Noticing: Putting Space Between You and Your Negative Thoughts
Much of good mental health deals with how we speak to ourselves, our inner dialogue. A therapist once told me that negative ruminations — also known as the negative shit we think about or say to ourselves — are a universal characteristic of anxiety and depression. Learning how to deal with these negative thought patterns is the crux of most therapeutic methods, from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) to mindfulness-tinged practices.
This holds true for my experiences with depression and anxiety. When I am in a place of ill mental health, I say horrible things to myself:
“You are so stupid. You will never amount to anything. You are such a failure at life and adulthood. You can’t do anything right.”

The other feature that goes along with negative ruminations is having little distance between myself and my thoughts. What do I mean by this? Well, it means that once I think something, I believe it to be true. I take it at face value, hold it close to my heart, and allow it to affect my behavior. If I say to myself, “You are so stupid, you’ll never be good at anything,” I believe it. I stop doing whatever it is I’m trying to accomplish.
If the stories we tell ourselves are filled with self-loathing, shame, and failure, no wonder we get depressed.
It took many years to get between myself and these thoughts, to create space. These thoughts were so automatic, I didn’t even realize I had them. They didn’t even have words attached to them: I would simply experience a deep sense of shame and fear after trying and failing at a new task. Like Pavlov’s dog, I equated failure with shame.
It wasn’t until years later that I learned how to put space between myself and my thoughts. How to notice a thought. For years therapists had been telling me, “Just notice what you say to yourself.” I’d find myself thinking, “Okay, I noticed. Now what?!” Turns out, the simple act of noticing a though gives you space. The more space you have between yourself and your thoughts the more control you have over them. Suddenly, my thoughts weren’t gospel truth: they were just thoughts.
Want to practice noticing? Here’s a simple way to do it. The next time you have a negative thought, rephrase it by adding the phrase, “I just had the thought that…” in front of it. For example, let’s say you think to yourself, “Oh god, I always drive like a maniac, I’m so careless,” take a breath and say, “I just had the thought that I always drive like a maniac and I’m so careless.”

This meta-cognitive strategy serves multiple purposes: 1) it puts space between you and your thoughts, and 2) this space allows you to see that it is a thought and nothing else. This process is also meant to be judgement-free. We aren’t doing anything else but noticing. Don’t come to any conclusions based on what you notice. Just notice.
Just because you think it, doesn’t make it true.
Noticing allows us to take a step back from our thoughts, to begin the gentle, compassionate process of asking ourselves, “Is this true?” Peeling our true selves away from the myths we believe is a slow and subtle process. I’ve been doing it for years and it is hard. It requires daily mindfulness practice, something I want to write more about at another time.
For now I’ll say this: you can start making space between you and your thoughts right now. It takes 30 seconds. We all have 30 seconds. Notice what you say to yourself and put a little space between you and your thoughts. See what happens.
