Is the storyline in your head holding you back?

Are the thoughts in your head difficult to control? Do they make you feel negative or, produce negative outcomes? Do you want to learn how to begin controlling them? Let’s explore your thinking…🧠🕵️‍♀️🕵️‍♂️

👉 Good mental health depends upon your affective states that shape how you feel, think, and act. For example, your stress responses, emotions, moods, and impulses. These can support your adaptive functioning, however, maladaptive affect regulation processes or maladaptive affect generation processes can adversely impact your mental health (Gross et al. 2019). Below, is a framework to help you understand how this can work. I have detailed and provided an example for each stage involved in affective states. These stages can vary in duration, automaticity, and specificity. 🔶 Situation – You are in an interview for a new career and realise you feel anxious. 🔶 Attention – Because of this realisation you now fixate on the chance you might fail to be offered the position. 🔶 Appraisal – This leads to you now appraising the situation as more threatening. 🔶 Response – This results in you experiencing increased anxiety. (Gross et al. 2019)

However, with practice and time, you can learn affect regulation strategies. ✅ Situational Strategies -> situation selection which involves choosing which situations you put yourself in and situation modification which is modifying what is happening in the situation. For the example of attending a job interview, it would not be helpful to implement situation selection and avoid the interview. However, you can implore situation modification. You can prepare for the interview to reduce feelings of anxiety when being interviewed. You can focus on the abilities you have that you feel confident discussing while in the interview if you begin to feel anxious. ✅ Attentional Strategies. -> You can change what aspects of the situation you attend to. For example, when you feel anxious in the interview you can distract yourself from these anxious thoughts by diverting your attention solely focusing on responding to the question you have been asked. ✅ Appraisal Strategies -> This involves changing how you view the situation with reference to values, goals, and additional motivational concerns. For example, instead of focusing on the thoughts that are causing you to feel anxious, you focus on this interview being an opportunity to develop your interview skills and add to your experience ✅ Response modulation Strategies -> This involves counteracting the affect-related experiential, behavioural, or physiological changes you are experiencing. For example, if your anxiety in the interview is making your body feel hot you can take off your blazer and take a sip of cold water.

These strategies have also been found useful in regulating impulses, stress, and emotions in addition to the aforementioned benefits for mood regulation (Gross et al. 2019).

👉 Helpful or Harmful?🧐 If thinking about the negative or positive impact of your thoughts is new to you, it can be challenging to understand if they are harmful or helpful. Having a few anxious thoughts before attending an important job interview can be healthy as they can improve your performance. But intense anxious thoughts can be harmful when it impairs your performance or even causes you to avoid the interview.

✍️ Helpful or Harmful Exercise: Over the next week start making a note of some of your thoughts throughout the day. Then ask yourself the following questions.. ✍️ What emotion does this thought make you feel? ✍️ Are these pleasant or unpleasant emotions? ✍️ What behaviours does this thought lead you to do? ✍️ Are these helpful or harmful behaviours?

This should help you develop a deeper understanding of the helpfulness or harmfulness of the thoughts you are experiencing.

👉 People with anxiety and depression can often experience depressive rumination and worry. Anxiety and depression are strongly associated with repetitive negative thinking (Spinhoven et al. 2018). Repetitive negative thinking has been identified as a risk factor for depression and anxiety, the severity of the symptoms, and the persistence and relapse of anxiety and depressive disorders (Spinhoven et al. 2018). Below are descriptions of these types of thoughts:

🔷 Unconstructive repetitive negative thinking – This is when you repeatedly have intrusive thoughts that you find difficult to disengage from that focus on your problems or negative experiences (Ehring and Watkins 2008). 🔷 Depressive rumination – Consistently focusing on your depression, the symptoms of depression you are experiencing, and the cause and consequence of your depression (Nolen-Hoeksema 1991) 🔷 Worry – This is a chain of thoughts or images that negatively affect you and feel uncontrollable (Borkovec et al 1983)

A systematic review has reported that cognitive-behavioural and mindfulness-based interventions can be effective in the reduction of both worry and rumination (Gu et al. 2015). Happio has launched a therapy programmes based on cognitive behavioural principles that can help you to reduce your feelings of anxiety and depression.

👉 Self-Compassion✨

Self-compassion is the balance of increased positive and reduced negative self-responding to struggle. By a recognition that we are all humans and humans have imperfections and lead imperfect lives. It entails mindful awareness of suffering and ruminating less on personal experiences or negative beliefs about yourself. (Neff 2003, Neff et al. 2018). Research has reported that self-compassion scores are a significant predictor for well-being in the following areas, psychopathology, emotional intelligence, self-concept, positive psychological health, body image, interpersonal functioning, and motivation. (Neff et al. 2018). What does this mean for you? It means when you experience a negative thought be kind to yourself, and show yourself compassion and love. This can help reduce poor mental well-being.

👉 Acceptance of Negative Thoughts and Emotions. A struggle many clients experience is challenging their negative thoughts once they have learned to identify them. This is because many people believe them to be true, and feel it isn’t a negative thought if it’s the “truth”. If you are one of these people, and you face difficulty challenging these thoughts, acceptance could be a useful strategy for you.

Relevantly recent research has reported that individuals who accept their mental experiences rather than judge them may attain better psychological health. As acceptance helps reduce the negative emotion experienced in response to the negative thought or emotion (Ford et al. 2018). Accepting your thoughts can help you to reduce your reaction to the thought which can exacerbate the negative mental experience. Acceptance also predicted lower negative reactions to daily stressors

Remember, you are not alone! Take a look at our Managing Stress and Anxiety course if you feel you would benefit from support with managing your thoughts 🤗.

🤗 Happio is here to help you! 🤗