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 is important to keep in mind that thought patterns are not only about the content of your thoughts, but also about how you think.
Thinking patterns can also be thought of as habits you have in thinking[1]. Habits, for example, can 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 negative, this can mainly lead to additional anxiety, depression and even physical symptoms.
On the positive side, it helps recover from depression, pick up habits that improve your health, prepare well for business and take steps when you have certain expectations for what the future holds[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 can generally notice that thoughts sometimes move faster and sometimes slower. You may even take coffee in the morning because you want your thoughts to go a little faster. If you suffer from insomnia , you may actually want your thoughts to go slower at night anyway.
But during a brainstorming session, again, you may find that you become happy with how fast your thoughts go.
Speeding up your thoughts has a positive impact on how you deal with new situations, abrupt changes in your environment and your behavior after you get motivated by having a "craving" for something, such as 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 the process, thinking patterns you have can also do a lot to reduce stress[6]. Stress is often the result of certain choices and beliefs.
Making choices and thinking patterns
The choices you make are made by the thought patterns you have, such as choices about health. But also in other decisions, such as when 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.
- Namely, how big or small you make something. The relativity of things.
- The effect of an anchor. How a particular event has created a pattern of thinking that may not always be logical or good for you.
- The fear of losing something (loss is often felt harder than gain).
- How good or bad you think an idea is depends on the person giving the idea.
- The influence of your thought patterns on whether or not you will take something on[8]. Is it in line with your own preconceptions about a particular object or situation or not?
Negative thinking patterns
Negative thinking patterns are also not helpful at all. If you've been through an unpleasant event and you keep ruminating. You keep thinking back on that event, as in that becomes your thought pattern, then that is not helpful at all.
Indeed, this can lead to feelings of hopelessness and thoughts of suicide(call 113 if you think of this often). In addition, ruminating, thinking back on an unpleasant event, increases painful thoughts, and can also change your behavior in negative ways.
Another negative mindset is to keep 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 will help 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 thinking patterns are often associated with autism or even OCD. You then want things to stay the same, for example, you put objects down the same way and you want to think about certain things in a certain way.
If you have rigid thinking patterns, you become uncomfortable with new situations or uncertainty. This is also linked to people with higher 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 disadvantage again can be difficulty with change and difficulty coming up with solutions to problems and then expressing that difficulty externally, such as with an anger outburst or just internally with 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 done with cognitive behavioral therapy combined with hypnotherapy. In fact, hypnosis helps people to be more docile to the hypnotherapist, and that can help to allow new thoughts to come in. The shield of your fixed thought patterns or rigid thought patterns can be more easily broken by this.
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 thinking patterns? Initially, the hypnotic state already helps with this. Normally you have a critical mind that gives you all the pros and cons to a particular idea, but that critical mind softens, so to speak, when you are brought into hypnosis.
Especially if you have awkward thinking patterns, this is very helpful, because hypnosis makes you go along more quickly with the suggestions, new ideas and commands, given to you by the hypnotherapist.
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 practically? Then come to a free online master class.
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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