Today's audio is centred around revisiting thought challenging. If you recall a while back, I did a video on how to challenge thoughts. As I mentioned, it's a very, very useful technique to learn and kind of core to the success of cognitive behavioural therapy really. Personally, I use it every single day of my life, noticing unhelpful thinking and challenging it with more helpful thinking. And because I've practised it a lot, I've become very good at it. It's absolutely a discipline, I believe. And it does require some early attention and patience for most, not always qualities that people with ADHD are blessed with. So I'm hoping that some of you, and hopefully, as many of you as possible, have stuck with it and are getting some benefit from it.

Now there might be some of you who kind of gave up quickly, that's okay, too. If I had a quid for every time somebody did that, who I was treating, or kept forgetting to do it, I'd be a very rich man. So yeah, I just wanted to do this audio on revisiting the process, either with a view to re-encouraging you to do it, maybe watch the video again, and those of you who are doing it, to just yeah, sort of sharpen your skills a bit really. I hope it's going okay. Some of the common struggles that people have with the technique is, it's a bit involved, you know, there's detail there, again, just noting that that's not always easy for people with ADHD.

A lot of people forget to do it. That's okay. It's just about trying as hard as you can to remind yourself to notice, to be aware of your thought patterns and metacognitive processes. And remember, you can always do it retrospectively, I think that's one of the great benefits of the process of thought challenging, actually, is that you could have really struggled in a situation. let's say, for example, you're at a barbecue and I don't know, you spoke a bit too much and interrupted a few people. And then you've started to beat yourself up about it later on at the barbecue or the next day, you can always revisit that, locate the unhelpful thinking and change it.

And, you know, it's sort of like, you can calm yourself, you can soothe yourself, you can be compassionate towards yourself, after the event, it doesn't have to be done in the moment. Actually thought challenging is much easier to do retrospectively, or, in anticipation of something that you're anxious about, it's much harder to do in the moment. And that tends to come over time. So practising with past and future is a really, really good way of learning to do it effectively. And the benefit of doing it retrospectively is that hopefully, a scenario like that will come up again, or a similar scenario. And perhaps then you can recognize some common thinking traps.

Don't forget core beliefs are often driving those negative thinking styles and types of thoughts that you might be having, which cause pain and distress, or anxiety. Another problem might be people who are trying to over control the process. So that might be for some of you with ADHD who have learned to almost over organize to compensate for your brain's lapses in concentration, etc. So some people might be over controlling it and making it bigger than it needs to be trying to overthink it too much, where it just becomes a ball ache.

It just becomes a pain. So you stop doing it. You don't need to do that. It doesn't need to be this intensive process. But like anything, the more you practice it, the easier it gets. I would say the biggest difficulty that I come across is that people don't drill enough down to the heat where the heat is in the situation. People might just write a thought record and just write a couple of thoughts.

So for example, in my hypothetical barbecue scenario, maybe you recorded the thoughts "Yeah, I said too much and I talked over someone, they're judging me" or something like that. And there's shame there. And then they just sort of challenge those two or three thoughts. But actually, if you revisit that - and that's what I would do in this sort of thought challenging revisiting session in one to one therapy, I would ask them where they went with those thoughts. Well, what did that mean to you, that they might be judging you, that you interrupted and were rude? Maybe they won't like me, and they will talk about me and other people will judge me.

So there's more heat there isn't there, it's bad enough that you think somebody is thinking a bad thought about you. But it's actually much more powerful to then think actually, they no longer like me, and I'm no longer going to be their friend etc, there's more heat there. So you challenge that more than the others in a way? No, they've been my friend for years, they know what I'm like, etc, etc. So that's a common difficulty. And sort of attached to that is, you know, some people forgetting to challenge the hot thought itself. So they might have recorded the hot thought in the unhelpful thoughts column, but they didn't, in the helpful thoughts column, tackle the true heat, you must do that more intensively than the other thoughts. And you'll tend to find that the distress will come down more rapidly.

And I think lastly, people writing false positives, as in "all the negative thoughts, I need to change them to positive". As I mentioned in the video, though, that's problematic, because we might not be able to buy what we're selling ourselves. If it sounds too positive, it's likely to be unrealistic. And in which case, it's not going to be that effective. And by default, you'll probably go back to the negative thought process that you had in the beginning. I'm just going to finish with a quick story.I had a client once who gave me consent to tell this story, actually. And I have done it many, many times as a way of helping my clients. Now this person had really severe anger difficulties. She struggled initially with thought challenging. But over the weeks, she started to get the hang of it more and more. And her confidence grew. And one day she came in and said, Hey, look at these thought challenge records. I was able to bring this situation down from 80 to 10. And other ones 70 to 20, etc, etc. She looked really pleased with herself. And I said, “that's great. Well done. But I'm confused. Because when you came in, you said you'd had a bad week”. She said, Oh, yeah, I've been angry. Quite a bit.

I said, Well, okay, well, why don't you just do a thought challenge on all these other times, you're angry? And I said, Alright, then well, when was the last time you were angry? And she said, Oh, just before I left the house, actually. I said right, well, what happened? She said, Well, I was making a cup of tea, and I dropped a spoon and I said to myself, "stupid cow", or words to that effect. It was actually a bit more brutal than that. And I said, Well, okay, so that was the unhelpful thought, what was the helpful thought? And she thought about that for a very long time. And then looked at me and said, it's just a spoon. Now, that might sound really obvious to you, but to that particular person, that was a game-changer, that changed everything for her, because she realized that her emotions weren't necessarily made up of big situations.

The anxiety-provoking barbecue, the work stress. Her day was made up of a continuous series of sort of individual negative thoughts or self-critical thoughts, chastising thoughts, and in recognizing that she realized she didn't have to do a sheet all the time. She didn't have to sit and disseminate all of her thoughts all the time. It was simply just noticing that she was being hard on herself and just correcting the thought. So bear that in mind, it's not always about the big situations. Good luck with that anyway, guys.