Rob Dial

Why would someone spend hours imagining fake arguments that never actually happened?

Why would someone replay conversations from three months ago?

Why would someone create worst case scenarios while they're just laying in their bed at night, completely safe and warm under their covers?

If it feels terrible, why would we keep doing it?

The answer is because your mind is not just producing thoughts.

Your thoughts are producing chemistry and chemicals inside of your body.

Every thought that you think creates some sort of corresponding emotional and physiological response inside of your body.

It doesn't just stay in your head.

So imagining an argument with your spouse, and you have that imagination, if I say this, she's gonna say this, and this will happen, and that'll happen.

Your body will actually start to change as you imagine this.

Your heart rate will start to change.

Your muscles might tense up in some sort of way.

Stress hormones might be released in your body.

And your body begins preparing for a threat that doesn't even exist, but your mind is just vividly imagining.

And so from your nervous system's perspective, the threat is actually real.

And neuroscience often talk about this and how the body becomes conditioned to emotional states through repetition.

And so the core principle of it is this, repeated thoughts strengthen neural pathways.

making certain emotional responses more automatic over time.

And so the phrase that's often used in neuroscience, which you probably heard me say a hundred times, is neurons that fire together wire together.

So the more frequently that you think a certain way, the easier it becomes for your brain to continue thinking that way.