What negative automatic thoughts are, how to recognise and overcome them
Some strategies to defeat 'thought ants' by improving emotional state and propensity to action
by Nicola Chighine*.
3' min read
3' min read
In the previous article we introduced the concept of ANTs (Automatic Negative Thoughts) as the set of negative and dysfunctional thoughts that manifest themselves automatically in a person's mind, negatively influencing their emotional state, propensity for action and self-efficacy, until they become insurmountable obstacles to change.
We continue and conclude our description of the most frequent and dangerous thought ants here:
The 'too late' ant: this limiting thought will tell us that we are out of time, it will shout at us that we are too late. This ant will try to convince us that we have missed a train that will never pass again: it is too late to open that business, we are too old to change jobs, we are too late for that investment. As if there were an absolute hourglass, a chosen meridian that inexorably marks a rigid and supreme time, and decrees, without any appeal, who is centred and who is not.
The solitary ant: as the name suggests, this is a type of ant that has surrendered to the belief that it has to face life's challenges alone. Out of metaphor, it is the haunting belief that we are the only ones with that particular problem, the only ones who are experiencing that particular critical situation and facing difficulties. It is a thought that consumes energy, hope, and blocks us from opening up to new connections, sharing and alliance building, which are essential to sustain change efforts. The world is full of lonely ants who have forgotten the ancestral power of connection.
The seer ant: you can imagine her with a picturesque turban on her head and a crystal ball in front of her. It is the dangerous and distorting tendency to project a hypothetical future on the basis of weak and fragmentary suppositions. Assumptions, if not critically analysed, become beliefs that create a reality that appears to be the only one possible in our heads. There is a particularly dangerous variant that tends to imagine the future by uncritically projecting the past, thus boycotting even the most sincere desire for change.
