5 Ways to Change Your Thoughts

Do you ever have worrisome thoughts that race through your mind causing anxious feelings? Do the thoughts keep you up at night? Do you get overwhelmed and then shut down emotionally? What we think has direct influence over what we feel so the ability to recognize and manage our thoughts is key to managing our emotions and mood.

Here are the first steps in learning to manage your thoughts and feelings. As you become more aware of your own ability to recognize, stop, challenge, and change your thoughts, you will start to feel less stressed.

1. Recognize your body’s physical responses. Sometimes we first recognize an emotional path to our thoughts because our bodies are physically responding to unrecognized thoughts or external stimuli. Our bodies give us a clue that we are feeling “something”. Because we know our thoughts can influence our feelings, we can then start to back up this physical reaction to feelings and thoughts.

2. Acknowledge your Default-Zone thinking: Your default zone is your “go to”, automatic thinking that has been ingrained over time due to various life influences and affects how your perceptions have been framed. When a troublesome thought infiltrates, use a “STOP” sign or other visual to help your brain re-track for a nano-second so you can remind yourself to take a deep breath (inhale 5 seconds, exhale 5 seconds…repeat). Take time to imagine your breath as a color moving through your body. Count slowly.

3. Ask yourself, “Is this thought based in reality”, “Am I making it up?”, or “What am I afraid of?”

4. Take action. Because you are in control of what you think, you can choose your thoughts. Choose a decisive action word like “delete”. See yourself using the delete button on your computer as you are deleting these negative thoughts. It is important not to fight against the thought or try to push it away – simply acknowledge the thought and observe the thought going away. You can also try envisioning a plane with a flying sign (you know, the ones you see at the beach sometimes). See your thought on the sign as the plane flies through and beyond your sight, off into the distance. Repeat this exercise with other thoughts if they linger.

5. Reframe. After you’ve deleted the old thought, replace it with a general positive statement. Sometimes using an opposite thought to the one you were having is an easier place to begin when trying to think of positive thoughts. Thinking of things you are grateful for is an instant re-framer! Challenge yourself: “What would be the opposite of what I was just thinking?” or “What am I grateful for?” Write these things down.

As you moved through these steps, did you notice your emotional state? Did it change by the end of the process? Make note of what you recognize. Write it down.

What we are trying to do is create awareness and focus. This will take practice, but do it as often as you need to. You will be creating a new pathway for your brain to follow when you have distressing thoughts. This is just the beginning of a process that can readily move you toward a more peaceful mind.

Whistle While You Work

The tender Snow White possessed clear optimism in her efforts to motivate those seven dwarfs. She used “soft skills” very effectively. Before they finished whistling their tune, her team had completed their task.

What are these “soft skills” that businesses and industry are adopting for management training? Emotional Intelligence or EQ (Emotional Quotient) has become a buzz word for today’s management. There’s good reason for that.

In our current economic climate, the stress of doing business today has zapped strength from management. Doing more with less has become the directive. The amount of stress compounded between employer and employees is taking its toll. Stress begets stress, and the cycle interferes with productivity.

So as managers, how do we cope?

It appears that managers can more readily adapt to this challenge when they have certain emotional intelligence abilities—forming good working relationships, being cooperative and constructive members of a group, controlling anger and other impulses, and in general being pleasant to be around. The Center for Creative Leadership, www.ccl.org, has found that the primary causes of “derailment in executives” involve deficits in emotional competence. The three primary ones are difficulty in handling change, not being able to work well in a team, and poor interpersonal relations.

Interpersonal relationship skills can enhance the opportunity for change in the other deficit areas. Improving EQ in the workplace is proven to have a direct and positive impact on leadership and management effectiveness. These skills affect teamwork and innovation – creativity when you need it most.

Emotional awareness and being able to manage these emotions are the key elements of EQ. Developing empathy, “learned optimism” (Martin E.P. Seligman, PhD), adaptability, and conflict resolution skills are all pieces to this challenging puzzle. Emotionally balanced individuals are motivated. Motivated employees bring a healthier approach to their productivity. A more productive team means a more profitable business.

So perhaps your management team needs a tune up. The time is ripe to create an opportunity for management to push through these troubled times. Give workplace optimism a chance.

Come on get smart, tune up and start to whistle while you work.

Emotional Rescue

As I read the lyrics of the infamous Mick Jagger, Keith Richards hit song, I am struck by the image of a “knight in shining armor riding across the desert on a fine Arab charger”. The Rolling Stones would come to your emotional rescue. But I ask, “do you need to be emotionally rescued?”

Better still, “do you want to be emotionally rescued?”

“Yes”, you say, “anything to get me out of the feelings quagmire brought on by this relationship with my (blank).” Go ahead, fill in the blank. My boyfriend, my husband, my partner, my boss, my sister, MY MOTHER!

Our relationships can take over our lives. We lose ourselves in them, and in the process we tend to lose parts of ourselves. We lose our voice; we lose our values, our personal integrity. The emotions can be overwhelming and keep us up at night. You know those nights. Racing thoughts. Painful emotions. Tears. These emotions sabotage our ability to function and how we communicate. They can affect how we treat others and how we treat ourselves.

What if you could rescue yourself? What if you could resolve these emotions, learn to manage them, and find a way back to a healthy self who sleeps well at night and walks straight in their day? In doing this you bring a richer self to your relationships, helping those relationships become more balanced and full.

There are lots of theories that tell us how what we think influences our emotions. How amazing it is that we can affect how we feel, by changing how we think. The result is a shift in emotion, mood, attitude and behavior. Of course, this helps every relationship in your life. Especially the relationship you have with yourself.

I believe that individuals and couples can find emotional balance and realign their individual goals to improve their relationships. Healthy, well-balanced individuals make healthy, well-balanced relationships. Becoming aware of what your emotions are, what they are attached to, what defenses you have built, gives you a fighting chance to change your relationships today.

Be your own “savior, steadfast and true”. Come to your own “emotional rescue”.

Emotional Rescue, lyrics by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, 1980

Cupid Painted Blind

Will Shakespeare knew a thing or two about emotional intelligence and perhaps a bit about Cognitive Behavior Therapy. “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind”. Pretty powerful stuff going on in the 16^th century. I believe he was saying that what we think determines how we feel.

If I were embarking on a journey with my life-partner, I would rather hear Will’s poetry. But sometimes this journey is a far stretch from being poetic. At times it can be utterly confusing. Trying to figure out the best ways to make a relationship become a true partnership takes skills beyond what we may learn growing up. We have our parents or caregivers as role models for what marriage might look like. We have the environment of those relationships to guide us. This could be good news… or not.

We come to the relationship table with pre-conceived notions, expectations, of what we want our partnership to look like.

While it is important to have discussions about what either of you may “expect” from each other, consider this: an expectation is a disappointment waiting to happen. Expectations are based on fear. Something like, “this is what I expect to happen, and if it doesn’t…”. So let’s begin by reframing that notion. We do not want to start our relationship exploration on a note of fear. Let’s focus on goals. If you shift the thinking toward goals, the feeling becomes more “hopeful”. That is where we want to start – hopeful.

Short and Long term goals are a hopeful place to begin your discussions. Again, proceed with caution here as long-term goals may have the tendency toward “projection”. It is important to build the notion of adaptability into these discussions. What may seem like a reasonable long-term goal today, could change tomorrow. We apply this to short term goals as well. Adaptability is the operable goal.

So begin your journey on this note: Create hopeful goals with adaptability. Remember that this is the beginning of an incredible journey of exploration. An adventure into learning what makes a relationship become balanced and healthy. It is a journey of self-discovery, honest sharing, acceptance, and validation. Your journey will help create a foundation of mutual respect and loving kindness. This is a thinking process, and it absolutely affects how you may feel about your future together.

“…and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.” And that’s okay.

William Shakespeare, Mid-Summer Night’s Dream, 1595

Turn On The Light

I can recall times as a young girl, at night when a sound from outside, or a creak of my door would send my mind racing with notions of a “boogie man”. I’d call for my mother, she’d come into my room, and I would fretfully, fearfully, tell her that there was a monster in my room! Mom would turn on the light. Suddenly, as if by magic, blinking my eyes, I saw that nothing was there. My heart would stop thumping. I would take a deep breath and sigh with a little smile of reassurance. The perfect opposite had happened with the turn of a light switch.

We are talking about fear. It is one of the most debilitating of all emotions. Fear can be widely classified into two types: external fear and internal fear.

External fear is caused by something outside of you which you are strongly motivated to avoid. The Book “The Gift of Fear” by Gavin de Becker, talks about recognizing this type of fear and honoring our “gut” feelings that can be a sensor for warranted fears. It is important to distinguish this category of fear from the more troubling “internal” fear. De Becker addresses both. I recommend the book for its encompassing approach to real or perceived danger.

Internal fear is a part of your thinking that you link to a negative emotion. Some specialists refer to this category of fear as psychological fear. False Evidence Appearing Real. It’s a great acronym to use when we begin to challenge our thinking. It is a healthy reminder and can help us move out of internal fear. There are many types of internal fears. Identifying what you are afraid of is an important part in learning how to manage it. We have to know what it is that needs changing. This link provides a list of common fears, excluding phobias, and I believe you may come up with others that are specific to you.

For me, the fear of being misunderstood has been a big one. In the past, when I would reflect on what I thought another person might be thinking (about me or a situation involving me), I could easily throw myself into an anxious mood. What I call the “I think, they think” syndrome, is a common pitfall that many of us have experienced at one time or another. It really gets lumped into a fear of judgment. But, it is an imaginary thought, completely made up! Consider this: have you allowed feelings to rise based on what you think someone else may (or may not) think? I wish we had the power to know other people’s thoughts, but we don’t. I got tired of giving my energy to something that wasn’t a reality. Fortunately, with practice and due diligence, I have been able to “catch” that thought, recognize it for what it is, and thwart the fear that may be looming large, ready to infiltrate if I allow it to. This process and practice has become so automatic, that it happens instantly for me now. It can for you too. The brain allows us that chance, that split-second opportunity to subvert the fear.

In the simplest way possible, I will attempt to explain a very complex, neurological process that happens when the brain processes different types of fear. The amygdala has been identified as the emotion region of the brain. Individual amygdaloidal nuclei have separate roles, and distinct parts that process different fear responses and behavior. WHEW! In other words, multiple areas of the brain process different types of fear. That’s about as far as I can go with brain science in one sitting. But for those of you who want to take a more in depth look, here is a link with a nice explanation and graphic of what happens in the brain with fear.

Knowing that our thoughts can actually stop that brain process from moving into a fear response is good news. But how do we do that? First recognize, “hmmm, there it is: fear mode”. Take deep breaths. Yes, it really works. Challenge the facts of a situation: what is real and what is not. Reframe your thoughts. This takes practice, and one of the ways I encourage you to begin learning how to reframe your thoughts, is to think the opposite.

You may remember “Opposite George” from Seinfeld? In that episode George returns from the beach and decides that every decision that he has ever made has been wrong, and that his life is the exact opposite of what it should be. George tells this to Jerry who convinces him that “if every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right”. George then resolves to start doing the complete opposite of what he would do normally. Psychiatry and psychology professionals have latched on to the “Opposite George” idea and have woven it into their practices to help alleviate forms of anxiety and fear. Now, you can give it a try. Come up with an opposite thought to that which you fear. It may even be nonsensical. That’s even better. Something nonsensical, funny, or pleasurable is produced in a competing area of the brain from fear. You can’t do both at the same time.

Opposites Of Fear

Here’s a little cheat sheet. Take a look at this simple list of opposite perceptions: the first word being the fear and the second word its opposite positive perception.

Unwanted             Loved

Worthless            Valuable

Insignificant         Significant

Incapable            Competent

Insecure             Secure

Pained               Satisfied

Weak                 Strong

Lost                 Peaceful

Defective             Good

So, go ahead and give it a try. Add your own examples to this list. We cannot control whether things will go our way or not, but we can learn to control our own thoughts, our responses, and our own conduct. We can challenge the perception. In this way, we can gradually find a genuine liberation from fear. Just…

TURN ON THE LIGHT.