Lesson 5- Automatic Thoughts

Welcome back to video five of the Coping Power Classroom series. We’re glad you’re back!

This week, students are beginning to learn about automatic thoughts and thinking patterns that can be helpful or hurtful. Internal dialogue, or self-talk, is completely normal - most people engage in some form of self-talk on a daily basis, and they might not even realize they’re doing it! This internal dialogue has an incredibly powerful impact on our emotions, so students are learning how to use the cognitive process of self-talk to their benefit.

Unfortunately, sometimes people repeat unhelpful thoughts over time until these thoughts become habitual, cyclical patterns. We may not even notice we’re thinking these hurtful thoughts, but they can impact our feelings and our behaviors. With practice, we can recognize these thought patterns. Recognizing the negative thought patterns we might be using is the first step in working to change those thoughts to be more helpful and healthy, which will help us feel better over time!

Your students are learning four main unhelpful thought patterns that they and their peers might engage in. This topic tends to be tricky for students to grasp, so we recommend you take a little time to review the four thought patterns yourself so that you can point them out to students when you hear and recognize them, and so you can help them engage in productive conversations to change those unhelpful thoughts.

The first unhelpful thought pattern is disqualifying or missing the positive. This happens when you overlook all of the good things that happen in your life and focus only on one little challenge or mistake. For example, after giving a presentation, you think it went horribly because you stumbled over one word, even though the rest of the presentation was perfect.

The next thought pattern is all-or-nothing thinking, sometimes called thinking in black-and-white. This happens when we assume that imperfection is automatically failure - that we can either do things perfectly or not at all.

The third unhelpful thought pattern is catastrophizing, also called magnification. This is when we blow something way out of proportion and make a small problem appear much bigger than it actually is. As the saying goes, it’s making a mountain out of a molehill.

Lastly, jumping to conclusions occurs when we imagine we know what others are thinking, or when we try to predict the future in a way that is negative or hurtful to us. For example, we might decide that someone hates us simply because they walked by without smiling or saying hello.

As we mentioned before, thought-based coping and self-talk are really challenging concepts for students to grasp, so we’ll actually spend two weeks of the program reviewing this skill. Your help in the classroom throughout the week is so important in making sure your students are developing an understanding of these concepts!

This week, we encourage you to discuss the unhelpful thinking styles with students. Talk to students about how to recognize unhelpful thoughts. If they’re comfortable sharing an unhelpful automatic thought that they experience, give them time to share that thought, and then help them brainstorm ways they can begin to change the thought to be more helpful in the future. You might even share an example of your own negative thinking patterns, and how you are working to overcome them.

Thanks for watching!