Embrace the Truth

LIBERATE YOURSELF FROM THE LIES POLLUTING YOUR BRAIN

We have met the enemy and he is us.

—POGO POSSUM

You can’t empty your mind of thoughts. You might as well try to empty the ocean of its water. Thoughts just keep coming back, it seems. That’s the way of it. But thoughts aren’t a problem if they’re met with understanding.

—BYRON KATIE, A Thousand Names for Joy

A number of years ago I wrote an article for Parade magazine called “How to Get Out of Your Own Way.” After the article was published my office received over ten thousand letters asking for more information about self-defeating behavior. CNN heard about the response and asked me to be on one of its shows. At the time, I had never been on TV, but I agreed to do it because I thought it might help spread the news of my work. In the green room waiting to go on, I had a panic attack. I couldn’t catch my breath, my heart raced, and I wanted to run out of the studio. Fortunately, the little voice in my head started to laugh at me and said, “You treat people who have this problem. What do you tell them to do?”

“Breathe! Slow down your breathing.” People who have panic attacks breathe too fast; by slowing down your breathing you start to get control over yourself. I did that and felt calmer.

Next I thought, “Don’t leave. If you leave the studio, you will never come back and the fear will take control of you and you will never be on TV again.” So I didn’t leave.

Then I thought, “Write down the first three thoughts in your head to see if you’re scaring yourself. If you are, talk back to those thoughts.” My first thought was “You are going to forget your name.” Now that was funny, because why would an interviewer have to ask the name of an invited guest? The second thought was “You are going to stutter,” and the third thought was “Two million people are going to think you are an idiot.” I chuckled to myself. No wonder I wanted to run out of the studio. My brain was playing a horror film with me as the main victim.

Fortunately for me, I knew how to talk back to these thoughts. You do not have to believe every thought you have. Thoughts lie. They lie a lot. Just because you have a thought has nothing to do with whether or not it is true. I had been teaching my patients something I call ANT therapy for years. ANT stands for “automatic negative thought,” and like ants at a picnic, the ANTs in your head can ruin your day. In ANT therapy, whenever your feel sad, mad, or nervous, you write down the thoughts going through your mind and evaluate whether or not they are true. If they are not true, talk back to them. You do not have to believe or accept every thought you have. You need an internal ANTeater on patrol.

So, in the CNN studio in Los Angeles, I took out a piece of paper, just like I would tell my patients to do, and did the ANTeater exercise. I drew two lines vertically down the paper, dividing it into three columns. In the first column I wrote down the thoughts, unedited as they occurred in my brain. In the second column I wrote the type of ANT it was. In my work, I have described nine different types of ANTs (see box on Chapter 12). In the third column, I killed the ANTs by talking back to them. Were you good at talking back to your parents when you were a teenager? I was excellent. In the same way, you need to learn to be good at talking back to the lies you tell yourself.

So in the first column I wrote the initial thought: “You are going to forget your name.” In the middle column I wrote, “Fortune-telling,” because I was predicting the worst, the most common ANT among people who have panic attacks. In the third column, I wrote, “Probably not. I have never forgotten my name. But if I do, I have my driver’s license in my wallet.” Playing with the thoughts help to see how absurd they can be.

Below the first ANT I wrote out the second one: “You are going to stutter.” In the middle column I wrote, “Fortune-telling,” because I was still predicting disaster in the future. And in the third column I wrote, “Probably not. I usually don’t stutter, but if I do there will be people who stutter in the audience who will now have a doctor they can relate to.” Having fun with the thoughts helps you disarm them.

SUMMARY OF NINE DIFFERENT TYPES OF ANTS

1. Always Thinking: Overgeneralizing a situation and usually starting thoughts with words like always, never, everyone, every time

2. Focusing on the Negative: Preoccupying yourself with what’s going wrong in a situation and ignoring everything that could be construed as positive

3. Fortune-telling: Predicting the future in a negative way

4. Mind Reading: Arbitrarily believing you know what another person thinks, even though they have not told you

5. Thinking with Your Feelings: Believing your negative feelings without ever questioning them

6. Guilt Beatings: Thinking with words like should, must, ought, or have to that produce feelings of guilt

7. Labeling: Attaching a negative label to yourself or others

8. Personalization: Allowing innocuous events to take on personal meaning

9. Blame: Blaming other people for the problems in your life

Then I wrote the last thought: “Two million people will think you are an idiot.” In the middle column I wrote, “Fortune telling.” Again, I was predicting the worst. In the third column, I wrote, “Maybe so.” Then next to it I wrote three numbers, 18-40-60, which stands for a rule I teach my patients, called the 18-40-60 rule, which says that when you are age eighteen you worry about what everyone thinks of you, when you are age forty you don’t give a damn what anyone thinks about you, and when you’re age sixty you realize no one has been thinking about you at all. People spend their days worrying and thinking about themselves, not you.

This five-minute exercise helped me relax and I was able to go on the television show and do well. If I would have run out of the studio, I would have likely never gone back and it would have dramatically changed my life and career.

Negative Thoughts Change Your Brain and Your Life

Do not let your thoughts prevent you from having a magnificent mind. Learn how to talk back to them. The ANT technique described above is not hard. I once taught it to a nine-year-old boy who suffered from terrible anxiety and depression. After several weeks he told me he was feeling much better. He said, “It’s an ANT ghost town in my head.”

Here is an example from his ANT therapy. He worried incessantly that his mother would die and leave him alone. This is not an uncommon worry for children who suffer with anxiety disorders. We did the ANT exercise together in my office.

ANT	Type of ANT	ANTeater
My mother will die and leave me alone.	Fortune-telling	I have no way of knowing that. My thoughts are making me sick. She could live a very long time.

Internal logic is one of the most important brain skills we will ever need. It is the ability to tell ourselves the truth, to be completely honest and logical with ourselves. It is a course we should have all taken repeatedly, like English or math, starting in the third grade. Yet nowhere are we ever taught how to question our own thoughts, how to correct the erroneous words and images that circle in our minds, torturing and tormenting our souls. So much trouble is stirred up by the lies we tell ourselves and few people know how easy it is to correct them.

Nearly all of us have suffered an inordinate amount of fear, anxiety, terror, and depression as a result of the unquestioned thoughts generated by our brains. Thoughts that are downright lies. It is hard to be effective directing a life, a family, or a business with distorted negative thinking patterns. Yet in my experience, most people walk around infested by ANTs, and they don’t have the skills needed to rid themselves of these pesky creatures. They have no idea that the source of their suffering is within their own synapses.

How you think moment by moment plays a primary role in how you feel. Predominantly negative thoughts cause you to feel bad, while positive or hopeful ones help you to feel good. In this chapter, I will give you a thinking tune-up. I will teach you how to tell yourself the truth to improve brain function and your overall sense of well-being. To start, here are five simple facts to help you begin to manage your thoughts and emotions.

FACT 1

Did you know that every time you have a thought your brain releases chemicals? That’s how your brain works. You have a thought, your brain releases chemicals, an electrical transmission goes across your brain, and you become aware of what you’re thinking. Thoughts are real and they have a real impact on how you feel and how you behave. Like a muscle, the thoughts that you exercise become stronger and become the thoughts you rely on and believe, good or bad.

Every time you have an angry, unkind, hopeless, helpless, worthless, sad, or irritating thought, your brain releases negative chemicals that make you feel bad. Think about the last time you were mad. How did your body feel? When most people get angry, their muscles become tense, their hearts beat faster, their hands start to sweat, and they may even begin to feel a little dizzy. Your body reacts to every negative thought you have.

Every time you have a happy, hopeful, kind, optimistic, positive thought, your brain releases chemicals that make you feel good. Think about the last time you had a really happy thought. How did you feel inside your body? When most people are happy their muscles relax, their hearts beat slower, their hands become dry, and they breathe slower. Your body also reacts to your good thoughts.

Mark George, M.D., when he worked at the National Institutes of Mental Health, demonstrated this phenomenon in an elegant study of brain function. He studied the activity of the brain in ten normal women under three different conditions: when they were thinking happy thoughts, neutral thoughts, and sad thoughts. During the happy thoughts, the women demonstrated a cooling of their emotional brain and they felt better. During the sad thoughts, he noticed a significant increase in the emotional brain’s activity, which is consistent with depression. Your thoughts matter.

FACT 2

Your body reacts to every thought you have. We know this from polygraph or lie detector equipment. During a lie detector test, a person is hooked up to equipment that measures the following.

• Hand temperature

• Heart rate

• Blood pressure

• Breathing rate

• Muscle tension

• How much the hands sweat

The tester then asks questions, like “Did you do that thing?” If the person did the bad thing his body is likely to have a “stress” response and it is likely to react in the following ways.

• Hands get colder.

• Heart goes faster.

• Blood pressure goes up.

• Breathing gets faster.

• Muscles get tight.

• Hands sweat more.

Almost immediately, his body reacts to what he thinks, whether he says anything or not. Now the opposite is also true. If he did not do the thing the tester asked about, it is likely that his body will experience a “relaxation” response and react in the following ways.

• Hands will become warmer.

• Heart rate will slow.

• Blood pressure goes down.

• Breathing becomes slower and deeper.

• Muscles become more relaxed.

• Hands become drier.

Again, almost immediately, your body reacts to what you think. This not only happens when you’re asked about telling the truth, your body reacts to every thought you have, whether it is about work, friends, family, or anything else.

FACT 3

Thoughts are very powerful. They can make your mind and your body feel good or they can make you feel bad. Every cell in your body is affected by every thought you have. That is why when people get emotionally upset, they actually develop physical symptoms, such as headaches or stomachaches. Some physicians think that people who have a lot of negative thoughts are more likely to get cancer. If you can think about good things you are more likely to feel better.

Think of your body as an ecosystem. An ecosystem contains everything in the environment, including water, land, cars, people, animals, vegetation, houses, landfills, and so on. A negative thought is like pollution to your system. Just as pollution in the Los Angeles Basin affects everyone who goes outside, so too do negative thoughts pollute your mind and your body.

FACT 4

Unless you think about your thoughts, they are automatic or “they just happen.” Since they just happen, they are not necessarily correct. Your thoughts do not always tell the truth. Sometimes they lie to you. I once treated a college student who thought he was stupid, because he didn’t perform well on tests. When he was tested, however, we discovered that he had an IQ of 135, very bright. You don’t have to believe every thought that goes through your head. It’s important to think about your thoughts to see if they are helping you or hurting you. Unfortunately, if you never challenge your thoughts, you just believe them as if they were true.

One negative thought, like one ant at a picnic, is not a big problem. Two or three negative thoughts, like two or three ants at a picnic, become more irritating. Ten or twenty negative thoughts, like ten or twenty ants at a picnic, may cause the couple to pick up and leave the picnic.

FACT 5

You can learn to eliminate ANTs and replace them with positive thoughts that are not “pie in the sky” thinking but rather true, real, accurate thoughts that give you peace, encouragement, and a fair assessment of your current situation. This skill alone could completely change your life if you embrace and practice it. Once you learn about your thoughts, you can choose to think good thoughts and feel good or you can choose to think bad thoughts and feel lousy. That’s right—it’s up to you! You can learn how to change your thoughts and change the way you feel. One way to learn how to change your thoughts is to notice them when they are negative and talk back to them. If you can correct negative thoughts, you take away their power over you. When you just think a negative thought without challenging it, your mind believes it and your body reacts to it.

Whenever you notice these ANTs, you need to crush them or they’ll ruin your relationships, your self-esteem, and your personal power. So here is the exercise: Whenever you feel sad, mad, or nervous write out the automatic thoughts in your mind. Then ask yourself if any of them are ANTs, if any are distorted. What type of ANTs are they? Then kill each ANT by talking back to it. You do not have to believe every thought you have! In fact, if you do, they will surely make you sick.

The Work: Another Technique

As I wrote earlier, a number of years ago I went through an emotionally painful time in my life after I lost someone important to me. I felt terrible for almost nine months, despite all of the emotional management skills I had developed over the years. I had trouble sleeping, felt sad and anxious, and suffered crushing chest pain. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t get the other person out of my head. In my search for healing I read at least fifty books about grief. None of them made a bit of difference until I read Loving What Is by Byron Katie.

In this very wise book, written with her husband, accomplished author Stephen Mitchell, Katie, as her friends call her, described her own experience suffering from suicidal depression. She was a young mother, business-woman, and wife in the high desert of Southern California. She became severely depressed at the age of thirty-three. For ten years, she sank deeper and deeper into self-loathing, rage, despair, constant thoughts of suicide, and paranoia. For the last two years, she was often unable to leave her bedroom and care for herself or her family. Then one morning in 1986, out of nowhere, Katie woke up in a state of amazement, transformed by the realization that when she believed her thoughts, she suffered, but when she questioned her thoughts, she didn’t suffer. Katie’s great insight is that it is not life or other people that make us feel depressed, angry, abandoned, and despairing but our thoughts that make us feel that way. In other words, we live in a hell of our own making, or we live in a heaven of our own making.

Katie developed a simple method of inquiry—the Work—to question our thoughts. It consists of writing down any of the thoughts that are bothering us or any of the thoughts in which we are judging other people, then asking ourselves four questions, and then doing a turnaround. The goal is not positive thinking but rather accurate thinking. The four questions are:

1. Is it true? (Is the stressful or negative thought true?)

2. Can I absolutely know that it’s true?

3. How do I react when I believe that thought?

4. Who would I be without the thought? Or how would I feel if I didn’t have the thought?

After you answer the four questions, you then take the original thought and completely turn it around to its opposite, and ask yourself whether the opposite of the original thought that is causing your suffering is not true or even truer. Then, turn the thought around and apply it to yourself (how does the opposite of the thought apply to me personally) and to the other person, if one is involved in the thought (how does the turnaround apply to the other person).

When I personally started to do the Work I immediately felt better. I was more relaxed, less anxious, and more honest in dealing with my own thoughts and emotions. Katie and Stephen have since become friends and I have shared their insights with almost all of my own friends and patients. You will notice that there are similarities between the Work and ANT therapy. The Work is also powerful, easy to learn, and very effective.

For example, I had a mild-mannered, charming patient named Nile who loved his girlfriend very much. She was beautiful, brilliant, passionate, and generous. But the downside of their love affair was that the girlfriend’s bad moods suddenly manifested as intensely and unpredictably as tornadoes. When his girlfriend was on a tear, she lashed out at Nile, finding fault with everything from his earning power to his taste in clothes. Accusing him of selfishness and of taking her for granted, she often made his life miserable. Understandably, Nile lived in constant apprehension and stress. Whenever his girlfriend had a temper tantrum, he suffered from headaches and stomach pains. Nile’s thoughts about his girlfriend were literally making him sick!

In one part of his mind, Nile knew it was time to end the relationship. But he felt powerless to break things off because another part of him still loved his girlfriend.

I had Nile begin the Work with the statement “I do not want to break up with my girlfriend.”

Well, when I asked him if this was true, he immediately said, “No, I have to leave her because this relationship is making me sick.”

Okay. But did he know this to be absolutely true? “I have the psychiatrist bills to prove it,” he joked. “But seriously, sometimes it feels like I’m losing my mind.”

And how did he react when he thought “I do not want to break up with her”?

“My hands start sweating, I feel tense all over, I’m stressed out.”

I invited Nile to turn the thought around and find three examples to see if this were more true than the original stressful thought.

“I do want to break up with my girlfriend,” he started. “I’m tired of walking on eggshells all the time. And I’m sick of churning out stomach acid whenever she flips out. Even though I love her, she’s bad for my health and I think I deserve better,” he concluded.

Asking the four questions and doing the turnaround helped Nile realize that he was breaking up with his girlfriend in order to reclaim his peace of mind, health, and autonomy. When he eventually told her that he had to end the relationship, Nile felt a huge burden had been lifted from his life. His headaches and stomachaches stopped and he started dating again, with a stronger sense of self.

If you want to know yourself, write down your stressful thoughts, four questions, and the turnaround about someone else. Point the Work toward others in the beginning, and you will soon see that everything outside you directly reflects your own thinking. Yes, your thoughts are all about you, and very often, they are completely disconnected from your reality, or “what actually is.” This strategic form of thinking and questioning your thoughts directly puts a close-up lens on the reality of your life, which is always a good thing, because the truth can set you free.

Truth in the Courtroom of Your Mind

One of the other exercises many of my patients have found helpful in quelling the critics in their heads and boosting their self-esteem is one I call “Truth in the Courtroom of Your Mind.” It takes a bit of effort, but you are worth the time it takes. Do the following steps.

1. Take a piece of paper and draw out a courtroom scene. Include the judge, prosecuting attorneys, defense lawyers, defendant, court reporter, witness stand, and jury box. This is a drawn representation of the voices in your head.

2. Choose a crime that you mentally accuse yourself of. It can be anything you feel guilty about, or anything you’ve actually done of which you’re ashamed.

3. Put yourself on trial. Actually begin to write out the dialogue of a trial. Have opening statements by the prosecutor and the defense. Call witnesses. Raise objections. At first, notice the strength of your internal prosecuting attorney; after all, he’s had practice accusing you all these years. However, as you write out the trial, you’ll begin to notice the lies your prosecutor tells in the courtroom. He distorts the truth to make you look worse.

4. Strengthen your defense attorney. Instead of the wimp he has been, make him stand tall and defend you with eloquence instead of silence. Hire the best lawyer in the world to help defend you. You’re worth it.

5. Repeat this exercise several times, until you have sufficiently strengthened your defense attorney.

Some have written two pages of dialogue, but I have one patient who wrote forty pages. Do what helps you. One person who performed this exercise wrote, “This is fun. I hired a whole gang—Clarence Darrow, Daniel Webster, Melvin Belli, Bella Abzug, Johnnie Cochran, and Perry Mason. Then I gave the prosecution Hamilton Burger, who has never won a case, and a guy I used to know who became the worst lawyer ever to pass the bar. Every time old Burger is about to make a point, my old friend trips him up. He forgets to file papers and summon witnesses too.”

After you’ve tried this exercise several times on paper, begin to set up this scenario in your head: Identify your accusing voices (can you match them up to your accusers of the past?), and identify and strengthen those voices that root for you and defend you. Our prosecuting attorneys can also work in our best interest. They do that by bringing up important issues we need to look at, but they do it in such a way as to help us learn from our mistakes rather than beating us up for them. The commentary these inner voices provide on our actions can either enhance or sabotage our chances for success. Train your inner voices to work in your own best interest. After all, they are your voices; put them under your control.

The Truth About Gratitude

When you bring your attention to the things you are grateful for in your life, your brain actually works better. Psychologist Noelle Nelson and I did a study on gratitude and appreciation. She was working on a book called The Power of Appreciation and had her brain scanned twice. The first time she was scanned after thirty minutes of meditating on all the things she was thankful for in her life. Then she was scanned several days later after focusing on the major fears in her life. After the “appreciation meditation,” her brain looked very healthy. On the day of her “fear-based meditation,” Noelle took the exercise very seriously. One of her fears was about what would happen if her dog got sick and she couldn’t work. She had a string of frightening thoughts.

“If my dog got sick, I couldn’t go to work because I would have to stay home to care for him.”

“If I didn’t go to work, however, I would lose my job.”

“If I lost my job, I wouldn’t have enough money to take my dog to the vet and he would likely die.”

“If the dog died, I would be so depressed I still wouldn’t be able to go back to work.”

“Then I would lose my home and be homeless.”

After these thoughts I scanned her brain. Her frightened brain looked very different from her grateful brain. Rather than look healthy, she had seriously decreased activity in two parts of her brain. Her cerebellum, in the back part of the brain, completely shut down. The cerebellum, also called the little brain, is known to be involved in physical coordination, such as walking or playing sports. New research also suggests that the cerebellum is involved in processing speed, like clock speed on a computer and thought coordination or how quickly we can integrate new information. When the cerebellum experiences low activity, people tend to be clumsier and less likely to think their ways out of problems. They think and process information more slowly and they get confused more easily. When I saw this finding, I thought that this was why negative thinking is involved in athletic slumps. If an athlete thinks he will fail, likely he will. I now had proof that negative thinking actually shuts down the coordination part of the brain. The other area of the brain that was affected was the temporal lobes, especially the one on the left. The temporal lobes are involved with mood, memory, and temper control. Problems in this part of the brain are associated with some forms of depression and also dark thoughts, violence, and memory problems. In Noelle’s scans, when she practiced gratitude, her temporal lobes looked healthy. When she frightened herself, her temporal lobes became much less active. Negative thought patterns change the brain in a negative way. Practicing gratitude literally helps you have a brain to be grateful for.

Here is the exercise: Write out five things you are grateful for every day. The act of writing helps to solidify them in your brain. In my experience, when depressed patients do this exercise daily they actually needed less antidepressant medication. Other researchers have also found that people who express gratitude on a regular basis are healthier, more optimistic, make more progress toward their goals, have a greater sense of well-being, and are more helpful to others. Doctors who regularly practice gratitude are actually better at making the correct diagnoses on their patients.

When you tell yourself the truth, your brain works better and you feel and act happier. Using the ANTeater exercises and the Work, along with having a competent internal defense attorney and focusing on gratitude, are essential skills to keep your brain healthy and encourage success in everything you do.