How many of you have ever had bouts of depression or feelings of anxiety?
The Key Concepts in this article are to help you:
- Become Aware of your thoughts
- Learn about the different types of thoughts
- Focus on thought management
- Remove negative thought patterns
The story of Victor Frankel:
Victor Frankel was a Jew and a survivor of the concentration camps during WW II. He survived the death camps that had killed 11 million people and 6 million Jews. He was also a physiatrist who studied with Freud and Adler in Vienna. Before he was taken to the concentration camps, he developed his own kind of therapy which was divergent thinking according to the current philosophy. Whereas Freud and Adler focused their therapy on the negative events that occurred in people’s lives; Victor’s emphasis was on the positive outcomes of events. He called is approach Logotherapy. Prior to the holocaust he spent most of his time working with suicidal patients, and he had a great deal of success with his approach. He believed that what we give to life, not what we take from it, makes our lives meaningful. It was because of his ability to manage his mind he survived the atrocities of the Nazi death machine. He survived 2 ½ years and 4 different concentration camps with his mind over matter philosophy. Victor developed three main ways that human beings find meaning in life.
Meaning Through Action or Creation:
For example, an auto mechanic who feels his life is meaningful when he comes up with the correct diagnosis for an ailing car and then repairs it. Meaning through creation can occur when a musician finds satisfaction in writing and recording a piece of music.
Meaning Through Experience:
Might be the exhilaration of scaling a difficult mountain face, or a human encounter through a simple smile from a stranger, romantic love, or love of family and friends.
Meaning Through Suffering:
This can happen when a person responds to a difficult situation that is outside their control and can turn that suffering into a human triumph. For example: a teenager who faces living with alcoholic parents can get lost in the pain of that life or he can focus on his life goals and create something better. It’s a choice. Victor used this turning suffering to triumph that enabled him to overcome the adversities in the camps. In other words, positive thinking can actually save your life. After the war Victor wrote his famous book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”. It has been translated into 27 languages and has sold over 4 million copies in English alone. It is a book that I highly recommend reading.
The basic theory of his Logotherapy is that finding meaning in life can enable a person to survive the worst conditions in life. We too can turn our sufferings into victory when we learn to manage our negative thoughts.
You can learn how to increase your effectiveness and your potential by managing your thoughts.. The following summary notes come from the book Stop the Automatic Negative Thoughts by Joseph Neyyen:
Our automatic negative thoughts or ANTS are gloomy, cynical, and complaining thoughts that just seem to be marching in all by themselves.
ANTS can cause people to be depressed and fatalistic. This kind of thinking makes for self-fulfilling prophecy; if you have already made up your mind to a negative outcome, your will make sure it happens. Positive thoughts will make you more effective in life.
What goes on in our minds all day long can determine whether your behavior will be is self-defeating or self-promoting. Those self-defeating negative thoughts we keep repeating over and over in our minds, hypnotizing ourselves into failure. When we keep saying them over and over and over again, I call that renumerating. This means to recount. Those who renumerate are like cows chewing their cud; they chew it over and over and over again. Those who renumerate have more of a problem with depression and anxiety. And women tend to renumerate more than men.
Here are some typical Automatic Negative Thoughts
- You never listen to me.
- Just because we had one good year in business doesn’t mean anything.
- You don’t like me.
- This situation is not going to work out. I know something bad will happen.
- I feel as though you don’t care about me.
- I should have done much better, I am a failure.
- You’re late because you don’t care.
- It’s your fault.
- You are really arrogant.
Here are some actual step-by-step “thinking practices” to manage those ANTS.
Step One: Realize that thoughts are real
- You have a thought.
- Your brain releases chemicals.
- An electrical transmission goes across your brain.
- You become aware of what you are thinking.
- Thoughts are real and have a real impact on how you feel and how you behave.
Step 2: Notice how negative thoughts affect your body.
Every time you have an angry thought, an unkind thought, a sad thought, or a cranky thought, your brain releases chemicals that make your body feel bad. Think about the last time you were mad. Do this now. Notice how your body feels. When most people are angry, their muscles become tense, hearts beat faster, hands start to sweat. Your body reacts to every negative thought that you have.
Step Three: Now notice how a positive thought affects your body.
Every time you have a good thought, a happy thought, a hopeful thought, your brain releases chemicals that make your body feel good. Think about the last time you really had a happy thought. Now how does your body feel?
Step Four: Begin to notice how your body feels to every thought that you have.
This is how a lie detector works. It measures hand temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, muscle tension, and how much the hands sweat. You must become your own lie detector. Your body will tell you when you are filling your mind with the lie’s of negative thoughts.
Step Five: Think of bad thoughts as pollution.
Your thoughts are very powerful; they can make you feel good or they can make you feel bad. Every cell in your body is affected by the thoughts that you have. That is why when people get emotionally upset, they frequently develop physical symptoms. Some physicians believe that our negative thoughts can lead to cancer. If you think about good things, you will feel better.
Step Six: Understand that your automatic thoughts don’t always tell the truth.
You must challenge your thoughts to see if they will help you or hurt you.
Step Seven: Talk back to your ANT’s
You can train your thoughts to be helpful, or you can allow your negative thoughts to control you and make your life miserable. When you correct negative thoughts, you take their away their power over you.
Step Eight: Exterminate the ANT’s.
Think of those negative thoughts that invade your mind like ants that bother you at a picnic. One negative thought, like one ant at a picnic, is not a big problem. But when there are 20 ants you might pick up your picnic and leave. When you have those negative thoughts, you must learn to crush them or they will ruin your relationships, your self-esteem and your personal power. Write down your negative thoughts and talk back to them. For example, if you catch yourself saying: “My husband never listens to me.” Write it down. Then write down a rational response, he must be distracted right now, my husband usually listens to me.
OK, let’s kill an ant. Write down a negative thought that you frequently have.
Now write down a new rational response.
Now let’s take a look at the different types of ANT Species
- Always/never thinking, thinking in words like always, never, no one, everyone, every time, everything
- Focusing on the negative: seeing only the bad in a situation.
Tell the story of the executive who focused on the negative.
- Fortune telling predicting the worst possible outcome to a situation
- Mind reading: believing that you know what others are thinking, even though they have not told you
- Thinking with your feelings: believing negative feelings without ever questioning them.
- Guilt beating: thinking in words like should, must, ought, or have to. Look at all I have done for you, makes others feel guilty
- Labeling: attaching a negative label to yourself or to someone else, hiding behind our judgments
- Personalizing: investing innocuous events with personal meaning. “What other people think of me is none of my business.”
- Blaming: (the most poisonous red ant) blaming someone else for your own problems. We blame the government, the neighbor, the boss, the spouse, the employees, and the kids. We are responsible for our lives and we are responsible for how people treat us.
Pick one from the above list and to identify the type of ANT, the Species and then let’s kill the ANT and journal your response.
Many of the ANTS make us depressed but to kill the fortune telling ANTS means overcoming our fears and anxieties as well. Several techniques can help us focus on those fortune telling ANTS:
Here are some additional practices that can help you derail those ANTS
- Diaphragmatic breathing
- Meditation and Visual Imagery
- Hypnosis and self-Hypnosis
- Nutrition
- Scents from essential oils
Victor Frankle survived the holocaust by managing his thoughts and helping others do the same. We to can survive adverse situations by managing our thoughts.