Challenging Automatic Thoughts and Cognitive Distortions

Thought Examination as the Key to Resilience

Our core thoughts and beliefs are the root cause of our feelings, our behavior, and ultimately, the results we achieve.

If you want to grow in your stress management and resilience building, it's critical that you get very good at examining your thoughts.

The big trick to doing this is understanding that most of the thoughts that cause us deep emotional pain aren't actually true.

Just because a thought causes us to feel intensely doesn't mean it's true, even if it may seem that way at the time.

Learning to question the validity of our own minds is one of the most important skills we can develop to empower our thinking and our strength.

The Nature of Automatic Thoughts

Thoughts that arise during pivotal moments are automatic, and one of their characteristics is that they are completely spontaneous, appearing out of nowhere.

They happen so quickly that you may not even be aware of them at the moment they are shaping your perception of reality.

Secondly, these automatic thoughts are often negative and self-defeating, as our brains evolved to look for what could go wrong and assume the worst.

This tendency toward negativity is an ancient survival mechanism that, in the modern world, often causes us more problems than it solves.

The Deceptive Power of Automatic Thoughts

The third characteristic of these thoughts is that they are very believable, as they often appear to be true or we can justify them based on past experiences.

However, and this is the most important characteristic, despite their apparent believability, these automatic thoughts are, for the most part, fundamentally irrational.

If you take the time to examine them with a closer look deeper, you will realize that they almost always contain distortions of logic.

It is precisely in these logical distortions that their power to harm us lies, as they present us with a view of reality that is not objective.

The Path to Challenging Our Thoughts

One way to change these thoughts is to quickly recognize that they are n