You don’t need a quieter mind; you need to stop letting negative thoughts decide your life for you… and I’m talking about how to do exactly that in Episode 344. So, Let’s Talk About Mental Health!

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Episode Overview:

Your mind can sound completely certain of something, and still be completely and utterly wrong… because thoughts are not facts. But negative thoughts, in particular, can feel frighteningly convincing when they show up, especially when they’re loud and insistent… but thoughts really are not facts, and so you don’t have to let every anxious thought take control of your day. The secret is learning how to do that, which is what I’m talking about this week!

In this episode of the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, I’m talking about your relationship with your thoughts: why your mind can make negative thinking, racing thoughts and overthinking occurs, what automatic negative thoughts are, and why negative thoughts and anxiety feel like absolute truth… even when it’s just mental noise dressed up as certainty. This is for you if your mindset gets hijacked by worst-case scenarios, harsh self-judgement, 3am spirals, or that familiar feeling of being dragged around by whatever your mind shouted at you most recently. I’ll explain why trying to silence your thoughts or argue with every single one is exhausting (and usually pointless), and I’ll share practical ways to catch a thought and decide whether it actually deserves to take control. This is not about cultivating a perfectly quiet mind; it’s about learning how to stop believing your thoughts automatically, how to stop negative thoughts from running your life, and how to protect your emotional health one thought at a time. 

👉 Ready to stop handing your thoughts the wheel? Then let’s talk!

💡 TL;DR: Your negative thoughts might feel true, but this episode shows you how to stop believing your thoughts on contact and start treating thoughts as thoughts… not facts. 🙂

New here? Hi! Let’s Talk About Mental Health is your weekly dose of practical mental health advice for real life. I’m Jeremy Godwin (hello! 👋) and I keep things simple, honest, and doable so you can feel more in control of your life and your mental wellbeing. If you’re not already a free subscriber, sign up below to have episodes and transcripts land in your inbox every Sunday:

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Episode Transcript:

You don’t have to believe everything you think

Your mind lies to you all the time.

Something cruel pops into your head about you, or about how today’s going to go, and you just believe it, no questions asked… and then your whole mood changes to match that negative thought.

Now… you’ve probably always assumed that if you thought it, it must be true. But you’ve completely misread what a thought even is.

And once you know, it changes everything.

So let’s talk about… why you don’t have to believe everything you think.

Hello and welcome! I’m Jeremy Godwin and this is the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, full of practical advice to help you understand and improve your mental health.

This episode is not about how to stop negative thoughts, because you can’t, and it’s not about how to argue those thoughts into submission, because you can’t do that either. Instead it’s about something far more realistic and far more useful, which is how to stop handing those negative thoughts the steering wheel so that they control your life.

Because most of us go through our lives letting whatever pops into our head determine how we feel, and we rarely, if ever, stop to ask whether that thought actually deserves that kind of power.

And look, if your mind tends to run hot or if it forecasts disaster or likes to replay your worst moments over and over or quietly inform you that everyone’s annoyed at you, then I want you to hear this loud and clear: there is nothing wrong with you. That is a brain doing exactly what brains have evolved to do, which is scan for threats and clinging to the negative in order to protect you. The trouble was never that you have these thoughts; it’s what happens in the split second after one pops up, when you take it as the truth and then react like it’s a fact and then your whole day ends up shaping itself around something that your mind just made up.

Last week I talked about why you’re so hard on yourself, and that harsh inner voice is a part of this… but this topic goes wider and deeper, because it’s not just the cruel thoughts that you believe on contact. It’s nearly all of your thoughts. So today we’re going to look at why that happens, what it’s quietly costing you, and how you can start taking back the steering wheel one thought at a time. And before we go any further, let me give you one small thing that you can do the very next time that your mind throws one of these negative thoughts at you… because it takes only about two seconds, and it genuinely shifts something. So when the thought lands, don’t just let it be the truth. Put five words in front of it:

“I’m having the thought that…”

So, “I’m useless!” becomes, “I’m having the thought that I’m useless.” “Today’s going to be a disaster,” becomes, “I’m having the thought that today’s going to be a disaster.”

Now, I know that probably sounds almost too small to bother with… too “Jeremy’s banging on about positive wording yet again.” But notice what it does when you apply that. The moment you name it as a thought, a tiny little bit of space opens up between you and it… and you’ve then gone from being stuck inside the thought to standing back and looking at it.

Name it, and then you’re looking at the thought instead of being inside it.

Hang on to that idea, because everything else today will build on that. OK, so let’s talk about…

What are negative thoughts?

So let’s get really clear on what’s actually happening here… because once you see the shape of it, it changes how you approach it.

Your mind produces thoughts; constantly, all day long… whether you ask it to or not, it’s churning out a running commentary: on you, on other people, on what just happened, on what might happen next, on what your favourite Real Housewife just posted on social media. Right? All of that. Most of those thoughts you don’t even notice. But some of them land with a thud… and those are the ones that grab your attention, they grab your emotions, because they tend to be the loud, negative, and maybe even frightening ones.

And the thing that nobody ever taught us is that a thought turning up in your head tells you absolutely nothing about whether or not it’s actually true. It is just a sentence your brain made up while it’s trying to make sense of the world. That’s it. But we don’t experience it that way. Oh, no, no, no! We experience it as a fact being handed to us by a reliable source… and so we react on the spot as though it’s completely real. Our emotions kick in, right?

And you probably know exactly what all this feels like, because you live it. It’s the thought that lands the second that you wake up telling you today’s going to be awful, and you believe it before your feet have even hit the floor. It’s sending a message and then sitting there absolutely certain the other person is annoyed at you and reading silence like it’s a verdict on you. It’s one mistake at work spinning into, “I’m rubbish at my job! They’re going to figure out that I’m a fraud!” It’s lying there at 3:00 AM while your mind plays you a highlight reel of every worst case scenario in stunning 8K detail while you take notes like it’s an important documentary. Right? Different flavours, but it’s the same move every single time: a thought shows up, you swallow it whole, and your mood, your body, your whole sense of how things are drops to match.

Now, most of us assume that because a thought feels true, then it must be true. You are not alone here! We think that the strength of the feeling is proof. So when a negative thought, like “Everyone thinks I’m an idiot,” arrives wearing a suit and carrying a clipboard, sounding utterly convincing, we treat the conviction of the thought as being evidence of its truth. But a thought feeling true and a thought being true are two very completely different things. And your mind is genuinely terrible at telling them apart. It will deliver pure fiction with exactly the same confidence that it delivers fact… because your mind can convince you of virtually anything.

The feeling of certainty is not a fact check. It’s just a feeling.

And I want to be really clear about something here, because this is where a lot of us tend to tie ourselves in knots. The goal is not to decide that all of your thoughts are wrong, or that they’re all lies, right, and then now start arguing with every single one of them. That is not what I’m saying, and that is just as much of a trap… and honestly, it’s exhausting and it’s futile.

The point isn’t that your thoughts are false. It’s that they’re not facts, they’re not orders, and they’re not the truth about who you are. They are just thoughts. Some of them are useful, some of them are rubbish, most are just noise, and you get to decide how much any of them gets to matter.

Which brings us to the real question here, the one that changes everything… and it’s not, “Is this thought true?” The question is, “Why do I keep handing my thoughts the keys to drive my life?”

So with that in mind, now let’s talk about…

Why this affects your mental health

So… why does this one reflex, as in believing a thought the instant it lands, why does it do so much damage? Well, let’s start with why your mind is like this in the first place… because it’s not a personal flaw, and I promise you that it is not just you.

So… your brain, all of our brains, your brain evolved to keep you alive. And the way it did that was by scanning relentlessly for threats and hanging onto anything negative far more tightly than anything positive. A cave person who assumed the rustle in the grass was nothing probably got eaten… but a cave person who assumed the worst probably lived to be your great, great, great grandparent times a hundred.

So you have inherited a mind that is genuinely brilliant at generating worst case scenarios and dwelling on what’s wrong. Because for most of human history, that was a survival feature. The problem is it’s still running that same software now… except the saber-tooth tiger has been replaced by an unanswered text message or a slightly weird look from your boss. Your mind treats them the same way. It throws up the threat warning, and it does so with total and utter conviction.

So… here’s the mechanism that sits underneath all that… and once you see it, you’re going to begin to spot it everywhere. So a thought lands and you believe it on contact, and because you believe it, you feel it: your body responds, your mood drops, your stomach goes into knots, and now you’re in a worse state. And a mind in a worse state produces more thoughts in the same direction, which all seem to confirm the first one… which drops your mood further, which then produces more negative thoughts. That’s the spiral. And notice here what’s actually powering it. It is not the thought. The thought on its own is harmless, it’s just a sentence; it’s just words put together. What powers the spiral is the believing, the instant unquestioned belief that whatever just popped into your head is the truth. The thought doesn’t control you. Believing it does.

And this is the part that I really want to just like scream from the rooftops, so please hear me loud and clear when I say that you are not your thoughts.

You are the one noticing them.

Just think about that for a second, because it is genuinely a bit mind-bending and very philosophical… but it’s an important thing to get your head around. If you can observe a thought, watch it arrive and watch it go, then you cannot be that thought, can you? There has to be a ‘you’ that’s separate from the thought doing the watching. And seeing that gap, recognising it, that tiny bit of distance between you and the thought… that’s where all your power lives. It’s the difference between being the passenger who gets taken wherever the thought wants to drive, versus being the one who looks at the thought and decides whether or not to follow it. Most people never realise that the driver’s seat was theirs to take the entire time.

There is a huge cost to letting your negative thoughts do the driving. When you believe everything you think, you hand your entire emotional life over to the least reliable narrator that you’ve got: a frightened, negatively-skewed bit of brain that catastrophises for a living. Every passing worry gets to ruin an entire afternoon, if not a whole day. Every harsh self-judgment gets filed away as being fact. You make smaller choices in life. You brace for disasters that never come. You talk yourself out of doing things before you’ve even tried. And slowly, you end up living a smaller and more fearful life, one that is shaped not by what’s real but by whatever your mind happened to shout at you the loudest.

That is an enormous price to pay for believing something that was never more than a sentence.

And look, I have to be clear, it is not just you dealing with this. Please understand that! Some of the sharpest, loveliest, most capable people I know are quietly being run ragged by a mind that they have never once thought to question. They assume that the problem is that they think too much. But it isn’t. The problem is that they believe too much. And the good news, the genuinely hopeful bit, is that the believing is the part you can actually change. And we are going to talk about how to do that right after this very quick break.

[AD BREAK]

And welcome back! So, now let’s get into the ‘how to’ part of this episode, and let’s talk about…

How to take back the wheel from negative thoughts

Alright, let’s talk about what to actually do. And I’ll say upfront that none of this is about silencing your mind or somehow never having a dark thought ever again, because that’s just not realistic and it’s not going to happen… and chasing it will only wear you out. This is about small and repeatable ways of changing how much power your thoughts have. So here’s where to start. First…

Stop fighting the thought.

When a negative thought arrives, the instinct that most of us have is to fight it in some way, right? To fight, or suppress, or to debate it, or to like pile up evidence for why it’s wrong or to try to put it aside is also a form of fighting. And I get why: resistance feels like you’re doing something. But think about what you’re actually doing, right, even ignoring it. What you’re doing is you are treating the thought as a worthy opponent… which means that you’ve already agreed that it does matter enough to fight it. And that’s a recipe for disaster. Because you cannot out-argue a mind that pumps out thousands of these thoughts a day. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll win one or two arguments with it… but it’s just going to file another complaint and another and another, right? The harder you wrestle the thought, even if you’re ignoring it, the more real and important it feels and the more stuck you’ll be. So, stop getting in the ring to fight it. OK, next…

Catch it in the act.

And this is about building the habit of catching the thought as it happens and then naming it for what it is. This is where that little tool from earlier in the episode grows up. So adding on, “I’m having the thought that” was step one… and now I want you to actually use it, on purpose, several times a day. So a thought arrives, like, “I’ve made a complete mess of this,” and you catch it with, “Ah, there it is, I’m having the thought that I’ve made a mess of this.” You’re not judging it, you’re not arguing with it. You’re just spotting it, and labelling it. Because the moment you name a thought as a thought, you step back from it… and you’re looking at it, instead of staring out through it. It stops being the truth, and instead it becomes a thing that you’re holding at arm’s length while you look at it.

And honestly, the catching is most of the work… because you can’t decide anything about a thought that you never even noticed that you were believing. Next…

Ask who’s driving.

Once you’ve caught the negative thought, you ask yourself the question that this whole episode is built around: who’s driving here, me or the thought? So, picture it like this: your mind is a bus and you’re the driver, and the thoughts are the passengers. Some of them are lovely, some of them are loud, maybe frightening and absolutely convinced that they should be in charge, and there’s one of them up in the back who’s yelling directions at you really, really loudly. Now… you can choose to hand that passenger the wheel of the bus, and plenty of us do all day long, or you can hear them, let them shout, and just keep on driving where you were going. That’s the decision, and it’s available to you every single time a thought lands. Not, “is this passenger right?” Just, “Am I letting it steer?” Next…

Change the question you ask.

And this is about making a decision quickly because, look… you don’t have time to hold a full tribunal over every single thought that happens. Stop asking yourself whether a thought is true and start asking whether it’s useful. Does following this thought help me, or does it just make me feel worse? Because a thought can be completely accurate, and still be utterly useless to dwell on. And a thought can feel rock-solidly true, and still be total and utter garbage. Truth was never the right test. So when the thought turns up, you’re not fact checking it… you are simply asking, is this worth my energy? And does acting on this take me anywhere good? If yes, great, use it. If no, you let the thought just go sailing past like a cloud. Use the techniques I talked about earlier. You’d be amazed how many of your thoughts just simply do not survive that one simple question. Next…

Let it be there anyway.

And this one is for the thoughts that won’t leave, and this is the move that will change everything. Right? So you let them be there without obeying them, without engaging with them. Often you think that you have to get rid of a thought before you can move forward. You don’t. You can feel anxious and still make the decision. You can have, “You’re going to embarrass yourself!” running a loop in your head and still go and walk into the room and do the thing. The thought is allowed to come along for the ride… it just doesn’t get to drive. You stop waiting for your mind to give you permission because often it won’t, and instead you go and live your life with the thought sitting in the passenger seat grumbling away. Because the strange thing is when you stop fighting a thought and stop obeying it, that’s when it tends to lose interest and just drift off on its own eventually. Next…

Practice it like it’s a practice.

And this is the thing to carry with you: treat all of this as a practice, not a test that you have to pass or fail. You are going to get hooked by a negative thought again. It is inevitable. You’ll believe a horrible thought, and it will hook you in, right? It’ll grab you, and then you’ll react to it, you’ll spiral, and then you’ll only realise an hour later what just happened. That is not a failure. That’s completely normal. And it’s what the human mind does. It’s not either/or. The win here is not catching every single thought, because you won’t. They’re thoughts, not Pokemon… you can’t catch ’em all! The win is catching more of them more often, over time… and then being kind to yourself about the ones you miss.

Every single time that you notice that you got hooked by a thought, even if noticing it comes later, it’s like you’ve just done a rep: that’s the muscle getting stronger. And the good thing about that is that it compounds over time, quietly… until one day you catch yourself mid-spiral and think, “Hang on, that’s just a thought,” and you put it down.

So please don’t go adding, “Oh, I’m bad at not believing my thoughts” to the pile of negative thoughts! That’s just another thought, and you don’t have to believe that one either. If you do though tend to struggle with overthinking and thought spirals, please check out Episode 321 where I cover how to deal with that; you’ll find it on your favourite podcast platform, and it’s also linked in the episode description.

Conclusion

So here’s what I really want you to take away from this episode. A thought is not a fact, it’s not an instruction, and it’s not the truth about who you are. It’s just a sentence that your mind produced… and you get to decide how much it matters, and whether or not you’re going to let it take the wheel.

So… if you were to stop believing every thought you had, what would you do differently? Who would you be if your mind didn’t get the final say?

Because when you boil it all down, you are not the voice in your head. You’re the one who gets to decide whether to listen to it.

Each week I like to finish up by sharing a quote about the topic, and I encourage you to take a few moments to really reflect on it and consider what it means to you. Now… I’m keeping it simple this week with a quote by an unknown author, and it is:

Thoughts are just thoughts, not facts.

Unknown

Let me repeat that.

Thoughts are just thoughts, not facts.

Thank you very much for joining me today. Look after yourself and make a conscious effort to share positivity and kindness out into the world… because you get back what you put out. Take care and talk to you next time!

Join me next week when I talk about staying calm when your emotions take over, and check out my episode on overthinking and thought spirals next. It’s linked in the description. I release new episodes every Sunday, so follow or subscribe to never miss an episode.

Let’s Talk About Mental Health is an independent program. Discover more at ltamh.com.

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Let’s Talk About Mental Health.
Making Mental Health Simple.

Let’s Talk About Mental Health. © 2026 Jeremy Godwin.

The information provided in this episode is for general awareness on the topic and does not constitute advice. You should consult a doctor and/or mental health professional if you’re struggling with your mental health and wellbeing. You’ll find additional information on the Resources page of this website.