Challenging our own thoughts!

If someone said that all your thoughts may not betrue, would you agree? Isn’t there a possibility that some of our thoughts (let’s say 5%) are really not worth trusting? And what if they also told you that your thoughts can influence your emotions and even your behaviour? How would you react to that?

Well, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), one of the most widely practiced forms of psychotherapy with more than 2000 studies demonstrating its effectiveness for various psychological problems such as depression, insomnia, and obsessive compulsive disorders, says exactly this: don’t blindly trust your thoughts, especially the negative ones; evaluate them first.

“Nobody loves me”, “I can’t do it anymore”, “It’s pointless”, are a few examples of what we call “Automatic Negative Thoughts” that hold so much power that they affect your mood and even your behaviour. Imagine your close friend failing a subject due to sickness. How would they feel if they thought, “If I wasn’t sick, I would have surely passed” versus, “This always happens to me; maybe I am a failure”. The second one would definitely make the person feel more defeated and sad. The interesting thing is that, we don’t intentionally construct these thoughts. The “Maybe I am a failure” part in the above example just pops up in our heads and then messes up our emotional state. It is similar to the web page that suddenly opens on the next tab when we are using the internet. Let me ask you: do you blindly trust the page that opens, or are you a little skeptical of its legitimacy? This article is all about being a little skeptical of our own thoughts, especially the negative ones, and questioning it before blindly believing them.

These automatic negative thoughts are actually driven by rigid, core beliefs that we have about ourselves, others, and/or the world, which is a whole different story that shall be dealt later. Having said that, we also have to remember that just having these negative thoughts isn’t a sign of a problem or a disorder. Everyone has them from time to time. But imagine your close one constantly dealing with these thoughts, even when something good happens. How self-defeating and emotionally distressing would that be? A student finally scores average marks after a lot of failures through her hard work. Now if she starts to think that it was all because of luck and has thoughts like “I still am not good enough” or “I still can’t be like my sister; everyone loves her”, she will still be unhappy and may even stop making efforts in the future. Appropriate interventions are required. The earlier the better.

So how do we address these automatic negative thoughts? Well, first we have to understand that nobody is born perfect or with all the skills that helps to manage our problem. Like learning how to ride a bike or cook food, sometimes we need to learn the skills we lack to deal with our problem. Identifying and evaluating our automatic negative thoughts are one of those skills that we need to learn for improving our well-being. In the book Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Basic and Beyond (Beck, 2021), the author has mentioned a few ways we can develop these skills.

Identifying the Automatic Negative Thoughts

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy assumes that automatic negative thought usually precedes the negative emotion we feel or the unhelpful behaviour we show. However, we are more aware of how we feel or behave than what we think. So whenever we are aware of negative emotions or unhelpful behaviour that can be a cue for catching the negative thoughts that precede them. We have to intentionally look for such negative thoughts and develop a habit of writing them down whether on our mobile phones or in a diary, so that the efficiency of being aware of these thoughts greatly increases.

A person might be feeling guilty because she has not contacted her best friend for a very long time and even missed her birthday due to her own personal crisis. Now every time she wants to call her, the negative thoughts such as “She would be mad at me for not calling earlier” or “I have failed as a friend”, may bring on that guilty feeling. The guilty feeling may even make her more anxious and stop her from reaching out to her friend, and their distance may further increase. Her emotions and behaviour are affected. If this pattern of thinking repeats for a long time and spreads to other aspects of her life, the emotional distress increases to a point where she would be vulnerable to other mental health conditions. If we look beyond her feelings of guilt and anxiety and beyond her behaviour of not calling her friend, we would be able to identify the negative thoughts that have played their part.

Evaluating the Automatic Negative Thoughts

After identifying the negative thoughts, they need to be evaluated so that we stop believing them blindly. In the book Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Beck lists out a few questions that we need to ask ourselves that definitely help in evaluating our negative thoughts:

1. Based on what evidence do I think that my thoughts are true or not true?
2. What’s another way to look at this?
3. What’s the worst that can happen/ the best that can happen/ or the most realistic scenario?
4. What would I tell my friend if this happened to them?
5. What will happen if I keep telling myself the same thought versus if I changed my thinking?

These questions will certainly give us a different perspective and provide a check against our habit of automatically believing, what our mind feeds us.

In the above example, what if she didn’t believe her thought “I have failed as a friend”, by remembering the past experience where she helped her friend in numerous situations? Or looked at the situation differently and thought that, “Even though she would be mad at me, she will forgive me once I tell her how bad my situation is”. Learning how to do these would definitely help her mood and even her behaviour.

There are a lot more things that go on inside Cognitive Behaviour Therapy besides the above tools and techniques, which have been proven to be effective in helping people with mental disorders. However, these basic techniques are also very helpful when used in our day-to-day life promoting our well-being. There isn’t a rule that mentions, we should apply these basic techniques only when we already have severe disorders, is there? Wouldn’t it be better if we applied these tools and techniques in our daily lives now, before we fell into the clutches of severe mental disorders? One of the therapy’s goals is to make the person their own therapist. Why don’t we start today? Just remember that your negative mood and unhelpful behaviour may be due to automatic negative thoughts. Again, cognitive behaviour therapy is not the only approach to manage our difficult emotions and behaviours; there are many others as well. But considering the substantial evidence supporting its effectiveness, why not give it a try?

Make a habit of not blindly believing your negative thoughts. Challenge them, at least with one question, as mentioned above.

Reference

Beck, J. S. (2021). Cognitive behavior therapy: Basics and beyond. Guilford Publications.