Mind App

Track and explore automatic thoughts

A tool for tracking and developing automatic thoughts as part of cognitive-behavioral therapy.

Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia on automatic thoughts:

“Automatic thoughts. These are thoughts that the brain thinks out so quickly that they do not have time to reflect in words in the internal dialogue that a person usually leads with himself when he makes a decision.

Automation occurs usually with those thoughts that were often repeated before or to which a person attached particular importance. After the thought is “automated,” the brain no longer spends much time re-thinking slowly about this thought, but causes a feeling or an action instantly, based on previous feelings and actions associated with this thought in memory.

Such “automation” can be useful when you need to quickly make a decision, but it can hurt if an incorrect or illogical idea is automated, therefore, among the tasks of cognitive psychotherapy is recognizing such automatic thoughts, returning them from the automatic subconscious to the area of ​​slow verbal rethinking, so as to remove the wrong judgments and rewrite them in the form of correct counterarguments.

 The main characteristics of automatic thoughts:

- Reflexivity.

- Coagulation and compactness.

- Insensitivity to conscious control.

- Fastness.

- Perseverance and stereotype.

After thoughts become automatic, they are no longer the result of reflection or reasoning, but evoke feelings or actions instantly and subjectively perceived as valid, even if they appear surrounding to people as ridiculous or contradict obvious facts.

Examples: “If I get a mark of“ good ”in the exam, I will die, the world around me will collapse, after that I will not be able to do anything, I will finally become a complete nonentity”, “I destroyed the life of my children by divorce”, “Everything that I I do it, I do it poorly, so I give up on any difficult things. ”