One of our most popular blogs is our Thinking Traps blog. It lists out common traps that we can fall in to when we’re faced with challenges. Once you identify your thinking traps, then you can work on identifying and creating coping thoughts. These thoughts will help you escape the trap, feel less negative and move forward.

Feedback Loop From Hell

One of my favorite books is the Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson. In the book he talks about the Feedback Loop From Hell. When we’re faced with a challenging situation we often get anxious or have negative thoughts. Then we get frustrated or anxious with ourselves for having negative thoughts Then we get anxious about being anxious about being anxious. You can see the problem here. Here’s a common example of a feedback loop and the steps that most people experience.

1. Challenging Situation: Your supervisor leaves you out of an important conversation.
2. Automatic Negative Thought: My supervisor doesn’t value or appreciate me.
3. Dwelling on Thoughts: My supervisor always leaves me out of these types of conversations, they didn’t trust me last week with that important project, a month ago I was working on that project and they told me to stop.
4. Self-fulfilling Prophecy: You believe your supervisor doesn’t value or appreciate you so you check out and reduce your effort which results in behaviors that your supervisor does not value or appreciate.

Cognitive Coping

If we can learn to identify our automatic thoughts and thinking traps and replace them with coping thoughts we can disrupt the Feedback Loop from Hell and improve our mindsets. In order to do this you’ll need to identify your automatic negative thoughts and thinking traps.

You can download the list of thinking traps below or head over to the blog on thinking traps to go more in depth on the topic.

Use this worksheet to identify your automatic negative thoughts and thinking traps and shift them in to coping thoughts.