7 Destructive Thoughts You Have Every Day

I Interviewed 100s of People On Their Most Destructive Thoughts, Here's What They Said & Why These Thoughts Continue To Fester

The Perfect Recipe For Destructive Thoughts (& Burnout, Anxiety, Depression)

I bet your mornings look something like theirs:

Alarm goes off, you reach for your phone. With one eye open, you scroll through dozens of notifications:

• Emails that make you feel behind on your work and anxious for the day ahead

• Social media posts that make you want to escape the mundane routine of your every day life; that make you wish some force of nature (like winning the lottery or striking the algorithm at the right time) will launch you into a more desirable reality

• News articles that report, once again, the world is ending and our democracy is cancelled, that make you feel hopeless and numb at the same time

• Business news about another 25 year old CEO who is worth $XXXmillions after their latest round of funding, that make you feel like your own accomplishments are not enough and saving money as it is, is near impossible.

Ugh. A wave of dread washes over you, but the show must go on.

You get out of bed, and like a zombie, you fly through your morning routine with music or a podcast on.

You send reply texts and emails to the most urgent groups so you’re not too buried for the rest of the day.

You feel exhausted. Too exhausted to work, so, you numb yourself with a huge coffee or breakfast item.

Hours later, you eventually hit a work-slump and wrap up for the day. You mindlessly return your doom scrolling on your phone with Netflix playing on the TV in the background, half paying attention to both screens.

Days and weeks pass, stress mounts, mystery physical ailments (as insignificant as headaches or indigestion) start to appear and pick up momentum to more serious issues like overwhelming anxiety, sleep issues, closing yourself off, or flaking on social plans that you once enjoyed. It all feels like a chore.

You can’t explain it, but you’re just not you anymore.

Is It ‘You’ or Is It The World We Live In?

This was me for the first 6 years of my career. Until one day, my brain broke.

I woke up in a fog. I lost all energy. I stopped performing well at work. I started forgetting everything. I couldn’t keep my tasks straight. I developed ulcers, migraines, insomnia. I was hospitalized numerous times, until I landed in the Mayo Clinic and was diagnosed with a chronic illness called Fibromyalgia.

It’s not new information that our thoughts and experiences create physical responses in the body (see: The Body Keeps The Score).

Fibromyalgia is no different. It is an illness of the brain. It means our painful thoughts cause painful physical symptoms in our body (like the ulcers, hair loss, weight loss, exhaustion, back pain, etc.)

At age 24, I was sick as a dog with 30+ different symptoms, but when I looked around, my peers weren’t feeling great either.

• 42% of adults have 1 or more chronic illnesses and that number continues to increase

• Anxiety is up 37% YoY

• 76% of Adults experience overwhelming, prolonged stress called ‘burnout’ atleast some days

For many of my clients, they have a laundry list of mystery symptoms that are filed under the umbrella terms like “anxiety,” “depression,” or “burnout.” These very real, once extreme, diagnoses are now sadly ‘the norm’ for most people.

When it comes to healing, most of us take long weekends, book lavish vacations, or try detoxes (dietary, digital or otherwise).

The problem is, these are band-aid solutions. After a weekend away, we come back to our normal lives and don’t change a thing. Even when we change jobs, or move cities, our doom scrolls continue and our thoughts spiral downward.

To really experience change, we must change our lifestyle.

Early Research

Back to my chronic illness journey - after years of hospital visits meeting with dozens & dozens of professionals, I learned that my thoughts affected my health significantly, BUT if I wanted to feel better, it was my job to monitor and correct them. No one else could do the work for me.

The only place to begin the healing process was with my darkest, most painful thoughts:

• What were they, exactly?

• Where did they come from?

• How long had they been around?

• Was anyone else thinking this way?

• If other people were thinking this way, did they have physical symptoms too?

Starting in 2018, I began studying, recording, categorizing, and re-writing negative thoughts patterns, not only in myself, but in hundreds of others as a coach and consultant.

I worked with hundreds of corporate employees in both 1:1 and group settings to uncover patterns of the most destructive thoughts that we all have every day.

What I found was alarming.

When and why did our thoughts get so ugly?

After conducting 100s of interviews over the years, I became concerned that even the most beautiful, successful, and well-loved people were having dark and destructive thoughts about themselves all day, every day.

The cause of these thoughts is our environment.

The world we live in is LOUD.

“An unlimited amount of information can be created each day, but a limited amount of attention can be paid. Therefore, information is not a scarce resource, attention is. Each person has only so much of it.”

- Berkeley Economic Review

Many people and brands are competing for our attention.

Our attention is a scarce and valuable resource that should be paid with care.

However, the loud world we live in makes it increasingly difficult to thoughtfully manage our attention:

• 3.2 billion images are shared on social media each day.

• 720,000 hours of video are shared on social media each day.

• We see 4,000-10,000 advertisements/logos/taglines each day.

• 5 exabytes of content are created across all digital platforms every 2 days.

  • *5 exabytes of information = the amount of content was created from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. We now create this much every 2 days.

Your attention is a commodity that people are willing to pay for.

$862B+ was spent in the ad industry in 2023. Superbowl ads are one example of how much brands are willing to pay to get in front of you for only a few seconds.

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” -Herbert Simon

Take away: Your attention is a valuable & scarce resource that many entities are competing for. If you don’t manage your attention, someone else will.

Because of the wealth of information out there, when we choose to focus on keeping up with everything, we're really choosing to focus on nothing.

Our Input

The constant influx of ‘news’ (personal, professional, or worldly) can create the sensation of “trying to keep up” but never feeling caught up. It’s a un-winnable, anxiety-inducing race to be “in the know.”

In an effort to avoid feeling out-of-the-loop, we’ve developed an addictive relationship with our devices. We habitually reach for our devices even when we know they’re charging in the other room; our thumbs involuntarily “ghost scroll” even when we delete an app.

On average we pick up our phones 215x a day, and see:

• 85 texts

• 126 emails

• 4,000-10,000 ads

• 2 hrs 27 minutes of social media - equal to thousands of images / videos depending on our scroll speed

• GenZ’s screen time is reportedly a whopping 9 hours a day

Everything we are consuming (articles, podcasts, news, social media, texts, emails, slack messages) is INPUT to our brains on how to think and behave.

We are consuming 5X as much information per day in 2022 as we did in 1986. It’s no wonder our attention span is down 33% since the year 2000 or that we’ve seen a 70% increase in anxiety & depression in young people since the inception of social media.

The quality of our thoughts has decreased with the quality of our inputs.

Knowing this, we should be as selective with INPUT (the content and information we consume) as we are with the food we eat. We have power and autonomy in what we read/watch/listen to, just as we have power and autonomy in what we choose to eat.

How Your Input Affects Your Thoughts

Even if you don’t have physical symptoms like I did, the “always-on constant consumption” takes a huge toll on our internal dialogue.

Internal dialogue is the conversation we have in our heads. It’s not bound by the same rules as expressed speech. It can be: words or images, fast or slow, and conscious or subconscious.

All in all, we have ~6,200 thoughts a day. About 80% (4,960) of our thoughts are negative, and 95% (5,890) of our thoughts are repetitive in nature.

“Our internal dialogue is moving at 10x the pace of expressed speech. Said another way, the voice in your head is a very fast talker.” - Rodney J. Korba

Due to the fast pace of our internal dialogue, most of our dialogue goes unheard and unexamined. Evaluating this unchecked dialogue is the biggest opportunity for improving our mindset.

The fast, negative, repetitive nature of our thoughts means we don't just say:

• I'm lazy

• I need to lose weight

• I'm out of style

• I’ll never have enough money

one or two times. We say it thousands of times.

What we consume has a significant impact on this type of dialogue because it tends to affirm and reinforce the negative things we believe about ourselves or the world.

For example, we can ALWAYS open up our phone to find someone skinnier, prettier, smarter, richer, more accomplished and more worldly than us.

That doesn’t mean our thoughts about being worthless are true; however, our input can act as confirmation bias to the most irrational & negative thoughts.

Shifting your mindset requires radical honesty about your internal dialogue AND selectivity with our consumption. When we talk about mindset work, we are talking about uprooting and rewriting thoughts, beliefs and perceptions that have been reinforced thousands of times, usually over decades.

This work is difficult, but worth it, as we create space for a new and different way of thinking that open up new possibilities and opportunities in our real lives.

If you’re curious about what you’re consuming, consider becoming a free subscriber to receive my ‘Input Workbook’ with exercises to evaluate what you’re consuming and how it’s serving you.

The 7 Categories of Self Destructive Dialogue

In my study of hundreds of clients (and thousands of thought patterns), I’ve found that thoughts are more than singular thoughts. Because of their fast-paced & repetitive nature, our thoughts become a lens in which we view the world.

I’ve broken these lenses into 7 buckets I call the 7C’s of Destructive Dialogue.

The 7C’s of Self Destructive Dialogue:

• Competing - constant striving to win 'something,' even when no competition exists

• Comparing - evaluating our social or work performance based on someone else’s achievements to to make our own accomplishments feel small or not-enough

• Criticizing - grading or berating the self or others

• Craving - continuously wanting or seeking of 'more, more, more' in any arena. Lack of satisfaction regardless or success or performance

• Convincing - talking yourself or others in or out of opportunities or relationships as a means to ‘stay safe’

• Controlling - over managing people or situations to create a desired outcome

• Catastrophizing - outsized & irrational reactions/responses to personal or world events

If these thoughts sound familiar to you, you’re not alone and it’s not your fault. The more I continue to coach and interview clients, the more these 7 categories are reinforced as ‘the norm’ across all walks of life, including gender, race, ethnicity, and socio-economic background.

The themes are important to know because, in my coaching experience, the most efficient way to work on our thoughts is NOT to go one thought at a time. (That’s a gargantuan, near impossible task when you consider the speed & volume of our thoughts).

A more fruitful exercise is to instead to work on the most dominant themes or lenses that shape our world view so that we can create lasting change. When we work on a lens of thinking, rather than a singular thought, we can knock out 1,000s of thoughts at once.

When I started working on these mindsets, my symptoms began disappearing one by one: the ulcers healed, my sleep improved, I felt more energized, and my relationships grew stronger. My clients had similar experiences.

While I can’t promise these results for everyone, I can promise that letting go of these ways of thinking will significantly improve your life in ways you can’t yet imagine.

I’ll plan to dive into each of the 7C’s & how to overcome them in detail in future articles. If you’d like to learn more, you can subscribe here:

A Sneak Peak Into 1 of the 7C’s: Competition.

Competition itself is not inherently good or bad. For example, it’s not wrong to put yourself up for a promotion and “compete” with a peer for the position.

Competition becomes toxic when we view ALL of our work and social interactions through a lens of competition.

We compete to be the highest performing, best dressed, funniest, coolest, and smartest, co-worker/friend/sibling, etc.

Life becomes a competition and the mind suffers loss to every unwinnable, imaginary battle.

We convince ourselves that a competitive mindset helps us achieve and do more, but in reality, a kinder mindset will unlock more doors AND leave us feeling mentally and physically energized, rather than drained.

We “compete” without realizing we have better options.

When we stop competing, we:

• discover what we’re really capable of instead of fighting so hard to win nothing

• focus on the opportunities we really care about

• connect better with others and cheer for them when they win

• distribute our energy & attention more thoughtfully

When we aim to connect with others rather than compete with them, we open new doors that we never thought possible, not only to our performance but also to our network/relationships. I’ll be coaching on this in the full break down of the 7C’s in the coming weeks.

1 Quick Reflection For Healing

Neuroplasticity is our brains ability to grown & change based on new thoughts and experiences.

If you are discouraged by the quality of your thoughts, know that your thoughts are NOT facts and they are NOT permanent. You can change your brain with experience & effort.

Your thoughts are not your fault, but they are your responsibility.

When you improve your thoughts, you improve your life.

When we realize our attention is a precious and scarce resource, we must pay it more mindfully.

Healing starts with mindful awareness of our thoughts and input. Mindful awareness for most of my clients begins with two simple questions:

• Which of the 7C’s is most significant to you?

• Which of your inputs reinforce this type of thinking?

I’d love to hear your questions and reflections in the comments section below.

The best way to support me as I continue to share this work is to like, comment, restack, share, & subscribe. Thank you :)

Love you,

Jessie