Automatic negative thoughts vs positive empowering thoughts

Tame your 'ANTS'

Photo: Pixabay

Tame your "ANTs" and turn them into "PETs."

One secret to a happy life is taming your “ANTs” and turning them into “PETs.”

No, not the little black, or red, creatures that crawl around your yard, and sometimes your house and ruin your picnic. You’d look a tad silly walking down the street with an ant on a leash. ANT stands for automatic negative thoughts, while PET is the opposite — positive empowering thoughts.

I love my ANTs. I haven’t met one I didn’t like and I have made friends with a lot, maybe not as many as Taylor Swift has followers on X but it feels like that some days. I treat those negative thoughts like a carnivore drooling over a steak at Madrid’s oldest restaurant or an oenophile sipping a great wine in a Paris bistro. PETs, not so much. I don’t know many and the few I do know aren't friendly. They didn’t like me, at least not enough to stick around.

That is the challenge for me and anyone who has a bad love affair with their thoughts and would like to move on to something more empowering, ones that would make them feel happy, joyful, enthusiastic instead of sad, depressing, suicidal, where every day feels like Monday morning in February.

According to an article on the BrainFit website, the term ANTs were given life by Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive theory, which has been called the current gold standard in psychotherapy. Beck coined ANTs when he realized how many of his patients’ thoughts were negative. We have 60,000 to 70,000 a day, many of which are repetitive and negative.

Not all negative thoughts are bad. Some kept our ancestors alive. If they thought a moving bush was a tiger and ran, they survived. If they assumed it was the wind and it was a tiger, they died, and their genes ended up on the jungle floor. All your ancestors believed it was a tiger and ran. Their genes survived and became you. Negative thoughts equaled life—your life.

That’s not as true now as it was then. We don’t run into many tigers in the concrete jungle but the fight-flight-freeze signal is not a flashing light any more. For many, however, it is always on. Stress is epidemic and it’s getting worse.

For many people, from school kids to CEOs, fight or flight is always on. They are constantly reading the environment and people’s faces to see if and where danger, a threat, is lurking. It has become a threat and leads to high-blood pressure, lowered immunity, upset stomach and ulcers. That can kill. It takes longer than going one on one with a tiger but the end result is the same. To neutralize that threat, we need to domesticate our ANTs.

While Beck coined ANTs, psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Amen popularized them, especially in his 2015 book Change Your Mind, Change Your Life.

Automatic negative thoughts are varied and many, but Amen labels nine of the most common patterns as different “species” and calls the most destructive “red ANTs.”
Here are some ANTs Amen identified:
Fortune telling: This is the ANT of almost anyone who has a panic disorder. They are masterful at predicting the worst, even though they don’t have any evidence.

Mind reading: Where you arbitrarily believe that you know what someone else is thinking, even though they didn’t tell you. It’s a major reason why people have trouble in relationships.

Guilt beatings: Thinking with words like “should,” “must,” “ought” and “have to.” The words we use to talk to ourselves are very important. Guilt is not a good motivator for change.

Blame: Whenever you blame someone else for the problems in your life, you are a victim and you can’t do anything to change it. Stay away from blaming thoughts and take personal responsibility for changing the problems you have.

Labelling: Calling yourself or someone else a derogatory name. This diminishes your ability to see situations clearly and labels are very harmful.

“Negative thoughts invade your mind like ants at a picnic," Amen and his wife, Tara, wrote in Brain Warrior’s Way.

“Whenever you notice an ANT infestation, the best way to rid yourself of the pesky creatures is to write down your thoughts and investigate them,” Amen said.

“Whenever you feel sad, mad, nervous or out of control, write down your automatic negative thoughts (ANTs) and ask yourself if they’re true and whether they’re helping you or hurting you,” the husband-and-wife duo write.

Of course, Amen isn’t the only one preaching against the mind-numbing and anxiety-inducing negative thoughts. Even Stoicism, the 2,300-year-old Greek philosophy, on which Beck based the original cognitive therapy, offers many insights.

Two of the foundational tenets, cited by the Roman Stoic Epictetus, suggested that when we learn what is in our control and what is not—and most things are not—and act accordingly, life becomes less anxious and much simpler. The second tenet is it is only our opinion that things should be different than they are.

It is only my opinion that the people who stop at roundabouts and merge lanes instead of flowing with the traffic are, well, you get the idea. Four-way stops and turn signals as well. Simple, but yet so confusing for some people. At least that is my opinion, even though I know what other people do or don’t is not in my control.

I’m working on it. Epictetus would be proud.

An article in Psychology Today claims Stoicism is still relevant, (and has certainly undergone a revival in the last 20 years.)

“Aaron Beck, the father of CBT, wrote that ‘the philosophical origins of cognitive therapy can be traced back to the Stoic philosophers,” it said. “Albert Ellis, the founder of rational emotive behaviour therapy, a precursor to CBT, frequently cited the Stoics, and was especially taken by a line from Epictetus: ‘Men are disturbed not by events but by their opinions about them.’”

Byron Katie had the same positive, empowering thought in 1986 after she had a mind-blowing, enlightenment experience.

She created a protocol for challenging all thoughts and called that self-inquiry the work.

Her first questions at the start of investigating, and challenging, a thought is:

• Is it true?

• Is it absolutely true?

• How do you feel when you have that thought?

• How would you feel if you didn’t have that thought?

You can go much deeper. Byron Katie has work sheets on her web page that will take you through the process.

After her enlightenment experience, where she could not even remember who she was, she spent a year in the heat of the California desert killing her ANTs, although she didn’t call her disempowering thoughts by that name.

“I discovered that when I believed my thoughts I suffered but when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that.”

Like the Buddha, she found that suffering is optional.

“When you believe a thought that argues with reality, you’re confused,” she said.

She took a page from the Buddha’s admonition to his followers not to take his word for anything, but investigate for themselves.

“Don’t believe anything I say. Test it for yourself. The important thing is to discover what’s true for you, not for me,” she writes in A Mind at Home with Itself, her commentary on the Diamond sutra, one of the most important works in Buddhism.

“I don’t let go of my thoughts. I meet them with understanding and they let go of me.”

That is definitely a way to tame your ANTs and turn them into PETs.

Don’t forget the leash when you take your ANTs out from the dark and into the sunshine and the clear light of day. Or become an ANT-eater--but cover them with chocolate first.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.

Social service groups and food banks need for help now greater than ever

Giving a little means a lot

Photo: Ross Freake

Don Evers has stood beside a Red Kettle for 60 Christmases, and finds that the need has grown since he started in the cold of Saskatoon winters when he was a teen. "One of the Salvation Army's mottos is 'Giving hope today' and that's why I do this. It's a little cold out here but it's well worth it for the end result," he said

Canada is hungry and growing hungrier.

The empty, rumbling collective stomach is contracting in hunger pains and the growling is getting louder.

Many would argue we are approaching a redux that John Steinbeck wrote about in The Winter of Our Discontent. He titled the book from a line Shakespeare put into the mouth of Richard III.

“We can shoot rockets into space, but we can't cure anger or discontent,” he wrote. Steinbeck, that is, not Shakespeare.

We can add hunger to the list of things we can’t cure despite our collective wealth and technology. The rich are indeed getting richer. But if they want to make it through the eye of a needle and into heaven, the richest people might consider helping solve poverty and homelessness.

If Elon Musk, the $400-billion man, had used $250 million to reduce poverty instead of currying favour with (U.S. president-elect) Donald Trump, many poor Americans would be having a better Christmas.

The moral imperative dictates that if we can alleviate suffering, we should. A society, a civilization should be judged by the way it treats its weakest, a point Jesus made emphatically in the parable of the sheep and the goats.

“For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me,” he is quoted in Matthew 25. “Most certainly I tell you, because you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

A more modern, and less poetic version was mouthed by former U.S. vice-president Hubert Humphrey in 1977 at the dedication of the building in Washington D.C. that bears his name.

“The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

Unfortunately, when many politicians think about the less unfortunate, it’s how to use them for political advantage, to score points or votes.

That leaves us, we, the people, the ones who have enough that we can share with the ones who don’t, and if we can’t do it during Christmas, this season of generosity and compassion, when will we?

The local Salvation Army is trying to raise $1 million in its annual Christmas campaign, but that is not just for gifts, the money helps fund services year round.

The Central Okanagan Food Bank is also on the front line helping the less fortunate. The first Canadian food bank that started in 1981 in Edmonton — and in Kelowna three years later — and was meant to be temporary.

Since then, it has spawned a multitude of offspring, and they have been sewn into the fabric of society but the thread is being stretched to the breaking point.

Without food banks — and organizations like the Salvation Army — the dystopian future often predicted in science future movies would be here now for many Canadians of whom one in four can’t survive without help. It isn’t just the homeless or people without jobs. It’s also the working poor who face an uncertain future.

The cracks in the system are showing. The demand on the Central Okanagan Food Bank is up 38% this Christmas and demands on the Salvation Army are growing every year too.

Food Banks Canada says it recorded more than two million visits in March, nearly double the monthly visits five years ago in March 2019, and 6% above last year's record-breaking figure. According to HungerCount and the Poverty Report, things are expected to get worse next year, and much worse if Trump enacts his promised 25% tariffs. We aren’t quite there yet but without the food bank, the Salvation Army and many other wonderful charities, we might be.

Unfortunately, in contrast to the people who have been served by progress and technology, the poor are not only still with us, but their numbers are growing.

It is the worse that Don Evers, a Salvation Army bell ringer for 60 years, has ever seen it.

“I don’t think I’ve seen more of a need. Everything from homelessness to poverty to people who just can’t make ends meet,” he said.

All of us can do a little bit, which will add up to a big bit. Those little bits just might prevent things from getting worse even if it is just for now, this Christmas, this moment. If we don’t, how bad will be in three years, or 60 years? Problems don’t get better by ignoring them or pretending they don’t exist.

While not everyone can afford to donate to the Salvation Army or the food bank, they can volunteer. If they can’t give money, they can give time. Until we find a solution, we can use the elephant-eating method. But instead of one bite at a time, one dollar at a time or one hour at a time.

When you see a Red Kettle or receive a solicitation from the food bank, pretend it is the light and walk toward it. It’s not too late to help, it’s never too late. The need is always there.

For many holding the line, there is also hope.

“We’re crazy enough to believe that humanity will show up for each other,” said Jennifer Henson, co-pastor of the Central Okanagan Salvation Army. “It’s like during the fires, we saw the most devastating things happen, but, then, we also saw the best part of humanity. And it continues to happen and that’s what keeps us going.”

In his great poem, Ulysses, Tennyson wrote, “It’s not too late to seek a newer world.”

While we might lack Tennyson’s vision and facility with words, we can help create a newer, better world for the 24% of Canadians who need our help.

Merry Christmas.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.

'Search' stories help us find the way

Zen and art of searching

Photo: Contributed

Tending The Ox, one of the 10 Oxherding Pictures.

Zen has a wonderful, 900-year-old pictorial story, which, in modern terminology, would be called "no bull."

It’s actually called the Oxherding Pictures, and since Zen essentially teaches without words, it’s appropriate to depict man’s search for himself in illustrations.

The ox is a metaphor for the mind, which refuses to conform to any discipline and the oxherd is the Zen practitioner trying to find his true self.

The mind was compared with a wild ox because it had to be captured, tethered and broken, a long, slow process. Following the example, the Zen student is encouraged to directly experience his own mind through meditation, subdue anxieties and desires, experience oneness with all, and find peace.

But it isn’t just in Zen, all literature is rife with search stories, variations of the oxherding story: Prometheus, Odysseus, Jason and the Argonauts, the Knights of the Round Table or a native American on a vision quest; it’s about anyone who confronts adversity, is changed in the process and then brings back something to his community. Fairy tales are a variation of the search motif.

“The call rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration — a rite, or moment, of spiritual passage, which, when complete, amounts to a dying and a birth,” mythologist Joseph Campbell writes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. “The familiar life horizon has been outgrown; the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for a passing of a threshold is at hand.”

The process is always the same: departure, initiation and return.

All the stories are really the story of all of us, on a personal search for fire, the Golden Fleece, the Holy Grail, or the bull. Once we start on the path of self-discovery, there’s no going back. We might never discover who we are, but we’ll never be content with who we were.

“The journey begins as an exhausting search for an elusive quarry,” Timothy Freke writes in Zen Wisdom. “The seeker is pictured in search of himself, but all he can find is rustling leaves and singing cicadas and he does not yet realize that these are the very clues he seeks. During this stage, the student is often confused and discouraged. He doesn’t really know what it is he is looking for.”

The ultimate irony is, of course, that the bull only appears lost because the oxherd thinks he is alone, separate from others, from the world, which both religion and science argue is an illusion.

So the oxherd, the searcher — us — seeks, reaching crossroads, uncertain which one to take, going one way, doubling back, taking another until he discovers a teaching, a method that works and he sees the bull’s footprints everywhere. He sees through the illusion and realizes everything is a reflection of himself.

“Better keep yourself clean and bright,” wrote George Bernard Shaw. “You are the window through which you must see the world.”

While the seeker accepts that point intellectually, he still has trouble living it; he has found the path, but has not yet passed through what Zen calls the “gateless gate.”

The oxherd captures the bull, but it refuses to be tamed, just like our restless, monkey mind. After a lifetime thinking what it likes, it doesn’t want to submit — just as we find excuses not to meditate, go on a diet, exercise or spend more time with our kids, our spouse or our parents.

The student must train his mind so it doesn’t conjure fantasies or watch movies in his head and begins Zen training until the mind is tamed and he accepts that it is not other people who cause his anger and angst, but himself.

With practice, vigilance and discipline, the mind is calmed and the oxherd is no longer concerned with success or failure, or what the world thinks or demands.

“He realizes that the bull has only been a temporary subject of his quest,” Freke writes. “His search has led to the realization that the separate self, that he previously took himself to be, is not his true self. The seeker knows his Buddha-nature — his deeper identity.”

With that comes the realization all is one, that everyone and everything is but a reflection of a deeper reality, the Absolute.

“Although the vision that the seeker has been seeking has finally been attained, there is no self to glory in this achievement. Mind, clear of all limitations. Confusion is replaced by serenity. Ideas of holiness are irrelevant,” writes Freke.

That brings joy, which encompasses sadness and happiness, but is greater than both. With joy comes acceptance of the self and the world.

The search is often portrayed as something outside ourselves, a heroic quest that summons physical courage and mental strength, but essentially is a journey inward. The searcher goes “into depths where obscure resistances are overcome and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world,” writes Campbell.

“The godly powers sought and dangerously won are revealed to have been within the heart of the hero all the time. He is the “king’s son” who has come to know who he is and therewith has entered into the exercise of his proper power.

“From this point of view, the hero is symbolical of the divine creative and redemptive image, which is hidden within us all, only waiting to be known and rendered into life.”

The final word goes to Zen: “Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.”

Even the enlightened have to pay the hydro and cell phone bills.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.

Looking at ourselves through our dark sides

The shadow knows

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Marcel Proust

We will never be completely whole until we accept the invitation that Darth Vader extended to Luke Skywalker. “Come to the dark side.”

Star Wars director George Lucas learned his mythology from Joseph Campbell, the world’s foremost authority on the subject.

“The self is the totality, and if you think of it as a circle, the centre of the circle would be the centre of the self,” Campbell wrote in Myth and the Self.

“But your plane of consciousness is above the centre and your ego’s up there above the plane of consciousness, so there’s a subliminal aspect of the self which you do not know. And this is in play constantly with the ego.”

Campbell’s circle metaphor comes from Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychologist who used the word shadow to describe those dark parts of ourselves we don’t like and refuse to acknowledge.

“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate,” said Jung. “That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.”

We are controlled by beliefs and urges we don’t know and until we shine a light down into our own abyss, we’re doomed to dance to a tune we might not recognize. When we were young, we assimilated just about everything our parents, priests and peers told us. Because we wanted, needed, to be part of the tribe, we accepted societal norms and dictates. The qualities that didn’t fit were thrown into the dungeon of ourselves.

As children, we were told not to lie, not to steal, not to be selfish. But what child doesn’t, so we were punished or ostracized when those “bad qualities” emerged. Even now as adults, when they climb up from the psychic basement like an unloved relative, we lock the door and ignore the knocking.

We project those aspects onto other people. The jealousy, anger, greed, fear, envy, sloth, lust, laziness we don’t like and/or don’t acknowledge in ourselves we see in other people.

The show-off in the weight room, the know-it-all in the classroom, the inconsiderate driver on the highway, the nosy neighbour wouldn’t annoy or upset us if they weren’t exhibiting repressed parts of ourselves.

When we react — over-react — to something our children or co-worker did, we’re responding to some unheeded part of ourselves.

The world really is a reflection of us. We look in a mirror darkly and see the monsters and then project them onto other people. That which we fear will, like Job, come upon us unless we bring it into consciousness.

“If one sees only unloveliness in others, it is because unloveliness is a strong element in himself,” Ernest Holmes wrote in Science of Mind.

“The light he throws on others is generated in his own soul and he sees them as he chooses to see them, He holds constantly in his mind a mental equivalent of unloveliness and creates unlovely reactions toward himself.”

If we are to fuse our splinter parts, we have to acknowledge that they exist. Pretending they aren’t there causes us problems and embarrassment because they’ll show up like a broke brother-in-law or a tiresome school mate.

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves,” Jung said.

Poet Robert Bly wrote that we all drag a long, black bag behind us into which we stuffed the aspects of ourselves our friends and family didn’t like. By the time we reach middle age, the bag is long and heavy and some people start thinking about lightening the load.

“Your shadow self includes emotional and psychological patterns that come from repressed feelings that you do not wish to deal with consciously for the fear of the consequences.” Caroline Myss writes in Sacred Contracts.

“Your shadow also contains the secret reasons why you would sabotage the opportunities that come your way.”

It requires great fortitude and resolve to admit that we are what we vilified and abhorred, but now’s the time to reclaim our rejected majesty. If we don’t, we stay in the wasteland, adhering to the dictates of the tribe, forever reciting the mantra of don’t.

“It takes a tremendous act of courage to admit to yourself that you are not defective in any way whatsoever,” Zen master Cheri Huber said.

It isn’t just the negative trait we deny and project onto others. When we tell people what we think about them, when we think they are bright and funny we’re seeing positive aspects of ourselves in them.

“If you admire greatness in another human being, it is your own greatness you are seeing,” Debbie Ford writes in The Dark Side of the Light Chasers. “You may manifest it in a different way, but if you didn’t have greatness within you, you wouldn’t be able to recognize that quality in another person.”

Yet if we own our positive traits, we don’t have any more excuses for not realizing our potential, for being as good as the people we admire. So we prefer to exercise what Abraham Maslow called the Jonah Complex, setting low standards and evading our potential growth with an ah-shucks mentality. Oddly, it’s much less fearful than aspiring to greatness.

“Within our ourselves, we possess every trait and its polar opposite, every human emotion and impulse,” Ford writes. “We have to uncover, own, and embrace all of who we are, the good and bad, dark and light, strong and weak, and honest and dishonest.

“It is your birthright to be whole: to have it all. It only takes a shift in your perception, an opening of your heart.”

The shadow knows.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.