Escaping the Pattern of Toxic Thoughts
Have you ever heard a new phrase, song, or saying for the first time ever, and somehow over the course of the next few days or weeks you start hearing it everywhere? Or maybe you notice a sleek red car drive by that you’ve never seen before, and then you start seeing it in every parking lot. Or maybe you learn about a style of house while you’re watching HGTV, and next thing you know you spot it all over your city or town. Could there really be an increase of people buying that sleek red car you noticed, or that new style of house? Or are you just more aware of it now?
This is a concept we refer to in psychology as frequency bias, and it can happen with pretty much anything. The fancy name for this is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. And if you’ve never heard of it before, there’s a good chance you will after today. (See what I did there?) The main idea is that the frequency of those things is not actually increasing, but simply your awareness of them. And that awareness changes everything.
There’s so much going on around you in one particular 24-hour period that it’s impossible for your brain to absorb it all. But when you bring your attention to something—which is called selective attention—you begin to make note of that specific thing more and more often. Your brain tunes into it!
LOOKING FOR PATTERNS
What if we could begin to apply this frequency bias to our thoughts? What if we could increase our awareness and start to see and understand our thoughts in ways we didn’t before? What if we could actually tune in to our patterns of thinking rather than just defaulting to our usual? The incredible thing is, we can.
In the last daily practice, I asked you to write down all the negative thoughts you had in a 24-hour period. If you haven’t had a chance to do that, I want you to stop, go back to the practice before, and spend some time there first; we need to have something to work with if we want to identify patterns. Now, I want you to take a look at the thoughts you wrote down.
Do any patterns emerge?
Are there any themes that you tend to default to again, and again, and again?
Let’s try to isolate those today. We’re trying to get to the root of why you think the way you do. And to do that, we need to see if we can find some patterns.
God gives us permission to change the pattern. We have the power and control to choose which thoughts we will tune into and ruminate on throughout the day. So much of the Bible aligns with healthy psychology and counseling. God knows our tendency to default to the negative, so we’re being asked to make it a habit, a daily practice, to tune in to whatever is good, pure, true, lovely (Philippians 4:8). We’re being challenged to increase our awareness of the right thoughts and beliefs throughout the day and throughout our lives. Don’t just default to your usual, mindless patterns. Change the patterns. But to do that, we’ve got to first stop and take note of our patterns—both the good and the bad— so we can begin to change the way we think. We have to recognize our patterns if we want to replace our patterns. And when we do that, it will begin to change everything. Because thought change leads to life change.
When Hannah, from the last lesson, wrote down all the negative thoughts she had in a day, she came in with a list longer than she’d expected. Here’s what it read:
I don’t fit in. They’re just pretending to like me. He’s just being nice because he feels sorry for me. I can’t believe I yelled at the kids. I am the worst mom. If I don’t get it together, he’s going to leave me. They invited me out of pity, but they don’t really want me there. I don’t have what it takes to get it done today.
And those were just some of the things she had on her list. When she actually faced her thoughts, she realized how consistently mean, degrading, negative, and unhealthy they were. When I asked her to see if she could find a pattern, she realized she was stuck in a spiral of thoughts with a theme of inadequacy. She was never good enough— not in her personal life, not in her marriage, not in her friendships, not as a mom, or a homemaker, or a businesswoman. Her thoughts were always pointing out where she wasn’t measuring up, fixating on all that was lacking. Now that she recognized a theme to her negative thinking, she started seeing it in almost every aspect of her life.
We have to recognize our patterns if we want to replace our patterns.
CONNECTING THE DOTS
Why was Hannah caught in a cycle of toxic thinking? Why did she always feel like she wasn’t enough? Long ago, Hannah started defaulting to this way of thinking to try to make sense of why she was adopted. This wasn’t a conscious decision on her part—she was so young at the time. But sometimes our brains process things for us, without our permission or awareness. The brain tries to make sense of the world around us, and its interpretation may or may not be based on truth.
Young Hannah’s mind needed to make sense of the fact that her biological parents had given her up for adoption. It was less painful for her to believe that she was the problem than it was for her to believe that something went terribly wrong with her biological parents. There must have been something they didn’t like about me. There must have been something wrong with me. I must not have been what they wanted.
I must not be good enough. This is where the seeds of her default thinking were planted—watered by the circumstances of life, fertilized by more unhealthy thinking, until she grew up learning to believe those thoughts and apply them to other areas of her life. They had become a part of her thought process without her awareness.
For Hannah to be freed from her default thinking, she needed a reset. She began by recognizing her negative thoughts, but that alone wasn’t enough. Now she actually had to replace them with truth.
In your life, too, it isn’t enough to simply stop thinking negative thoughts. You have to go the next step and begin thinking truthful thoughts. Replace them with truth, over and over again, until some- thing begins to change—until you begin to change.
Debra, are you saying that if I just think healthy thoughts enough, I’ll actually start believing them? That’s exactly what I’m saying. It took you many years to build up your default thinking, so don’t expect things to change overnight. But when you begin to fill your mind with truth, you also fill your life with truth. Things begin to change.
It may not seem like you’re doing much—repeating positive statements of truth instead of your negative default thinking—but when you begin replacing your negative thinking with truth, you’re changing the function of your brain. Every thought you think releases some sort of neurochemical. Negative thoughts release stress chemicals, and positive ones release feel-good chemicals. So, when you change your, you literally change your brain. Your brain is neuroplastic, which means it’s malleable—it can change. You have the power to change how your brain works, and in turn how you feel and what you do, just by changing your thoughts.
God made our brains, and He knows best the value and importance of thinking about whatever is true, and noble, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Philippians 4:8 is not just a sweet, sentimental verse in the Bible—it’s life or death. Your thoughts have the power to seriously enhance or completely destroy your life. If you see the same stream of thinking coming back again, and again, and again, it’s time to own up to it and let the mental battle begin. Change your thought patterns, and you’ll change your life patterns.
Excerpted with permission from Reset by Debra Fileta published by Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, Oregon, 97408. Copyright 2023, Debra Fileta. www.harvesthousepublishers.com
Debra Fileta is a licensed professional counselor, national speaker, relationship expert, and author of Reset: Powerful Habits to Own Your Thoughts, Understand Your Feelings, and Change Your Life, True Love Dates, Choosing Marriage, Love in Every Season, as well as Are You Really OK? She’s also the host of the hotline style Love + Relationships Podcast. Her popular relationship advice blog, TrueLoveDates.com, reaches millions of people with the message that healthy people make healthy relationships. Connect with her on Facebook or Instagram @DebraFileta.
