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You track your expenses. You track your data usage. You may even track your steps. But have you ever tracked your thoughts?
Socrates claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living. Let me modify that to say that the unexamined mind can make life miserable. Negative thoughts are triggers for negative emotions like anxiety, depression, anger, worry, guilt, and so on. And negative thoughts left unexamined and unchallenged can wreak havoc on our emotional well-being. In practicing cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT, I help patients capture their disturbing thoughts, hold them up to the light of reality, and substitute healthier, more adaptive ways of thinking. Habitual ways of thinking, often formed in childhood, don't change overnight. Change occurs through regular practice of new ways of thinking and chipping away at old habits of mind.
Read the Signals
Emotions are the body’s signals that something requires our attention. We worry if a loved one is sick or our job is threatened. We get angry when we perceive others disrespecting us or treating us unfairly. We get anxious when we perceive potential threats we don’t think we can handle.
As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, disturbing and distorted thoughts ramble through our minds and leave negative feelings in their wake. We are often more aware of the feeling than the thought that triggered it. Feeling states are difficult to ignore, but thoughts come and go. Or put another way, emotions are sticky but thoughts are ephemeral. My patients are typically better able to recall what they were feeling when disturbing or upsetting events occurred than they are to remember what they were thinking at the time. Or they say that their emotions were triggered by the external environment, by things that happened to them or were said to them, not by whatever they might have been saying to themselves under their breath. We shouldn’t be surprised that our attention is outer-directed. Our attention is directed toward the world outside ourselves, not the interior world of the mind, not unless we make the effort to look inward.
One way of capturing disturbing thoughts is to use your feelings as a guide to your underlying negative thoughts. Read the signals. Whenever a negative feeling bubbles up, take notice of of what you are thinking at the time. For example, if you start feeling anxious, stop and ask yourself, "What am I thinking? What's my thought trigger?" Then jot down the offending thought in your thought diary or thought log.
Become a Thought Detective
Become a thought detective by keeping a running diary of the negative, nasty thoughts that run through your mind and then connecting them to your feeling states. A cognitive behavioral therapist may be helpful in identifying triggering thoughts and classifying them according to the type of cognitive distortion they represent, such as all-or-nothing thinking, catastrophizing, expecting the worst, emotional reasoning, personalizing, self-labeling, and so on. You may benefit from having someone outside your own head pick your mind for thoughts that make you anxious, angry, worried, or depressed.
Once you detect an offending thought and classify it, work on changing it. But keep in mind that you can’t directly control your thoughts, any more than you can hold back a sneeze. Sure, you can tell yourself not to think negative thoughts, but the offending thought will likely recur despite your efforts to send it packing. In the previous entry on this blog, I proposed controlling what you can and letting go of the rest. Letting offending thoughts roam about in your mind unattended leaves you at their mercy. You may not be able to control thoughts that pop into your head, but you can control how you react to them. You can monitor them and learn to talk back to them.
Using a Thought Log
One useful mind-tracking device I use with my patients is a Thought Log. The set-up is simple. Take a blank piece of paper (or create a table on your computer screen) and draw a grid comprising four columns and, say, six rows where you will make diary entries. You can label the columns as follows: Event, Thought Trigger, Emotional Consequence, and Substitute Thought. Then use the rows to enter daily events that trigger negative emotional states, as in this example:
Event: "Couldn't sleep. Was worrying about John."
Thought Trigger: "Everything is my fault. John wouldn't be the way he is were it not for me."
Emotional Consequence: Felt depressed
Substitute Thought (Rational Back-Talk) : “Don't make this all about you. Stop playing the blame game and figure out how to help him."
You might also use a fifth column to classify cognitive distortions to see how your disruptive thoughts fall into certain patterns of distorted or self-defeating thinking. For example, thinking it's always your fault in the example above represents both personalizing (assuming you are the cause of other people's problems) and self-blaming (tendencies to heap blame on yourself, whether deserved or not).
Use a thought log as a way of catching disruptive thoughts. Get into the habit of stopping yourself whenever you encounter a disruptive thought. Apply the SRS method—Stop, Rethink, and Substitute— to learn to change how you think to change how you feel (see 3 Key Steps to Changing Your Mind on this blog).
(c) 2019 Jeffrey S. Nevid
