CBT Technique: Automatic/unhelpful Thoughts
Cognitive behavioral therapy cbt is a type of therapy that can help to improve your mental health it aims to change negative thoughts and belief you may have which can affect how you feel and behave.
Automatic Thoughts:
Thoughts influence much of our experience of the world, including our emotional experience. In this blog, I’ll be referring to a specific kind of thoughts that we call “automatic thoughts.” Automatic thoughts are the thoughts that automatically arise in our minds all throughout the day. They’re those destructive and unreasonably negative thoughts that you have that make things go from bad to worse avoiding eighties feels as impossible as avoiding red lights when you’re running late you’re gonna hit one or two or every single light from your house to work on that morning that your reports due 9:00 am and your boss is already on the edge and you might just fired and then get evicted and see. Hundreds of automatic thoughts pop into our head everyday sometimes these are negative and unhelpful but thoughts are not facts so it’s helpful to challenge our thinking.
How to Challenge Automatic/unhelpful thoughts?
A thought record is one cbt technique that can help you look at negative thoughts in a more balanced way it works well if you have a notepad and pen to write down your answers.
Step 1: Think about the situation that’s upsetting you what emotions and feelings do you have how intense are they rate the intensity from one to ten with ten being the most intense.
Step 2: What is the negative thoughts try and be specific about the thoughts running in your mind write them down perhaps something hasn’t gone as well as you to flight your thoughts spiral and you start to think everything goes wrong and may be even that you’re bad a person.
Step 3: Now it’s time to put your thoughts on trial focus on the facts is there any factual evidence that this thought is true. Does everything always go wrong? Are you really a terrible person?
Step 4: What is evidence that this thought is not true can you think of a time when something you did went well what about your friends and family and how much they care and value you what are the good things in this situation.
Step 5: Weigh up the evidence is there an alternative thought a more balanced and realistic way of looking at things perhaps alternative thoughts could be things didn’t go as well as I’d like but that’s ok. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes I’m human and doing the best I can.
Step 6: Check back in with yourself how do you feel now rate again the intensity from one to ten remember the way that you think about a situation affects how you feel try this exercise next time automatic negative thoughts start affect you.
Using a thought record is a skill that can help you identify and clarify the thoughts that are leading to more problematic emotions. By practicing identifying thoughts in challenging situations, you develop and strengthen the skill of metacognition. With some practice, you can gain the ability to quickly identify dysfunctional automatic thoughts in the moment, and get some distance from them to lessen the intensity of your emotion. The button below links to an example of a completed thought record.
