outcome then your words reflect your thoughts so you really want to choose your words wisely and listen carefully number two is to concentrate on what I focused on that night while I was diving.

I focused on the distance that was being created between me and the other and I focused on the fear and the waves crashing against me. What we focus on is what we think about and if you focus on your fear here and what not. you want, you might get more of what you don't want, but if you change your focus, it changes your perspective, you change the way you interact with it, and it changes your results. Number three is physiology, when my heart rate was beating above 150 beats per minute, that's when our brain goes into fight or flight mode, that's when we lose access to executive function. of our brain and just by breathing I was able to slow my heart rate and regain that access to my executive function.

So you can do this too, you don't have to be in a life or death situation to just move. your body breathe or use your body position to change your thinking you can do this every day you can do it at work if you are distracted or at school if you don't want to do your homework you can do it in any context maybe a conflict or you are not getting the result you want, your body is with you all the time and lastly when we combine that with a purpose that is bigger than ourselves, we now have all aspects of what I call energy management and that means which is how we present ourselves during the time we have and we have to practice it, so there's a great Navy SEAL quote that says in a crisis you don't rise to the occasion, you go down, no pun intended, you go down. to the level of your training, but I would say that you sink to the level of your thinking, so he goes back to the matrix, so in the movie neo, when he starts to believe that he is the one and he isBy practicing using its power, it has granular agility and game speed, and if you want to gain greater agility and speed in the way you manage the energy of your thoughts, then you can manage your internal dialogue, direct your focus, use your body and your physiology and connect with a purpose that is bigger than yourself and now you have the power to avoid them. bullets stop those bullets of unproductive thinking that come from emotions like fear, anger, sadness, pain, guilt or shame, the fact is that you are neo, you are the one who has the power and you are always grateful .