Thinking patterns: Breaking negative or rigid thinking patterns.

Everyone has thought patterns, and what thought pattern you have can have an awful lot of impact on your life. To help clients, or yourself, have healthy thought patterns this blog article explores this in more detail.

It’s important to keep in mind that thought patterns aren’t just about the content of your thoughts, but also about how you think.

You can also think of thought patterns as habits you have in your thinking[1]. Habits can, for example, be triggered by certain cues in your environment.

Consider the time of day and location you are in[2].

Consequences of your thinking patterns

There are all kinds of thinking patterns you can have, and they in turn have all kinds of consequences. Research shows that your well-being and health depend on your thought patterns and what you do.

Some thinking patterns can even lead to criminal behavior. For example, if you still have childlike thought patterns, self-centered thinking or think a lot about control[3].

You can also have repetitive thought patterns and they can be positive or negative depending on what they say.

In the worst-case scenario, this can lead primarily to increased anxiety, depression, and even physical symptoms.

On the positive side, it helps you recover from depression, adopt habits that improve your health, prepare well for business matters, and take steps toward achieving specific goals for the future[4].

Then the speed of your thought patterns can also affect you, regardless of the content of your thoughts. For example, it is well known that people in a mania or who call themselves euphoric often have very rapid thoughts. While someone suffering from depression thinks more slowly.

In addition, substances can also affect the speed of your thoughts, such as caffeine and nicotine. Those would make thoughts a little faster anyway.

In everyday life, you’ll generally notice that your thoughts sometimes move faster and sometimes slower. You might even have coffee in the morning because you want your thoughts to move a little faster. If you suffer from insomnia , on the other hand, you might want your thoughts to slow down at night.

But during a brainstorming session, again, you may find that you become happy with how fast your thoughts go.

Accelerating your thoughts has a positive impact on how you deal with new situations, abrupt changes in your environment, and your behavior once you’re motivated—whether by a desire for food, drink, sex, or perhaps something that is an addiction for you.

One way to speed up your thoughts is to give yourself time pressure[5].

Thinking patterns and coping with stress

In addition, your thought patterns can also play a significant role in reducing stress[6]. Stress is often the result of certain choices and beliefs.

Making choices and thinking patterns

The choices you make are shaped by your thought patterns—such as choices related to health. This also applies to other decisions, such as when you need to solve a problem.

For example, can you stop your thoughts? Think nothing at all for a while? In the case of dilemmas that need to be solved, people who cannot do this, people who therefore keep thinking, are more likely to go for a solution that requires cooperation[7]. For example, with the person forming the dilemma.

Whether this is useful depends on the context.

There are also certain pitfalls of which you should be aware of thinking patterns when making a decision.

1. Namely, how big or small you make something. The relativity of things.
2. The effect of an anchor. How a specific event has created a thought pattern that isn’t always logical or good for you.
3. The fear of losing something (loss is often felt harder than gain).
4. How good or bad you think an idea is depends on the person giving the idea.
5. The influence of your thought patterns on whether or not you are willing to accept something[8]. Is it in line with your own preconceptions about a particular object or situation, or not?

Negative thinking patterns

Negative thought patterns aren’t helpful at all. If you’ve experienced a traumatic event and you just keep ruminating—if you keep thinking back to that event, and it becomes your thought pattern—then that’s not helpful at all.

This can lead to feelings of hopelessness and thoughts of suicide (call 113 if you think about this often). In addition, ruminating—thinking back on a traumatic event or dwelling on painful thoughts—can also negatively affect your behavior.

Another negative thought pattern is constantly worrying.

This kind of negative thinking can make you feel stuck in a certain situation. You then cannot figure out how to get out of a particular problem[9]. Therefore, it is important to break negative thinking patterns.

A hypnotherapist helps you do this.

Rigid thinking patterns

Do you suffer from rigid thinking patterns? If so, you find it difficult to adjust your thinking patterns in new situations. You cling to thought patterns that are actually no longer appropriate.

Because of this, it can be difficult to get out of social problems, as conflict is often maintained rather than cooperation[10].

In addition, rigid thought patterns are often associated with autism or even OCD. In such cases, you want things to stay the same—you arrange objects in the same way and want to think about certain matters in a specific way.

If you have a rigid thought pattern, new situations or uncertainty make you feel uncomfortable. This is also linked to people with higher levels of social anxiety.

Also, with rigid thinking, you may find it difficult to work with metaphors. You take everything very literally. That literalness has to do with the fact that with rigid thinking, you may find it difficult to think about situations that are different from the current one or about ideas that you have to think of primarily as concepts.

What can be a benefit of rigid thinking is that you want to complete a task before starting a new one. Switching tasks depending on your environment or other cues is something that is difficult for people who think rigidly.

A potential drawback, however, is that you may struggle with change and find it difficult to come up with solutions to problems, which can then manifest externally—such as in an outburst of anger —or internally, as feelings of hopelessness[11].

Breaking thinking patterns

Sometimes you may feel that you are stuck in a certain situation, but generally you are stuck in a certain thought pattern. After all, you are not in prison, but you are only trapped in the possibilities you can think of for yourself.

Reason enough to break thinking patterns.

This can be achieved through cognitive behavioral therapy combined with hypnotherapy. Hypnosis helps people become more receptive to the hypnotherapist, which can facilitate the acceptance of new thoughts. As a result, the barrier created by your ingrained or rigid thought patterns can be broken down more easily.

Then cognitive behavioral therapy can then help you change and break negative thinking patterns or obstructive thinking patterns. For example, you can practice in your mind how to deal with certain situations or changes so that it becomes easier in real life[12].

If you have thought yourself completely stuck and have developed feelings of hopelessness and depression as a result, hypnosis also helps you break those depressive thought patterns. In that case, hypnotherapy itself may even work better than cognitive behavioral therapy. Even after six or 12 months after treatment, people could receive 1 to 20 treatments[13].

Changing thinking patterns

But how does hypnotherapy change thought patterns? First and foremost, the hypnotic state itself helps with this. Normally, you have a critical mind that weighs all the pros and cons of a particular idea, but that critical mind is, so to speak, toned down somewhat when you are put under hypnosis.

This is especially helpful if you have unhelpful thought patterns, because hypnosis allows you to more readily accept the suggestions, new ideas, and exercises that the hypnotherapist gives you.

This also creates new connections in the brain, giving you new thinking patterns.

In fact, your thinking patterns are based on certain beliefs you have, and you will explore and then change them with a hypnotherapist.

This can be done in a variety of ways. A popular way for hypnotherapy is to apply regression. That's when you go to the first time you experienced an impeding thought pattern.

They then look at what was going on at the time, and how to look at it in a different way that creates a new pattern of thinking.

Learn Hypnosis

Want to know how this works in practice? Then come join a free online masterclass.

Or sign up directly for one of our events or trainings to see the world from a whole new angle. You will find that your thinking patterns can completely change even when learning hypnosis.

Fun for yourself and fun for other people you help with this knowledge.

Click here to learn more about our trainings and events.

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