Detox Your Thoughts with Psychologist and Best-Selling Author Andrea Bonior

#034 Meet Andrea Bonior

Andrea Bonior is a clinical psychologist, college professor and bestselling author. She also writes a weekly column for the Washington post called “Baggage Check” where she offers her readers great advice.

She’s the author of an amazing book called Detox Your Thoughts. It’s filled with helpful, actionable tips for dealing with unhelpful ways of thinking.

Andrea is really good at taking complex scientific principles and breaking them down into helpful tips. I invited her on the show to share some of the strategies that help us develop a healthier inner monologue.

Some things Andrea and I discuss:

How to give unhelpful thoughts less power
Visualization techniques that can help you let unhelpful thoughts go
How to limit how much time you spend worrying about something
How to recognize when your thoughts are distorted
How your emotions affect the way you think
How to improve your sleep
Strategies that can prevent you from looking at your phone while you’re in bed
How to increase the chances that you’ll succeed
Why you can’t depend on willpower (and what you can depend on instead)
Scientific strategies for quitting a bad habit
Why you should own how you’re feeling
Effective coping strategies for dealing with uncomfortable emotions
How to identify unhealthy patterns in your life

Quotes:

“People who suffer from depression really need to learn to recognize that depressed voice. We know that that depressed voice is just not an accurate representation of how things are.”

“We have to have our environment adapted to what we want to actually do. We have to create a system that works. We have to choose goals in the right way in order to succeed.”

“This year above all else, our minds are cluttered. We have to make so many decisions in so many high threat situations that we never had to before.”

“The data really shows us that depression and anxiety are not caused by the presence of negative thoughts. They’re caused by those thoughts becoming sticky because we give them power.”