Welcome to unfuck your brain. I'm your host Kara Lowentile, master-certified coach, and founder of the School of New Feminist Thought. I'm here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you're truly excited to live.

Let's go.

Welcome to this week's coaching hotline episode where I answer real questions from real listeners

and coach you from afar.

If you want to submit your question for consideration, go to unfuck your brain.com forward slash

coaching hotline, all one word, or text your email to plus one 347-997-1784. And when you get

prompted for the code word, it's coaching hotline, all one word. Let's get into this week's questions. Here's the first

question. I understand them thought work. We learn our thoughts create our feelings and other people

don't cause our feelings. I was wondering how this relates to social phenomena or theories like

mood contagion. I feel like I frequently see articles and possibly scientific studies that show

people's moods, especially negative ones, affect those around them.

Is this because of the thoughts we think when people are crabby?

Would love some clarification.

So, essentially, yes.

I just saw a great meme recently that was like, I'm an empath.

I can feel other people's feelings just by deciding in my own head that that's what they're feeling and then feeling it. I'm not doing it justice. But you have to remember that every study you see is performed on people who don't know about thought work. It doesn't mean that there isn't something of value in those studies, obviously, and I base a lot of what I teach on cognitive psychology. but when we're talking about something like that,

it's your own thoughts. So, like, think about a family member that's always in a bad mood. If your thought is, like, I have this thought about one of my family members, that's their favorite hobby, is being in a bad mood. And so it just doesn't bother me. So if you ask me, I'd be like, no, it doesn't really affect me. That's now. If you'd ask me 10 years ago, I would have been like, yes, it ruins the whole event for everyone. Everybody's stressed out. Everybody's upset when this person is upset. Like, it's overbearing and everybody can feel it. And I would have had a totally different answer. Those are just two different sets of thoughts I have. So it's our own thought.

I do think like sometimes, yes, we are able, sometimes, not always. Sometimes we are correct and our

guess about what someone else may be thinking, but that doesn't mean that their feeling creates

our feeling. It's our thought about it. So bottom line, yes, it's the thoughts we think when people are crabby or whatever

else it is. It's our thoughts. If we don't care about their negative mood, then we feel fine.

If we think a bunch of thoughts about their negative mood, then we feel terrible, especially when

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