Print Your thoughts, feelings and behaviour all interact and influence one another. It follows then that you can have an effect on the way you feel or behave by changing the way you think or the perspective you take in a situation. This article will focus on how thoughts can influence you and why they play an important role in mental health.
What are thoughts?
Thoughts are ideas, opinions, assumptions or images that occur in the mind. Your mind is constantly racing with thoughts. You might experience them as that little ‘’voice’’ inside your head that follows you everywhere and talks to you constantly. Sometimes these thoughts are positive, sometimes they are negative, sometimes they help us, sometimes they seem like an obstacle. Research suggests that people typically have more than 6000 thoughts a day! The amount and variation of the thoughts you experience can make it hard to understand how they may be impacting you.
How do your thoughts influence how you feel?
Everyday your brain is tasked with processing information that comes from the world and environment around you: the traffic report on the radio, the recent conversation you had with your colleague at work, the weather outside, the room temperature, your social media feed. Objectively speaking this information is neither inherently good nor bad. Your thoughts and beliefs help you to make sense of this information and give this information meaning so that you can act accordingly. Thus it is the way you interpret – the meaning you give or your thoughts about this information – that determines how you feel about it. This is why two people can have different feelings or come to different conclusions about the same event. Your thoughts act as the bridge between the information that comes in and your feelings.
See below for an example of how two different people can interpret the same situation differently.
Situation: Receiving constructive feedback about areas of improvement at work
Person A
- Thought: ‘’They are generally happy with my work. This feedback is a chance for me to grow and get better at my job.”
- Feeling: Motivated, inspired.
Person B
- Thought: “I must be doing a terrible job if they’re saying this. I am never good enough’’
- Feeling: anxious, stressed, insecure.
Thoughts and mental health
You can imagine that if a large number of the thoughts you have are unhelpful, inaccurate or if you have a tendency to pay too much attention to negative thoughts this could significantly impact your wellbeing and lead to an increase in negative emotions. But why do we think about things differently from one another? The thought you have in a given situation can depend on a vast number of factors. For example: your past experiences, beliefs, biology, genetics, current mood, the timing, who you are with, etc. An example of this could be someone who grew up with high-achieving parents who placed immense pressure on academic success. As a result, they often experience doubtful thoughts about their ability or competence in professional settings leading to anxiety. Similarly, someone who was bullied in school may have overly cautious and mistrustful thoughts in social situations, or perceive benign comments as potential threats.
Furthermore our brain loves to take short cuts. You do not always think things through realistically and thoroughly. You often have quick and ‘’automatic’’ thoughts or interpretations and these can be vulnerable to bias and filters. For example many of us fall victim to the negativity bias. This is where you have a tendency to give more importance and attention to negative information compared to positive information. In other words, you are more likely to be influenced by or remember negative information over positive information. Another example is the confirmation bias, which is the tendency to pay attention to and remember information that supports or confirms beliefs you already hold.
You can read more about thinking errors here.
Empowerment through awareness
Luckily this is also a hopeful idea. While you are not always able to control situations or external events, you can become aware of our thinking patterns and influence the way you think about them or the meaning you take from events.
Sources:
- Beck, J. S. (2020). Cognitive behavior therapy: Basics and beyond. Guilford Publications.
- https://www.psychologytools.com/self-help/thoughts-in-cbt/
- Kahneman, D., & Egan, P. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow (Vol. 1). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Kanouse, D. E., & Hanson, L. (1972). Negativity in evaluations. In E. E. Jones, D. E. Kanouse, S. Valins, H. H. Kelley, R. E. Nisbett, & B. Weiner (Eds.), Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.
