You send a text. An hour goes by. Then two. By hour three you’ve decided they’re mad at you, bored of you or quietly pulling away. You’ve replayed every word of your last conversation trying to work out what went wrong. Then your phone buzzes. “Sorry! Was out on a run!”
Most of us have had some version of this experience. If not with a text, then with something else that leaves us assuming the worst of ourselves, others or the situation we’re in.
We tend to treat our thoughts like reports from the world—accurate dispatches about what’s actually happening. But more often, they’re like first drafts that have been written quickly and sent out before anyone has checked the facts.
Psychiatrist Dr Daniel Amen calls this an ANT problem—Automatic Negative Thoughts. A couple of ants in the kitchen are no big deal, but a colony can take over and ruin your day. Negative thoughts work much the same way. Left unchecked, they multiply until they begin to shape the way we think, feel and respond.
minds that never stop
Thoughts weave their way across our minds constantly, from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep each night. Studies suggest we have upwards of 6000 thoughts per day, most of which we’ve had before.
Some are harmless, everyday musings, like needing to wash the car, adding milk to the grocery list or remembering it’s time for a health check-up. Others are more complex and can make us feel mad, sad, worried, nervous, lonely or out of control. They show up as thoughts like, “My presentation was a disaster”, “I’m a terrible parent”, “Nobody finds me attractive” or “My boss didn’t say goodbye to me—he must be unhappy with my work”.
A lot of the thoughts we have are far-fetched exaggerations of the truth, half-stories or worst-case predictions. When we hold onto them, our bodies start to react as if they’re true. We feel anxious, tight in the chest, tense in our shoulders or experience a wired feeling we can’t quite shake, even though we’re not in any obvious state of danger.
so what do we do about it?
Amen says we need to employ an anteater to clean up the ANTs in our heads before they take over. How?
Step 1: keep a thought log. When you find yourself getting emotional, write down the thought behind your feelings. You don’t have to do this forever—just try it for a week or until you get better at doing it in your head.
Step 2: question your thoughts. Ask yourself, “Is this true?” Then ask again, “Can I be absolutely certain that this is true?”
Step 3: flip it. If the evidence doesn’t hold up, write the opposite version down and see if it’s just as plausible. “They don’t care about me” becomes “I know they care about me because . . .”
The goal isn’t to ignore every negative thought or adopt some cheesy positive-thinking trick that denies reality. It’s to check our thoughts for accuracy, instead of granting authority to everything that shows up.
With practise, you won’t need the full write-it-down, work-it-through routine. You’ll get quicker at catching and correcting a thought in real time, before it can spiral.
If you want peace of mind, ask the questions, do the work and remember: not everything you think is true.
