Every single thought you have releases chemicals in the brain that can make you either feel good or feel bad.
With stressful negative thoughts, your hands get cold, you get tense, your heart rate goes up, breathing becomes disorganized and your immune system decreases its effectiveness.
With happy, loving or hopeful thoughts, your brain releases chemicals that help you feel positive and good.
- Exercise: Whenever you feel sad, mad or nervous, write down the automatic thought in your head so you can evaluate it by asking yourself these questions:
- Is it true?
- Can I absolutely know it is true?
- How do I feel when I believe this thought?
- Who would I be without this thought? Then turn around the original thought to be the opposite of what you had written down and see if this is actually truer than the original thought.
- The lies that happen in the brains of addicts are the basis of “stinking thinking.” Challenging your thoughts in this way lets you question their rationale and helps you see how untruthful you can be to yourself. This exercise also lets you see how your negative thoughts make you feel badly about yourself and your life – and your emotional response to them makes you vulnerable to relapse. Identifying how you would feel without the thought and turning the questions around allows you to see yourself and your life through a more realistic, positive and hopeful light.
- All addicts share the counterproductive emotions of shame, pain, guilt and humiliation and these lead to the automatic negative thoughts.
- There are different types of categories, including:
All or nothing: Seeing the world in black and white.
All or nothing thinking: Always thinking.
Overgeneralizing: always, every time on everyone, such as taking one event and seeing it as something that will always repeat itself. For example, with one relapse, “I will never be able to be clean and sober (or lose weight, or to get the desire job”
Fortune telling :You predict things are going to turn out badly.