3-4-5 Program: Thinking Styles
One of the most important and effective things to focus on.
As you go through your day try to notice if your thinking falls into any of these categories or patterns. Once you've done some of the core activities it will get easier to figure out your own thinking styles and pin-point faulty or negative thinking habits and change them. Go through the list below and see if any of these kinds of sentences and their tone sound familiar.
Notate in your log which of these you do, (we all do some of them at some point). Identifying which ones you do the most and which cause the most worrying is the key to solving the problem. Training your brain to produce better thinking and the easing of the physical symptoms of anxiety will combine to greatly increase your objective well-being and happiness.
CATEGORIES
All or nothing:
The tendency to think in terms of extremes. "If I'm not perfect, I've failed." "I can't enjoy it if it's not 100% the way I want it."
"If they say I can't do it, I'll die."
Selective Abstraction
The tendency to focus exclusively on the one thing that didn't go right all day. Even when everything else went fine, we can only think about the one thing that bothers us.
Emotional reasoning
The assumption that because we FEEL a certain way that must mean what we're thinking must be true.
"I feel embarrassed so they must hate me."
Over-generalizing:
Being overly broad in our conclusions when there is only a single event. Using words like "always", "everything", "nothing" to explain a certain situation is over-generalizing.
"Nothing good ever happens to me."
Magnification (or minimization):
Taking every event or conversation and perceiving it as if it is far more significant and overwhelming than it really is. Or the reverse: invalidating a real issue by making it seem less important than it is.
Jumping to conclusions:
The tendency to assume we can read other people's minds and know what they are thinking or to read the future and predict exactly what will happen.
Discounting all positives:
Not counting the good things that have happened. Not recognizing anything good you've done or that others have done.
"That doesn't count."
Key idea
Identifying and changing our thinking habits may help more than anything else.
We've all lapsed into bad habits. Taking control of our thinking habits by seeing them clearly can help ease psychological pain.