5. What Young People Have Told Us About Their Thoughts and Feelings Which Keep Spinning, Round and Round!

Some young people we have met have described how their thoughts and feelings are often spinning out of control. This can leave them feeling sad and/or worried, possibly making them feel physically unwell and changing the way they behave (stop doing things). As you have probably noticed, things we feel, do and think are all related to each other.

When you are sad and worried it is difficult to concentrate, you may feel tense, irritable, sick and lost. Young people frequently report having headaches, trouble sleeping and find they are constantly thinking about something.

Young people have told us how the negative feelings and thoughts they experience, seem to disappear for a time, but have come to notice they really just fester away in the background.

Often triggered by a change in mood, young people have explained to us that these negative thoughts soon grow again, spreading like a disease, causing them to feel unhappy, stressed and critical of themselves. When this happens, the risk of worry and sadness coming back and taking over, can increase. It’s as if the negative stuff takes over automatically.

Interestingly, what the young people have been telling us about their experience, has also been found and evidenced in studies of child and adolescent mental health by researchers and experts in the field.

Young people and scientists like, Professor of Psychology Susan Nolen-Hoeksema (Yale University), have observed and reported the following negative automatic thoughts or ruminations, which tend to get stuck on repeat, playing over and over in the mind:

'I am going to fail', 'What am I doing to deserve this?', 'Why do I always think this way?' 'It's my fault', 'I think about how sad and worried I feel','Why do I always feel this way?', I think about how angry I am with myself', 'Why do I have problems other people don't have?', ' I am often thinking about things to try and understand why I feel this way', If only I didn't feel this way', 'I'm always wishing things had gone better', 'Why can't I handle things better?', 'I won't be able to concentrate if I keep feeling this way', 'I am a failure', 'It's going to be a catastrophe', 'I'm always making mistakes', 'People will think I'm stupid' (Nolen-Hoeksema, 2011; Treynor, Gonzalez & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2003).

Young people tell us that when they try to think their way out of feeling and thinking negatively, they often feel like they are either sinking further into the negative thoughts and feelings, or it’s like their mind is getting more and more caught up or entangled, like in some kind of 'spiders web.' This is the experience which is some times called over thinking or rumination.

Ruminating or thinking about a problem related to our mood, feels as if it should bring a solution, but when we try this approach, which works well in other problem-solving situations, things only appear to get worse.

So in summary, it seems that when the negative automatic thoughts or ruminations are spinning around we often try to resolve the problem by thinking. This works very well with many problems but not our mood, automatic negative thoughts or rumination. It seems the more we try to think our way out of these thought patterns the more we get stuck in them. As some young people have described, these automatic negative thoughts are like spiders webs, which spread like a disease.

The good news is, that these are the very negative thought patterns that mindfulness training targets and helps us to step back from!

References

Nolen-Hoeksema, S (2011). Email to Editor of Website.

Treynor, W., Gonzalez, R., & Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2003). Rumination Reconsidered: A Psychometric Analysis. Cognitive Therapy and Research. 27, (3). 247-259.