How Killing ANTs Can Improve Your Health
We talk a lot about physical health and detoxification here, but what about toxic thoughts, and their effect on your health? Your thoughts have tremendous power. They can inspire fear and prevent you from taking action. They can ruin your day. They can harm relationships. Thoughts can make you self destructive, or even cause you to harm others. But they can also help you achieve your goals, make new friends and enjoy a rewarding, fun, and healthy life. In fact, more and more studies are finding that your thoughts also strongly influence your physical health! Yes, your thoughts have this much power – if you give it to them.
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Unfortunately it seems to be human nature that some of the most pervasive types of thoughts are ANTs. This is a lovely acronym for “Automatic Negative Thoughts.” They’re those negative thoughts that seem to pop up and ruin a perfectly good day. Here are some examples of ANTs.
1. You turn in a project. The feedback is 99% positive. However, instead of focusing on the positive comments you dwell on the one negative comment.
2. Your friend/spouse/co-worker is in a bad mood. You take it personally and feel as if you must have done something to cause that bad mood.
3. You leave the house and wonder if you remembered to lock the back door. All day long you can’t help but feel like when you get home all of your belongings will have been stolen and your home destroyed.
4. Your pants feel tight when you get dressed in the morning. You thus think thoughts like, “I’m so fat,” or “I’ll never lose weight, I’m a failure.”
These are all examples of ANTs. You didn’t intentionally invite them into your mind and yet there they are. They’re also examples of types of ANTs: personalizing, catastrophe, emotional reasoning and so on.
So how do you stop these unwanted and unhelpful thoughts?
