Do I have ANTS? - Video Transcript

Hey, I'm Kristen the anxiety therapist and today's video is going to be about ants, which are automatic negative thoughts. Now, I think we've all experienced these at some point in our lives and it's actually um quite normal for humans to have their attention gravitate toward negative things versus positive. But the problem arises when these ants are in abundance and they're more pervasive and persistent um which can lead to symptoms of anxiety and or depression.

So these automatic negative thoughts, they're automatic in the sense that they tend to occur outside of our awareness. And they've become so ingrained through repetition, usually dating back to childhood or at least um have been present for several years that it sort of um shapes the way we we perceive everything.

So if you can imagine putting on a pair of glasses and the lenses skew everything to be negative. So it really changes your perception of yourself, other people situations the world, et cetera. So, I'd like to give this um this analogy to kind of highlight the way these thoughts affect your brain structure, because our brains are very plastic, meaning that they can they can change, right. It just, it takes repetition and it takes time to do so.

So when we have these automatic negative thoughts, it's almost like if you think of um a snow covered hill that you would go sledding or skiing on. I think most of us have been sledding or skiing unless you live in a really warm climate. But um you know, the first time you go down the hill, it's fresh powder.

And so the sled or the skis can really go anywhere. And then the more times you go, the more that snow gets packed down and you're actually creating a pathway, right, or a trail. So the sled or the skis are gonna tend to find that that pathway when you go down that hill, and the more times you go, the deeper that that pathway gets, and so it would be harder to sort of veer off of that.

So the same thing happens in the brain when we have repetitive thoughts, we are literally creating these neural pathways, um and the deeper they get, the more automatic those thoughts are so in order to change those neural pathways, which is very possible, and therapy is a great way to do that.

Um we really have to be intentional about becoming aware of our thought processes, right? Are are they negative? Are they positive? Are you know, when do we tend to think negatively, is it all the time? Is it in certain situations? Um we really have to just be attuned to that and pay attention to that and then we can sort of stop ourselves and reframe the thoughts.

So we're calling it out for being negative and then we can reframe it, meaning that we just take a step back and we try to shift the thought to be either more neutral or more positive. Um and then the idea is repetition. So the more we can identify the negative thoughts kind of stop ourselves. Take a step back, reframe it and then repeat this process and make the thoughts more more neutral or positive.

We're creating those new neural pathways and we have to be very intentional about this because the automatic thoughts are gonna be there right there, automatic, so um they will exist without us putting in any effort. So in order to change the way we think about things, we have to be very intentional about shifting our thought processes to the more positive things. And that is that can be done in the moment by sort of identifying these negative thoughts, but also through just rehearsing positive thinking, whether it's through um affirmations about yourself or a gratitude journal, you know where we have to be intentional about shifting our focus toward positive things in order to in order to sort of neutralize some of those negative thoughts.

So I hope this video has been helpful and if you have any questions, feel free to drop a comment or message me um and please be sure to follow me on instagram or facebook if you are interested and want to see more videos. I hope you have a great weekend and I'll see you next week.