For example, you might not go to a social activity because your ANT says “You’ll have a terrible time” and that can lead to missed opportunities, isolation, and a cycle of feeling worse and worse. The impact of ANTs is profound they can distort your perspective, trigger strong emotions, and influence behavior in harmful ways. How we think about a situation, directly impacts how we feel.Īutomatic negative thoughts are involuntary, habitual thoughts that focus on negatives, exaggerate problems, or predict disaster. And if I had thought “Maybe they’re actually a chronic people pleaser who is doing therapy homework to be more assertive and this is the way they’re learning and practicing“ I would have felt happy for them, proud of their accomplishments. If I had thought “Maybe they’re working on their anger management, they put the card instead of slashing my tires” I would have felt relieved. If I had thought “Meh, they’re just probably an unhappy human being with nothing better to do, whatever.” I probably wouldn’t have cared much, maybe felt a little calloused. You see, there are hundreds of possible ways I could have interpreted this situation. We all are deluded when we think that the situation, the trigger is what makes us feel a certain way. This was thanks to Automatic Negative Thoughts. Without even realizing it, I interpreted that situation as threatening. That they were out to get me, and this triggered the stress response. I wasn’t upset because of the piece of paper, I was upset because I interpreted that card to mean that people were attacking me, that I was surrounded by a mean and dangerous world. Our emotions don’t actually come from the situation, they come from how we think about the situation. So why was I upset? It would be easy to say that I was upset because someone put a mean card on my window. (I blame that on the pregnancy hormones). I definitely cried a little on the way home. What’s their stupid problem, they took the time to print out “you suck at parking” business cards. Why are people so cruel I thought? Poor me, I’m having a bad day and this mean person needed to come make it worse. “Learn to drive you idiot” and gave me the finger.” Now normally I would have shrugged this off, but not today. But it wasn’t a regular business card, it said “You suck at parking” It said “F&*# you. Got what I needed, came back out, and when I got to my van found that someone had left a business card on my window. I pulled into the closest parking spot I could find, but then realized that the truck in the stall in front of me was sticking out into my stall a little bit so I couldn’t pull all the way in, twisting around to back out and find a new parking spot seemed exhausting with my huge belly, so I checked that my van was in the lines and went into the store. One day, when I was super pregnant, super tired, exhausted and overwhelmed with parenting three little kids and growing a human inside of me, I had to go to Home Depot to fix something in the house. And then I’m going to teach you some skills to stop letting it control you and how you feel. Let me tell you a story about the invisible thing that fuels anxiety and depression.
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