I’ve had a lot of clients come to me recently with feelings of being overwhelmed. Maybe they’re in grad school, or saving to buy a home, or working on a career change; and they’re juggling this, their daily lives, and their plans and hopes for the future. I find it is easy to stay trapped in your own head when you’re so busy and working so hard. That the doubt and negative self-judgment simultaneously push you to work harder and cast a dark feeling of insecurity over the whole process.
When you begin the process of thinking about your thinking, you’re able to see how much weight and validity we tend to automatically give our negative thoughts, while dismissing our positive thoughts and examples as a fluke, luck, or not enough to result in lasting change.
I try to encourage client’s to not just accepts the thoughts that guide you, but to really stop and check in on some of the content. Are you telling yourself you can’t do it? That people are judging you? That others have done it better? Just because these thoughts occur doesn’t make them true. Tapping into your thoughts helps you recognize negative pattern, question them, and replace them with more realistic thoughts that carry more truth.
For example, a client comes in and tells me that they are in school for a post-masters program and they’re feeling depressed and isolating from friends because they’re overwhelmed by the program. Together we examine the thoughts that are making the client feel this way, and identify that one particular thought is repeated often: “I am not as smart as everyone here, and what am I going to do with this degree if I am already feeling out of my league?” Next, the client is encouraged to process why they don’t feel as smart and whether there is any evidence to support this belief. Have they failed a test? Has someone in the program told them they are not smart? The client realizes there is no actual evidence for this thought, but they have been allowing it to be true simply because it’s in their head.
Then we explore the fears and insecurities the client carries relating to feeling less smart – and process the times in their life they’ve felt this way, which may have created this negative thinking in the first place. Finally, we work together to dismantle the negative thought with a more realistic and self-supporting thought. Instead of “I am not as smart as everyone here, and what am I going to do with this degree if I am already feeling out of my league?”, the client is able to re-frame the thought using evidence, to, “I am feeling that everyone here is as passionate as I am about this program and I am second guessing myself because it’s new and intense. I can do this, as my coursework and participation have shown me. And I can collaborate with the people in my program to gain insights into how this is going to help or shape my career.”
Over time the ability to examine a thought and to question its validity using evidence from your life, becomes easier. And in doing so, you stop allowing the negative thoughts to carry more weight or truth than the positive, or neutral thoughts. It’s a great exercise to try on your own, and would be even more effective with the help of a professional who can support you in processing the themes in your negative thinking, where they come from, and how to use reality to change them.