Hello, it's Jen. How are you? I am your host and this is the Girl Brave podcast. I've mentioned this before, but I have a new project coming out and it is a book called Skip the Bad Songs, and I wanted to talk about what that means to me and some things that I do in my life that really, really, really work in order to make me feel less stressed, less anxious, and less worried about what other people think about me. So if you're interested in learning any of that, uh, this is the podcast for you.
So the book is called Skip the Bad Songs. And what that really means is we all have these thoughts that come into our head. Sometimes we think them on purpose, sometimes, sometimes we think them on accident or they're habitual. They're thoughts that we've thought over and over again. And most of those thoughts that we think over and over again are, I'm not good enough. I'm not gonna try out for this or that because, um, someone's going to make fun of me or I'm gonna make a mistake.
All of those things are these negative thoughts that keep going through our brains, right? So there is a trick, most amazing trick that I wanna share with you today on how to let all of those thoughts be something of the past. What this trick is you being selective on what matters to you and what doesn't.
Okay? So you might be thinking, well, guess what, Jen? It matters to me what my friends think about me. It matters to me if people are making fun of me. Of course those things are very valid. But here's the thing I wanna add on to that. You could spend all day and all night thinking about what you imagine your friends are thinking about you, or imagine how your friends are making fun of you, and maybe they're not friends that are making fun of you. Maybe they're the popular kids in class, whoever it is that you have in your imagination that's making fun of you.
How many hours or days do you stress over them making fun of you? Now, that's a lot of time for you to be imagining something that even if they are making fun of you, which I highly doubt, even if there are, it's probably one, two seconds and then they're onto someone else or onto another stupid thing to think about or talk about or gossip about.
So you don't need to spend two days or a whole night or a whole weekend worrying about something that actually maybe is done in 30 seconds if it even happens at all. So how do you stop that?
Well, the book is called Skip the Bad Songs, and I really want you to imagine trying this before you say, Nope, it's not gonna work for me. Imagine playing a Spotify playlist and a song that comes up. You've heard it too many times, you don't like it, you're gonna skip that song and you're gonna go to something that you like, a new song that you like the next song that you like. It was very easy for you to skip over that bad song and listen to the good one. So I want you to imagine those thoughts in your head and think about, I could skip over this thought for now. It's always there. I can always go back and play it if I need to, but I'm gonna skip over it for now and think about something that is more fun, better to do.
Now, if you can't think about something else, you can always try doing an action, doing a new activity, changing what you're doing to distract yourself. So if you're laying in bed, scrolling through social media, you come across a friend that you follow or a popular kid that you follow, and you automatically start feeling bad about yourself, put the phone down and think about what other things that you can do to make yourself feel better. You could go outside and take a walk. You could do your nails, you could do a facial play, a board game. I mean, anything that you can do to just distract yourself, it'll get you out of that rut, that mind rut that you're in.
So the way that thoughts work is they start to make little channels and paths in our brains. And the more you think of thought, the deeper that path's gonna be. It's like on a trail and there's been bikers and those bike tires are getting deeper and deeper. So that's what your thoughts do. So what I'm suggesting you try is to think a different thought. So it doesn't start to be ingrained in your head. It makes such a big difference.
I've used this so many times in my life where I'm obsessing about something and I think, wait a minute, minute, Jen, you're not sure this is a 100% true. What if you just think about something else for the next five minutes and then you can come back to it if you want?
And I really don't come back to it. I mean, yes, it might pop back into my brain, but I can focus on something else and it definitely takes practice. So try it this week. Something's in your mind and you wanna talk about it or think about it and it's making you very stressed. You know, yes, you can talk about it with somebody, but if it's something that you don't even know is true and you're kind of just fixating on it and obsessing about it, have a go-to thought.
Have a thought that you can just immediately go to that makes you happy. Is it about the last vacation you're on? Or, um, a fun experience shopping with a friend? Anything that you can, your go-to story that makes you feel better. And then before I finish, I just wanted to say one thing. If you are a friend of a friend, someone's friend, and you have heard someone gossiping about your friend, I a hundred percent, please, please, please plead with you just to let it go. You're not a hundred percent sure what the people gossiping about.
Were talking about you're gonna put your own spin on it and then you're gonna tell your friend that those people were talking about them, and it's just gonna make your friend feel worse about themselves. So don't gossip about people, gossiping about your friends.
Let it just go you by sharing that secret information about people, talking about your friend with your friend is not being a good friend to them. You're making them feel bad about themselves and you're making them really susceptible to being more shy and and ostracizing themselves with the people that you said were talking about them.
So if, if you are listening and you like to be a buddy and tell your friend that those people over there are talking about them, please think twice before you do that. And don't spread these rumors. Even if they're true, your friend doesn't need to hear it, it's just gonna make them feel bad about themselves, and it's gonna just ruin their night. It's gonna ruin their day. It might even ruin their week. It might even ruin potential friendships.
So please just keep it to yourself, let it go. If there's something that the group of people wants to talk about with your friend, then let that happen organically. But I wouldn't stick your yourselves in the middle of it and, uh, tell your friend these things.