Negative intrusive thoughts
Especially for adolescents, a coping mechanism from
Nicola Morgan, author of The Teenage Guide to Stress and
Blame My Brainwww.nicolamorgan.com
Copyright © Nicola Morgan 2015
Intrusive negative thoughts
• Any thought is a only pathway between cells in the brain
• The brain learns by repetition. Each repetition creates a stronger pathway that is easier to follow next time.
• But the brain can learn negative, unhelpful things, too: negative intrusive thoughts
• We CAN replace a negative pathway with a positive one, simply by doing and repeating it
Next day, you will PROBABLY choose the same path. It will be easier. And harder to choose a different one.
And soon, it will be the only path you bother to try. It has become a habit. Now, if that happens to be a NEGATIVE thought, that thought will keep happening. It will become automatic. Just like learning a dance routine.
BUT you COULD choose another path. It wouldn’t be easy at first. But you could. You could just choose to think a positive thought.
And the more you practised, the stronger that new pathway would become and the easier it would be to follow each time
Soon, it would be the easier path to follow and the old negative one would fade away and become weak.
The old one might not completely disappear and you might accidentally tread that path again, but you’d be able to find your way back to the positive one more easily next time. You did it once – you can do it again.
Negative intrusive thoughts
Especially for adolescents, a coping mechanism from Nicola Morgan, author of The Teenage Guide to Stress and Blame
My Brainwww.nicolamorgan.com
Copyright © Nicola Morgan 2015
Much more advice about all sorts of teenage stresses in The Teenage Guide to Stress