Pretty much every client who has come to see me has, at one time or another, spoken about their negative automatic thoughts. These are the thoughts that pop into your head, seemingly at random, that are unhelpful. Thoughts like – “I’m useless”, “I’m unloveable”, “I’m an idiot”, “I’m crazy”, “I’m ugly”, “Nobody likes me”, etc etc. I’m almost certain that there isn’t a person in the world who hasn’t had thoughts like these pop into their heads now and then.

A lot of the time the clients who come and see me are so frustrated with these thoughts they talk about trying to ‘get rid of them’. Now, as much as I understand this desire, often my reply isn’t what they are looking for but it is the most truthful and realistic one that I can give. I tell them that I have NEVER given anybody the goal of ‘getting rid of’ their negative thoughts. This includes myself. I don’t even know if it’s possible to entirely ‘get rid of’ them. So, the goal I have given myself, and the one I put forward to my clients, is to work on the thoughts every time they happen. To clarify this I use an analogy that I like to call The Jukebox Brain…

Think of your brain like an old fashioned jukebox (CD’s or records depending on how old you are). But this jukebox is stuck on random! It will play whatever the hell it wants and you have absolutely no control over this. However, the repeat and skip buttons still work. So, you can’t control what song it plays but you do have choices:- you can sit and listen to the whole of the song, press repeat and listen to it again (and again, and again) or you can skip the song and play something else.

We may not feel like we have control over what thoughts pop into our brains but we do have control over what we do with them. We can sit and dwell on them – play them over and over – or we can try to skip onto a different thought. We may need to do this a lot. Sometimes, when we’re feeling at our worst, our jukebox brain can seem to want to play every unhelpful song it has in it’s repertoire but the more we skip them the easier it can become…

The main thing that I want to get across is that you are not failing if you are still having negative thoughts! I’ve been working on mine for possibly 20 years now and I still get them all the time. Being hard on yourself for still having them will just make it worse. The goal is to try and play them all the way through less and less and to try and skip them more and more often.

If you are having trouble with your jukebox brain then you might find Cognitive Behavioural Therapy helpful as it works on finding alternative thoughts that you can try and ‘skip’ to. See the CBT section on the Therapies page of the website for more information.

Thanks for reading. If there are any subjects you would like me to cover then please use the Contact page to let me know.