Dear Therapist,

I'm really struggling with my overactive mind and negative thoughts. Any suggestions?

Signed,

Struggling

Dear Struggling,

Taming our unruly minds is an age-old challenge. Some ancient wisdom traditions dating back thousands of years even sound like precursors to modern Cognitive Behavioural Therapy CBT . The Yoga Sutras outline the theory and science of yoga as a practice of stilling the mind. The Buddha, too, was clear that training the active mind is difficult but essential for wellbeing. The Stoics of ancient Greece and Rome challenged students to control their thoughts to transform their beliefs and emotions. So our psychology hasn't changed much in the last few thousand years. Nor has the counsel for befriending our minds: progress is achieved not by luck or accident but by working on it day in, day out.

Conscious attention and redirection is needed because our thoughts naturally skew to the negative. Most of us are aware of the negativity bias which is part of our survival system that keeps us safe. But many people don't realise just how biased our thinking is: roughly 80% of our thoughts are negative and, of these, 95% are repeated. Let that humbling estimate from the National Science Foundation US sink in. No wonder so many of us share author Anne Lamott's sentiment: 'My mind is like a bad neighbourhood. I try not to go there alone.' But go there we must to clean up a neighbourhood littered with the neurological junk of cognitive distortions.

Three common cognitive distortions we can hone in on as a starting place:

• Catastrophising: Irrational fears that lead us to believe something is far worse than it actually is; over-estimating risks
• Discounting: Minimising our positive attributes which leads to underestimating ourselves; can morph into the inner critic
• Mindreading: Negative assumptions regarding what others think/feel. The thing about assumptions is we rarely make positive ones negativity bias again! so the thinking is distorted and not to be trusted