Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs) are involuntary, recurring thoughts that often surface without conscious intention, casting a negative shadow over one’s mood and outlook.
These thoughts can trigger self-doubt, anxiety, and a negative perception of oneself or situations. Recognising and addressing ANTs is crucial as they can significantly influence emotions, behaviours, and overall mental well-being.
These thoughts come up repeatedly, unbidden, and they can create shadows over your mood. They can change your entire day and common triggers or situations can make this happen.
In exploring this subject, questions arise: Why do we end up experiencing self-defeating, mood-lowering thoughts? How can we catch and kill these thoughts? Why can it affect everyone from an organisation right up to the top? Why are people susceptible to this, and what kind of techniques can help combat them?
First of all, there are two minorities here.
Minority number one: A small number of people are aware that they’re experiencing automatic negative thinking. Most people have no idea that it’s going on. It’s happening at the subconscious level, they are deeply affected, their decisions are affected, what they say, what they do, how they behave, their body language, their eye contact, all affected by automatic negative thinking. So this minority of people do have a clue that it’s happening, and they’re being so deeply affected.
The other small minority are people who’ve actually done something about it, who’ve become proactive, who’ve got professional help or who’ve just got help. You know, you don’t need professional psychiatrists, psychologists or even counsellors.
There are all sorts of ways of raising my awareness of what is automatically popping up at the back of my head, very often triggered by what someone else says or does or a decision or my perception of what’s going on. And as soon as I’m triggered in that way, I’m catapulted very often back to some shadowy place or in this case, specifically: I’m afraid I’m no good. I can’t do this. Everybody else is better than me and the whole range of automatic negative scripts that pop up instantly whenever we’re triggered in certain ways.
Outside those two minorities, most people, because they’re not aware of it, go through life, as most psychologists would suggest, sleepwalking. They’re not aware. They’re going around very often heavily influenced by automatic negative thinking because it can happen multiple times in a day, and yet, clearly because they have no clue, they don’t do anything about it.
They’re simply slaves. They’re imprisoned, they’re emasculated, you can describe it in many ways. They’re straightjacketed, they’re handcuffed by these automatic negative scripts that in most of the clients that I work with provide, once they’re worked on and once they’re transformed, the most extraordinary liberation in terms of having peace in everyday life and getting on with a happy balanced life.
Now the immediate question is, well, how do you do that? What do you do?
And there is no generic universal magic wand. Every single person needs unique support in terms of how emotionally and psychologically they are affected, how their psychopathology, their history, their upbringing and the narratives that they learn whenever they’re young, that all requires quite careful handling.
However, there are a number of simple principles.
Step number one, and this is the hardest one, this is by far the most painful and difficult and scary step, is to identify the automatic negative cognitive script that is popping up, and for a lot of people, they need hand-holding, support, encouragement, guidance, inspiration, anything to get them through that shadowy moment because it is a scary moment.
Most people are afraid of what they might find, however, once they’ve identified the automatic negative script, it can be something as simple, something as apparently innocent, not innocent but apparently innocent as, I’m no good, everybody else is better than me, and that’s a very common one. That’s hugely common.
And so, having nailed the, hopefully accurately, the automatic negative script, the next step is to encourage the individual to ask the question, is there any truth to this script?
And more often than not, that creates a huge amount of embarrassment and humiliation because in a coherent moment, in a quiet moment, in a lucid moment where the individual feels safe and secure and they’re coherent, they can see things clearly, they’re frequently embarrassed by how ridiculous the automatic negative cognitive script sounds when they see it, write it down, read it, hear it in the light of day.
So that, again, needs lots of encouragement and affirmation to get people through that and help them to minimise the embarrassment and any potential humiliation.
However, once they’ve got over that, there is a certain amount of euphoria.
They realise, wow, this has been terrorising me all my life. And just because I took a quiet moment and I got some encouragement, I’ve nailed it, I’ve named it, I’ve touched it, I’ve called it by its name, and I know what this is, and it’s ridiculous. It’s not true, and that’s the answer to this question, is it true?
100 times out of 100 in my experience, the individual looks at it and says, no, that’s not true. That is ridiculous. But for some reason, subconsciously, I believed it, I allowed it to tyrannise me, and time’s up.
But what do I do next? How do I get rid of it?
And that’s step three. Step three involves encouraging the individual to identify, without being childish about it, in a mature way, if that’s not true, if what you’re telling me is that cognitive script, the negative one, is not true, what is true? And that usually stumps the individual. That can require quite a lot of careful support and encouragement.
Very often, understandably, humanly, they don’t. We jump to just exactly the opposite of what the negatives say. And very often that’s not helpful.
Very often it requires a nuanced exploration because somewhere in there, in that person’s heart and in their mind, there’ll be a message which is the antidote, the inoculation, the way in which the negative script can be countered.
So once that hard work is done and a remedy, an inoculation, an antidote, cognitive script, a healthy one is identified, then two things need to happen.
Number one, the individual needs to be able to… encouraged to repeat, read, say aloud, observe, listen to the cognitive script, the healthy one, every day, at least two or three times a day, at least two or three times a day, and to allow that healthy script to assimilate. Now, it becomes repetitive, it becomes boring, it becomes tedious. Most people can do it for a couple of weeks, and then it’s a bit like antibiotics.
They feel much better, and so they’ve stopped taking it. The research suggests that for the complete, pretty much the complete elimination of the negative script, it is important to repeat the healthy script for between 10 and 15 days, 12 weeks at least two, three times a day, and that takes a huge amount of commitment, conviction, and courage (three Cs).
However, over 40 years that I’ve been working with clients on this hugely important axiomatic issue in life, the results are astonishing. It can have a transformative effect on the individual’s energy, their confidence, their imagination, their sleep, their peace, their energy. It can be transformational.
However, it’s not an easy process. It requires a certain amount of skill to navigate an individual through it, and to observe carefully where they may be tempted to fall into bear traps and go down rabbit holes. That needs to be carefully managed, and with good and careful management, in a relatively short space of time, the immune system of the individual can be stimulated, and it takes between 10 and 12 weeks for the healthy cognitive script to do its work.
The first kind of step is recognising it happens. People can go through life without recognising what’s going on at all, but assuming they know there’s a problem… they might try and work it out themselves alone, what is essentially a perception problem. So how can this be reframed using repetition to create a new habit?
My younger clients will create a note on their iPhone or a daily alert in their diary with the healthy cognitive script embedded. The older generations are much more comfortable with a small card slipped into their wallet or into their purse or their handbag or their magazine.
I’ve discovered that well-trained coaches like myself are well able to achieve success in this arena, and to be honest, it’s actually rather helpful that the individual sees that they don’t necessarily need heavyweight psychiatric or psychological support.
It can be deeply reassuring that it’s something that can be done, in the same way that you’d visit a GP and talk an issue through and find a remedy.
It’s important to understand that these thoughts are common and that you’re not alone. With the right approach, support, and techniques, you can overcome these automatic negative thoughts and lead a more balanced and peaceful life.
Give me a call on 07850 143 209, write to me at email@dannymcguigan.com or connect with me on Linkedin.
