Automatic thoughts, cognitive filters, and the art of decision making
Imagine you are in a foreign country waiting for your bus to arrive. Suddenly a stranger comes to you and speaks to you in a language you have no clue what. What will you do — Ignore the person? Move away? Try to tell him that you don’t know his language? What’s the immediate emotion that comes to your mind? What’s the “automatic” thought that comes to your head?
Automatic thoughts, a concept in cognitive behavioural therapy, are images or mental activity that occur as a response to a trigger (like an action or event).
These thoughts ‘pop up’ in our minds without we being conscious about it.
How come “successful” people have different reactions to common life situations? How can some people look at the positives of a situation while others do not? How can someone be calm in a situation where many would go berserk?
How are these automatic thoughts created?
Whenever we have thoughts, there are thoughts that we give priority to, and thoughts we dismiss. Thoughts that are encouraged and discouraged. Thoughts that are identified as right and thoughts that are identified as wrong. This comes from our belief systems, past experiences, and expectations from the future.
This video beautifully explains how the human brain takes decisions (observations, judgment, and actions) and how a “cognitive filter” plays a greater role in our decision-making.
So a depressed person focuses on all things bad in a situation, while a productive person focuses less on what can go wrong and more on what can be done at the time.
Can we make conscious choices about our automatic thoughts?
So if we are making these choices — encouraging certain thoughts and behaviors, can we control this process? There are reasons to believe in the affirmative.
- Emotional Weights — What kind of emotions you give more importance to? Is it fear that gets your attention first or excitement? Identify your emotional weights, see which emotions drive you. And whether that is in line with your goals. You are not capable of innovation if you are fearful and angry all the time.
- What drags you down? Once you have identified emotions that bring you down, find out the path to these emotions. Does thinking about your place in your company “drag you down” to negative thoughts? Does obsessing about building million-dollar businesses “drag you down” to places that make you insecure and weak?
- Build a path to “lifting” emotions — Remember all the times when you felt more open brimming with a lot of new ideas. Now give me some time to understand how did you land there. How was your mental make-up? What were the triggers? Identify activities and conditions that are associated with “lifting” emotions. Focus your life around such actions.
- The earlier you detect “dragging” emotions the easier it is to come out of it. Especially if you have a history of being emotional, you know how easy it is to go from “calm to storm” in microseconds. You have already built neural pathways that trigger impulsive actions. So identify cues that take you on that rollercoaster. And get off the seat before it starts.
- Themes — Identify themes that will guide you in your actions. For example — every time you trying to do something, what if the automatic thought is “how can I find my way around this problem?”. Now in your current state, you might get thoughts like “it is not possible”, “it is difficult”, “it can’t be done”, “too less time”, “something more urgent is out there to be done”, “this is useless” etc. Now, if you look at these thoughts as one of your own, then they are difficult to ignore. But if you look at these thoughts as independent of you, as something outside of you, you can neglect them like you neglect a stranger’s opinion. For thoughts, every reinforcement is encouragement and ignorance is discouragement. This is how we help form the automatic thought process. If we don’t actively build it, then we are stuck with thoughts and actions that we did not choose to begin with.
What happens next?
Now that you have identified and stopped “dragging” emotions and built your life around “lifting” emotions, you would see you automatically have more positive thoughts than before. You have started adding weights to thoughts that align with your goal. You have started encouraging all thoughts that are in line with your vision. Now, in any situation, you will see these thoughts spur up first.
Are you done once you do this? No. The human brain is the most malleable. You can be a Leader or Follower, Optimistic or Depressed, Visionary or Status Quoist, all in the same life. Human brains work on reinforcement. And reinforcement decides your life.
Keep reinforcing. The same brain that once wanted to watch Netflix and not read that book will tell you to do the opposite. That’s why a famous philosopher once said, “if anything is humanly possible, you can do it”
Name them to tame them
Enjoying your emotions is one thing. Getting immersed in them all the time is another. There is an extreme end of the analytic mind and extreme end of the emotional mind. You can decide and choose to be in the middle.
This is what I did — I called out my emotions
Fear. Anger. Anxiety. Desire. Judgment. Excitement.
Whatever it is, whichever emotion, I mark them. I just tell myself this is the emotion that is going on right now. The moment I do, there is clarity on what’s the situation in my mind, what are the variables involved, and how to handle it. The more I did this, the easier it became.
And after a certain time, I did not have to do anything consciously. Emotions were in check. Situations were much clearer in the head.
Final thoughts
Are you unable to connect with other people? Are you unable to reach out to people that would help you grow? Are you unable to write that first blog article you always wanted to?
It could be that automatic thought of yours that is stopping you from doing it. Anytime where you try something and then leave it, more than that strategy failed, it is your ability to not see through that failure. Your automatic thoughts were not helpful enough for you to look into the gaps that you can push through. Your thoughts did not point you in the right direction.
How to get your thoughts to point you in the right direction? By asking the right questions. By being open about it. Your automatic thoughts should help you in your goals. So these thoughts should be open, looking for a gap or opportunity constantly, these thoughts should look for ways for you to grow. This means that any thought that doesn’t do this needs to be ignored. And any thought that helps you should be encouraged.
By building this automatic thought process, you can build yourself from scratch. You can build yourself in ways you want. You can basically self-architect.
Emotion is Intelligence series raises questions on our central assumptions about intelligence, emotion, creativity and mental well-being
Harish is an entrepreneur building products that help affect our emotion, feeling and psychology
