On this podcast and in my coaching sessions, I spend a lot of time talking about thoughts. Talking about how the thoughts that we have shape our feelings and actions, and how we can intentionally modify our thoughts, not to just make stuff up, but to focus on thoughts that we already believe, but that we know serve us better, in order to feel better, do the actions we intend to do and achieve our goals. So there's lots of focus on thoughts. In this episode, I'm going to turn that completely around and tell you the opposite. If you want to know why and how that still makes complete sense, I promise, keep listening.
Hello and welcome to episode 13 of season 2 of the PhD Life Coach. And today we are going to be thinking about why you should act without thinking. Those of you who are regular listeners will know that this is not what I usually talk about. Usually I get you to really analyze your thoughts and feelings in order to figure out why you're doing the actions you're doing and to try and generate thoughts and feelings that will make it easier to do the actions. And I stand by all of that. Okay. Super useful. If you want to know more about it, go back and listen to more of my other podcasts where we talk about it lots and lots.
But today we're going to be thinking about that action line. Now, if you don't remember the self coaching model, it has five components. I have a whole episode on it, by the way, if you haven't listened to that, it was a few weeks ago, go back, check that out. But the self coaching model really helps us to understand why we do the things we do. So we have five bits. We have the circumstance, which is the factual truth of the situation. We have thoughts, which is the story we tell in our head, the kind of cognitive processes. We have feelings, that's the F line, that's the emotions we experience in our body.
We have the A line, actions, those are the things that we do, and they can be the things that we do externally that everybody can see, or the things that we do in our head, like worry and ruminate and beat ourselves up. And then we have the R line, which is the results line, and this is the outcomes of our actions.
And what the self coaching model tells us is that thoughts create our feelings, feelings create our actions, and actions create our results. And by doing that, it can be really empowering. We can see that it's not our circumstances that are making us feel this way. It's the thoughts that we're having about those circumstances.
And then we can see what the consequences of those thoughts are. And then we can decide whether we want to keep that model or not. In some situations, it will be perfectly appropriate to keep a negative model, to keep a model where you feel angry or you feel frustrated because you think it's justified. And I talked a little bit about that last week.
Other times, you might see how those thoughts are really not serving you, and you might start to pick holes in them. Query, are these thoughts really true? Start thinking of other thoughts that might be helpful. And this is work that I would encourage everybody to do, that I am constantly doing, that I work on in my workshops with my one to one clients, and in my membership as well.
So why am I now talking about the action line? Why am I talking about acting without thinking?
It's because sometimes we can get in a thought trap. We can sometimes get ourselves into a situation where I'll do that when I feel confident enough, or I'll do that when I feel motivated enough, and we get caught up in generating the thoughts, thinking, okay, what do I need to think in order to feel confident? What do I need to think in order to find this task interesting? And sometimes that can just really slow us down. And it can create the impression that unless we're feeling the right, in inverted commas, emotion, we can't do the action.
Sometimes it makes things more complicated than it needs to be and sometimes it means that we're almost doing the same thought work over and over again, trying to work out what do I need to think in order to feel motivated to do my exercise or whatever. What I'm proposing instead is that you select a set of actions that you know are in line with who you want to be and where you always feel better afterwards.
The feeling better afterwards is a funny one because think about that model. Circumstances followed by thoughts about them, feelings, actions, results. There's nothing in that model that allows for an action making you feel better. Sometimes that's really useful to remember. We don't want to get into a situation where we only feel good about our day when we've been as productive as we think we should be, for example. So where we think that the act of being productive is what makes us feel good. It's not. It's the thoughts we have about the tasks that we've done that make us feel good.
And so in many ways, it's really useful to remember that actions don't cause our feelings, that our thoughts create our feelings. However, the one thing that the model doesn't really characterize is actions that have physiological effects. And physiological effects that directly, biochemically, affect our feelings in a way that is separate from our cognitive processes. It doesn't really allow for that in the model.
So let me give you some examples and then I'll tell you a little bit more about mechanisms by which that happens and why you might even want to do it anyway. My go to's are things that I've never regretted doing. They're things that I've procrastinated doing. They're things that I've put off for ages and ages and ages and things that I regularly don't feel like doing, but that I've never regretted doing. Once I'm doing it, I always feel better.
They're things that are in line with my future self. They're things that the me that I want to be more of in the future does these things regularly. And they're things that plausibly have a biological effect on my health.So for me, those things are having a shower. I'm not a cold shower girly. I know you guys might listen to people on Instagram telling yourself you need to freeze your tits off every morning. I'm not a cold shower girly. I'm just a shower, girly. It's nice. Okay, let's just have a shower. Feel clean. Love it.
Going for a walk, drinking a glass of water, putting some music on, and having a bit of a stretch. Those are my kind of five go to actions that I try and do even when I'm not thinking thoughts that are particularly conducive to them. So shower, walk, water, music, and stretching. I accept, model purists out there, that in order to do those things, I need to have a thought and my thought will probably be something like, this will make me feel better, which will make me feel purposeful, it will make me feel willing and then I'll do the thing. So, I accept there does need to be a little bit of cognition that takes you from not doing the thing to doing the thing. What I don't wait for though, is motivation to do the thing. I don't try and coach myself to really want to go for a walk, to really want to have a shower, to really want to drink water.
My thoughts that I try and nurture for it are way more pragmatic. Just Just go for a walk. You always feel better. You never regret it. Just a kind of much more focused on doing the action line, rather than worrying about whether I'm wanting it for the right reasons or whatever. It's thoughts and feelings that are just focused on, let's just go do the thing.
I want to kind of highlight the difference here, the difference for somebody who's worried about thought work and sort of needing to feel motivated before you do something, the thoughts will be I should do this thing. I don't really want to do this thing. Let's try and make myself want to do it. I wonder why I might do it. I wonder what I might get out of it. Let's try and generate some enthusiasm for it. Really sort of staying in that. Or, more commonly, because most people don't do active thought work, more commonly are, I'll go later. I'll feel like it later. Okay, so almost making yourself, um, like, what's the word, almost making yourself like a victim to your mood. So if I don't feel like it now, I'll do it later when I might feel like it.
My side, where I'm talking about acting first, these really pragmatic thoughts is when you hear yourself saying I don't really feel like it, saying, yeah, I know, but we are going. You know, I want you to channel the most pragmatic mum you know, who has children going, I don't want to go to school. Okay, but it's a school day. So off we go. It's that sort of no negotiation, no wasting lots of time persuading you that you want to go. We just are. Let's go.
And the reason this only works with activities that are in line with your future self and that create a physiological effect, is because it's really hard to sustain things that you've just told yourself, I've just got to do it. Whereas when it's something that you know you will feel better once it starts, then you only need to get yourself out there.
Okay, it's a little bit like I think I've talked before about the different levels of bravery it takes to do bungee, parachute, those sorts of things versus climbing up something or along something because bungee, parachute, you've only got to be brave for a second! Once you've jumped, not a lot else you can do about it, you're doing it. Whereas those other things you need to be brave for a more sustained period of time and keep yourself slowly moving up the high and scary thing.
So, using this action first approach with tasks that you know once you're doing them, you'll be glad. There is not one day, even when it's minging outside, there is not one day where I've regretted taking my dog for a walk. I go out and it's like, it's so cold. It's so rainy or whatever, but he's so happy. And I'm outside and it's fresh air and I'm moving. And there's something a little bit smug about being out when the weather's not that great.
And you're like, look at me. I'm out in the rain. And. You just know that once you do it, you'll feel better. Similarly, I don't know if you guys get it, that whole you're sitting on your sofa, you're sitting on your bed, like, I can't be bothered to shower. I just can't be bothered, it's too much effort. But once you get in there, you're like, ah, so warm, so nice. It's those things, it's where you just need to get going and then you'll feel better.
So in our model, where actions can't create our feelings, we follow through that traditional circumstance, thoughts, feelings, actions, results, why do these things actually make us feel better? First reason. I mentioned the physiology. So those tasks that I mentioned all elicit physiological responses in our bodies. These might be different physiological responses depending on the thing.
We know that being outside, particularly in nature, elicits biological responses in the body. We know that exercise is, exercise is associated with post task reductions in blood pressure. So you get lower blood pressure after you've exercised, you get releases of oxytocin and things like this, particularly where it involves anything social.
We know that physical activity generates It's called cytokines in the muscle. So these are molecules that communicate with our immune system and interestingly with our brains. And I might do a whole session on this at some point because it's pretty cool stuff. So most of the people who know me from academia think of me as a teaching focused member of staff. And that's what I was for like the last 10 years of my career, I'm really focusing on teaching leadership. But for the first 10 years or so of my career, I was a psychoneuroimmunologist. I looked at how psychological factors affected our immune system. So why we get ill when we're stressed, essentially.
And as part of that, I was part of a broader community that was interested in interactions between stress and immune function. And whilst I looked at how stress affects immune function, there was a whole bunch of colleagues around the world who looked at how the, how immune function. affects our feelings and our stress levels.
Products of our immune system can talk directly to our brain by various direct and indirect mechanisms, which change the way we think, feel and behave. It's why when we feel poorly, we'll generally act in the same way, no matter what we're infected with. When you then tie that to the fact that I was also in a sports science department where I collaborated new people who looked at how exercise induces cytokines, these immune products, you can sort of tie it all together.
You can see how exercise secretes cytokines, which talk directly to the brain, which change the way we think, feel, and behave. Interestingly, and I once did a FameLab entry about this. It went horribly wrong. That's another story. You might be able to find it on the internet.
Interestingly, fat tissue also produces cytokines that talks to our brain and changes the way we think, feel, and behave. That's really exciting. Anyway. I'm getting on a tangent. If you want to hear more about that, let me know. Um, you can always contact me on Instagram, where I'm the PHD Life Coach, on Twitter, where I'm still Dr Vikki Burns, although if you search the PhD Life Coach, you'll find me anyway, or through my website. So let me know if you want to know more about that stuff.
But basically, all of these behaviors actually induce physiological changes in our body that can change the way we think, feel, and behave. So acting first can directly, biologically change all of those things.
The second reason is because you're changing your circumstance, and whilst changing your circumstance doesn't necessarily change the way you think and feel, you can train yourself to do so. When you take an action, that means the result is you go out on a walk, your circumstance is now, I am on a walk.
And when you're on a walk, you can have whatever thoughts you choose to have. And for some of you, it might be, I hate walking. This is boring. Why am I even doing this? Hope this is over soon. In which case you'll get a little bit of biological benefit, but you won't get as much psychological benefit. I know that for me, even unconsciously, even in my unintentional model, I like being on a walk. And so the tendency is for my thoughts to be, Oh, this is so nice. I'm so glad I got myself out.
And that's why it's really important what you pick for these act first things, because this only really becomes reinforcing if it's a task that once you're doing it, it's very easy for you to think thoughts that make you feel good. I have never stood in a shower and gone, Oh my God, I wish I hadn't done this. Never. Okay. So this is why I'm not suggesting you do act first for your HIIT routine or your, you know, something that you don't really want to be doing, or that you don't enjoy there in the moment. This is for things that as soon as you're doing it, you find it very easy to have thoughts that make you feel good.
So that's the second reason. So first, direct biological effects of the physical activity that you're doing, whether that's because of the exercise you're doing or the changes in temperature that you're experiencing or being in nature or those things. The second thing is putting yourself in situations where you know it's easier to think the intentional thoughts that you want to think, where they're more likely to come up just by chance.
And the third reason is it reminds our brains that we can do things that we didn't want to do in the moment. By taking something that actually is quite easy to do, when we don't particularly feel like it, i. e. things that we generally enjoy once we're doing them, we remind our brain that we don't have to actively want to do something in order to do it.
We can just intend to do it. We can do it because we planned it. We can do it because it needs doing, just that really pragmatic, okay, just needs doing thing. We don't have to generate all these really positive emotions in order to do it. And I talked about this a little bit last week when I was talking about being able to do boring things.
So learning to act first, learning to act from a, Oh, well, we're going to do this because we know it makes us feel better and, you know, it's on plan, so let's go. If we can practice that with things that we actually quite like doing anyway, then we can sort of generate that feeling. for other tasks as well. Become sort of training for those tasks too.
And then the fourth reason, I think I told you there were three, there's four. I've given you a fourth one. The fourth reason is because it gives you a glimpse of your future self. So I mentioned that I only do this with tasks that are really in line with who I want to be in the future. Okay, the Vikki that I want to be really consistently in the future, regularly goes out for walks, jumps in the shower without faffing about sitting on her bed on the phone for 20 minutes before she gets in there.
Gotta love that! Don't tell me it hasn't happened to you. Um, she stretches regularly. She puts music on to make things feel nice and improve the mood. It's things that I want to do more in the future. And so when you then do them, even though you don't particularly feel like it in the moment, you're glimpsing that future you, where this is just part of what you do.
I've talked before, and I'm going to do a whole episode about it, about motivation and the kind of spectrum of motivation, but one of the most beneficial forms of motivation is integrated motivation where you do it because it's what you do. It's just, it's just me. It's just what I do. And so the more we can generate a sense with some activities that we do them without thinking too much. They're just actions that we do. We're rehearsing that sort of integrated regulation and making it much more likely that these will just become part of our lifestyle and part of our future selves.
So what can you do on the basis of episode? I always want you to go away from these episodes and actually try something. I don't want these to be those podcasts that you kind of listen to with good intentions and then just wait for the next one and don't change anything in your life. So what I want you to do is I want you to pick one thing that you think fits that criteria that you might want to act without thinking.
So something that you decide in advance that you, you mostly enjoy when you go and do it. That is something that you aspire to do more in the future, but that at the moment you sometimes procrastinate or put off. Okay, so. Pick your one thing. Oh, and the other thing is it needs to be plausible. Okay, it needs to be something that is actually achievable now. So maybe you have a desire to have regular massages, for example, and there's probably physiological benefits associated with that. But maybe that's not financially possible for you at the moment.
So it needs to be something that always makes you feel better. That's in line with your future self, that you often procrastinate at the moment, but that is plausible to do in your current scenarios. Okay. And next time you're feeling a bit fuggy. Next time you're feeling like you're just not getting on with things. You can feel that you're procrastinating from tasks. I want you to just go and do the thing.
Some of your brains will be going to, I'm going to do the thing and I'm going to do the thing every day. And I'm going to do the thing for 20 minutes and I'm going to do the thing. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. You don't need to, we don't need a routine here. We don't need a new structure. So much goes wrong when we try and make things too complicated from the start.
Just the next time you're feeling a bit meh. You're going to go and do the thing. Or the next time you think about doing the thing and hear yourself saying, Oh, I don't, I don't really feel like it today. That's when you're going to go, I know, but we're going to go anyway. And when you do, I want you to really try and remember and absorb how it feels. How long was it uncomfortable for? Usually hardly any time at all. For me, the ridiculous thing, and this is where it shows it is a little bit more about my thoughts and not just my physiology, is, once I've decided I'm doing the thing, I already feel somewhat better.
So when I start putting my shoes on, putting my coat on, putting my hat on at the moment, I'm recording this on the 1st of December and it's freezing! Um, when I start getting ready, I already feel a bit better. Okay, so it's not even the physiology of walking that makes me feel better, having made the decision that I'm going to do the thing.
So actually for me, I really feel uncomfortable for a very, very short amount of time. Notice that, because it makes it so much easier to decide to do the thing in the future if you're really aware, I'm going to feel uncomfortable for about three minutes, because I can't really be bothered. But after that, I feel fine. It's okay. I quite enjoy it. And then I start to feel better.
And then I just want you to just be really mindful of the thoughts you have while you're out there and the feelings that you're generating for yourself. Really try and remember when it feels good, try and make that really vivid. Try and make that really stick in your mind so that next time you want to, there'll just be a little bit less resistance and it will be easier to act without thinking.
I would love to know what activities you choose, whether you pick some of mine or whether you've got some others that you fancy trying out. Do let me know on Instagram or Twitter or through my website. Um, also on LinkedIn. Forget that. Always find me on LinkedIn too.
As a final note, it's coming up to the end of the year now. I've got some amazing podcasts coming up. I am going to do shoutouts back to ones that I think you should listen to from last year, because there's a bunch of absolute crackers, um, back there too. So keep an eye out for those on my social media as I remind you on those.
Make sure you are following me. Make sure you're on my mailing list so that you can come to my online free group coaching that I do once a month. Got one booked for December and for January. Keep an eye out for those. If you're not on my mailing list, you just go to my website, go to the work with me button, and then there's a sign up button there.
You'll get occasional emails, they're not very regular, and access to those monthly free group coaching. I am also booking up workshops for next year, so I do PGR workshops, all the way through the year on a whole variety of topics, like how to write when struggling to write, how to be your own best supervisor. How to overcome imposter syndrome, what to do when you feel behind, what to do when you've got too much to do, all of these things. If you're a student, talk to your university, ask them to book them. They can book them one at a time, or they can book them in a series. They get a little bit cheaper the more you book. So talk to your universities about that. If you're an academic, you can book them at department level, at school level, university level. Whatever works for you.
I also have supervisor training too. So if you're a member of staff and you think that would be of interest to your university, please do get in contact. you can use the form on my website, or I am Vikki@wemburycoaching.com. . You can find me, not a problem. So lots of different options to work together. Lots of ways that I can support you. Thank you so much for listening and I will see you next week.
Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.