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If only you had a switch on the side
of your head that, with a quick flick, could simply stop the ruminating, the
worry, the anxiety, the hurt, the anger — all of the distressing thoughts and
feelings that flood your mind. Clearly you don’t have an on-off switch to
control your thoughts. However you do have more control over your thinking and
feeling than you may imagine. You can become more aware of what you’re thinking
and decide how much attention and importance you should give to these thoughts
and feelings. Your goal is to see your mind, if not always as a friend, at
least as a part of you that you can control, manage, and calm.
Simply saying to yourself, “I will
absolutely not think about this stuff anymore!” rarely works. Suppressing
unwanted thoughts by willing them away is tough to do. Remember when a friend
challenged you: “Don’t think about pink elephants”? Barely are the words out of
your friend’s mouth when a herd of pinkish elephants fills your mind. The
harder you try to will yourself not to think of something, the more likely it
is that you in fact will think of that something.
The following sections offer some
effective techniques that have been shown to help you escape persistent
negative thoughts. I start with a technique that focuses on specific unwanted
thoughts and progress to other ways of coping with more generalized forms of
emotional distress.
Stopping your unwanted thoughts
Sometimes an unwanted thought or
worry grabs you and won’t let go. Perhaps you have an upsetting worry that
continually intrudes into your thinking and keeps you from enjoying a pleasant
evening with friends. Or maybe you’re trying to fall asleep, and the thoughts
racing around in your head make sleeping impossible. You recognize that there’s
nothing you can do about your worry and that your worrying is only making
things worse. You’d be better off if you could somehow stop thinking about
this. But how?
That’s where a technique called
thought stopping can be useful. It’s an effective way of keeping repetitive
worries and upsets temporarily out of your mind, and it’s also effective in
weakening those thoughts, making it less likely that they’ll return.
Concentrating on two things at the same time is hard. So if your mind is
flooded with distressing thoughts, change course. Find something else, a
“wanted” thought you actually enjoy thinking about.
Here’s how to get this technique to
work for you:
1. Write
down your unwanted thoughts.
On
a piece of paper, write down three or four thoughts that repeatedly trigger
distress. It could be an upsetting memory (your embarrassment when you said
something dumb at a meeting), a future fear (an upcoming dental visit), or an
imagined anxiety (a plane crash).
2. Think
of some pleasant replacement thoughts.
Write down three or four pleasant,
happy thoughts you may have, such as taking a great vacation, achieving a
long-term goal, skiing down a mountain, shopping — any pleasant experience,
past or future. Keep these pleasant thoughts in your memory so you can easily
bring them into consciousness.
3. Focus
on an unwanted thought.
Find
a place where you’ll be undisturbed for about 20 minutes. Sitting or lying
comfortably, take some deep breaths and relax your body as much as you can.
Close your eyes and select one of your unwanted thoughts. (Don’t choose your
most distressing thought at the beginning. You’ll get to the tougher ones
later.) Get into your distressing thought using all your senses — what it looks
like, feels like, and so on. Hold onto that unwanted thought for a bit.
4. Yell
“stop!”
Now
(and this may sound a bit strange) yell out the word “stop.” At the same time,
picture a red-and-white hexagonal stop sign — you know, the kind you see on the
street corner. Make your sign large and vivid.
5. Replace
that thought.
Replace
that unwanted thought with one of your pleasant thoughts. Mentally shift your
attention to that positive image and feeling. Immerse yourself in this
replacement thought, strengthening it with visual images, sounds, and maybe
even smells and tastes (Thanksgiving dinner?).
6. Repeat
this process.
Do
this again with the same unwanted thought. Then try it with another unwanted
thought. If your pleasant replacement thought loses some of its potency, use
one of your others. After you get better at this, stop yelling “stop” and only
yell the word in your head. You’re now ready to put this into practice in real
life.
The image of the sign and the vocal
or silent “stop” will disrupt your thought sequence and temporarily put the
unwanted thought out of your mind. Be warned, however: It probably will return,
and you may have to repeat this sequence again. And again. If your
stress-producing thought or image is strong, it may take many repetitions of
this technique to weaken or eliminate it. Stick with it.
Snapping out of it
A variation of the thought-stopping
technique that has proved useful for many people is to use a rubber band to
help interrupt a distressing thought. Simply take an ordinary rubber band and
put it around your wrist. Now, whenever you notice an intrusive or unwanted
thought crowding your thinking, pull the elastic and let it snap your wrist.
This shouldn’t be painful — just a sharp reminder that you want this
distressing thought to go. Use your mental stop sign and remember to replace
your unwanted thought with something more pleasant.
One way of enhancing this “stop”
technique is to combine it with a breathing technique. It works like this.
Instead of replacing your unwanted thought with a pleasant one, focus instead
on your breathing. Take some slow, deep breaths and begin counting your exhaled
breaths, forward from one to ten and then backward from ten to one. Repeat this
process every time you encounter those unwanted, distressing thoughts.
Copyright © Allen Elkin Phd – Originally appeared in Stress Management for Dummies 2nd edition by Allen Elkin
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