Wherever we go, we can be sure that our thoughts will be with us. Is there ever a time that they stop? Even when we sleep, they are whirring away, feeding our dreams. They wait – sometimes patiently, sometimes less so – for us to wake up and engage with them in our usual way. Wanting them to stop is an unrealistic and unhelpful wish, as they are never going to. As we saw in Chapter 3, those of us who worry a lot often think we have more thoughts than the average person, but everybody has roughly the same number per day, so it is not the volume that is the problem, or even the overridingly negative content of worrisome thoughts, it is our emotional reaction to them that can make them seem louder or more frightening. Over time, if we learn to give these negative thoughts less attention, they will become quieter and more infrequent.
There are, in fact, no thoughts that you could have that other people haven’t had. Your mind is just throwing a string of words at you and, if you don’t react, your brain will move on to the next random thought. If you have a strong emotional response and try to fight off the thought, you are letting the brain know that its content is in some way relevant and that there may be danger. So, in an attempt to protect you, your brain will keep feeding you this same thought.
In Chapter 5, when we talked about ‘troll thoughts’, we discussed just how effective it can be to simply ignore the troll!
To challenge or let go – that is the question
When we are looking for ways to address our thoughts in a different manner than before, it’s important to be aware that not all of those thoughts should be treated in the same way. There are generally two broad categories of thoughts, which require two very different responses. Sometimes we need to shine a light on what we are thinking and step back and think about it logically; at other times, we need to simply acknowledge the existence of our thoughts and then just let them be. Some will quieten with a rational response; others will feed off our attempt to rationalise them, and see this as a confirmation of their importance.
As we continue to expand our awareness of what we are thinking – and this will be achieved with commitment and practice– we will become more adept at recognising which category a particular thought or thinking pattern falls into. In this chapter, we will look at ways of making these distinctions and at techniques for handling these different kinds of thoughts.
For thoughts that can be challenged, we will be looking at ‘Thought Records’, a tool used in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). This technique helps us to drag our thoughts from the hazy fog in the back of our minds and out into the light of day, so we can see what we are dealing with and bring some balance to our thinking. For intrusive, speculative, ‘worry’ thoughts, those which dwell on situations that haven’t yet happened (and often never will), we will be using a process called ‘defusion’ – a component of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) – with a view to separating ourselves from our thoughts.
Firstly, however, we need to know which thoughts to challenge and which thoughts to defuse.
Thoughts to be challenged
The thoughts we need to bring forward and challenge are generally those that have an element of uncertainty to them, ones that relate to a specific, concrete situation we are dealing with, or that we may have to deal with in the near future. If we have a closer look at the context of such thoughts, we will see that we have a lot of relevant information already available that we are currently ignoring. These are not the recurring thoughts that we are always grappling with, but tend to be negative thoughts around specific situations. We’ve allowed the problem to niggle away at the back of our minds, unaddressed, because it is uncomfortable to look at. We may be distracting ourselves with one escape method or another to avoid thinking about the issue but, in reality, we have handed it over to our negative thoughts to get to work on. And get to work they will!
Some anxious thoughts thrive in this vague and foggy space. Whether you are paying attention or not, your brain is continually mulling over the issues you are worried about. If you have been experiencing negative and worst-case scenario thinking for a long time, then defining and challenging our thoughts is an approach that will be used here. So, if you have just had an argument with your partner, or are worried about a work interview coming up, these are some scenarios where you can challenge your thoughts.
To give you an example: say you are due to go back to work after a long period off sick, and you are worried about what your manager and colleagues might think and how you will cope with their reactions, not to mention the more demanding aspects of your job after so long away. This is a thought, or a train of thought, that would be helpful for you to examine more closely – What specifically are you worried about, etc.? – and then go about challenging, so that you can see the problem in a more rational light. This, in turn, will enable you to think about whether you are possibly overreacting in your thoughts and about concrete things you could do in order to make your transition back to work easier.
We’ll be unpicking this particular scenario more on page 103, when we look at Thought Records.
Thoughts to let go
If our thoughts are intrusive and persistent in nature, where the content is purely hypothetical and filled with danger, trying to challenge them may keep them alive, by letting our brains know we are seeing the thought with its hypothetical scenario as a real threat. For example, if we constantly worry that a relationship will not last, even when our partner continually shows us love and is always reassuring us, then this is a thought that would be better served by less attention, not more. Or if we are continually worrying about what our colleagues think of us and assuming that it will be negative, no matter what evidence we have to the contrary or how many times we have talked ourselves around, then this is also a thought that might just need less oxygen.
If we are unsure which approach to use, we can play with both and see how the thoughts in question respond. It is only when we experience our thoughts quietening, becoming more balanced and less intrusive, that we will gain trust in a certain way of responding. Do allow for a decent trial period, as this will all be new and, however unhelpful the old ways of thinking may be, your brain will initially prefer the easily accessible, well-worn tracks your worry habit has laid for you long ago.
Thought Records
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) has many great tools for helping us address anxiety and change our old ways of thinking, and one that has been of great benefit to both myself and my clients is the Thought Record. This enables us to get unhelpful thoughts out of our heads and down on paper where they can be examined and challenged. It can be a great way to ease our anxiety about a given situation and an incredibly helpful tool that we can use to bring reason and balance to a situation where our negative thoughts have been given free rein.
When we talk about what makes us anxious, or what we are worried about, it is so important to get our hands dirty in the specifics of what exactly is going on. Using broad categories, such as ‘work’ or ‘my relationship’, to initially identify what aspect of our lives is troubling us may be a good way to open up a process of reflection – but to make any real progress, we need to dig down further into what specifically in those areas is causing us difficulty and how exactly are we reacting to it.
A Thought Record can help us step back from a spiral of negative thinking, by walking us through a process where we can gain much-needed perspective. It is not about positive thinking or looking on the bright side of life, but more about helping us find a voice for the other side of the argument in order to come to a more balanced conclusion. Negative, catastrophic thinking might have had the upper hand in our minds for the past two hours; now, we are just letting the other side have a chance to respond.
Thought Records can be used before we approach a situation that we are unsure and worried about or after an event to look at what has been causing us difficulty, and to stop a brutal, unbalanced postmortem in its tracks.
There are seven key elements to a Thought Record:
1. The situation: What happened or what is about to happen?
2. My emotions: What you are feeling? Rate the strength of each emotion as a percentage, from 1—100 per cent (where 100 per cent is the emotion at its most intense).
3. My thoughts: Write down everything you can about what you were/are thinking. Identify the thoughts that are causing you most pain. Get it all out and save no paper!
4. Evidence for my thoughts: Just because it is negative does not mean it is untrue. You are not dismissing your thoughts out of hand, as to gloss over reality is not the goal here. Simply list the evidence that supports the negative thoughts, so you know what you are dealing with.
5. Evidence against my thoughts: This is where the challenging of the negative thoughts will happen, as you note down all the evidence that doesn’t support them.
6. Balanced thought: Having taken into account all of the above, come up with a new thought that takes in both sides of the argument and is as close to the truth as you can get to with the evidence you have.
7. My emotions: Now you reassess each of the emotions from Point 2 on the previous page, again rating them on a percentage scale. It’s important to note that they will very likely not have disappeared altogether, which is fine. The goal of the Thought Record is to lower the intensity of the original feelings.
The beauty of Thought Records is that, the more we do them, the easier they become, and the more we can incorporate them into our everyday thought process. In time and with practice, we will develop the capacity to use a Thought Record during an actual situation and not just in hindsight, so that we can learn to lower our emotional responses on the fly, so to speak.
As we have seen, there are all sorts of situations in which we might use a Thought Record. Here are two examples that use Thought Records before and after a situation or event.
EXAMPLE ONE
SITUATION
Had an argument with my partner an hour ago.
FEELINGS
Angry: 75 per cent; Frustrated: 60 per cent; Helpless: 40 per cent; Anxious: 30 per cent
THOUGHTS
I can’t believe my partner could be so hurtful.
Why can’t they see my side?
Will we ever be able to work things out?
They wouldn’t say those things if they really loved me.
They don’t care about me.
Why am I even in this relationship?
This is typical of all my relationships.
I’ll never be happy with anyone.
EVIDENCE FOR MY THOUGHTS
What was said really hurt, and my partner always says hurtful things when we fight. They stick to their argument and don’t budge, even when they hear my side. When they are angry, they don’t seem to care that I am upset.
EVIDENCE AGAINST MY THOUGHTS
My partner only says hurtful things when we are in the heat of an argument. After time has passed, they do tend to shift their position and acknowledge some of the things I was saying. We have always worked things out before. I too say hurtful things, and when I come out of the argument, I regret them. Generally, it is obvious that my partner cares about me, it’s just during fights when I feel they don’t. We have often figured things out after a fight and it has cleared up things that have gone unspoken for a long time. I do want to be in this relationship.
BALANCED THOUGHT
The fight really upset me, but if I let some time pass, we will figure this out and there can be some benefit from the argument. They do still love me, but we maybe need to figure out together how to communicate better and not let issues build up.
FEELINGS
Angry: 50 per cent; Frustrated: 40 per cent; Helpless: 20 per cent; Anxious: 20 per cent
By figuring out what you are actually saying to yourself (via your thoughts), you can see why you are reacting so strongly and emotionally, and why the argument was so upsetting. You went from what was probably a run-of-the-mill argument to thinking it meant something awful about your future. This is how our brains operate. Something happens and we add beliefs (e.g. if we fight, we are not meant to be together; when things are broken, they can’t be fixed; people will always hurt me; I’m unlovable) into the mix, and, all of a sudden, we are reacting to something much more than an angry exchange of words about a current, run-of-the-mill situation.
EXAMPLE TWO
SITUATION
Heading back to work soon after some time off sick with stress.
FEELINGS
Anxious: 75 per cent; Embarrassed: 80 per cent: Apprehensive: 80 per cent
THOUGHTS
I shouldn’t have been off for such a ridiculous reason.
I should have been able to handle this without taking time off.
Everyone else deals with stress better than I do.
Nobody else would have needed time off.
I’ve let my team down and left them in the lurch for a week.
My colleagues will judge me.
People will think I’m weak.
My reputation has been damaged.
Management will be doubtful about me now.
EVIDENCE FOR MY THOUGHTS
I know the environment is very stressful at the moment, but I am the only one who’s been off sick. We are extremely busy and other people have had to step in and take on more work because I was not there. My manager is under a lot of pressure.
EVIDENCE AGAINST MY THOUGHTS
I have talked to two colleagues about this before and they have always been very supportive. I don’t actually know what other people are thinking. If I knew someone was off because of stress, I wouldn’t judge them for it. There are always people off sick and I have never had a problem helping out with their work to get things done. Having anxiety or depression is seen much less as a weakness these days: there is much more awareness and understanding. My manager has been fully supportive any time I have talked with them about this.
BALANCED THOUGHT
I do wish I was able to deal with this kind of stress better, but it was just too much this time. It’s clear that those I have talked to are concerned and very supportive. I do not know what those whom I have not talked to think one way or the other, but most people these days recognise the difficulty of a mental-health issue. I am of more use back in the office when I’m feeling well and healthy.
FEELINGS
Anxious: 40 per cent; Embarrassed: 50 per cent: Apprehensive: 50 per cent
For the initial ‘Thoughts’ section, take as much time as you can. Really try to draw out what you are thinking and write everything down. This process is very useful, as it will slow down your thoughts because you can only write so fast. It will also get all the thoughts out of your head and can give you access to thoughts you didn’t even know you were having.
If we look at the thoughts in Example Two on the previous page, we can see that, if they were to follow some of them to their most obvious conclusions, it wouldn’t be long before that person would be worrying about their current job, and perhaps even their ability to hold down jobs in the future.
This may seem like a stretch, but this is the sort of place our minds can go when left to their own devices. This is why the process of writing down our thoughts can be so important, and why we sometimes need to take our thoughts out of the fog and know exactly what we are saying to ourselves.
When you start to use this method to examine your thoughts, it can be difficult to come up with evidence against your negative thoughts – especially if you are used to being hard on yourself. In the early stages, it can be very helpful to look at the first four elements in the Thought Record list, and take a step back for a moment. Then bring to mind someone you really care about, someone you’d hate to see hurt, and who you’d help out if you could. Now, imagine they have come to you with the thoughts on that page. What would you say to them? Would you tell them to get over themselves and stop being so stupid or would you have some empathy and understanding? If we can turn just 5 per cent of the concern we would have for others back to ourselves, it would be a great start. What have we got to lose?
Separating ourselves from our thoughts
We are not our thoughts.
This must be one of the biggest life lessons I have ever learned. Developing the ability to separate myself from my thoughts was perhaps the most important step I took towards really being able to manage my anxiety, as opposed to constantly firefighting and papering over the cracks. I have also witnessed this as being one of the most beneficial tools I can pass on to others.
Because my thoughts came from me, I always presumed that they were really important and completely represented who I was and what I believed. Anything my brain said to me, I took as fact. So, when it said I was weird, I believed it. When it warned of danger, I retreated. When it told me that others were not interested in what I had to say, I decided to keep quiet. And when it hit me with a horrible, intrusive thought, I believed there was something wrong with my moral compass and that I would have to monitor myself closely, otherwise I might act out those thoughts.
But the truth is, we are not our thoughts. We may be with them every moment of the day, but how much do they reflect on us?
Yes, you may sit down and decide you are going to think, for example, about the pros and cons of leaving your current job, and your mind will go to work as directed. But what about that nineties song that popped into your head earlier in the day? The one you hate, but now can’t stop humming. Where did that come from? Did you summon it, decide it would be nice to hear it – or did your mind just throw it up out of nowhere?
It’s hardly surprising that we pay so much attention to our anxious thoughts. As I said in Chapter 2, there was a time in our long-distant past when our ancestors would likely have ended up being killed by a predator if they didn’t heed the fearful messages from their brains. We don’t, of course, face those dangers now, but our brains are still wired to look out for and highlight things that are potentially dangerous.
In the work we are doing in this book, our aim is to make some of the things we worry about all the time less relevant to our brains, and we can only do this through monitoring and moderating our reactions to our thoughts.
In Chapter 4 (Anxiety Toolbox I), we looked at imagining the brain as a puppy. We feed it and look after it, so it loves us and wants to protect us. If we jump nervously when the doorbell rings, the puppy learns to bark every time someone comes to the door in an effort to keep us safe. The way we interact with our brains can be similar. If we react to a thought in a manner that confirms the danger, then, in an attempt to protect us, our brains retain that thought as important and replay it when necessary.
In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), there is a very useful technique called ‘thought defusion’. This concept rests on the recognition that, in the normal run of things, we are fused or bonded with our worrisome thoughts. We engage with them and they bind us to them. As we saw on page 95, there are thoughts we need to bring to the light and those we should treat differently.
It might not feel like it at times but, no matter what happens, we have a choice about what we do in any given situation. Victor Frankl, the renowned Austrian psychiatrist and psychotherapist, has written very powerfully about having the freedom to choose. Frankl realised this ultimate and most liberating of truths when he was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War – that even in a situation of utter powerlessness, he still had a choice in the way he responded to his circumstances.
When you are hit with a worrisome thought, you have a choice. What you have tended to do up until now is get caught up in a fight in your head, either trying to push the thought away or using rationality to defeat it. But what if the very thing you do to try and combat the worry is keeping the thoughts alive and thriving? While it’s unlikely that the thoughts will go away completely, it is the fight that keeps them loud and prominent.
We may have thousands of thoughts a day, but if we were asked in the evening to recount some of them, we would probably recall just about three or four of the most worrisome ones. The other multiple-thousands of thoughts are forgotten in almost the same instant they pop up in our heads, because we do not pay them any attention or attach importance to them.
So, if we are hit with a bunch of ‘what if’ thoughts on a Sunday before a busy week in work, we have a choice about how we react. We can get caught up with the thoughts and have them hang around for the entire evening (which is probably our habitual pattern) or we can try and defuse from them. Let’s look at some of the ways we can do this.
Personify the brain
A great way to distance yourself from your thoughts is to personify your brain. If you can see your brain as, for example, the boisterous but good-natured puppy mentioned on page 108 or some well-meaning but actually really unhelpful friend, you can begin to defuse yourself from the thoughts it sends you. Your brain is desperately trying to help you, but doesn’t really know what is best for you. It often just throws out random thoughts and then looks to you for guidance on what to do next. If you don’t react, it simply moves on. But when it sees a strong emotional response, it just keeps the thoughts coming.
It can often feel as if your mind sees fire and reaches for the petrol. If, observing this, we begin thinking, Why do I keep doing this to myself?, it can just add to our pain. If we can see our brains as an over-zealous friend who really wants to protect us, but is a little misguided or as a hyperactive puppy that loves us but often gets out of control, it can take the sting out of our thoughts.
So, name your brain. Something friendly – it’s not a monster. For some reason, I always used Damien. I imagined him as a small, frightened boy who was constantly telling me not to do things because he wanted me to stay safe. I would be quite imaginative in my interactions with him, doing things like ruffling his hair and telling him, ‘I’ve got this’, or scooping him up and putting him on my shoulders, while saying something reassuring: ‘Come on, Damien, we’re going to a meeting. It’ll be grand.’ I had a lot of compassion for Damien – he was so small and often scared – but the more I was able to do the things he didn’t want me to do, the more he saw that those things weren’t as scary as he thought, and the more he was able to relax.
It got to the stage where I could keep Damien calm before he even got worked up and clamoured for my attention. I’d leave him playing with his toy trucks at home before I headed to work. If he started to get anxious, I’d invite him to come along and tell him to bring the thoughts with him, since they were not going to go away. The main point was, I was no longer going to get caught up with those thoughts and Damien’s worries. They were both part of my life, but they could no longer dictate that I should stop whatever it was I was about to do.
This may sound a little off the wall, but being able to personify your brain in this way means that you can get a bit of distance from your thoughts and treat them with a little less importance. It can give you a sense of perspective that you cannot have when you are immersed in a thought pattern that is all-consuming and hard to shake off. I no longer need to use the label Damien, as I am practised enough to disengage from my thoughts without recourse to the strong imagery I once used.
Some thoughts still blindside me and I am often shocked at how sneaky and manipulative my brain can be, but when I catch what is happening, I can stop the engagement and shift my attention onto something of greater value to me.
Whatever way you want to do it, the idea is that any time your brain hits you with a ‘worry thought’, you simply have to acknowledge it and then push on with what you were doing. It doesn’t matter how you do this. If you worry unduly about being found out at work, acknowledge the thought – ‘Oh yeah, I’m a fraud. Cheers, Brain. Anyway, I have to finish this …’ – and then continue with what you were doing beforehand.
A quick heads-up. Your brain is used to you reacting to specific thoughts in a certain way. If you now indicate that you are no longer too concerned when one of the old familiar worrisome thoughts hits us, your brain will do a double-take: ‘Eh? Hang on, we’ve been worrying about this for years – what do you mean, it’s no longer dangerous?’ So, initially, the thoughts may become louder or more persistent, but don’t let this put you off. It will take time for your brain to come on board and lower the threat level usually associated with a particular thought, but, with practice and persistence, it will see that this is not just a one-off or a trick.
Name the thoughts
We have countless thoughts and can probably group our most worrisome ones into themes. If it’s the persistent Sunday evening blues or the ‘what if’s’ about the project we’re on, we can categorise these, ‘work worry’. If it’s the repeated fear of our partner leaving, even though the relationship is good, we can call this, ‘abandonment worry’. This just gives us a way to snap out of our heads when we catch ourselves drifting off into unhelpful thought patterns.
It’s like when someone is telling you a story on 1 April, and, initially, you are getting sucked in by it all. The minute you realise what is going on – ‘Ah, April Fool’s, of course’ – the power of the other person’s story is gone. You can do something similar when you find yourself being caught up in one of your brain’s familiar worrisome themes. Your brain may not back off in the same way as the April Fool’s storyteller, but, when you figure out what is going on, you can simply choose not to engage.
Bore the worry away
Another thought defusion technique is to repeat a persistent ‘worry thought’ fifty times. Contrary to engaging with it, this practice serves to render the thought meaningless. If we have a fully-formed worrisome thought, we should try to break down the form it takes to one word. So, if we are at work, and we have the anxious thought that we will make a mistake on the task we are doing and get in trouble, we can sum that up with the one-word theme, ‘trouble’. In fact, try and do this now as an experiment – say the word ‘trouble’ out loud fifty times …
By the time you get to the tenth time, you’ll find that the word begins to lose all meaning. It gets harder to say, as you become more conscious of how your mouth moves rather than the sense of what you are saying – it’s a weird sensation, and not something we normally focus on. Again, this is breaking the direct link the thoughts have to our emotions. We are looking to take away the power of the thought by blunting its piercing sting and the force of its meaning.
Mock the worry away
I know worry isn’t fun, but the lighter we can keep things, the better. Again, if you can get to a place where you can see your brain as really trying to help, but not knowing how, it’s easier to not get so caught up in what it tells you. If you know it is not actually trying to work against you, you can throw an arm around it and say something reassuring like, ‘I know, I know – just relax.’
In his brilliant book, The Happiness Trap, the world-renowned ACT trainer Dr Russ Harris also asserts that, rather than challenging difficult thoughts, defusion is very often the most productive way forward.
Harris proposes that a very effective way of doing this is to put your thoughts to music, even suggesting the universally known song ‘Happy Birthday To You’ as a tune to use. So, take the same work worry thought from above, in its extended form – which will be something like: ‘I’m going to mess up and get in trouble.’ Now, start singing in your head the ‘lyrics’ of that thought to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday’:
I’m going to mess up and get in trouble,
I’m going to mess up and get in trouble,
I’m going to mess up and get in troooooooooooouble
I’m going to mess up and get in trouble!
Here, you are letting your brain know you do not see the danger that it does. You are showing it that the worrisome thoughts about the situation do not deserve your time or emotion – they’re just not relevant to what’s going on right now.
Whatever you feel works best in helping you to separate from your thoughts, it is crucially important to begin the process and think about how you can build some of these techniques into your daily life. It is a process, so it will take you time to understand what strategies work best for you, and decide what tweaks are needed to make them your own. Going forward, even when you are on the plateau, you will need to remain vigilant and keep on top of things, so that you can build towards the next spike of progress on your way to mastery.
‘Future Stew’ will know what to do
One thing that has helped me tremendously when dealing with uncertainty in my life has been learning to trust my future self, who I nicknamed ‘Future Stew’. Constant, anticipatory anxiety was always a huge issue for me. I would spend long periods of time worrying how an event would unfold (usually a mundane workday situation), and then, an hour into the day I dreaded, everything would be fine. My worry would always tell me I couldn’t do things, but those things kept getting done anyway. It got to a stage where there was a real, consistent disconnect between my predictions of the future and how that future actually played out.
The more I looked at the reality of these situations, the more I learned to trust Future Stew, because I could see that he never let me down. He found things difficult, undoubtedly, and had to learn from many mistakes, but he was able to cope. I trusted that guy more than I trusted myself! If I looked back on any event, Future Stew always managed much better than I thought he would – and yet I always doubted him. It was ridiculous. Over time, I learned to hand things over to him, safe in the knowledge that he would sort it out, which meant I could stop worrying about it and just go to sleep. I managed to get to the point where it wasn’t a case of just hoping that things would work out: I actively cultivated a genuine trust in the future version of me.
So much of our worry is tied up with overestimating the threat and underestimating our ability to cope – but if we were to stand back and look at things objectively, we will see that we’ve always coped. Even if we could have done better or might have thought at the time that we didn’t cope, we always at least survived and learned a valuable lesson. So many of my clients have the same kind of difficulty with future worry – and yet when we examine their pasts, they have dealt with loss of parents, jobs and relationships, serious health issues, huge financial difficulties, and whatever else life has thrown their way. When they got to the actual feared event, they had somehow found a way to cope.
The future version of yourself does not have to deal with worry. It doesn’t have to deal with all the ‘what if’ thoughts, worst-case scenarios or foggy thinking. It has to deal with the actual situation when it presents itself, and it always gets through that. The Future You gets to face a real event, not a hundred imagined ones. And when a real event unfolds, it goes into action mode and worry often disappears. There can be fear, for sure, but when we are in the moment, we are fully capable, we have something tangible to deal with and we almost always come through OK – and even if we don’t think we have, we will survive in any case.
In this strategy of handing over a situation to our future selves, there is again an element of thought defusion, where we will not allow ourselves to engage. We just acknowledge the thought and move on: ‘Thanks for that, Brain. I’m not sure how we’re going to do this either, but Future Stew will figure it out. Now, I have to go to work and get on with my day.’