How many times have you relied on your own thoughts as facts?
When you’re first considering this question, it might seem easy to believe it never happens to you, or at most very rarely. Because when I bring up “facts,” your brain might revert to a more academic place, a work-related place, or perhaps even a political place. In those contexts, most of us seek out information in order to ascertain what is truly factual.
But underneath all of that, there is a much sneakier system in place. It’s a system that makes assessments about the people and things around us, usually in a matter of seconds, and carries it off as fact. It forms the basis for how we see other people, and more importantly, it also forms the basis for how we see ourselves. And it all happens with very little input in the form of facts.
You see we all have this running dialogue inside our heads, somewhat resemblant of the movie Inside Out. It’s constant. Sometimes that dialogue is helpful, such as when we say “I’ve really worked hard this week, I deserve a break.” But there are a lot of times when that commentary is pretty hurtful, such as when we raise our voice at our child and after the fact berate ourselves saying, “Damn! I’m such a terrible mom.”
It’s not a great accomplishment to lose your cool, of course, and I’m not here to suggest that we stop saying anything constructive to ourselves. But, how does it help to be so denigrating? And really, is it even true?
Take this raised voice incident as an example. When you say “I’m such a terrible mom” to yourself, what is that based on? How do you know that statement is true? Or in other words, where’s the evidence?
If you want to better evaluate the accuracy of your “self-talk,” you need to spend some time doing a little detective work. There are many ways of learning to evaluate our own thoughts, but I’ve found these 4 steps to be really helpful.
1. Gather the evidence
When you’re trying to make a case for anything, you need to look at the evidence on both sides. So when we are trying to evaluate the accuracy of our thoughts, we need to gather the facts that both support and contradict our thought.
In the case of the “I’m a terrible mom” thought…
What is the evidence you are a terrible mother? Go ahead, get out a piece of paper, and jot down all the things that come to your mind. No need to go in depth on this. Just a quick note for each piece of evidence, such as “I yelled at my kid.”
When you’re done listing out all the evidence that supports your thought, then compile a list of evidence that contradicts your thought. In our running example, this would mean making a list of all the reasons you’re a great mom. You might put “I give my kids lots of hugs” or “I take my kids on adventures” or whatever might be true for you.
If you’re having any trouble generating a list of evidence suggesting you are not a terrible mom, then by all means phone a friend. Sometimes we are so consumed by our self-defeating thoughts that we ignore anything that is positive. If you relate to this, I guarantee it’s because you’re just not seeing some pretty great stuff about you.
2. Evaluate the evidence
The next step is to go back through your evidence and evaluate the quality of it. Remember, we are searching for facts. That means anything on your list that your bff might disagree with is suspect.
Any opinions, or any labels that you give yourself, such as “I’m mean” or “I don’t do anything right” are first to go. Maybe there’s something there you’re trying to depict, but you’ve got to find the facts within those opinions.
Maybe you find yourself yelling frequently. Or maybe your child dislikes most of the meals you provide. Or maybe you keep running late in the mornings because you’re oversleeping. Cross out the opinions and labels and replace them with the facts that lead you to those opinions.
Next look out for sweeping generalizations. Words like “always,” “never,” and “only” are often red flags for inaccuracies. Even if you run late 5 out of 7 mornings, it’s still not accurate to say “I’m always late.”
This may seem like a tedious and insignificant exercise, but the accuracy of the words we say in our heads is hugely important. Think about it in the context of getting feedback from someone else. Hearing them say “You never do anything right” is going to have a very different meaning, and a very different impact on us, then hearing them say “You haven’t paid the phone bill on time for the last three months.”
The former statement is a global attack on our entire being, while the latter is a very specific criticism within a very specific time frame. Not only is that last one easier to swallow, but it’s also easier to fix.
3. Consider your priorities
The next step in evaluating your thoughts is to place them within the larger context of what’s important in your life. For example, if you’re trying to evaluate the accuracy of the thought “I’m a bad wife,” you’ll want to consider what is important to you in a marriage (as well as what’s important to your husband).
It may be true that you never send your hubs love texts while he’s away. But even so, that may not be nearly as important in your marriage as the fact that you greet each other warmly upon his return.
This step can get a bit tricky, so don’t aim for perfection here. Instead, your goal is to generally consider the things that are important to you, and order the evidence accordingly. In step 2 you ensured that all the items left on your list were factual, and now we are trying to assess how much we should care about these facts.
4. Allow your results to modify your thought.
This is the culmination of all your hard work in evaluating your thought. What we are aiming to do here is to change that original thought (which most likely was an opinion, a label, or a sweeping generalization), and make it more specific. We want the new thought to accurately reflect all the facts that you accumulated.
In the worst case scenario, you will have identified several facts that support your original thought (because they are both accurate and important). But even in this worst case scenario, your efforts are still productive. Because you will still benefit from modifying your original thought to be more specific and factual. Not only will this help you to avoid making sweeping generalizations, but it will also point you in the right direction of where to start if you’re wanting to make some changes.
For example, let’s say the thought you were examining was “I’m an asshole.” After compiling your evidence, evaluating it, and prioritizing it, you were left with these three main points that support your thought: “Most of my comments to my partner are criticisms, I often forget to consider how my decisions about my time will impact my kids, and I haven’t been returning my friends’ phone calls for the past two months.”
But you also realized these points: “I express my love to my children every day, I work hard at my job so that I can help support my family, and I’m willing to take accountability for my mistakes.”
We now have to incorporate these contradicting statements into our new, modified thought. It’s no longer accurate to say “I’m an asshole.” Instead, we have to say “I’ve got some work to do on the way I talk to my partner, how I make decisions about my time, and finding time for my friends. But I’m doing really well in other areas, like my affection, my hard work, and my accountability.”
Sure that’s quite the mouthful, but I think it’s going to lead you into an entirely different direction in terms of how you see yourself.
After listing out these steps, I hope I’ve convinced you to stop equating your thoughts with facts. This is such an important part in taking charge of our mental health because it gives the power back to us to view ourselves fairly and to make changes when our actions are not in line with our priorities.
The next time you hear that critical voice pop into your head, challenge it. After all, just because you think it, doesn’t make it true.
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Want more thought-related coping strategies? Check out these links:
How to Radically Accept Life’s Lemons… And Then Move On
Your Hidden Power for Managing Stress
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Dana Basu, PsyD is a licensed clinical psychologist at EverGROW therapy and founder of Everything But Crazy, an online resource for parents. She provides individual therapy, support groups, and online resources for parents in Orange County and throughout the state of California via online therapy. She specializes in working with the highly sensitive person and people with difficult childhood experiences, trauma, parenting stress, and chronic guilt.