How to break obsessive thinking with The Blue Dolphin trick

In 1978, psychologist Daniel Wegner realized something interesting about the mind.

He did a study with subjects who were told to NOT think about a white bear. Guess what, they ended up doing the exact opposite. A more popular variation of this today is the ‘don’t think about the pink elephant’ joke often dropped in conversations.

Whether it’s the white bear or the pink elephant, the logic is the same. Try not to think of either animal and the damn thing comes to mind every minute.

More formally, this is known as the ironic process theory where making deliberate attempts to suppress certain thoughts makes them more likely to surface.

As you can imagine and have probably experienced, this can be a bloody nightmare during times of worry and stress. Trying to stop obsessive thoughts is not fun.

So what do you even do when your mind is infested with white bears?

You turn to a Blue Dolphin.

Promise I’m not trying to turn your mind to a zoo. Bear with me.

A big part of mastering the mind and emotional intelligence is realizing that while you may not always have control over the thoughts that enter your mind, you have control over how long you dwell on certain thoughts.

This is where the blue dolphin analogy comes in. When you find yourself ruminating over a stressful thought (let’s call it the white bear) you can shift your focus to something else(a blue dolphin).

The idea is to find a different point of focus and distract yourself from the thought that’s weighing you down.

Of course sometimes it’s useful to just think about a particular thought and let it out of your system. This can be done by dedicating specific time to thinking the thought through and putting it on paper so you can look at it objectively.

The idea is to accept your thoughts without dwelling too much on them. There’s little use in switching to a different thought only to get swamped by that one too.

Thoughts are meant to come and go. Just let them pass.

After all, The last thing you want to be stuck with is blue dolphins jumping all over your head.

The real deal of the online hustle

If there’s one goal that’s driving most of the world today, its freedom.

Freeom to work at your own time, freedom to make your own buck and freedom to explore the most instagrammable destinations without waiting for annual leaves.

Digital entrepreneurship guarantees most of that, which explains why most of us are gravitating towards that life.

But things aren’t as glamorous as they come across on social media. Very few entrepreneurs are willing to show the nasty side of things and Dina Rogojna is one of them

From co-founding a successful supplements online business, to working to over a million followers on Tik Tok, Dina shares some of her dark moments and the confronting aspects of being a digital entrepreneur.

It’s important to understand the full picture before diving into anything. This conversation offers just that.

P.S: Follow the show if you haven’t already and If you like what you hear, would be grand if you leave a review.

Emotion smart at your doorstep

In case you missed this last week, the missing piece from all of our education is here:

Since the advent of modern education, IQ has been at the forefront of our development.

Parents shell out big bucks to get their kids to become ‘smarter’ while teachers devote half their lifetime to the same cause.

While there is an abundance of skills to be learnt today, there’s one key missing skill that I consider to be the core reason behind our personal suffering whether it’s stress, rocky relationships and interracial conflict.

It’s called Emotional intelligence.

Head to emotion-smart.org above and jump on the waitlist. You’ll be notified when we officially launch.