How to manage negative thoughts is an essential skill for maintaining one’s mental well-being. Everyone experiences negative thoughts, but it’s crucial to learn how to deal with them effectively. Here are several techniques to help you handle these intrusive and harmful ideas.
Pause for a moment and take a look at the thoughts that are currently occupying your mind. Are they positive, calming, and supportive? Or do they create a sense of chaos, negativity, and disorder?
It’s common for everyone to have automatic negative thoughts, as nobody is immune to feelings of fear, insecurity, or anxiety. However, how we handle these thoughts makes a difference.
Some people have developed a more rational approach to disabling negative thoughts almost immediately. For example, when a thought like “I’ll never get a job again” comes up, they respond with something like “I have successfully overcome similar situations before.” It’s important for all of us to have effective psychological strategies to manage these types of mental activities.
In this article, we will be discussing five effective strategies to disable negative thoughts. These thoughts are composed of mental images, ideas, and emotional states that do not contribute to our overall sense of well-being, and can even have a negative impact on it.
Strategies to help you turn off automatic negative thoughts
It’s a common question to ask where automatic negative thoughts come from and why they occur. Soflau and David conducted a study in 2017 and suggest that from a clinical perspective, these types of thoughts, along with negative images and ideas, gradually form the basis of depressive and anxiety disorders.
To understand how to handle negative thoughts, it’s important to know their origin and triggers. These authors suggest that automatic thoughts stem from our beliefs and perceptions about ourselves and the world around us. They are cognitions that take hold in our consciousness, arising as inferences, descriptions, and evaluations without us being aware of them.
It is worth mentioning that managing and gaining control over automatic negative thoughts is not a simple task. It requires effort, dedication, and a set of fundamental techniques. The strategies provided below can prove to be highly beneficial if you are finding it challenging to turn off your automatic negative thoughts.
1. Cognitive restructuring
Dr. Debra A. Hope from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (USA) explains that cognitive restructuring is a commonly used therapy process, which involves recognizing and challenging negative and irrational thoughts. The following are the steps involved in this model:
Recognize any automatic negative thoughts.
One must recognize the cognitive distortion that reinforces negative thoughts. Examples of such distortions include catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, and engaging in ‘all or nothing’ type of thinking.
One should challenge the negative thoughts and evaluate if they are helpful or not.
Lastly, it is important to challenge and replace the automatic negative thoughts with healthier and more rational thoughts.
2- Ant technique
This is a highly effective strategy that involves a visualization exercise where you imagine your negative thoughts as ants, little insects that move around aimlessly and occupy every corner of your mind. The objective is to eliminate them from your mind to restore inner peace. The process involves:
- Identifying any automatic negative thoughts.
- Identifying their triggers. Where do these ‘ants’ come from?
- Assessing their impact. How do these thoughts make you feel when they dominate your mind?
- Creating a more adaptive mental approach. How can you rephrase these thoughts to feel better?
3- Becoming conscious of your automatic negative thoughts
Becoming conscious of your automatic negative thoughts and their effects is a crucial step towards deactivating them. Often, people are carried away by the inertia of mental forces that condition their emotions, behaviors, and decisions.
A straightforward tactic is to maintain a journal where you can document the following aspects:
- Reasoning that hampers you
- Ideas that cause catastrophizing
- Critical evaluations that are negative
- Thoughts that are irrational
- Images that are negative
Along with these, it’s essential to describe how these thought processes affect you and the associated emotions and feelings.
4- The technique of challenging questions
Also known as the Socratic dialogue, involves a conversation between two or more people that encourages reflection and the ability to generate new approaches to problems. You can apply this technique to your own thought processes by asking yourself the following questions when a negative thought arises:
- What purpose does this thought serve? Is it useful?
- Where does this thought come from?
- Should I listen to it? If I do, what might happen?
- What would happen if I thought the opposite?
To improve the atmosphere of your mental universe, it is essential to work on it daily, and finding a strategy that works best for you is important. One practical exercise involves using a piece of paper and a pencil to create a worksheet with two columns: one for thoughts that weaken you, and the other for healthy reformulations of those thoughts. The purpose is to deactivate your automatic negative thoughts and replace them with more adaptive and positive approaches. This requires adopting a more flexible, innovative, and positive outlook.
It can be effortless to fall into the trap of a negative psychological filter, which stems from deep-rooted beliefs, education, personality patterns, or poor coping strategies. However, the outcome is always the same: your health, well-being, and potential all take a hit.
