Thought patterns are habits of thinking in a particular way and are a product of implicit neural processing. Thought patterns become stronger after each time they are activated ie. each time you think the thought. They may be rational and positive, but they however may also be distorted and negative. These ”samskara-dukha” are debilitating to mental health as they perpetuate anxiety, stress, and depression. So how do we work to dewire these chains of destruction?

The first step is to accustom yourself with the common negative and distorted thinking patterns:

• All-Or-Nothing Thinking: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

• Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

• Mental Filter: You pick out a single negative defeat and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors the entire beaker of water.

• Disqualifying the positive: You dismiss positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

• Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.A. Mind reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out.B. The fortune teller error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.

• Magnification (Catastrophizing) or Minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.”

• Emotional Reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.

• Should Statements: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

• Labeling and Mislabeling: This is an extreme form of over generalization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He’s a goddam louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

• Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

~ Burns, D. (1980), Feeling good: The new mood therapy

After you have familiarized yourself with these patterns, begin a daily mind-watching meditation practice. Everyday in the morning or before bed, set a timer for 3 to 5 minutes, and sit in a comfortable seated position. Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and then begin to observe your thoughts; do not attempt to control them – simply sit and watch where your brain takes you. After the timer goes off, write down every thought you can recall in a journal. After a few weeks, you may now begin to notice any thoughts that seem to recur over and over again as you review your journal entries. Analyze whether these thoughts are possibly distorted and/ or negative, then highlight them. For every negative thought pattern, write down a “counter”: a more rational and positive thought.

From here on, every time you become of this thought, initiate the counter immediately. Yoga, meditation, and any other contemplative practices are great times to habituate these thoughts: make this counter thought your intention for attentional focus. These counters act like antibodies for distorted and negative thought patterns. When you think the counter, they will now activate different circuitry which will begin to rewire your brain to now be accustomed to the new and better way of thinking, inhibiting the old. The more repetitively this is done, the easier it will become, as the old thought pattern will gets weaker and weaker. So take initiative to rewire your distorted and negative thoughts to create for yourself a more rational and positive world!

Thank you:

Burns, D. (1980), Feeling good: The new mood therapy. New York, NY: New American Library.

& Renee Rodoja, a beautiful yoga teacher and friend.