In the 1960s, Beck was working with patients with depression and noticed that streams of negative thoughts spontaneously popped up. You’ve heard of ants spoiling a picnic, but these “ants” could be spoiling your life.Īaron Beck, MD, is considered the founder of cognitive therapy. Why Automatic Negative Thoughts Are Called ANTS If you do something often enough, including thinking negative thoughts, you create a neural pathway. This is evidenced by the fact that 90% of all thoughts are repetitive you’ll have almost the same thoughts today that you had yesterday. The second reason you may have so many automatic negative thoughts is that your negative thinking has become a habit. " Cognitive biases and distortions are sneaky ways in which your mind convinces you of something that isn’t really true. This enables us to solve problems before we get into trouble.īut this capability to imagine threats can also work against you by turning your mind into a “random negative thought generator.” Imagination is one of the best qualities of the human mind and we use it to imagine potential threats and problems. Our ancestors survived by constantly being on the lookout for threats, fixing problems as they arose, and then learning from their mistakes. So you can stop beating yourself up for having them they exist to keep you safe. There are two main reasons why we have automatic negative thoughts.įirst, having negative thoughts is perfectly normal.
AUTOMATIC NEGATIVE THOUGHTS HOW TO
Let’s examine why human thoughts are so predominantly negative and, more importantly, how to control all those unwanted negative thoughts. Psychologists have labeled these automatic negative thoughts.īuddha wisely said that nothing can harm you as much as your own thoughts, and, for many of us, this certainly is true. The majority of these thoughts are negative and seem to pop up out of the blue. The average human brain does a lot of thinking, up to 70,000 thoughts per day.
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