In my last post, I talked about how negative thoughts can contribute to depression. The goal of depression treatment is not to eliminate all our negative thoughts and replace them with positive ones. In fact, our brains are hard-wired with what is called a negativity bias, a heightened awareness of any situation or any person that might be a threat. This awareness is helpful with external threats, but when you perceive your thoughts and feelings as negative because they are a threat, you are susceptible to depression.
The problem isn’t that you have negative thoughts. The problem is that you think these thoughts are true.
So, how do you handle these negative thoughts that can lead to depression?
Instead of eliminating them, you can learn ways to develop a different relationship with these thoughts.
This different relationship involves learning ways to look at your thoughts instead of through them. Here are some ways to handle these negative thoughts.
1. Practice seeing thoughts as thoughts, not reality.
You spend a lot of your life caught up in thinking. The average person has over 6000 thoughts a day, but your brain has the ability to process over 70,000 thoughts in one day. A lot of these thoughts are repeat thoughts, ones that happen over and over. Because there are so many thoughts that happen so often, it is easy to believe the stories that are formed around them.
See if you can feel the difference between these two statements.
“I am going to make a fool of myself.”
This is a thought that you may struggle with if you have depression. As you sit with the thought, how does it make you feel? You may notice that your mind begins to come up with all kinds of evidence that proves this thought is true. Or it may search for evidence to prove that it is not true. Either way, you have given the thought the status of fact.
“I am having the thought that I am going to make a fool of myself.”
Do you notice the difference? When you are able to see these words as a thought that your mind is giving you, it gives you some space to decide what you want to do with the thought and how you want to respond to it.
I will often invite my clients to practice watching their thoughts. I invite them to close their eyes, and for the next minute watch the thoughts that their minds give them. Don’t try to generate thoughts; just notice the thoughts that come up. They are often surprised at how random the thoughts are. They are also surprised how many of these thoughts are judgmental and critical.
2. Practice defusing from your thoughts.
All the thoughts that contribute to your depression create a narrative about who you are. When you begin to believe that narrative, it shapes the meaning that you give to your life. You become fused with the thoughts and the narrative they create. Once you begin to see your thoughts as part of a depression-saturated narrative, you can learn ways to defuse from these thoughts.
Take the thought “I am going to make a fool of myself.” I will invite clients to put themselves in a situation where that thought was so powerful it was controlling how they felt and acted. Now, staying in that situation and the feelings that go with it, I invite them to say over and over, as fast as they can, “I am going to make a fool of myself,” until I say stop. After about 30 seconds, when I ask them how they feel, the power of the words is much less. A phrase that could dictate how they saw their life, thirty seconds later, they are just words.
There are other ways to defuse from your thoughts. You can thank your mind for giving you the thought. Some of my clients who really struggle with these negative thoughts will give their thinking mind a name. “Thanks, Bob, for telling me that I am going to make a fool of myself. I’ll keep that in mind.’
You can image your thoughts like cars on a freight train going by at a railroad stop. You can see them as coming in a door, walking across the room, and exiting through another door. You can imagine putting these thoughts on leaves in a stream and watching them float away.
These defusion techniques are not an attempt to minimize the thoughts you are having; instead you develop a different relationship with them that allows you to choose from a place of values. Visit my depression treatment specialty page to learn more.