Tips for a Healthier You: Countering Negative Thoughts
In his previous post, Dr. Stracks talked about the importance of recognizing and accepting emotions and feelings as a way to improve mental health. In this post, he explains what thoughts are, compared to feelings, and how recognizing thoughts and countering negative thoughts is essential to your mental health.
Countering Negative Thinking
Thoughts are a higher order human brain function that helps us make sense of feelings. Whereas feelings are based in physically based emotions, thoughts are further removed from our physical experience and thus tend to be more wide-ranging. As best as we can tell, they are unique to the human experience and involve the use of language in our brains to form the thoughts.
Thoughts obviously have their time and their place. If we’re building a bridge, I don’t want to use numbers that “feel” right. I want to analyze and make sure my data is correct and my thought process accurate. If I’m planning a vacation, I want to make sure I’m not showing up at a museum that’s closed that day or spending all my time criss-crossing town because I haven’t organized my itinerary efficiently. So clearly, it’s important to recognize when
The problems with thoughts tend to be twofold:
1) Thoughts are not always accurate, but when they show up in our mind, we rarely doubt their veracity.
2) We’re very good as human beings at thinking, and so we tend to default to that brain function even when we’d be better served by our feelings.
We can manage the second issue by getting better at understanding and identifying our feelings as we discussed in the last post, so here we’ll focus on the accuracy of our thoughts.
As I said, until someone points out to us that our thoughts may not be accurate, we tend to believe any thought that shows up in our mind. This can be something about our external world such as “It sure is hot out” or “I don’t think Lucy likes me very much.” It can also be about our internal world: “I’m really not very good at bowling” or “There’s never been someone better at poker than I am.” As soon as those thoughts enter into our minds, they generally get registered as facts. The truth is, though, that the thoughts are just a product of our brain function and do not have an external monitor helping us know if they really are true.
Add to this that a majority of thoughts are negative. In 2005, the National Science Foundation put out a seminal study stating that humans have on the order of tens of thousands of thoughts per day—and an astounding 80% of those thoughts can be categorized as negative.
That’s a lot of negativity bouncing around our minds every single day! It’s easy to see how our brain floating in that kind of negativity can be unhappy.
Because thoughts are only a product of our mind, though, we have more control over them then we would imagine. Learning to change negative thoughts into positive ones is a skill that’s worth cultivating by all of us.
The process of changing negative thoughts to positive ones is called Cognitive Therapy (Therapy of Thoughts). This technique is over a half-century old now and has been refined over the decades to be easier to understand and more effective to use.
A full explanation of Cognitive Therapy goes beyond what I’ll talk about here, but, in brief, it involves becoming aware of the thoughts that are floating around in our minds. Until we stop and notice what’s present there, we tend not to realize the messages that we are giving ourselves.
Once we recognize what we’re telling ourselves (such as, “I’ll never get that raise”) we can evaluate the thought objectively, see how the thought makes us feel, decide if we want to try to change the thought, and, if we do, call on any of dozens of different strategies to change the thought into something that’s more positive.
The technique does not end there, though. The two conditions that must hold for this to be effective are first, that the new thought must be believable to us, and second, when we recognize the new thought, our belief in the old, negative though has to drop down to close to zero. If those two conditions aren’t met, we haven’t done the work yet and have to keep going.
Many of you know that I’m a big fan of the Cognitive Therapist David Burns who’s written and spoken extensively on this topic over the past 50+ years. His original book on the subject, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, has sold almost 5 million copies and has been distributed in countries all around the world. Research has shown that reading that particular book and following the instructions in it can have a positive effect on mood and depression. If you like working on your own, Feeling Good or Dr. Burns’s newest book, Feeling Great, are both excellent resources. Our psychotherapists and Dr. Stracks are also available to offer support and guidance as you work on developing this new skill.
All of us here at Cormendi Health have seen significant, profound change when patients are able to put some of these tools to work. I encourage you to learn how to counter negative thinking and see the difference it makes in your life.
Would you like to learn more about countering negative thinking? Contact us through our website or by calling us at 312-489-8890 to set up an appointment with Dr. Stracks, Dr. Schubiner, Michelle Grim, or one of our therapists and coaches.