An ANT Invasion!

Have you ever seen one ant in your house and then, all of a sudden, there are hundreds of them.

I was just reading Dr. Daniel Amen’s book, “Magnificent Mind At Any Age”, and he spoke of Automatic Negative Thoughts, thoughts that come into your mind unconsciously and send you into a tailspin.  He calls them ANTs.

And much like those pesky insects, when you have one ANT (Automatic Negative Thought) many seem to follow.  Why?

He explains that your physiology actually changes every time you have a thought. 

His brain imaging studies have demonstrated that your brain releases a certain set of chemicals each and every time you have a thought.

Positive thoughts produce chemicals that make you feel good.

Negative thoughts discharge chemicals that make you feel bad. 

One of his studies showed harmful thoughts actually deactivated both a woman’s cerebellum, the back bottom part of the brain that plays an important role in your physical coordination as well as her left temporal lobe, which when disengaged makes you more likely to get irritated.

Talk about how your thoughts create your entire reality.

He mentions 9 different Automatic Negative Thoughts, they are…

1)  Always or never thinking:  Overgeneralizing a situation.  These thoughts usually begin with words like, always, never, everyone or every time.

2)  Focusing on the negative: Preoccupying your attention on what is going wrong in a situation and ignoring everything that could be construed as positive.

3)  Fortune-telling:  Predicting the outcome of an experience or situation as the worst possible and as impossible to overcome.

4)  Mind Reading:  Arbitrarily believing you know what another person thinks, even though they have not told you.

5)  Thinking with Your Feelings:  Believing your negative feelings without ever questioning them.

6)  Guilt Beatings:  Thinking with words like should, must, ought, or have to that produce feelings of guilt.

7)  Labeling:  Attaching a negative label to yourself or others.

8)  Personalization:  Allowing innocuous thoughts to take on a personal meaning.

9)  Blame:  Blaming others for the problems in your life.

So what can we do?  We have one negative thought and all of a sudden there’s an entire army of negative thoughts traipsing through our mind.

As many of you know, on my path to being my own Wingman, I’ve become passionate about finding strategies to wipe those negative thoughts out and turn them around. 

Thankfully, Dr. Amen gives them as well.  He credits Byron Katie with developing a technique to help us question our negative thoughts and actually turn them around.

Katie calls it “The Work” and says we must question our negative thoughts and then turn them around.  She offers these four questions:

1)  Is it true?
      Say you are in a disagreement with your child or your parent and you feel he/she’s         not listening to you. The thought may get exaggerated to… He never listens to me!

      Well, it certainly feels true at that moment!

2)  Can I absolutely know that it’s true?

      Well, not exactly. 

      It’s certainly not entirely true; he listens to me sometimes, just not this time.

3)  How do I react when I believe that thought?

      I get defensive, irritable and “pissy” towards him. 

      I’ll start saying stuff I don’t believe just to make a point. 
      I become someone I don’t even like.

4)  Who would I be without the thought?

     Or how would I feel if I didn’t have the thought?

      I feel like I’d be my normal positive thinking self, the me I love when I’m 

      appreciating things, when I’m seeing solutions instead of problems, when I’m 

      seeing what’s going right in the situation and building from there.

The turnarounds…

·         My son always listens to me.  Hmmm. Not sure that’s exactly true.

·         I never listen to my son.  Ohhhh noooo, I don’t think I want to go there.

·         It’s great my son and I get together and talk, even though at times we  

          may disagree and get upset with each other.  This one I like!

Questioning my negative thoughts and turning them around is certainly one way to practice seeing who I am, and more importantly, who I want to be.

Being as we are human, ANTs, Automatic Negative Thoughts will always have potential to run amuck through our minds.  It’s best to have a plan, an ANTeater, so to speak.

Best of luck with your practice.

Thanks for letting me be your wingman today.

In Appreciation,

Michael