Living Well With Chronic Home Practice

Unhelpful Habits of the Mind

Extreme Thinking

• All or nothing, black and white thinking: views are split into extremes – something is either great or horrible. This type of thinking creates greater predictability which our minds , but it is not based on reality, which is not usually black and white but most often is very gray and constantly changing. Example: “I can’t coach my son’s football team anymore because of the pain so I’m an epic failure of a dad.” • Fortune Telling: predicting, usually negative, future outcomes and circumstances. Example: “This tension is going to lead to a full-blown migraine and will knock me out of action for a week!” • “Should” statements: Doing or expecting others to do what is believed to be the “right” or “moral” thing; or ideas about how the world should be. We often use should statements to motivate ourselves to do better. These kinds of thoughts make us feel pressured, increasing tension and striving, and increase our belief that we are failures. They imply that we need to comply with some external authority or rule. “Should” statements are arguments with reality. Remember Byron Katie’s quote – “when we argue with reality, we lose only 100% of the time.” Example: “The surgeon should have fixed my pain the first time I had surgery!” Or “I should be able to deal with this better!”

Selective

• Overgeneralization: One experience applies to all situations; seeing a single event as a never- ending pattern or defeat. Example: “no one would want to hire me, my boss at my last job saw me as damaged goods.” • Mental filtering: Not looking at the whole picture; focusing on the negatives of the situation to the exclusion of the positive. Example: “I am half a person because of this pain.” • Disqualifying the positive: Dismissing or discounting positive events or situations. Example: “I vacuumed the whole house today but that is hardly an achievement as it’s the first time in months.” A common response with pain is to disqualify any pleasant sensations or experiences because there is also the experience of the pain. This can keep us stuck focusing only on the pain, causing more stress and tension. • magnification and minification: exaggerating the negative in your life and minimizing the positive. Building a negative experience to make it seem worse than it might be or making positive experiences less than they really are. Example: “This pain is totally unbearable, it’s killing me!”

Relying on Intuition

• Emotional reasoning: basing your view of a situation, yourself, or others on how you are . Example: “I can feel my spine collapsing. If I exercise like they tell me to I know it will snap.” • Mind reading: inferring someone else’s thoughts, thinking you “know” what they are thinking. Example: “my doctor doesn’t believe my pain is real.”

Blaming

• 1.Personalization: blaming or criticizing yourself when you had limited control over the situation. Example: “It’s all my fault my relationship ended when this pain got in the way of me being intimate with my partner in the bedroom.” • 2.Labeling and mislabeling: this does not mean labeling an or thought, it means labeling yourself! Instead of seeing yourself as a person with a pain problem, you see yourself as defective, imperfect, broken, overgeneralizing and judging yourself or everyone in a group negatively or harshly. Example: “All doctors are just in it for the money, none of them care.”