![]() Don’t worry if you don’t believe it yet, still write it down. Beside each negative phrase, write the opposite – the positive equivalent. For a week, write down the negative self-talk that comes to your mind. Shifting your perception of yourself can be powerful. But try to let yourself ‘sit’ with the emotion, rather than letting yourself become distracted by the ANTs that will attach themselves to it. ![]() When the really difficult things come along, for example when facing a bereavement, it is absolutely necessary to allow ourselves time to grieve and feel the sadness. Try to get into the habit of recognising the start of this cycle and asking yourself: ‘How bad is it, on a scale of 1 to 10?’ Take a step back from the situation to gain perspective. But, we also often have a habit of sweating the small stuff, and see comparatively ‘trivial’ situations as worse than they are.Īwfulising is one of the strongest ANT magnets, drawing us down the spiral of often increasingly negative thoughts and emotions. There are, of course, situations where terrible things do happen. We all fall prey to cognitive bias – and one of the most common is the tendency to awfulise, or catastrophise. Try shifting your perspective to keep the ANTs at bay. Visual, aural, physical, kinaesthetic and creative mindfulness exercises can help, such as going for a mindful walk, using the NOW technique to Notice, Observe and Wonder, or writing a gratitude journal. Learning to bring your thoughts back to the present moment is key. Before you know it you’ve gone down the rabbit hole. One negative thought leads to another, which leads to another. For some, this negative self-talk can be like living with a gremlin, who is always ready to leap out and attack.īoth past and future noise, and negative self-talk, make ripe pickings for ANTs. Our self-criticism can be intensely personal and judgemental we ‘say’ things to ourselves we would never say to anyone else. Watch your negative self-talkĪ common type of noise is negative self-talk – the things we tell ourselves we can’t do, and the list is endless. But if we can adjust this perspective, we can utilise this time and energy better. We also spend a vast amount of time worrying about the future – or more accurately potential futures. We all have a tendency to dwell on the past, and to replay situations in our mind that cannot be changed. ![]() The rest is ‘noise’, and a good deal of that is infested with automatic negative thoughts (or ANTs). Scientists believe we have between 20,000 and 60,000 thoughts a day, but only about 5% of these are spent on the task in hand. It may surprise you to know that almost all of us have a problem with ANTs. Here, Mind Fitness experts Andy Barker and Beth Wood share their insights into how to stop automatic negative thoughts (ANTs) in their tracks. Do you have an ANT problem? Does your mind immediately go to the worst case scenario? While there’s nothing wrong with being prepared for every eventuality, spending too much time dwelling on things we can’t change can hold us back from moving forward.
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