TM4T Stress Armoury 31 - Tracking Thoughts

One of the buzz-phrases on stress-management sites is 'positive thinking'. This may not be effective in all situations, but it is an idea worth understanding.

This idea is important because there is a complex relationship between how we feel and what we think. If you are tired (feeling), this is likely to affect your judgement (thinking). 'How did that lesson go?' someone asks you. You're tired, so your judgement is biased: 'Pretty bad' you reply. This reply doesn't really reflect how the lesson went, it just reflects your feeling at that moment. Your reply of course, is not helpful in any way. The person who asked the question forms a poor opinion of your teaching skills, and if you tell yourself frequently enough that things are not going well, you begin to believe it. Another tiny step on the road to stress.

In fact stress is frequently defined as 'when the demands placed on someone exceed the personal and social resources that they are able to mobilize'. Therefore being stressed is actually a matter of judgements: if a teacher judges that...

a) they are threatened by a situation in some way (ie it is excessively demanding)

b) their capabilities and resources are insufficient to meet the threat (ie to meet the demands of the situation)

… then the situation is stressful.

Perception, in other words - your interpretation or judgement of a situation - is fundamental to the idea of stress; technically, situations are not stressful in themselves. Quite obviously, sometimes we are right in our perceptions/judgemetns/interpretations/what we tell ourselves. Some situations may actually be dangerous, either physically, socially, or professionally. In these situations, stress and emotion are part of body's early warning system that alerts us to threats Very often, however, we are overly pessimistic about situations and see threats - and stress - where non exists (a broken photo-copier for example).

Thought Tracking

Very few of us can control our feelings or emotions directly. We can, though, influence those feelings if we can become more aware of our thinking, and avoiding - where it is logical to do so - negative thoughts. You are thinking negatively when you fear what the future holds (even if that is uncertain), when you mentally or verbally criticize yourself for routine mistakes, when you doubt your abilities, or expect failure as a routine. Negative thinking like this inevitably damages your confidence and eventually harms your performance.

It may sound easy just to 'avoid negative thoughts'. It's not: one problem is that negative thoughts tend to flit into our conscious mind, do their damage, and then vanish again, before their significance has really registered. As they are so fleeting, they tend to be unchallenged, even if they are logically incorrect or even the opposite of the truth. and wrong.

Thought tracking involves mentally observing your thoughts and becoming aware of them - especially negative ones. One way to do this is to deliberately think of a stressful situation (recent or imminent). Don't avoid or suppress any thoughts, just let 'em come, jotting them down on a piece of paper as they rattle in.

This, of course, mirrors what you do when you keep a stress log; if you do keep a log, you can use it to jot down any negative thoughts which accompany your stressful situations: 'I'll never be any good at this', 'I knew that wouldn't work', 'what an idiot I am'. Being aware of, and tracking these mental thoughts, is the first step in taming these pesky beasts.

Rational Thinking

OK, so we've tracked a few negative thoughts: what now? The next step is to challenge those negative thoughts rationally. Be absolutely cold and logical and literal and skeptical and destroy them. If your negative thought was 'what and idiot I am'; counter it logically with 'I can't really be an idiot if I have a good degree, and I am regularly asked for advice by my colleagues...'. You may, of course, decide that the negative thought has some basis: for example, your rational mind may say 'OK, I'm not an idiot, but I didn't prepare thoroughly enough for that lesson.'. This is fine: you can fix occasional lapses in your lesson planning.

In challenging your negative thoughts, you should use your sense of values to apply reasonableness and fairness to your assessment. If your negative thought is 'I knew that would go wrong'; your rational response might be 'Do or don't I have the training and education which would reasonably be expected to teach that lesson?'; 'Have I or haven't I done the amount of planning a reasonable teacher would do?'; 'Did I or didn't I try as hard as I could in that situation?'.

You should be particularly aware of, and quick to challenge, generalizations. If you have one bad experience with a sixth-form class early in your career, you may find 'I can't teach A-Level' sneaking into your mind. Just because you got something wrong once, that doesn't mean that you're bad at your job. Similarly, make sure your rational mind takes the long-term view about incidents or situations that you find stressful. Just because you're finding new stuff, new responsibilities, stressful now, doesn't mean that they will always be stressful in the future.

If you find it difficult to be objective, it sometimes helps to imagine the voice of your best friend or a supportive mentor. What would they say in response to your negative thoughts?

Positive Thinking

Having taken an objective view of a situation, you can challenge stress even further by using conscious positive thoughts. This invariably involves planning a course of action, and visualise a positive outcome. If your rational thinking produced 'OK, I'm not an idiot, but I didn't prepare thoroughly enough for that lesson' you could develop this thought positively, resolving to prepare more rigorously for next week's lesson, and envirsaging what improvements will result.