Kate Parish on thoughts, and why they matter.
A thought creeps into your head and starts to make you feel anxious or worried. The more you think about this thought, the bigger it will get and the more worried you will get. The more worried you get the more stressed you get, the more control your amygdala will have and the less control your rational response part of the brain will have, because your amygdala needs all the oxygen at this point to help you to get away from this danger that it thinks you are in.
So, no oxygen for the rational response part of your brain, and it goes to sleep for a while.
But what if we could stop that thought getting bigger in the first place, so that we always have our rational response to help us make a sensible decision?
One thing we can learn to do here over time is the Grab, Look, Chuck Method…
- We grab the thought before it gets too big
- We look at the thought and we think…..’Is this helping me?’
- Then we chuck the thought if it is serving us no purpose.
The more we think about this thought, the more we feed this thought and the bigger it gets. The bigger it gets, the more anxiety you feel, the more control the amygdala needs, to help protect you, and the less available the rational response part of our brain is, because it has gone to sleep to save all the oxygen for the amygdala to save you.
But what if we grab this thought before it gets too big? What if our ourselves if this thought helping me. Is this thought making me feel good? Is having this thought going to make them like me? No. All the thought is doing is making you feel anxious, shutting down the sensible thinking part of your brain and not allowing you to move forward with a positive outlook. So chuck it.
We are not ignoring our thoughts here, as that is not good to do either, but we are challenging them to have a better positive outlook, rather than a negative outlook that won’t help us with what we want to do.
Children can do this. In fact sometimes kids are more open to it than we are. When we do this with children we actually write the thought down, we think of all the ways that this thought is helping us, usually none, then allow them to physically screw it up and throw it in the bin.
As with anything new, try this out when the child is feeling ok, because you will be more able to work with that negative thought and chuck it if you need to. When we are in a state of anxiety or worry, then we need to calm our mind first, before we can then take this next step and look at our thoughts.
Author: Kate Parish
Kate Parish
Kate Parish is a qualified primary teacher and founder of The Mind Gig.
Website: themindgig.com
