Automatic thoughts
Automatic thoughts are the quick words or pictures that pop into your mind in a moment, before you've decided what to think. "I've messed this up." "They're bored of me." They feel like plain facts, which is why they're worth catching. They aren't proof that something is wrong with you, and you don't have to fight every one.
Catch one automatic thought from today and look at it step by step. Nothing you type leaves your device.
The moment
Just the facts, as a camera would record them.
If writing this out leaves you feeling worse, it's fine to stop and come back later, or to talk to someone you trust. If you're thinking about harming yourself, call or text 988 in the US, or see crisis resources.
The level of thinking you can hear
In Aaron Beck's cognitive model, thinking has three levels. Automatic thoughts sit on top. Under them are rules and assumptions, and under those are core beliefs about yourself, other people and the world.1 The automatic thought is the part you can hear.
Three things mark one out. It's fast, arriving in a second or two as a short phrase or an image. It feels true, so you react to it instead of weighing it. And it comes with a feeling: sadness, dread, shame or anger shows up at the same moment.
They can be measured, too. Psychologists Steven Hollon and Philip Kendall built a 30-item questionnaire on how often people have negative automatic thoughts, keeping only the self-statements that set depressed and nondepressed students apart.2
- The moment: Your friend reads your message and doesn't reply.
- The automatic thought: "I said something wrong."
- The feeling: A drop in your stomach. Anxious, about 60 out of 100.
- What you do: You reread the message five times and send an apology.
- What it keeps going: You never find out she was on a train, so the thought stays.
Four shapes they come in
Examples written for this page:
About yourself
"I'm so stupid." (after dropping a glass at a friend's dinner)
About other people
"She thinks I'm a mess." (when a guest glances at the dishes in the sink)
About what's coming
"This is going to go badly." (an hour before a hard conversation)
As a picture
"Everyone's staring." (with a flash of yourself freezing on stage, before you've said a word)
Many automatic thoughts follow known shapes, such as catastrophizing, mind reading and labeling. The full list is on the cognitive distortions page.
Finding the sentence after the feeling
Often the feeling gets noticed first. Your chest tightens at a parents' evening, and only later can you find the sentence that went with it: "Everyone can tell I'm out of my depth."
The thought can repeat in the same words, too. If you've heard "Why do I always do this?" a hundred times, it may not sound like a thought anymore. It sounds like the truth about you.
The question CBT therapists use to find it is plain: "What was going through my mind just before I started to feel this way?"1 If more than one thought comes up, pick the one with the most feeling attached. Mind Over Mood calls this the "hot thought".3
About those 60,000 thoughts a day
The "60,000 thoughts a day" figure turns up on page after page, often with a claim that most of them are negative, and we couldn't find a study behind it.
The one study that tried to count thoughts was by Julie Tseng and Jordan Poppenk, who tracked shifts in brain activity in young adults and estimated over six thousand thoughts a day.4 The authors called even that estimate tentative, and it says nothing about how many thoughts are negative.4
We couldn't find anyone who has counted the negative ones.
Which ones are worth the trouble
Not all of them. In a Beck Institute workshop, Aaron Beck said it isn't worth targeting every automatic thought; the ones to work on are those tied to strong, unpleasant feelings.5
Writing one down and looking at it can lower your belief in it. One session with a thought record reduced belief in a negative thought compared with a control in a study of 91 adults, and a behavioral experiment, where people tested the thought by doing something, changed belief sooner.6
Why it works is less clear. In cognitive therapy for depression, thinking changes along with symptoms, and how that change happens is still debated.7
Catching one, then sorting it
- Name the moment, then the thought. Write what happened in a sentence, as a camera would see it. Then write the thought in its exact words, in quotes.
- Rate how much you believe it, from 0 to 100. The number gives you something to compare later.
- Sort it. Is it about you, about the past or about other people? Or is it a worry about what might happen?
- For thoughts about you or the past, weigh it. Ask what fits the thought and what doesn't. The thought record walks you through it, and Socratic questions help when you get stuck.
- For worries, test it instead. Write what you fear will happen and when you'll know. Then check. The worry time page shows how, and what a study of 29 people with generalized anxiety disorder found.
- Step back. Ask how you'd see it if a friend said it about themselves. The evidence for stepping back is on the Socratic questioning page.
If the same automatic thought keeps coming back in different situations, it may point to a deeper belief. The downward arrow and core beliefs pages show how to follow it down.
When the same thoughts fill the day
If automatic thoughts take up hours of your day or come with low mood most days, a therapist trained in CBT can help you catch and test them. What CBT is describes a session.
What was going through your mind the last time your mood dropped today? Write it down in the exact words, then rate how much you believe it from 0 to 100.
Answer this with JoyQuestions people ask
What are examples of automatic thoughts?
"I always mess things up." "He's going to leave." "Nobody wants me here." "I can't do this." Each is short, feels true, and arrives with a feeling.
Are automatic thoughts always negative?
No. "This will be fun" is also an automatic thought. CBT focuses on the ones that bring strong, unpleasant feelings, because those are the ones that cause trouble.5
How do you stop automatic negative thoughts?
You can't stop them from arriving. In a classic experiment, people told not to think of a white bear kept thinking of it, and thought about it more afterward.8 What you can change is what happens next: catch the thought, write it down, and either weigh it or test it.6
Related
- Thought record: the worksheet for catching and checking one thought.
- Core beliefs: the level under the automatic thought.
- Cognitive distortions: the common shapes automatic thoughts take.