<aside> 🎖️ Congratulations on your second week of the journey. In this week, we will learn automatic thoughts and common cognitive patterns. You will apply what you learned to track your automatic thoughts, which will improve your awareness of emotion triggers.

</aside>

<aside> 📎 Table of Content

</aside>

Automatic Thoughts

Last week, we worked on understanding our own CBT cycle and how we feel our moods. The key to understanding emotions is identifying the thoughts associated with them. Thoughts influence much of our experience of the world, including our emotional experience.

Most of the time, our emotions are affected by our automatic thoughts, which are quick thoughts popping into our heads without much conscious effort.

• They can be positive, negative, or neutral.
• They often occur rapidly and automatically.
• They can be words, images, and other types of mental activities.
• They can influence our emotions and behaviors.

Stretching it forward, Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs) are a set of beliefs we hold about ourselves by drawing inferences from prior events. More often than not, they are negative views we form about ourselves. As the name suggests, these thoughts are reflexive and flow automatically.

Everyone experiences negative emotions. We can't, and shouldn't, avoid them. But, we don't need our automatic thoughts adding more negative burdens. For example, if your automatic thought when you get a new assignment is "I always fail," you're likely to feel depressed or unworthy as a result, which is not a helpful emotional state for starting a big project or getting to work on Monday morning.

Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Triad

Automatic negative thoughts are categorized into three perspectives of one’s belief. This was first proposed by Aaron Beck in 1976 and is known as the Negative Triad.

The triad involves automatic, uncontrollable negative thoughts about:

1. One’s Self: “I’m worthless and hate myself”.

2. The World or Environment: “Why does no one care about me”.

3. The Future: “Things will never get better”.

There are many risks associated with automatic negative thoughts.

Usually, we are more aware of the emotions than the automatic 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.

Let's consider a common situation:

Li received feedback from her supervisor about a recent project. While the feedback was generally positive, there were some suggestions for improvement. Li felt a surge of disappointment and frustration.