What to do When Your Thoughts are Holding You Back

If empowerment is something that you’re seeking, overcoming the impacts of your negative thinking is a non-negotiable. I’m not going to sugar coat it either, like anything that is lasting it will take some work and effort and the first place to start is getting quiet and beginning to notice the voice in your head, what it is saying and importantly, how you are feeling in response to what it is saying. This is the first step to regaining some control.

There is a lot going around in the coaching world at the moment about the danger and damage of negative self-talk. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that we wouldn’t, even on our darkest day, speak to another person the way we speak to ourselves.

More often than not we’re not even aware of our inner voice and what it is saying to us we’re just so used to it looping the same thoughts and conclusions that we rarely stop to question it.

Our self-talk 99% of the time is the number 1 thing that holds us back from achieving our goals and living the life that we truly want to live. It feeds our self-doubts, fears and reinforces behaviours and actions that limit our ability to take steps forward, no matter how small they are. Negative self-talk can really keep you stuck.

Whether it’s work or life related, your negative thoughts impact your performance, your responses and ultimately your results.

I want to spend a little time unpacking this a bit more and also give you some tools to help you manage your inner critic. Please don’t approach this with the mindset of eliminating negative self-talk, it’s just not possible and you’ll be setting yourself for further disappointment and unhappiness.

What are ANTs?

Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs), a term coined by Adam Beck MD in the 1960’s, make up more than 90% of the thoughts that we have each day. And most days we have up to about 70,000 thoughts

Having negative thoughts is 100% normal. Genetically, we’re biased to think negatively, a hangover from our caveman days when survival depended on constantly looking out for threats. Danger and death could strike at anytime – it was critical to stay vigilant. The difference now is that the threat is a result of a thought, a story or the sense of meaning that we have attributed to something and it’s caused a stress response. Whether the threat is real as in physical or psychological, the brain doesn’t recognise the difference and responds as it would if you were running from a definite danger or threat.

It has been evidenced that about 90% of our thoughts are repetitive, the brain absolutely loves repetition. And we all know that the more you repeat something, the better at it you become. The brain does the same. By continually repeating a thought – the stronger it becomes (and the more difficult it becomes to change). In fact, the majority of the time it becomes a belief.

Why are some thoughts bad, aren’t just thoughts? 

Every negative thought you have changes your brain chemistry. When there is a genuine physical threat like there was everyday hundreds of thousands of years ago, it was important that your brain chemistry changed. It’s what kept you alive. This change in chemistry got your body ready for the fight or flight response.

When the amygdala sent a distress signal that danger was imminent, it sends messages to the adrenal glands which start pumping adrenaline into the bloodstream. If the stressor remains (whether it’s real or imagined), then cortisol also gets released. And before you know it, you are in a full-blown stress response.

ANTs are a precursor to chronic stress and the cascade of symptoms that go with it. I don’t want to go into that level of detail here but you can do some research for yourself and find out.

What I’m more interested in is sharing with you some tools to manage your ANTs and reduce stress and its impacts in your life.

(Just as aside here, what you consume mentally, visually and emotionally also changes your brain chemistry – so be mindful of the content you consume)

Below I’ve listed a couple of medically validated symptoms of chronic negative thinking:

•  It depletes the brain of healthy neuro-transmitters like serotonin and dopamine. This leads to feeling irritable, angry, fatigued and feelings of sadness. Lowered levels affect how you process your emotions and also impact your digestive system as well as sleep. These two hormones reduce the levels adrenaline and cortisol and in your body. They are often referred to as your feel-good hormones.
• Enlarges the amygdala (this is where your fight or flight response gets triggered from) which can result in increased levels of anxiety.
• Accelerates the brain’s aging process
• Impacts your productivity and decision-making capabilities overall affecting your performance.

 Negative thoughts become a self-fulfilling prophecy. With some effort though, you can make a positive change.

ANTs are disempowering

As a coach who is passionate about self-empowerment and self-leadership, negative thoughts are the absolute antithesis.  They erode your personal power and take away your sense of agency and control – all essential ingredients to empower yourself and others.

If empowerment is something that you’re seeking, overcoming the impacts of your negative thinking is a non-negotiable. I’m not going to sugar coat it either, like anything that is lasting it will take some work and effort and the first place to start is getting quiet and beginning to notice the voice in your head, what it is saying and importantly, how you are feeling in response to what it is saying. This is the first step to regaining some control.

How can you manage negative thoughts? 

Like I said earlier, we all have negative thoughts, it’s normal. Often times though we’ll start to beat ourselves up for having a negative thought which then just intensifies the unwanted result even further. It can actually speed up the process of the thought becoming a belief (I referred to this earlier). In the previous paragraph I mentioned getting quiet – now you can acknowledge that you’ve had a negative thought along with pretty much every one else around the world. Stopping the demonising, is also an important first step.

So how do you challenge negative thoughts and take away their power?

When you recognise that you’re having an ANT, write it down. In fact keep a journal for a couple of weeks or even months and record whether there are particular patterns and pathologies with your ANTs. You can overcome the impact of your ANTs it just takes a bit of work. I schedule a 5 minute check in with myself a couple of times a day. When the alert goes off on my calendar, I just take a moment to notice my thoughts and whether they are helping me or harming me. Raising the awareness of them has a powerful positive effect. When you notice the thought, just notice it and leave it at that.

If you find that you’re pretty distressed about what you’ve been saying to yourself, doing some deep breathing, I recommend 6 long slow breaths in and even slower breaths out will help to calm your mind. If you’re at work and want to do it in private, go to the bathroom and lock yourself in a cubicle or find an empty meeting room. It only takes about 2-3 minutes for you to notice a significant change in your stress levels.

Try a couple of these suggestions to manage the frequency and impact of your ANTs:

• Ask yourself questions like: Do I really believe this? What advice would I give to a friend who had this same thought?
• Writing them down will help you to recognise any patterns. These could be things like certain people and situations trigger particular thoughts, maybe different times of the day are more challenging for you. There is therapy in writing down all the things rolling around in your mind. The trick is to write them, not type them.
• View your ANTs as boring. If a friend came to you with the same topic of conversation everyday, no doubt you would get bored. You can do the same thing with your thoughts. Recognise them, acknowledge them and say to yourself, ‘oh – here we again with XYZ’
• Turn your ANTs into PETs (Positive Empowering Thoughts). This is an exercise where you can reframe your thoughts into something more positive and uplifting. See below for an example:

Trigger: I made a mistake at work

ANT: I’m probably going to get fired, I’m no good at what I do – I always make mistakes

PET: Oops I made a mistake, but that’s all part of getting experience. I’m going to work through this and use it to my advantage.

Nothing changes if nothing changes

Taking your power back from your thoughts, requires some effort. Just how much effort, is entirely up to you.

What I’ve suggested above may or may not work for you, you won’t know until you try. But importantly, what you do have now is a place to start. And that is recognising your thoughts and the impacts that they’ve had in and on your life.

Taking small steps is better than taking no steps and in the work I do, it’s actually more powerful than larger steps or leaps. Start where you are, with small changes. Monitor yourself for 7 days and see what you learn, and if you’re up for it, I’d love you to share it with me.

The bio

Liz Ellis is a leadership coach and specialist in strategic communications and engagement within the water sector. Her coaching practice, Empowered Leader, focuses on developing the skills and capabilities in leaders to embrace their personal power to improve their ability to influence better outcomes, communicate with clarity and lead with purpose and confidence.