Negative thoughts are there and on many occasions, they come to stay, but how to fight them? Is the key in learning to put them out of your mind so that they don’t bother you? On the contrary, these thoughts have a function and it is almost impossible to prevent them from appearing in your mind, so if you can’t handle them, join them.
This is one of the ideas explained in his book Don’t think about a green bear by the author and psychologist Luis Miguel Real, who assures in an interview with La Vanguardia that “the more we want to stop thinking about something, the less we are able to do it.” , that is why he proposes that, since you cannot change your thoughts, you have to learn to live with them.
We have all said to others or to ourselves on occasion phrases like “stop worrying” or “stop thinking about it” but that is not the solution to dispel negative emotions, which are almost impossible to control because thoughts are fast. , fleeting, elusive and inevitably appear in the mind when they are not called.
“The more angry we get with a certain thought, the more we tell ourselves that we shouldn’t think that’s what, paradoxically, the more attention we are paying to the thought and therefore, the longer it will stay in our consciousness,” explains Real. , who chose the title Don’t Think About a Green Bear in reference to this same idea that the harder you try to erase a thought, the more it stays in your mind.
This is how the mind works according to this psychologist; “The more we practice an activity, the more we automate it, in the same way, the more time we spend thinking about a certain topic, the faster it comes back to our mind and with more intensity.”
The proposal is simple to explain but complicated to carry out because it requires great effort: Not to run away from negative thoughts but to confront them. We have to spend a little time thinking and analyzing what happens to us.
“There are issues that, even if they are unpleasant or distressing, we should not run away from them but rather face them,” advises the psychologist. For example, if you lose your job, if someone close to you has died or if people are being laid off in your company, it is normal for you to worry and, in fact, it is healthy because “if you don’t worry, you won’t mobilize your resources, if you don’t “We take a certain threat seriously, we will not be able to defend ourselves if things go wrong.”
There are many situations in which it is clear why it is important to take care of what worries us. Someone who suffers, for example, from a phobia of flying on an airplane, could try to stop thinking about it, but it will appear in their mind many times and the more they want to get it out of their head, the more constant and intense the thought will become. Hence the advice would be to take the bull by the horns. Thus “when the person has managed to go through that situation of fear and live with those thoughts and manage themselves emotionally, when they have managed to do it once or twice, expectations change completely: they see themselves capable of handling themselves in that situation and the next time they already “It doesn’t cause as much fear or it doesn’t have as much intensity.”
It always depends on each case because negative emotions are very different. When it is a problem that causes a lot of distress, it is important to go to therapy to analyze what is happening, break down the problem and solve it and look for tools to manage it. But in any case, it is not solved by trying to forget it.
In conclusion, the key would be to learn to live with those bad thoughts, and we achieve this by rationalizing what happens to us and analyzing it to be able to live with it in a natural way because “we can worry in useful and functional ways.”
“Worrying is not an error of the mind, it is not a design flaw of our nervous system but a tool that has allowed us to survive” and negative emotions each have their function. “Our mind is a machine for detecting problems and possible threats to try to save us and guarantee our survival. If we perceive a situation as threatening or dangerous, in the end we will have to end up taking care of it,” Real adds.
That is why it is very important not to block negative emotions but to deal with them and let them do their job. For example, the fear that protects us from so many things: the psychologist gives the case of a skydiver who is more ‘paranoid’ than most and insists on checking every detail of the jump many times, this person would be more prepared to survive, since Your fear or worry that something might go wrong could be saving your life.
However, there are also times “that we exaggerate, that we are giving something an importance that it does not have because it entails little risk or because perhaps, if it occurred, the consequences would not be as serious as we imagine” but “first we have “We have to worry to reach that conclusion, we have to deal with that thought to determine that we were exaggerating a little.”
“Of course there are people with anxiety problems due to worrying too much about things that are of little importance or that are very unlikely to happen, but much more often I see people who have the opposite, who do not take risks seriously. or threats that may be in the environment and then they end up crashing into the ground.” This is exacerbated by self-help books, which insist on mental control of negative emotions, but “just because you think that bad things are not going to happen to you, does not mean that they are not going to happen to you.”
The importance of being alert for survival is clear, but what happens with other emotions, a priori less practical, such as anger or sadness?
“Sadness, anger or fear also have a function,” explains the author. “Anger is there to defend ourselves from situations that we perceive as abusive or unfair, all the social rights that we have won in the last century have been motivated by anger.”
“Going out into the streets and asking that women be able to vote, that came from a lot of people managing their anger in a healthy way, expressing it in a productive way” and like that, many other examples such as “the 8-hour work day and a lot of other things that we have gained by expressing anger and mobilizing our resources.”
“Anger is a very useful emotion, I think the most useful of all, it is essential.” “A person who does not allow anger to be mobilized is much more vulnerable to manipulation or mistreatment by other people,” Real adds.
Sadness also has a function, “it serves, for example, to help us process a loss, to inspire empathy in the people around us and create a tribe and support us.” “The feeling of sadness is often responsible for the feeling of familiarity, of community.”
There are several reasons why the author of Don’t Think About the Green Bear considers that many self-help books do a disservice to those who read them: on the one hand, they create “an erroneous perspective of how thoughts work” and on the other, that generate a lot of frustration because they instill erroneous ideas such as that you can stop thinking about something that worries you or that you can control what happens to you through your thoughts.
“Most self-help books are extremely toxic; first because they are written by people who have no training in psychology, then there are also many best sellers written by psychologists who have let themselves be carried away by the dark side and have dedicated themselves to selling ideas that are not healthy,” says the psychologist.
“Most people, when they read these self-help books that go along the lines of creating your universe with what you think, control your thoughts, if you think about bad things bad things will happen to you, you attract what you think and things.” Thus, they end up giving too much importance to their thoughts and paradoxically they end up getting even worse, with anxiety problems, etc.”
Furthermore, “when a person reads a lot of self-help books and believes many of those ideas, they end up developing expectations that are not healthy,” “I work in therapy with many patients who, after spending many years reading self-help books and going to workshops, of personal development, they come very frustrated because they can’t find their passion, because they can’t stop thinking about something that has happened to them, such as the death of a family member, etc.”, but that is completely normal.
However, not only are they tormented by these normal worries, but on top of that “they think that feeling any type of suffering is bad and unnatural and they also feel guilty.”
“In that situation, what we have to do is let ourselves feel what we are feeling”: “if you are angry because you believe that you have been treated unfairly, then allow it and look for ways to express it in a respectful way because recognizing it will lead you to a series of behaviors such as, for example, taking measures” such as reporting someone, standing up to them, not letting them walk all over you, etc.
Thus, we all have green bears that we would prefer to be in a cave instead of in our minds, but we are not going to be able to kick them out and we can make them useful guests that motivate us to change, self-knowledge or reflection.