Hi. So we're going to do another video today looking at ways in which we can challenge unhelpful thinking. One of the common myths about cognitive behavioural therapy is that it's changing negative thoughts to positive thoughts. Now, that concept troubles me really, I've never been a fan of that understanding of what CBT is, obviously, CBT has many levels to it. But for me, that's a problem. Because if you just change a negative thought to a positive one, you might not be able to buy what you're trying to sell to yourself. So you're much more likely to revert back to the original negative thought. So I'd much rather think about it as changing unhelpful to helpful, I find that it's much more palatable, much more realistic. And remember, we have between 20,000 to 70,000 thoughts in a day. So, you know, a lot of that is mundane, or boring or useless. Some of it's actually really helpful, and some of its deeply unhelpful, and I guess it's just that we're looking to try and help you to change and alter in cognitive behavioural therapy.

So thought challenging has long since been recognised as being synonymous with CBT. I think some more modern CBT therapists use it less these days, but I still believe it to be a really useful process if you can get your head around it. Now essentially, we all have a rational brain and an emotional brain, as we've talked about in a previous recording. And what we know about emotion essentially, is that it always passes. It might be after a bath, or a run, or a good night's sleep, or just a few hours after the event. But it always passes, regardless of how strong the emotion is. What we know is of course, that when the emotion is strong, we're much more in our emotional brain, our emotional mind, and our ability to think clearly is radically impeded. That's because it's designed to encourage us into more impulsive survival behaviours. But that's frustrating, isn't it, because when the threat isn't real, or we're feeling a disproportionate threat to the situation, that can really affect our ability to function properly.

So I guess what I'm saying to you is that we don't actually have to wait for the emotion to pass in order to think more rationally, to think more clearly. We can learn, well some of us can anyway, to objectify that emotion, and that's what I'm going to try and teach you over a series of two videos around thought challenging. And that is to get you to notice that your rational brain starts to shut down when you're feeling deeply anxious or in high expressed emotion, and I encourage you to sort of objectify that by using what we call the wise mind in psychology. That's the part of our brain that sort of overlaps the two parts of the brain and enables us to be more mindful, it gives us the ability to objectify emotion and think more intuitively. So when we do thought challenging, it's really, really useful at the point of recognising what the unhelpful thinking is, to then do what we call or some people call helicopter thinking or more modernly maybe you want to think about it as drone thinking.

Just imagine yourself floating above yourself in a little helicopter or drone. And looking down on yourself or standing outside the window looking in and noticing what's going on in there. What's going on down there. Well, Steve's freaking out about his presentation again, or, yeah, I'm having a meltdown about some situation that was making me feel panicked. So that immediately places us in the wise mind, from a place of objectivity. So we are now rather than just being consumed by emotion. We're now objectifying it. That enables us potentially to access our rational mind and to bring in rational thoughts to objectify that strong emotion.

Now, this is not easy to just turn on and start doing it straight away, it takes a great deal of practice, thought challenging is absolutely a discipline. So before I end this video, I'm just going to introduce you to a standard thought record, here is one I knocked up for you. So this is based on our standard CBT, six-column thought record. Now, for any of you who want this, you can get them online very easily if you just type in six-column thought record, or you can email us at stimuli and we will very happily send you a blank copy for you to print out and to use. But yes, essentially, it's the table to record what the situation is, I don't know, just preparing for my video. What the emotion is, where I feel that in my body, what's the physiological sensation of that, then log the unhelpful thoughts, then to do helicopter thinking or objectifying thinking so into our wise mind and to help us to generate more helpful thoughts, not positive, remember, more helpful thoughts, and hopefully in doing so, to change the outcome to reduce the level of emotion we feel.