Key Moment: How To Break the Habit of Negative Thinking

This is an excerpt from E175 of the Thinking Mind Podcast.

In this episode, Alex is joined by Professor Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia and one of the world’s leading researchers on the neuroscience of thought.

We explore why our relationship with thought may be one of the most important factors in our wellbeing. Kalina explains why spontaneous thought — mind-wandering, daydreaming, creativity and even dreaming — is far more important than modern productivity culture often allows.

We discuss  the difference between healthy mind-wandering and repetitive rumination, and what happens in the brain seconds before a thought enters conscious awareness. We also explore meditation, the unconscious mind, creativity, habits of thought, the cost of avoiding the past, and how we can begin to build a better relationship with our own minds.

Interviewed by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Alex is a consultant psychiatrist and a UKCP registered psychotherapist in-training. Website: alexcurmitherapy.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So habits, whether they're mental or or motor, constrain our movements in some very powerful ways without our intentions. So of course the prototypical example of riding a bike, at the beginning it takes a lot of thinking about every or even driving a car or doing anything complex, maybe playing a a piece on a musical instrument. To begin, when it takes a lot of thinking about every next movement and consciously executing every next movement. But the way habits work is that over time, as you repeat the same sequences, the sequences become chunked into units that can be executed automatically. And so this automaticity is part of what can also happen in thoughts. So sometimes I think this is actually a lot of obsessive thinking and ruminative thoughts that can become these habits of thought where given certain cue, like whenever I think of something, I ended up feeling bad about myself. And uh I think what happens in the mind is that the sequence of thoughts that maybe to begin with were not automatic have occurred so many times in that particular sequence that now as soon as I, you know, uh think of, you know, let's say my father, right? I suddenly start feeling bad about my past because I didn't have a good relationship with my father. Or maybe I had an oppressive relationship with my mother. So I avoid thinking about my family and my past because whenever I think about that part of my life, I end up feeling bad. And I don't know how I end up feeling bad, I just know that I do. So I avoid going there. And so what's what could have happened there in the process of time and and kind of linkages, mental linkages, is a chunking and a consolidation of a whole sequence of mental states that now are even no longer experienced as a sequence of mental states, but just as a shorthand of getting from one place to another. So this automaticity is one of the ways in which or of habits and also this compression of sequences of thoughts can happen over time, and that can lead us to these places of feeling like we can't go there because it makes us feel too bad.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

So I guess two things I'd want to highlight is the first one, just like with volition, it's not that really automatic thoughts are bad necessarily or unautomatic thoughts are bad, it's the spectrum and they both have the you know utility. And the second thing would be even when, and this is my observation again clinically, even when automatic thoughts have gotten to a bad place, they typically probably started as a helpful coping strategy. So for example, you may have started washing your hands frequently because you were exposed to something and you needed to wash your hands to keep them clean, but perhaps this spiraled out of control. Now you're washing your hands 10 times a day. Now perhaps you have obsessive compulsive disorder, your hands have eczema as a result of the amount that you're washing them. So it started as a helpful coping strategy. Somewhere along the way, somehow it became very, very automatic and reinforced. And now that same coping strategy is actually causing a whole bunch of distress itself.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

Yes, absolutely. I think I completely agree. I think a lot of these, first of all, habits are not by nature harmful. Habits can be very helpful, and you can build good habits, but also the the bad habits that often we end up having started off as some kind of a coping strategy that was necessary, oftentimes necessary for survival. Yeah, including the habits of not thinking about something. I mean, or like in the extreme clinical version of that, you would refer to something like dissociation. I mean, dissociation per se is a very important coping mechanism, but it then creates the burden of having to unpack that and having to undo also the damage that it did as it saved someone in the future. Right. So something like the habit of not thinking, which I'm very familiar with. I spent most of my 20s and 30s trying to undo my habit of not thinking about my past because you know I immigrated when I was in my early 20s, and I kind of left behind myself in Bulgaria when I moved to California and tried not to think about everything that happened to me in Bulgaria because not all of it was positive. And also I just wanted to make a new life for myself. And what I found that to begin with, that was a very adaptive strategy. I was I achieved and succeeded a lot by not thinking about the past, but then it caught up with me later on, and I started feeling that you know, this instability within myself, this lack of knowledge of who I am, this depression that started setting in because I was disowning such a big part of myself. And so what my experience with that was that it was really hard to now start thinking about what I'd established a habit of not thinking about. So it took me decades to get to a point where I could now think about something that I automatically stop myself from thinking for so long.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

And do you do you have any other principles as to how people can develop a bit of a healthier relationship with thoughts and thinking?

SPEAKER_00 5:35

Yeah, I mean, it's it really is a relationship, and it really is very similar to the way we may uh a long estranged relative who we may have. How do we if if we've spent many years of our life not having a good relationship with our thoughts, how do we go back and rekindle that relationship? It takes time, it takes patience, and it takes a lot of care and intention as well. So volition certainly has a huge part to play, but volition employed to the surface, to the service of spending time with ourselves rather than the service of you know making money or uh voluntarily introspecting. Voluntarily introspecting, but actually even more importantly, voluntarily creating the conditions and taking the time for that relationship to grow. And so voluntarily introspecting is important, but like you said, if it's too heavy-handed and if it's too kind of managerially done, it could backfire. So voluntarily, I think the volition is really important. You're just clearing chunks of our day when we could be in that mental state when the sharp wave ripples can start happening and give us new thoughts. And then creating also the conditions of safety within which we can receive these thoughts, whether that's with a therapist or whether that's with uh while gardening or any environment that creates a sense of safety in us. I think it's very important because what often comes out when we turn our minds towards our unconscious, spontaneous uh churnings is not necessarily pleasant right away. But there's certain friction that we need to go through in order to build that relationship down the road.