CBT: Unconscious Thought Tracking

This post is part of a series of posts exploring Cognitive Behavioural Therapy [CBT] techniques, their application, and my experiences with them.  All posts in this series begin with the tag 'CBT' so you can use the search feature of this blog to read the other posts.

When dealing with anxiety, the way we think about the world, and our day to day lives affects our state of mind and continues to feed our thought process.  Our thought process can influence our emotions, and whilst most emotions precede a thought, it is important to recognise that emotions can be triggered by thoughts and as we have discussed in previous posts emotions can send us into a spiral fed by a feedback loop that they induce.  To that end, it is important to identify where feelings originate in order to understand how they are triggered in the first place.  This isn't always possible to do, as I said, feelings generally occur before a thought rather than after a thought, however, chronicling your thoughts over time can help you gauge your shifting mental state and allow you to identify patterns and become aware of thoughts that are influencing your mental and emotional states.

In the process of chronicling your thoughts, the objective is to determine a temperature as it were.  If you think of positivity as heat, and negativity as coldness, or reverse if you prefer, then your mental state and emotional state can be in part indicated on a metaphorical thermometer.  As you chronicle thoughts when they occur you can attribute values to those thoughts based on how they affect the way you feel, with negative thoughts having negative values and positive thoughts having positive values, or reversed if you chose to reverse the scale - this can help you identify sources of hotness or coldness which represent sources of positivity or negativity however you chose to attribute these.

It is easy to assume that your thought process is inclined towards one side more than the other but it is often the case that we aren't able to accurately determine by what percentage this is the case, i.e. we cannot initially say that we have a 60/40 split with positive vs negative thoughts because our cognitive bias will lead us to pay more attention to one side than the other even if it isn't the prevailing direction that our thoughts are sending us in.

The purpose of chronicling thoughts in a journal is intended to help keep track of the thoughts we have and their influence and allow us to reflect on the data after it has been compiled to get a more accurate depiction.  The biggest obstacle to the effective use of this technique is establishing the habit of chronicling your thoughts.  Whilst recording each thought it is important to know what to record and what not to record.  You can choose to record everything for sake of simplicity but that will likely be burdensome and discourage you from pursuing this technique to get any real value out of it.  The most important thoughts to record are what are referred to as unconscious thoughts.  Where a conscious thought is one that you consciously decided to contemplate, an unconscious thought is one that occurs to you unprovoked or one that occurs in response to situations or stimuli.  For example deciding what to eat and thinking what food you would like is a conscious thought, whereas your reaction to dropping an egg on the floor when trying to prepare a meal is an unconscious thought because it details something that came to mind after an event occurred that was unprovoked.

Getting into the habit of chronicling your thoughts will be difficult at first until the habit of recording your thoughts is instilled and depending on how active our minds are and the volume of thought that we engage in, this may take some time to complete.  The first few days worth of data is not likely to be of much use as the habit will still be forming at that point and data will likely be missing.  Once you are confident that the habit has formed and the data is an accurate reflection then you can rely on it more conclusively.  With each thought that is recorded, note the effect it has on your emotional state, positive, negative, and neutral. 

A week or so worth of data would give a more accurate depiction at first at least for the sake of satisfying curiosity.  In order to achieve this goal, simply use a memo pad app on your phone, or a notepad, or a something that you can record your thoughts in and note in the moment whether they make you feel better or worse.  Reflecting on the data should give you an idea of the ratio of positive to negative thoughts that you have, and having the data to reflect on when heightened emotional states occur will give you the opportunity to look back and see if there was a thought pattern that had formed prior to that changing state.

For me personally this technique wasn't relevant to my situation as the stimuli that I was reacting to were not things that I had control over, this technique is primarily aimed at individuals who are struggling with anxiety that originates from their own thoughts and feelings as opposed to being situational.  If you are having emotions that don't originate from your own thought process then this likely won't be of use to you either.  It is worth noting that this technique can be adapted to be used to record your responses that occur when those stimuli occur and it can be useful in that regard to establish the same awareness of thought patterns however it doesn't offer much in the way of preventing stimuli that doesn't originate from your thoughts.

As you can imagine this technique didn't do much for me personally for the reasons I outlined above, I did manage to use it to identify thought patterns but those patterns were also self-evident prior to using this technique so whilst useful and effective, it didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, so I am quite indifferent on this one.  This does however highlight an important point to make, that not every technique will be relevant, and not every technique will actually work for you, they can be best seen as tools to arm yourself with as and when needed.