Do you have ANTS in your head? 🐜🐜🐜

I first came across this acronym in Dr. Daniel Amen’s book, Change your brain, change your life.  In it, Dr. Amen talks about how we all have these Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs) and how we can identify them.

As humans, we all have negative thoughts in our head.  It’s part of our brain’s way of keeping us safe.  Think about our ancestors living in the wild.  If they didn’t have any worrisome thoughts about predators in the wild trying to eat them every minute, we wouldn’t be around!  It paid to be on alert, looking for danger around every corner, dealing with potential threats and learning how to problem solve.  Their lives depended on it!

Add to that, around 90% of our 60,000 thoughts a day are also repetitive thoughts!  That’s a whole lot of negativity playing around in our heads!  A repetitive thought then becomes a habit or belief which we’re not even aware of.

So how do we flip this around?  Well, the best way to start is to actually be aware of these thoughts we are having.  Once we are actually aware of them, we can start catching them and then changing them.  Our brains are amazing supercomputers and we can rewire our old thoughts into brand new ones.  Basically, we are forming new habits that serve us better.

Ask yourself these questions next time you catch yourself with a negative thought:

• How does this thought serve me?

• Is this something I know to be true or am I assuming it?

• How can I see this from a different perspective?

• How can I flip this thought?

Challenge those thoughts and get rid of the ANTs in your head!

If you’d like to learn more about how to identify and turn your thoughts around to better serve you in your life, get in touch with me.  As a life coach and Master tNLP Practitioner, I work with people’s mindsets and I help you get clear about the mental sabotage that is preventing the success you want in your life today.