Challenging Negative Thoughts

There are two broad ways people can approach handling their negative or worrisome thoughts. This article will talk about the idea of challenging them and trying to replace them with more realistic alternatives. In a second article I talk about the idea of accepting and rolling with your thoughts. For most people a mix of both approaches will probably help. It's not a matter of siding with only one or the other.

The idea that people can improve their lives by getting a hold over their maladaptive thoughts is very common. I don't think I really have to explain how if you hold inaccurate beliefs about the world they will lead you to think and act in ways that can subtract from your life. Most people just intuitively understand this and have come to that conclusion on their own. The concept also comes up in a lot of self-help material.

As a formal psychological treatment the concept of changing negative thoughts is most associated with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. This approach suggests a number of practical applications based on the idea that a person's mood, thoughts (cognitions), and behavior can all influence each other. Many of the ideas below are summarized from it. Of course, whole books have been written about it, so I can only give little snap shots of the full theory and approach.

First I want to provide some perspective on handling negative thoughts, because the concept can be a bit over-hyped at times:

Challenging negative thoughts isn't a cure-all

Managing negative thoughts can undeniably help people with their problems. In my experience it's not the single solution to everything though. I know some self-help books do portray it that way. I find understanding the principles behind questioning your negative thinking can take a bite out of many problems. The concepts are especially good at eliminating a person's most over-the-top and inaccurate beliefs and ways of looking at the world. These concepts won't completely eliminate feelings of nervousness or sadness or insecurity for the rest of someone's life though.

Many people can only make so much headway in their problems by delving into how they think about them. They may also need to use other approaches such as facing their fears or taking steps to clear up real world sources of stress and unhappiness. Another problem is that people will often report that their more negative thoughts just 'feel' right and trying to think otherwise feels fake and forced and that they 'know' deep down what they're telling themselves isn't true. To really change their thoughts many people need to have life experiences that support a new belief system.

Challenging your thoughts needs to be practiced

The more experience you have with noticing and challenging your negative thoughts, the easier it will be to take their sting away. Just reading about the concept can help a good deal right away, but even more improvement will come with time. After a while you'll also start to get more familiar with the directions your mind tends to go. Like you might think, "Oh, I'm worried about this conference I have to go to. I'll probably start predicting the worst and getting myself worked up about possible annoying situations that haven't even happened yet."

Understanding negative thoughts

A big step to challenging negative thoughts is just to understand what they are and how they work. Many of the psychologists who contributed to CBT have identified the core ways many thoughts are distorted or problematic. For example, one way our thinking can go wrong is when we view things in stark Black and White terms. If you've done any reading in this area already you probably know all about cognitive distortions. I talk about them in this article:

Cognitive Distortions

More on the topic of social issues, I also cover some of the insecurities I've noticed shyer people tend to have:

As you may find by reading that last article, sometimes it helps people just to know that the insecurities they have are extremely common, and aren't some rare personal failing they have.

Automatic thoughts and deeper beliefs

Aside from knowing the types of maladaptive thinking we can all fall into, the second part of understanding negative thinking is learning how these thoughts usually appear. CBT holds that when we're in certain situations we'll have negative thoughts that pop into our mind so quickly and automatically that we don't even notice them. Just because we don't pay attention to them doesn't mean they don't influence our mood or behavior however.

Negative thoughts can also appear in the form of self-defeating statements that seem to play over and over again in a loop, usually in response to thinking about a problem area. They may also take the form of an inner critic who makes a negative running commentary on everything; "Oh look, you put your foot in your mouth just now. You suck with people.", "You failed to make eye contact with that person. You always do that."

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy theorizes that these knee-jerk negative thoughts originate in deeper beliefs about ourselves and how we think the world works. If someone has uncharacteristically negative or unhelpful thoughts about something, they likely have maladaptive schemas, and harsh beliefs about their core worthiness as a person. We picked these up through our early experiences in life somehow. A negative core belief about oneself is as simple as something like, "I'm unlikable" or "I can't handle life's challenges."

I find the concept of a schema a little trickier and more abstract. Basically a schema is a kind of 'map' or set of beliefs that determines how someone interprets and acts on certain aspects of the world. For example, one person may have a schema for 'new people' that says they're friendly and usually open to having others join their social circle. A second person's experiences may have led them to develop a 'new people' schema that says they're closed-off, rejecting, and hard to please. The two people are going to think and act very differently if they go to a friend's house and are introduced to a group of guys they don't know.

How to challenge negative thoughts

There's a more "regular" way to do this and a more structured, formal CBT way. The regular way is what we all do from time to time. We'll be feeling down or worried or insecure, and as certain thoughts pop into our head we'll debate them in an attempt to make ourselves feel better. We'll tell ourselves things like, "Come on, odds are no one is going to laugh at me tonight and ask me why I even bothered coming out."

With knowledge of how people think negatively, we can be a little better at doing this. Instead of vaguely telling ourselves, "That's not likely" we can instead say, "Well that's the cognitive distortion of predicting the future and jumping to the worst possible outcome." We can also get better at catching our knee-jerk automatic thoughts. Finally, we may have some insight about the deeper beliefs that are feeding our thinking; "I'm feeling this way because I believe that other women are passive-aggressive and catty, because I got teased in middle-school."

When you've identified a maladaptive thought you then want to suggest a more realistic and balanced alternative. A huge emphasis is on the words 'realistic' and 'balanced'. The idea is not to skip around being blindly Positive and thinking everything is happy and perfect and ignoring reality. An unrealistic negative thought may be, "Everyone at this party will hate me. I'll never make any friends in this city!" An equally unrealistic over-positive thought may be, "I'm an amazing person. Everyone there will love me instantly!" A balanced thought, assuming it's true for this hypothetical person, could be, "Yeah, I'm still awkward in some ways, but my past experience has shown many people do like me. The ones who don't probably won't be mean, but just kind of indifferent instead. I can handle that and will concentrate on the ones who seem open to me."

Thought Records

A more formal CBT technique is to keep track of and evaluate your negative thoughts by writing in a Thought Record. Many templates for them can be found online with a quick search. You can also quickly whip up your own in a word processor. This is just a more structured way of spotting and replacing thoughts as opposed to doing it in your head. It can be more useful because you're really sitting down and taking the time to deconstruct your thinking. Also, there's often something weirdly powerful about taking the time to write everything down too. Putting your worries down on paper just seems to take away some of their power.

They come in slightly different formats, but your basic Thought Record has several columns. Not every one will have all these categories, but here are some of them with examples from a hypothetical situation: