Part 5: Identifying Automatic Thoughts in CBT
What Are Automatic Thoughts?
If you’re working through this book in order, you’ve been spending some time identifying and thinking about feelings. Some feelings may seem predictable in certain situations, but others may be puzzling. Sometimes, we feel an emotion seemingly out of the blue, too strongly for what’s going on, or in a way that doesn’t seem to fit the situation at all. The key to understanding feelings is identifying the thoughts associated with them. Thoughts influence much of our experience of the world, including our emotional experience. In this book, we’ll be referring to a specific kind of thoughts that we call “automatic thoughts.”
Automatic Thoughts Definition
Automatic Thoughts are the thoughts that automatically arise in our minds all throughout the day. Often, we are completely unaware we are even having thoughts, but with a little instruction and practice, you can learn to easily identify them, and, as a result, get a better handle on your mood and behavior.
Automatic Thoughts Examples
Today is going to be terrible.
No one is interested in what I’m saying.
I only have bad dates.
It’s all my fault.
She is a bad person.
I’ll never find a good job.
I didn’t deserve the promotion.
I should be more motivated.
Why Focus So Much on Thoughts?
Our minds are thought-processing machines, creating and sifting through as many as 60,000 ideas in a given day. If we were to attend to each one of these, we would be overwhelmed by the flood of information. Thankfully, that’s not how our brain works. Most thoughts enter and leave our minds out of our awareness. The brain is pretty good at filtering what it deems unimportant information and focusing on what seems most salient. It does this by focusing on certain aspects of a situation and then assigning some kind of meaning to those aspects, resulting in our thoughts and opinions about things.
This process works well most of the time, but sometimes, we focus on less important bits of information, filtering out the more relevant parts. Other times, we assign meaning to something that isn’t totally grounded in the actual facts of the situation.
Take, for example, a pretty common experience, the job performance review. It’s not uncommon for people who have a mostly good performance review to filter out most of the praise and instead fixate on the one or two areas where there’s room for improvement. We call this phenomenon negative filtering, which means filtering out all but the negative information. Despite the majority of the feedback being positive, negative filtering might cause us to perceive the review as wholly negative, triggering emotions of disappointment, sadness, or anxiety.
The above example highlights a very common dynamic: Automatic thoughts have the potential to trigger intense negative emotions. Usually, we are more aware of the emotions themselves than the thoughts that trigger them. However, in most instances, it is the automatic thoughts that play the largest role in determining how we feel, not the situation itself. Learning to examine these thoughts allows us to better understand and deal with our emotions, modulating them before they get too intense or overwhelming.
Take the following examples using the same situation of the performance review:
Joan received a performance review in which 90% of the feedback was positive, and 10% was somewhat negative. Afterward, she found herself seething with rage, unable to concentrate, and eventually leaving early to have a drink at home.
Dante, on the other hand, received the same exact feedback and afterward found himself to be in a good mood the rest of the day. When it was time to go home, he decided to spend a little more time working on a presentation he would be giving next month.
Now, there was no difference in the information given to these individuals, but there was a significant difference in how they felt afterward. The key to understanding their differing responses is to examine their automatic thoughts about the situation. Joan had the thoughts, “I’m not appreciated here,” “My boss doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” and “It’s useless even trying to do a good job here with these knuckleheads in charge.” Joan probably had many other thoughts during the course of her hour-long interview, but these are the ones her mind singled out as most important, and as a result, she felt angry and resentful and decided that she couldn’t finish or it wasn’t worth finishing the day of work.
Conversely, Dante had thoughts of “It’s nice to hear I’ve improved at this,” “ She thinks I’m doing pretty well in most areas,” and “I don’t have perfect scores across every domain, but I did pretty well in most, and can definitely spend more time to improve my performance in the areas that are lacking.” These thoughts allowed him to feel more positive emotions throughout the day and, importantly, to feel motivated to be more effective. The above examples highlight the way thoughts affect our mood and our behavior:
When we’re working with clients, helping them identify automatic thoughts, we find that automatic thoughts can take many forms. They can be verbal, as demonstrated in the example above. They can also be single words instead of sentences: “Crap!” Finally, many people, from time to time, have automatic thoughts in the form of images. Using the above scenario, Joan may have had an image of herself working hard at her desk while her boss and coworkers were all goofing off. Regardless of the form automatic thoughts take, we can learn to examine them to identify their underlying meaning and their connection to our emotions and behavior.
How to Identify Automatic Thoughts
Some people find this skill difficult at first, but as we have found in our cognitive-behavioral therapy practice, they quickly catch on. The key to identifying automatic thoughts is to look for what comes to mind when an emotion arises. Example: Aaliyah discovers on social media that one of her friends, Ricardo, had a get-together with some friends and didn’t invite her. She immediately had the feeling of a pit in her stomach and identified the emotion as sadness. At that moment, she asked herself, “What is running through my mind?” She was able to identify the following thoughts:
1. Ricardo doesn’t really like me.
2. I’m never invited to anything.
3. No one really likes me.
Given the extreme nature of these thoughts, a profound feeling of sadness is pretty understandable. By writing out her actual thoughts, however, Aaliyah was able to process them differently and see how extreme they were. Although she believed them to be true on one level, identifying and writing out her thoughts helped her to understand where her emotions were coming from. The exercise also helped her see she was making some pretty broad assumptions that she didn’t wholeheartedly believe. Afterward, she felt a little better, and some of her sadness lifted.
This process of recognizing thoughts as thoughts is a demonstration of what is termed metacognition. Metacognition is the process by which we develop an awareness and understanding of our thinking. As is the case in the example, merely becoming aware of the thought process helps us distance ourselves from our reflexive cognitive responses and reevaluate them. It is hard to overstate how powerful a tool this can be in changing our feelings and behavior. All of the skills in this book rely on metacognition as the foundation.
Sometimes, it’s hard to identify a thought running through your mind, so another way of identifying the automatic thought is to look for the meaning of the situation. In Aaliyah’s example, if she were unable to identify any obvious thoughts, she might ask herself, “What does it mean to me that Ricardo didn’t invite me? Maybe it’s that I’m afraid no one likes me.” The thought, “No one likes me,” is the hidden meaning her mind has assigned to this event.
Another way of uncovering more hidden thoughts is to ask yourself, “What’s the worst part of this, and why?” Here, the answer might be that Aaliyah believes she never gets invited to anything, and that’s painful because she concludes that it means no one likes her.
Finally, if these methods don’t deliver results, you can identify the emotion and then work backward. The previous chapter identified some of the reasons different emotions arise. For instance, anger is usually a response to mistreatment of ourselves or someone we care about.
Had Aaliyah felt anger after seeing that Ricardo had not invited her to the get-together, she could have 1) identified her anger, 2) determined that it was probably a reaction to some perceived mistreatment, then 3) formulated a thought involving being mistreated in the situation. She might have uncovered the thought, “Ricardo isn’t treating me as he should because I’ve always been a good friend to him.” By using the emotion as a clue, we can play detective in discovering the mystery of the missing automatic thought.
An Invaluable Tool: The Thought Record
A thought record is a tool we use with our CBT clients that you can use to clarify the thoughts responsible for unwanted feelings and behaviors. In this chapter, we introduce you to a basic thought record to help you develop your metacognitive ability. In later chapters, we add to it to help you practice more sophisticated cognitive therapy techniques, such as cognitive restructuring.
Using a thought record is a skill that can help you identify and clarify the thoughts that are leading to more problematic emotions. By practicing identifying thoughts in challenging situations, you develop and strengthen the skill of metacognition. With some practice, you can gain the ability to quickly identify dysfunctional automatic thoughts in the moment, and get some distance from them to lessen the intensity of your emotion. The button below links to an example of a completed thought record.
Instructions for Completing the Thought Record:
Our therapy clients report that it’s best to complete a thought record about a difficult situation or one in which you feel a lot of negative emotion. Thought records work best when they’re completed close to the event. It’s also helpful to have a little distance from the intensity of the situation so your thoughts aren’t completely clouded by overwhelming emotion. Complete the following steps to get the most out of the thought record:
1. Identify the situation in one sentence or less. Make sure you do so as objectively as possible without editorializing. For example, I said “Hello” to Nicole, but she didn’t respond. Not: I said, “Hello” to Nicole, but she ignored me because she hates me.
2. Skip to the Emotions column. It’s easier to identify emotions then work back to the thoughts. Identify any emotions you felt at the time. Don’t get emotions confused with thoughts. Emotions are one word and are usually some synonym for joy, fear, sadness, disgust, or anger. Feel free to identify as many or as few emotions as are present at the time.
3. Rate the intensity of each emotion on a scale from 0-100. It’s not an exact science, so just go with your gut on this one.
4. Identify the thoughts running through your mind at the time. Thoughts can be words, full sentences, or images. If you have trouble remembering, consider each emotion you identified in the previous step, then work backward to figure out what thoughts led to that emotion. Rate how much you believe each thought on a scale from 0-100.
5. Complete one of these each day. At the end of the week, you might find that you have the ability to gain a little distance from your thoughts in the heat of the moment. That is metacognition in action!
Complete at least three or four of these thought records before moving on to the next module. As indicated above, it’s best if you can fill one out each day, as the next few chapters build on your ability to complete a thought record well.
Get Help
If you or someone you know struggles with self-defeating automatic thoughts or emotional problems, don’t just try to go it alone. Use the links below to find a qualified cognitive-behavioral therapist to feel well faster.
To find a CBT therapist near you, you can explore the links below:
CBT For Anxiety Disorders: A Practitioner Book. Wiley-Blackwell: Hoboken, New Jersey. – Simoris, G., Hofmann, S.G. (2013).
Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Second Edition: Basics and Beyond. The Guilford Press: New York. – Beck, J.S. (2011).
Cognitive therapy techniques: A practitioner's guide (2nd ed.). Guilford Press. Leahy, R. L. (2018).