How does your approach to confronting negative thoughts differ from mainstream therapies?
With acceptance and commitment therapy, what we do is we learn to accept the presence of the thought, but that doesn’t mean that we believe it’s true. We learn to neutralize it. Yep, there’s an anxious thought. Do I have to pay it any mind, or can it be background noise? I’m going to watch it pass. It’s the heckler in my mental audience. It can be there, but I don’t have to listen to it or even have to fight with it. The essence of mindfulness is that you can approach negative thoughts with a gentle curiosity.
For most of us, when we have negative thoughts, they are about us. What mindfulness does is help us distance ourselves from our thoughts as curious and nonjudgmental observers. It’s all about not getting into a huge fight with yourself that weakens you.
What if the negative thoughts have some truth behind them?
Let’s say you have a health crisis and are in the middle of medical testing, with a chance that you have a devastating diagnosis. It might not be helpful to say, I’m sure I’m fine. But what can we do with the thought? What is this thought doing? Is it helping me gain insight or be proactive? Do I have a plan in place? A support system? Who would I call first? At some point, the thought can give me strength, but when I catch myself over and over again returning to it, I can say that this thought isn’t helpful. It’s becoming sticky, and I need to separate myself from it.
Why are some people more prone to negative thoughts?
We know that the nervous system’s reactivity level is, in part, influenced by the biology that is inherited. In turn, environmental forces always act on genetics.
The field of epigenetics looks at how certain genes might be turned on or off depending on environmental changes, and some of those changes might be inherited. Beyond that, the environmental factors probably matter even more so because there are so many ways our experiences with threat early on in childhood can influence us to view the world as a more threatening place.
Whether we had a supporting and nurturing parental or guardian relationship matters a ton. Whether we were embraced with social connections and a sense of community matters. There’s also so much research about our diets and anxiety.
How does our diet affect our mental health?
A lot of people turn to processed food when they’re feeling mentally not great. I think we’re seeing more that our overly processed diets are influencing our mood. Our gut microbiomes are responsible for neurotransmitter activity. Serotonin, for instance, is a hugely implicated neurotransmitter when it comes to mood, depression and anxiety. That is synthesized in your gut and influenced by what’s happening digestively in the microbiome. We need good, diverse bacteria in the microbiome. The processed diets we tend to eat don’t help with that.
How does sleep affect mental health?
We know that sleep deficits make us more prone to hypersensitivity to threat. Again, it’s evolutionary because when we were dwelling in caves, if we were sleep deprived, we were more likely to die. We were more likely to be eaten or sluggish and could not escape from a predator as quickly. So, our brains created an adaptation where our brains will err on the side of thinking that things are threatening because it wants to keep us alive.
How does screen time affect negative thoughts?
It’s important to have nuance because the screen conversation is not just what, for example, social media is doing to our brains. It’s also what time on screens takes away. If it’s taking away time outdoors, physical activity, eye contact, hugs and social connection, that’s just as important as what it is doing.
Threat also just exists everywhere in our culture now, and anxiety spreads. If all of us are getting more anxious, then we’re talking about it. It’s on cable news. It’s on our social media feeds. We’re absorbing it. Emotion contagion is real, and we can easily pick up on other people’s anxiety.
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