Dr. Don Wood explains why your mind generates intrusive negative thoughts and offers a technique to interrupt them: recognize the thought early, switch to a prepared positive memory like an upcoming vacation, close your eyes to slow your mind, then open them and describe what you see to return to the present.
Chapters
If you have negative thoughts that pop into your head that ruin your entire day, here's what you can do to stop them. Why do these thoughts come into your mind in the first place? The reason why is your mind is always scanning the environment. It's always looking for ways to keep you safe. And thoughts sometimes can be intrusive because they may come in at the wrong time. So the problem happens when these negative thoughts start coming in. It's almost like a thread on a piece of material. Have you ever had like a sweater or something? You pull a thread, it just keeps running and running and running. The negative thought keeps running just like pulling on the thread. One of the keys is to recognize when a thought is coming in. The earlier you can catch it, the faster you can stop it. So here's one of the techniques you can use. Prepare in advance three other thoughts that are positive. Three things that are going on in your life that you're looking forward to. A vacation that's coming up. Maybe you're going to go watch your child perform in a play. Have those three thoughts prepared in advance. When one of those negative thoughts come in and you spot it immediately close your eyes. When you. When you close your eyes, you shut the brain down, you slow it down, and then what do you do? You use 1, 2, or 3 of those thoughts that you prepared in advance. So now you're going to shift gears into one of the positive thoughts. Then open up your eyes and look at the first thing you see and just quickly describe it in your mind. What that does is it brings you back into the present. By coming back into the present, there's no longer that negative thought running and you're in a different gear.
