Whether you realize it or not, you spend most of the
day engaging in self-talk, your internal thought language. (Yes, you do talk to yourself!) These are the words you use to describe and
interpret your world. If your thinking
and self-talk are accurate and in touch with reality, you function well and
feel good about situations. If, however,
your thinking and self-talk are irrational and untrue (and it often is), then
you will tend to feel stressful and uncomfortable. You may even experience an “inner battle”
between self-talk that is truthful and reasonable and self-talk that is
irrational, illogical, and false.
Here is an example of irrational self-talk: “Everyone has to like me.” Who says that everyone must like you? Can you get along knowing that one of your
classmates or peers may not like you?
Here are some other examples of irrational self-talk
from irrational thinking: “I should
never cry in front of other people” or “I can’t allow anyone to hurt my
feelings” or “I can’t allow myself to fail at anything” or “There is only one
person in this world who truly loves me.”
Irrational ideas differ greatly. Here are eight irrational thinking
patterns that influence emotions and ultimately influence behavior. As you read them, think of situations where
you used any of these irrational thinking patterns:
1. FILTERING: You focus on
the negative details while filtering/ignoring all the positive aspects of a situation. EXAMPLE:
Your boss tells you that your work is good but he thinks you socialize
too much with the other personnel in the workplace. You go home thinking that your boss doesn’t
like you.
2. POLARIZED
THINKING: Things
are black or white, good or bad. You
have to be perfect or you’re a failure. There is no middle ground, no room for
mistakes. EXAMPLE: Speaking to yourself, "You are so dumb. You should have known what to say. You just don't have what it takes."
3. OVERGENERALIZATION: You reach a general conclusion based on a
single incident or piece of evidence.
You exaggerate the frequency of problems and use negative global
labels. Popular words for
overgeneralization are all, every, none, never, always, everybody, and nobody. EXAMPLE:
"You always accuse me of saying that. You're never there for me. You do that every time. Everybody knows that."
4. MIND READING: Without their saying so, you know what
people are feeling and why they act the way they do. In particular, you seem to have certain
knowledge of how people think and feel about you. EXAMPLE: “You're doing that because you really don't care.”
5. CATASTROPHIZING: You expect, even visualize disaster. You notice or hear about a problem and start
asking, “What if?” or “What if tragedy strikes?” or “What if it happens to
me?” EXAMPLE: Speaking to yourself, "What will happen if this feeling doesn't leave me? What will happen if my son never talks to me again? What if I am not good enough?"
6. MAGNIFYING: You exaggerate the degree or intensity of a
problem. You turn up the volume on
anything bad, making it loud, large, and overwhelming. EXAMPLE: "That woman cannot stop talking. There is no way you'll figure that out."
7. PERSONALIZATION: You assume that everything people do or say
is some kind of reaction to you. You
routinely compare yourself to others, trying to determine who is smarter, more
competent, better looking, and so on.
EXAMPLE: Speaking to yourself, “I know that she's talking about me.” He's much better at speaking than I am."
8. SHOULDS: You have a list of ironclad rules about how
you and other people should act. People
who break the rules anger you, and you feel guilty when you violate the
rules. Cue words used for this type of
thinking are should, ought to, or must. EXAMPLE:
“You should never should look sad; you just need to be happy. You should have done it my way."
Most
of our irrational thought patterns had their beginnings in our family of origin
(FOO). As youngsters, our beliefs were
affected by what we saw occur around us.
Besides many good things we may have seen around us in our FOO, we also
may have seen addictive behavior from an adult, or a caregiver’s inability to
show warmth and affection we wanted, or an adult being overly critical, or an
adult being overly rigid in their religious beliefs. We may have witnessed guilt and fear in
adults around us who then attempted to transfer their guilt and fear onto us,
frequently through manipulation. Because
we consciously or subconsciously saw our parents’ or other adults’ irrational
beliefs played out in what seemed to be irrational behaviors, it was how we
learned to view our world. This thinking
may have led us to believe that no matter what we did in life, it would "never
be good enough.'' It may have led us to
believe that since we may not have known where we stood in a given situation, we
had to try to “read” what parents and others were thinking, and would then try
to please them. This thinking may have led
us to believe that we were nothing unless we did things in the “correct” way,
often the exact way adults demanded that it be done. This thinking did not
allow us to love ourselves unconditionally for simply being the person that we were.
The irrational beliefs
we saw around us influenced how we thought, and as we grew older those
irrational thoughts became irrational patterns of thought. Those thought patterns became familiar to the
neurological connections in our brains and through years of thinking the same
way about certain life situations, the neurons eventually fired in consistent
patterns. Thus, as adults, when
confronted with a given situation or event, or something similar to our
experiences, our brains respond in an automatic way. Regrettably, it may be an irrational thought.
Our thoughts, especially irrational thoughts, often
produce physical reactions that can affect our moods and feelings, and vice
versa. Those irrational thoughts and
feelings can then influence our thoughts as well as our behaviors. But the nexus, the focal point of our
experience is our thoughts,
particularly those generated from our irrational
thoughts and that often have evolved into patterns of thoughts.
What
we do with those thoughts can affect the event or situation at hand and will
most certainly affect our behavior, our action.
So
let’s look at a common behavior that has evolved from an irrational thought
pattern that many of us do not like/want to have: procrastination.
Perhaps
as youngsters we observed parents who would often put off doing things; they
would put off tasks instead of doing them right away. Or perhaps as youngsters, when we had
assignments due in school, we wanted to play and not do them, and perhaps our
caregivers were tired and would allow them to be put off, or would not allow
you to experience the consequences of delaying doing something until it was too
late. Whatever we observed or experienced ourselves, we likely learned at a
young age that it was OK to put off doing work, especially challenging or
difficult work. That thinking became a
pattern of thinking. You might argue as
to how irrational procrastinating is, but plainly, there are clearly good
feelings and moods as well as a likely physical reaction of well-being and
contentment when we accomplish a task, and particularly a challenging task, and
negative feelings, moods, and physical reactions when we procrastinate.
The emotionally
HEALTHY course of action would be that when there is an event or situation, and
let’s say for an example an assignment is due for a class, you pay attention to
the self-talk in your mind, the “inner battle” discussed previously, and to the
positive thought that you should not procrastinate. Ask yourself, “Why am I wanting to put off
doing this?” “What will be the benefit of doing it now? What will be the positive outcome if I
procrastinate?” “The negative outcome?”
“How will I feel if I put it off?”
What
you are doing by asking yourself these types of questions is challenging
the irrational thought of procrastinating.
You are interrupting the pattern.
That you may have been procrastinating for most of your life does not
mean you have to continue, unless of course you want to. That you may have learned this behavior from
your home environment does not mean that you are destined to keep perpetuating
it. That you may give in and
procrastinate does not mean that you are powerless to change.
Each
time you make the right choice to not procrastinate, your willpower will
increase. Done repeatedly (but not
necessarily every single time), the neurological synaptic connections in the
brain will begin to fire in a new way.
It won’t nearly be so difficult to simply do the task at hand. You will begin to enjoy the positive emotions
and feelings and even a positive physical reaction (or at least you will not be
experiencing the negative physical reactions that occur).
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