I speak about this so often with clients that I felt it justified its own blog post. Sometimes these negative thoughts can become so repetitive to the point that they end up looping. When it becomes a looping pattern, it’s like a downward spiral, it’s hard to see out of it.
Recently I caught one myself. I was reading about someone who tended to compare themselves to others and feel miserable. This is one of the most common negative thought patterns and I realized that I was experiencing the same. For a moment, it was like I had stepped away from myself. I could look at myself more abstractly and therefore could stop the looping pattern.
A client also shared that she caught herself, took a pause, and questioned whether her assumption was real or not. Similarly, with that extra time and question, she stopped herself from going into the looping pattern that she was so familiar with before our Rapid Transformational work together.
It’s not always easy to catch ourselves. One way is to write down your thoughts so that you can later go over them and see if there are any patterns. Once you identify them, it’s going to be much easier for you to catch going forward. Now you have radar out for them.
Keep track of your thoughts and you’ll be able to catch yourself more easily.