"Many would say it's a matter of practice, and if you're diligent, you'll pick up on it quicker. "It depends on how pervasive they are and how often you catch your thoughts and restructure them," she adds. It can take time to reverse long-held ANTs, Samson says. "Realizing this, it's still disappointing to be laid off, but without the same downward cascade that 'it's over' and things will never change," Samson says. If you've been laid off, are you really an idiot who can't hold a job? The facts might state differently: you have a college degree and have held several jobs long-term. Examine the evidence for and against your thoughts.Sometimes seeing your thoughts on paper - which engages a different part of your brain - can spur you to evaluate them more effectively, she says. "Anytime you use a word that's absolute, thinking something is 'totally' this or that, remind yourself that it can't be," she says. Notice how you frame what happens to you. Beyond that, Samson offers this advice to escape from ANTs: The first step to disarming ANTs is to take a mental step back and view your thoughts as understandable but ultimately unhelpful. "If you find automatic, distorted thoughts coming up again and again, they probably have their origins in other things." How can you escape from cognitive distortions? "We squirrel these schemas away as how we think about the world and ourselves," she says. These patterns of thinking might have started in childhood, based on behavior modeled by family members or the ways we processed stressful situations without an adult's input. We don't think out of the box or consider less-threatening alternatives. When we're stressed, Samson says, it's easier to lump our interpretations into distortions. To process information quickly, we tend to filter it into categories and impressions based on what we already know. "You're not noticing the ways your daughter is showing she cares about you," Samson explains. You ignore the fact that she's coming on Saturday and focus only on the thought that she's not coming when you wanted. Positive experiences don't count for one reason or another.įor example, your daughter calls to say she can't make Sunday dinner as you asked, but instead will visit on Saturday night. "The intensity of response can be enormous." It can even drive a wedge into relationships.ĭiscounting the positive: Maybe you dismiss any happy development as unimportant or due to chance. "Most of the time, these types of 'shoulds' are assumptions," says Samson. How rude! They're never getting another gift from you! But your response is based on an ingrained belief that people "should" send thank-you cards. How dare they? You went to a lot of work to choose their presents. Let's say your grandchildren didn't send thank-you notes for their holiday gifts. You feel guilty when you've done something you "shouldn't," and angry and resentful of others who break the invisible "should." Things "should" or "shouldn't" be the way they actually are. "Should" statements: You "should' be perfect, because mistakes are unacceptable. If you've fallen short, it's because you're completely incompetent - or so the thinking goes. The all-or-nothing ANT above leaves us stuck in good or bad, success or failure, with no middle ground between the two extremes. "When people get into a negative state of mind, it's really easy to remember all the bad things someone said or did to you, and hard to remember your successes." Feeling stuck in extremes of thinking "They're extremely common, and all of them can lead to a certain amount of misery," she says. While most of us succumb to cognitive distortions like these at least occasionally, it only becomes a problem when done chronically or to extremes, says Jacqueline Samson, a psychologist at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital. The focus of decades of research and refinement, ANTs tend to strike when we're anxious or depressed. Who is affected by automatic negative thoughts? That can sap happiness unless people learn to recognize and disarm these cognitive distortions. Comprising about a dozen categories (many overlapping), thoughts like these compel people to interpret distressing situations in unbalanced ways without examining the actual evidence at hand. This all-or-nothing way of thinking is a typical example of a pattern known as automatic negative thought (ANT). You're going to end up on the street with no means of supporting yourself. You've just been laid off, and doomsday thoughts ricochet through your brain in a chaotic rush: You're an idiot who can't hold a job.
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