Taking Hold of the Mind: “How” Skills

Non judgmentally

• See but don’t evaluate. Take a nonjudgmental stance. Just the facts. Focus on the “what” not the “good” or “bad”, the “terrible” or “wonderful”, the “should” or “should not”.
• Unglue your opinions from the facts, from the “who, what ,where and when”.
• Accept each moment, each event as a blanket spread out on the lawn accepts both the rain and the sun, and each leaf that falls upon it.
• Acknowledge the helpful, the wholesome, but don’t judge it. Acknowledge the harmful, the unwholesome,but don’t judge it.
• When you find yourself judging, don’t judge your judging.

One-Mindfully

• Do one thing at a time. When you are eating, eat. When you are walking, walk. When you are bathing, bathe. When you are working, work. When you are in a group, or a conversation, focus your attention on the very moment you are in with the other person. Do each things with all your attention.
• If other actions, or other thoughts, or strong feelings distract you, let go of the distractions and go back to what you were doing.
• Concentrate your mind. If you find you are doing two things at once, stop and go back to one thing at a time.

Effectively

• Focus on what works. Do what needs to be done in each situation. Stay away from “:fair” and “unfair”, “right” and “wrong”, “should” and “should not”.
• Play by the rules. Don’t “cut off your nose to spite your face”.
• Act as skillfully as you can, meeting the needs of the situation you are in. Not the situation you wish you were in; not the one that is just; not the one that is more comfortable; not the one that…
• Keep an eye on your objectives in the situation and do what is necessary to achieve them. Let go of vengeance, useless anger, and righteousness that hurts you doesn’t work.

Judging: Any labeling or evaluating of something as good or bad, valuable or not, as worthwhile or worthless. The essence of it is the valuing of things as more or less “good” or “bad”. Thinking of terms as “good” or “bad” can be harmful, may be an example of “all or nothing thinking”, and ignores that things and people have some “good” parts and some “bad” parts. It also is no necessary. An important mindfullness skill is not judging things in this manner, but to instead describe the consequences of what a person does. For example, “Your behavior is terrible” (judgmental) verses “your behavior is hurting me” (noticing consequences).

Types of Cognitice (Thinking) Distortions

1. All or nothing thinhking – You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
2. Overgeneralization – You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
3. Magnifying the negative – You exaggerate the importance of a negative thins (such as your goof-up), or you pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire pitcher of water.
4. Minimizing the positive – You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences. Or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities).
5. Jumping to conclusions – You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion. There are two types. Mind reading is when you arbitrarily conclude that someon is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out. Fortune teller error is when you anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.
6. Should statements – You try to motivate yourself with “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts”, as if you had been whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct “should” statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment. It is important to note that this isn’t talking able basic “shoulds” like “I should brush my teeth”. This is instead talking about taking “shoulds” to the extreme.
7. Labeling and mislabeling i This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself, such as “I’m a loser”. When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him or her like “s/he’s a louse”. Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
8. Personalization – You see yourslef as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.
9. Emotional Reasoning – “Because I feel it, it must be true.” without any other supporting evidence.

Emotional Mind – Thinking is impaired, thinking distortions are common, distances from others, impaired decisions

Wise Mind – Ideal for relationships and decision making. It’s half way in between emotional and reasonable mind.

Reasonable Mind – Impaired decisions and distances from others

To differentiate a feeling from a thought” Only a feeling can fit in the sentence stem “I’m ________”.

Many people think that an activating event causes an emotional consequence, like this:
Activating event: phone rings at 2 AM —-> Consequence: panic or anxiety

If this was true then the activating event would always cause panic or anxiety. However, someone who thinks the phone is a wrong number would likely feel irritation as opposed to panic or anxiety.

So, there is an important mediating factor that determines someone’s emotional consequence, which is that person’s belief (or thought) about the event, like this:

Activating event: Phone rings at 2 AM –> Belief: Somebody’s hurt –> Consequence: Anxiety/Panic
Activating event: Phone rings at 2 AM –> Belief: Wrong Number –> Consequence: Irritation

Sometimes our thoughts can be distorted or even downright false and the more we are in our emotional mind, the more likely that our thoughts can be distorted. So, it is important to separate our feelings from o0ur thoughts to determine if there are any distortions or falsehoods, and if so, to reframe our thinking to more accurately reflect reality.

How to Reframe Your Thinking

1. Work backwards from your feelings to ID your thoughts. Ask yourself: What am I thinking that is contributing to the way I feel.

2. Examine your thoughts using a filter.

1. What is the evidence for this thoguht?
2. Is this always true?
3. Is this thought helpful or harmful to me?
4. Did I inherit this thinking from my family-of-origin, or is it something I chose

If your thinking does not pass this test, then it is probably distorted and you need to reframe your thought.

3. Reframe your thinking

1. Use a positive statement and avoid negatives.
2. Use the proper tense
3. Use I statements whenever possible. For example, “I can”, “I am becoming”, “I am willing to”
4. Use statement which you have some belief in. It is ok if you are not 100% convinced of the statement, but it needs to be a little bit believable to you.

4. Use these statements and talk back to the automatic voice that can sabotage you!