5. Challenging Thoughts

Here you'll find all the worksheets and information you'll need to accompany your learning for Session 5 of our Managing Moods webinars.

 

What we learned this week

This week we looked at how we think about events in our life, and how that can affect how we feel, and also how we respond to those events.

Sometimes our thoughts can be automatic, and driven by our emotions, so we looked at how to spot whether a thought is what we really think, or just how we're feeling at the time.

 

Keeping a Thought Diary

A thought diary can help us to pay closer attention to the links between our thoughts, feelings and actions. 

It can also help you to put the two techniques we learned this week into practice, and reflect on how they affect how you feel. 

Resource: Download the Thought Diary worksheet below.

 

Learning to Spot Negative Automatic Thoughts

We all have negative automatic thoughts, and they tend to fall into 12 common types.  

Learning to spot them is the first step to being able to challenge them.

Resources: 

• Watch our video on how to recognise the 12 types of unhelpful thinking

• Download the worksheet on how to challenge the 12 types of unhelpful thinking

 

How to challenge Negative Automatic Thoughts

This week we learned two techniques to help challenge those negative automatic thoughts, and break that vicious cycle where the worse we feel, the more negative thoughts we have, and the worse we feel. 

• Taking your thought to court: A way to think through the facts about your thought, to see how true it really is. 

• Reasoning with your thought: A way of finding a more reasonable way of thinking about something, when our negative thought is about something important to us. 

You can find a guide to both of these techniques in the Thought Challenging guide below. 

Resources: Download our guide to Thought Challenging below.

 

Downloads