alisonboston.com

Ah yes…

Brain Gym 101, digital artwork, copyright Alison Boston

If you’ve looked and read further than the front page and gallery of this website, you will have found a page in the Free Stuff where I talk about changing my habitual way of thinking.

I’ve been learning how to do that for years.

One of the first books I ever read on this theme was given to me by my brother. ‘Focussing’ teaches a technique for creating mental shifts, partly by getting in touch with an intense emotion and asking it for clarification. Through a process of giving the emotion a series of increasingly accurate labels, you are able to get an internal shift that when it really works, is actually physical - and you are able to feel the emotion change position in your physical self.

I will write more about my focussing experience at a later time, but today I want to tell you about the latest addition to my Brain Gym.

I read about this technique in a cute little book I found right here.

As part of Cognitive Therapy in treating depression, the writer suggests using a Thought Record. Essentially making notes of negative thoughts, the idea being that when we write down those negative thoughts we can then look at them and say: “Hey wait a minute, I would NOT say that to a good friend.” (You are your own best friend aren’t you?)

I realise that writing down negative thoughts gives them power - a NO! NO! in my Brain Gym - yet I also see how this technique can really help with training ourselves to be gentle and loving with ourselves.

One of the things I’ve read in self help forums is the importance that we be gentle with ourselves and when we catch ourselves thinking negative thoughts, or when we beat ourselves up for accidently breaking a glass or forgetting to pay a bill or for whatever reason, to GENTLY shift our thinking into a more positive and loving place.

I think Thought Records can help us learn how to let go of those nasty, critical thoughts.

This kind of Thought Recording is also used in creating positive affirmations. You write down - stream of conscious - all the reasons why you are no good, or why you can’t do something - and then turn those thoughts into positive statements which become affirmations. When we apply this technique to Negative Thoughts, things like:

“I’ve really made a mess of things here.”

Become:

“I made what I thought were the best decisions at the time, and there have been good and bad things happen as a result. You can sort this out. You’ve got it in you.”

Now isn’t that more the way you would talk to a good friend when they were feeling down?

The thing is, to turn around the thinking and make it stick, we have to bring these kinds of self deprecating thoughts to the consciousness, and clean them up. Keeping a Thought Record gets them out of our heads and onto paper. It takes them from being intangible thoughts that can breed like a cancer into a full blown depression and turns them into just one little thought, that when written down we can look at and say. “Nah, not true!”