Thinking our way out of stress
We think our way to stress. It’s how we’re thinking that makes us miserable. However we’ve programmed, our brain gives us the outcome of our experience.
The good news is we can control how we think. Does it feel that way for you? Or does it feel like your thinking has control over you?
As children, our level of thinking develops as our brains develop. In our cognitive development stages, our thinking evolves as we age into adulthood. Ideally, that is. Sometimes, we get stuck at a certain level and act like children when triggered.
An example is some people getting negative feedback feeling criticized, triggering them to lash out. The reaction is not just about the feedback received, but what it meant. They are triggered by past experiences, regressing to a little, powerless child.
This is what we call childish thinking or stress thinking. When we are stressed, we are likely to regress into childish thinking. While this is normal for many people, it is certainly not ideal. When we are stress thinking, we tend to think with tunnel vision. In this state, we are likely to say things that hurt, make impulsive irreversible decisions and sabotage our relationships.
Here are some of the most common cognitive distortions that mess up with our brain and how to correct them.
Personalizing
This thinking makes everything “about me.” If someone doesn’t respond to your message and your first thought is “they’re ignoring me because they don’t like me,” it’s probably personalizing at play.
Here, we make everything about us. We think people are thinking about us, judging us and behaving in reaction to us.
People who think this way are easily offended. The truth is what most people do has little to do with us.
The opposite of this is objective thinking. This is taking on the perspective of an observer. From this neutral and unbiased perspective, a lot of the emotions don’t get activated. It just might look like “the other person is overwhelmed so they tend to respond late”.
Thinking from this lens defuses the hot buttons and allows us to think clearly.
All-or-nothing thinking
This is also called black-and-white thinking, or either-or thinking. One who thinks this way would tend to go to extremes, leaving no space for combining values, incorporating context and the in-betweens.
An example is a boss who swings from very kind, generous and understanding to extremely strict, punishing and lashing out. One day they think “I should care for my employees because I owe them my success” to “these employees can’t be trusted, and I should show them who’s boss”.
This kind of thinking creates obsessiveness and compulsion, which leads to controlling behavior. Learning to understand contexts, causes and effects and navigating through the shades of gray requires an in-between thinking.
Few things in life are black or white. We live most of our lives in the “in-betweens” and “it depends.”
Should-ing
When we have things we expect of ourselves, it becomes a demand. They function as rules we need to abide by, because at one point, we decided something should be attained at a certain time. This could sound like “I need to be at VP level by this time,” “I should be married and have kids by now,” “I must be earning XXX amount.”
Even if the idea turns out to be bad, there seems to be an instinct to follow the command. This limits choice because it leaves us no other option than to follow what we said we wanted. This causes stress that often leads to internal conflict.
Choice thinking corrects this. Ask: “Why should I? Do I still want to?”
Reviewing and letting go of past expectations—and living a life we want to be in—will dramatically increase life experience.
Blaming
This is transferring responsibility to someone else. If something is wrong, it must be caused by someone else. If one thinks from this angle, one has the victim mentality of “they did this to me.” Very few circumstances would have no contribution from us.
If we stick to this kind of thinking, we are likely to not change anything and therefore find ourselves in the same pattern repeatedly. We’re not learning, just repeating patterns.
Adult thinking requires pausing and asking, “what’s my contribution to this?”
When we take responsibility, we learn from experience and change our response. This is the path to changing outcome.
We say in Neuro-Linguistic Programming that the person is never wrong. It’s the frames and the thinking that are wrong. If you’re thinking the wrong way, it doesn’t make you a bad person. You may be behaving inappropriately as a result.
Changing the way we think transforms our perspective and empowers us to change our life experience. Changing your thinking changes the world for you.
(Sheila T. Tan is an executive coach and an organizational development consultant. She holds a Master’s degree in Organizational Development. Reach through coachsheila.tan@gmail.com.)
