One advantage of using a journal, or brain dump, is to help you recognise negative thought patterns. Writing about your thoughts and feelings will help you to start to see any negative patterns that may be keeping your thinking trapped. As well as making your mental health worse.

If you don’t use a journal then please consider starting one if you want to effectively challenge and change those thoughts patterns. With practice we can build an awareness that helps us to catch our negative thoughts on the go and challenge them.

These negative thought patterns are also called negative thought distortions and they will dictate how we think and behave within our life. There are quite a number of negative thought patterns and you’ll probably recognize that you use a number of them. Don’t worry about how many there are just choose one and learn to recognise this one and challenge it.

What Are Common Negative Thought Patterns?

1. All or nothing thinking or black and white thinking: You see things in extreme or in black and white terms.
2. Over-generalization: You see a single negative event as proof that other similar events will turn out the same way.
3. Mental filters: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it, then view the whole situation or day as negative also.
4. Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they ‘don’t count’ for some reason or another. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.
5. Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that support your conclusion. This can happen in the following ways: 1.Mind Reading and. 2. Fortune Telling.
6. Magnification (catastrophising): You exaggerate the importance of things usually in a negative manner. You can blow something small into huge proportions. You inappropriately shrink any positives and your achievements or desirable qualities also.
7. Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are.
8. Should/must statements (Perfectionism can come under this heading): You set yourself standards of what you perceive you ‘should’ or ‘must’ be doing. These standards are often too high and unrealistic. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements towards others, you feel anger, frustration and resentment.
9. Labeling and mislabeling: This is an extreme form of over generalizing. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself:
10. Personalizing: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event, when in fact you did not have primary or any responsibility.

It is scary to think that we have fallen prey to any kind of negative thinking, that our brain, which we trust, can fool us like this. That these though patterns create a negative bias, or perspective, of our world. If you find that your negative thinking has become overwhelming for you then please reach out for support. A therapist can work with you to overcome these thought patterns quite quickly.

My Workbooks.

I have a number of workbooks you might find helpful in my shop or on Amazon. They cover negative thinking patterns and how you can learn to challenge them. You will find all links to these workbooks here.