Have you ever felt your stress levels increase when you start ruminating on a situation? You’re not alone. For many people, the stress they feel is heavily affected by the way they think about their lives. 

“When our emotions are especially strong, our stressful thoughts can be more frequent, more intense, and less balanced,” shares Alexander Jendrusina, Ph.D., a counselor at FASCCO who specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). “One exercise I like to suggest is called catching your thoughts.”

Start With Awareness

The first step toward catching your thoughts is becoming aware of them. When you start to feel stressed (or anxious, sad, angry), take a few deep breaths, pause, and check what is going through your head. The more you practice noticing when stressful thoughts start occurring, the better you can get at catching these experiences in their beginning and intervening. 

Ask “Is This Thought Helpful?”

As you become better at recognizing your thoughts, also try evaluating whether the thought is helping you. If it is not a helpful thought, know you can work to reshape it. A helpful reminder is that we do not have to accept our thoughts as facts. Once you’ve caught an unhelpful thought, try asking yourself one of the following questions to generate a more balanced thought that can in turn reduce stress: 

• What would I tell a best friend or loved one having this thought? 
• What have I done before in a similar situation that was helpful?
• What evidence do I have to support that my thought might be true?
• What evidence do I have to support that my thought might not be true?
• In one week (or month, or year), how important will this thought be?

Remind Yourself What Works for You

Once you come up with a more helpful way to think about a situation, keep reminding yourself of it – especially if unhelpful thoughts creep back in. Try writing down your more helpful thoughts. Here are some options:

• Use a journal that you can carry with you. 
• Post your helpful thoughts in a place you will see them (like on a post-it on your monitor or a whiteboard on a refrigerator). 
• Type it into a note on your mobile phone.

We’re Here for You

If you’d like to learn more about these strategies or are interested in support, professional counselors are available for confidential services. If you work on an academic campus, contact the Faculty and Staff Counseling and Consultation Office at 734-936-8660 or [email protected]. If you work at Michigan Medicine, contact the Office of Counseling and Workplace Resilience at 734-763-5409 or [email protected].