Thought Exercises to Try to Improve Mental Health
“While thoughts can be positive and helpful, they can also tell us scary stories, keep us up at night, and make us believe things about ourselves that aren’t true. Sometimes, it feels like our thoughts have all the power — and that we’re helpless against them. Thought exercises help us see our thoughts more clearly and objectively. The following exercises can help you disentangle yourself from your thoughts and consequently change your emotions, your behavior, and your entire perspective.
Cognitive defusion exercise
Most of the time, we live in a state of cognitive fusion — fully believing our thoughts without giving them a second thought. Cognitive defusion is a technique used in ACT that can help you detangle and distance yourself from negative thoughts and feelings.
- Think of negative thought you often have that causes painful emotions. (Eg. “I am unlovable.”) → Say the thought out loud several times.
- To defuse this thought, start this phrase with “I’m having the thought…” (Eg. “I’m having the thought that I am unlovable.”
- To defuse it even more, start the phrase with “I notice I’m having the thought that…” (Eg. “I notice I’m having the thought that I am unlovable.”
- Now take a moment to consider how different it felt to say these phrases. When you notice yourself thinking negative thoughts, take a moment to defuse them so you can get some distance from them.
Thank your mind for the story
Our minds love to tell us the same negative stories over and over. In this technique, you will give the story a name, thank your mind for telling it, and then focus on the task at hand while it plays itself out in the background.
For instance, let’s say your mind starts telling you the familiar story that you’re an imposter and that people wouldn’t like you if they knew the “truth” about you. In this case, you acknowledge the story, name it the “imposter story,” and thank your mind for telling you this tale. Then you continue to focus on other things. This technique allows you to acknowledge the story from a distance without giving it any power over you.
Put your flaws into context: a self-compassion exercise
To counter the tendency to berate yourself when things aren’t going well, ask yourself the following questions:
-
Does this failure or mistake
take away from my good qualities?
-
Does it make sense to determine
that I’m a total failure because of this situation?
- Change the narrative: “I’m messy when I get overwhelmed. But I can start to work on this today.”
When we take action to bring our thoughts into the light and see them differently, they lose their power over us. We become disentangled from them and see them as they are: passing thoughts.”
Read
the whole article at PsychCentral
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💬 Do you think these techniques can be useful? Why yes/no? Do you know any other technique for dealing with unhelpful thoughts?
@globalBraid3744 Thank you so much for sharing this article! I'm going to try this, I hope it helps.
@comfortableNight4463
Yay, please feel free to let us know after you try whether these techniques are helpful to you.
@globalBraid3744 Negative thoughts are easier to occur than the good ones because of our body's self-preserving nature. We think positively about things that have alredy been achieved, while negative thoughts are interpretted by the brain as something that should be fixed.
Sometimes people tend to magnify things they see on themselves or their own life and this can trigger overthinking about what they need to improve. The techinques you presented help us listen to our own needs and demistify something the brain thinks negatively about.
Thanks for the interesting and meaningful post!
@calmDew1576
I agree that negative thoughts are easier to occur and moreover, they also seem to stick with us longer. Therefore, it is important to know some techniques to deal with them. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
@globalBraid3744
Thought exercises sound so interesting and effective!!
I love the self-compassion exercise.
I will definitely try to implement it into my life.
Thanks for sharing.💛✨
@innateJoy9602
I am glad you for it useful ✨ Thank you for reading