How to change thinking styles?

Hi Rex

Changing your thinking styles is possibly the most important thing you can do in tackling depression. It will profoundly affect your enjoyment of life.

As you might imagine with something so important, generally you need to work at it, and keep working at it. I consider pretty good at managing my thought patterns, but I am still trying to improve.

Once you have accepted the fact that this is a lifelong endeavour, (and an enjoyable one), then in my opinion, the first thing you need to do is become good at identifying when you are using extremist or depressive thinking styles.

I asked a client of mine recently to write down his negative thoughts, then to put them into a spreadsheet and split them into whether they were Internal/External, Global/Specific, Stable/Unstable.

(for more on this, see depressive thinking styles

As he is technically minded, this gives him a model for becoming more objective about the way he thinks, and the impact it has on him.

His then has to generate several alternative thoughts for those he has written, and any he has problems with we will go over together next time I see him.

This will be something that is ongoing until he strongly experiences the benefits of thinking in a more realistic, balanced way.

I think this is a really important question, and any tips our other members fancy contributing would be gratefully received

Roger

Roger,

Thanks for your reply. An event happened this morning about which I was getting quite stressed and worried, something that I should have followed up on a long time ago and I was coming up with all kind of terrible consequences because I was so late.... and then it was this afternoon that I realized that my stress was caused by the fact that I was thinking in a black and white fashion....this is only one mistake...that I think is correctable and does not undermine all the other good things that have been achieved. I think this is the first time that this realization has been so clear to me. I shall follow your suggestion with the spread sheet ....

Thanks

Rex