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Negative intrusive thoughts Especially for adolescents, a coping mechanism from Nicola Morgan, author of The Teenage Guide to Stress and Blame My Brain www.nicolamorgan.com Copyright © Nicola Morgan 2015

Dealing with intrusive thoughts

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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

Imagine you come to this place in the path; You have to choose a way down

Imagine you choose this path the first day

Next day, you will PROBABLY choose the same path. It will be easier. And harder to choose a different one.

Each day, that path will be easier to follow, stronger. More obvious

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