![]() ![]() In essence, you might notice your critical mind chattering away at you, but it will no longer take up central importance it once did and leave you free to choose what direction to take in your life. These methods, Coyne said, “help you change your relationship to your thoughts, such that you become more skilled at noticing them mindfully and making a space for them without reacting so that you are no longer hooked by them.” “This approach will teach you skills for how to manage these types of thoughts by helping you undermine their faulty logic or overestimation of threat,” she explained.Īpproaches like acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) or acceptance-based behavior therapy can also be helpful. To avoid these, Coyne reported that some people engage with mental health professionals by using cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). “Rather, it’s our response to that critical mind that can trap us.” “Having a critical, threat-detecting mind isn’t the problem,” Coyne asserted. This is important because we also treat unpleasant or unwanted thoughts-even though they are just thoughts-as actual truths that we must avoid, or fix, or suppress, or change.” Detaching From That Critical Voice Or an emotional reaction (I’ll feel nervous).Īnd, of course, I’d have a cognitive reaction (should I not speak up? What’s the right thing to say so I don’t look stupid?). “The problem? Not only does this focus on getting stuff out of our heads capture our attention, but it also often backfires-sometimes the more you try not to think about something, the more it sticks around.”Ĭoyne offered a real-world example of how this works: “My mind may say something like ‘Better not speak up in that meeting, people will think you are stupid, and that would be embarrassing.’ I might experience a physical reaction (my heart rate might increase). “If it’s our default for managing unwanted thoughts, it can trap us, such that we lose our focus on other, more important things in our lives,” said Coyne. The critical voice, she said, can cause people to “focus solely on avoiding unwanted thoughts and to avoid situations that trigger those thoughts.” This is defined as “experiential avoidance.” “People run into trouble when they get stuck listening to their mind solely, rather than being out in the world and noticing that sometimes the mind isn’t correct about what it thinks,” Coyne stated. Our nonstop, always cautious critical voice, Coyne said, is “an incredible ability, a boon to our survival, but also comes with a dark side.” “It wouldn’t be a great threat detector if you could turn it off at will, and it wouldn’t be a great threat detector if it somehow underestimated threats, right?” Getting Stuck Our inner voice, Coyne stated, “is always on, and it’s overinclusive in its estimation of what is threatening.” These are “features, not bugs” of our critical voice, she said. It’s what allows us to learn indirectly by listening to what other people say, rather than only directly through our own experience.” “But we do notice critical thoughts popping up as we go through our days.” She stated that “we have evolved to experience our thoughts as literal truths. People “do not hear voices, per se,” Coyne explained. Treatments and strategies for managing negative thoughts. ![]() The benefits and harms of listening to our critical voice.“Its function is to help us to avoid making the same mistakes so that we are physically and existentially safe,” she added. “It points out all the stuff that could be dangerous to us, including stuff that might happen in the future and all of our missteps from the past,” said Coyne, a senior clinical consultant at McLean’s Child and Adolescent OCD Institute. Having a threat detector or “critical voice” is a good thing. We think of this as our verbal mind or our ‘advisor.’ It’s the part of you that is linked to your languaging brain, whose function is to serve as your threat detector.” Moreover, Coyne stated, “Everyone has a mind that ‘talks’ to them. For example, you might have learned not to touch a hot stove because your parents told you ‘Don’t touch, it’s hot!’” “Our ability to speak, think abstractly, and reason gives us the ability to plan, problem solve, collaborate in groups, and learn indirectly, in the absence of our direct experience. “Humans, and our brains, have evolved such that we are capable of language, something no other mammals have,” explained McLean’s Lisa W.
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