![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Whatever feels right.Ĭhoose a fictional character (from a book/movie/cartoon) and think about their life for a while. Write a bullet list using nice fonts and decorate it, do just an ordinary pen and paper list. Feeling arty? Do a doodle or a drawing for each one or create a vision board of happy thoughts. You can decide how to record them in your journal. Might be a movie plot line you like to rerun in your mind, or a memory of something really nice that happened. Things you like to think about that just feel good in your head. So today prompt – lets make a list of happy thoughts. This is a healthy way to use positive thinking. You aren’t using them to force yourself to feel better because, god forbid we ever feel sad, you are using them to calm your brain so you can think straight. After awhile you can reconsider your crisis with your thinking brain rather then you fight/flight brain. This connects to your thinking brain, and switches it on. ![]() You can flick open your journal and look through your list of happy thoughts and choose one to think about for a while, instead of whatever crisis is going on. You listen to how you are feeling, and when it begins to feel too much, you can decide you need to do something to help you regulate. They are there to stop you getting overwhelmed or stuck. Happy thoughts aren’t there to stop you feeling awful, or to push the bad thoughts away. This is where your happy thoughts can come in You need to find a way to switch your thinking brain back on, out of fight/ flight mode. If you tried to do anything to fix what is going on you might flip over in to fight response, shouting at your parents again. You are in avoidant mode and, all your brain will be able to think about is what’s gone wrong. This is a flight reaction, find safety, don’t leave it, don’t face what’s going on. You feel like crap, and your brain is telling you the only thing you can do is curl up in your bed and never get up again. You fought with your parents, you broke your phone, missed out on messaging with your friend who then thinks you are angry with them and it just all feels like its falling apart. Say you had a really bad day, one where everything went wrong. When we are in fight/flight response our feelings can get stuck, like you are going round and round a track and never going anywhere. If we don’t listen tot how we feel hose emotions can build and explode when we don’t want them to. We need to pay them attention, even the tough ones. All our emotions are messages to our brain. When you no longer feel like you are allowed to feel bad, a bit like the cat in the meme. This can all turn into something called toxic positivity. People can tell you to ‘just be positive’, ‘keep smiling’, ‘don’t be so negative’. This helps your brain move in to problem solving mode rather then getting stuck on ‘the world is ending’ reaction. It’s about seeing the bad stuff and believing it will pass, and being able to imagine and focus on what it will be like when it does. Thinking positively isn’t just about thinking only about good things. I explained that in CBT therapists believe that what you think affects how you feel which changes how you act, in a triangle (check it out here ).There is a huge movement around gratitude, positivity, intentions and manifestation which is based in some way on this theory. We looked at the Cognitive- Behavioral Model when we used bullet journal prompts. ![]()
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