Thought record

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When we experience trauma in our lives it can often make us hyperaware of that trauma happening again. It’s like the old adage of putting your hand in a fire, after the first time you will never do it again! Our brains try and help by automatically making us more aware of times when trauma might reappear. Our brains are a little too helpful though as what can often happen is this can spread to other times when there is no actual trauma about to happen.

We then start to default to negative thinking, even when there is no reason to. Have you ever assumed someone is doing something as an attack on you just to find out later that it had nothing to do with you at all?

The thought record above is commonly used in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to record these negative automatic thoughts (NATs) and analyse evidence for and against them, with the aim to produce more balanced thoughts. Repeated use of this can help retrain your brain to automatically question the negative thoughts when they first appear, raising doubt in them, making them have less impact on you and ultimately eradicating them completely.