The Buddha Taught Us to Ask: Are My Thoughts Helpful or Harmful?
Image by Leonard Laub/Unsplash
How has your day been? I hope it has been a good one, full of calm thoughts and peaceful feelings. But for many of us, our days feel like more of a struggle, minds whirring with stressful or upsetting thoughts, bodies tense and emotions a stormy sea. If you had a rough day, try scanning back through your thoughts, checking the mental weather since you woke up. You will probably find a strong correlation between the flavour of your thoughts and how you felt. For example, worry is strongly linked with anxiety, so you may have been feeling anxious and then worrying about upcoming problems, tricky people or daunting situations.
This idea, that the way we think powerfully influences how we feel – and vice versa – is found in many schools of therapy, especially cognitive therapies like CBT, dialectical behaviour therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy. If you’ve ever tried any version of cognitive therapy, you will be familiar with the practice of becoming aware of your thinking and then using a variety of methods to adapt unhelpful thoughts like, This party will be a nightmare – I just know I’ll get really anxious and feel like a weirdo, to, I’m a bit nervous about this party but let’s see how it goes – it might be fun and if I’m not enjoying it I can just leave. The first thought is clearly anxiety-provoking and possibly a self-fulfilling prophecy. The second is more realistic, less emotionally loaded and will help you feel steadier – and perhaps enjoy the party a bit more.
It’s important to note here that there are many other factors influencing our feelings and moods. Polyvagal theory and other somatic models teach us that the nervous system has a powerful role to play in shaping not only our feelings, but thoughts too – ‘story follows state’ refers to the way our nervous systems assess, for example, threatening situations and quickly guide our reactions, before the more advanced but slower prefrontal cortex creates a story about that. I’m turning around and taking another route because I don’t like dogs, say, making sense of the fact that you have sensed a dog in your peripheral vision and turned around before you’re even aware of what’s happening. But that’s for another post – this one is about the powerful role of ‘top-down’ processes, with thoughts effecting the way we feel and behave as we move through the world.
The Buddha: first cognitive Therapist?
Dr Aaron Beck, founder of cognitive therapy, developed his groundbreaking model in the 1960s. Since then, this incredible approach – from a brilliant, kind-hearted man – has helped millions of people around the world. It’s hard to overstate Dr Beck’s gift to psychology and the world, as CBT offers fast, effective relief for so many people who desperately need it.
But, as with most psychotherapy models, Dr Beck didn’t invent cognitive therapy out of the blue. And one of the most profound influences on his theory of the mind came from northern India, 2,500 years before Dr Beck helped his first client. Because Siddhartha Gautama, known to us as the Buddha, developed a powerful, rich and incredibly detailed psychological model millennia before Western psychologists like Freud, Jung and later Dr Beck.
We tend to associate Buddhism with meditation, like mindfulness or metta (loving-kindness) practice. And of course meditation is a central plank of Buddhism. But the Buddha’s teachings focus far more on how we think, behave and engage with other humans – meditation is just one small aspect of the path toward a life free from unnecessary suffering. And he helped us see that learning to pay attention to your thoughts is crucial for optimal mental health and wellbeing –making him the first cognitive therapist, thousands of years before cognitive therapy was born.
Helpful vs Harmful thoughts
Let’s explore this through Lisa’s story. Lisa was a woman in her early 30s who came to see me because she was struggling with chronic cycles of depression, each more crippling than the last. ‘When my mood sinks I just feel terrrible,’ she told me in our first session. ‘I can’t get out of bed, everything seems grey and bleak and I just feel like the worst person in the world.’
It became clear that Lisa felt this way because she not only berated herself horribly all day, but – typically with depression – her self-perception was incredibly negative. She discounted any nice or kind thing people said to her, feeling she didn’t deserve them because, deep down, she was a horrible person. We linked this to the stream of harsh, hurtful things her stepmother used to tell Lisa when she was small. She married Lisa’s dad after her mum died when she was just seven and was clearly jealous of and threatened by this little girl, whose father doted on her.
‘She used to call me stupid, fat, a greedy pig,’ recalls Lisa with tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘And I was a bit chubby as a kid, I think from stress eating after my mum died, so what she said was true.’
Creating a ‘banned list’ of Barbs
These horrible insults, transmitted from her jealous stepmother, then internalised by her Inner Critic and then relayed to her from childhood to the present day, obviously had a huge impact on Lisa’s mood. Having taught her a parts-based understanding of her mind and how it worked, we tackled her Inner Critic, using internal family systems techniques to help negotiate with and quieten this self-lacerating voice in her head.
We also identified the worst things this part called her all day long and helped Lisa notice these thoughts, which were clearly harmful. Together we drew up a list of ‘banned’ words, which she had to notice in her thought stream and then calmly but firmly tell the Critic: No. Hurtful words like fat, lazy, stupid, pathetic, failure and loser were all on the banned list. And, little by little, Lisa’s depression lifted and we could work on the two attachment traumas (losing her mum, at such a young age, and being viciously attacked by her stepmother) at the root of her recurrent bouts of depression.
I hope you find these ideas helpful – and if so, why not come up with your own list of banned words? You could do it right now and then, with the help of a therapist, partner or supportive friend, push back against your Critic when it calls you horrible names. It’s a simple but surprisingly effective strategy that could help you feel better, fast.
Love,
Dan ❤️
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