Breaking negative thought patterns can remove anxiety, depression

The level of repeated negative thinking in the eye has the potential to stop multiple mental health disorders.

Think Eeyore and Piglet. Happy piglet is a chronic worry, coping with anxiety; GLUM EEYORE cheats everything that can go wrong, plunging into depression. But both fight with repeated negative thoughts.

People who think in this way often have trouble maintaining their well -being and relationships with others, says Thomas Ehring, a psychologist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. “They constantly continue to think [something] without being constructive ”.

Clinics usually address negative thoughts, such as concern and rumors, as part of a treatment plan for many diagnosed disorders, including depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, insomnia, suicide idea and other diseases. But official diagnoses are not needed to help people overcome this disturbing way of thinking, experts argue.

The specifics of the issue of stress less than the tendency of people to stuck in endless loops of punishment, says psychologist Michelle Molds of the University of New Southern Wales in Sydney. In fact, given its spread beyond disorders, clinics should consider targeting directly negative thinking, write forms and Peter Mcevoy, a psychologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, in February in Nature Reviews Psychology.

“We can see beyond diagnoses,” says Molds and ask “What is this special person who is keeping them stuck?”

Taking a diagnosis

Official diagnostics for mental health disorders were rare until about half a century ago. But in 1980, the third edition of Manuel Diagnostic and Statistical, or DSM-III, established full diagnostic criteria for a wide range of mental health disorders. The last iteration is over 900 pages tall and covers over 500 diagnostic categories.

“This has become the main way to deal with poor mental health. Look at the disorders as our main unit of analysis,” Ehring says.

The current system is promised with the idea that most patients will present with a single disorder. This diagnosis should then guide the treatment. In reality, most people who struggle with mental health problems meet the diagnostic criteria for numerous disorders. And even when two people make the same diagnosis, they can suffer different symptoms.

Joint symptoms

These deficiencies have led many scholars to attract their attention to what are called transdiagnostics, or symptoms that seem to exceed diagnostic boundaries. These factors may include avoidance trends, interpersonal challenges, prejudices of repeated negative attention, and negative thinking.

Researchers in this developing area remain separate: Should they combine conventional and transdiagnostic approaches? Or to give up conventional diagnoses completely and simply to treat those comprehensive transdiagnostic symptoms?

Regardless of where someone sits on that debate, the latest advances in understanding and measuring repeated negative thinking make the factor an ideal case study of what a transdiagnostic treatment approach may seem, say forms and others.

Identifying Repeated Negative Thinking

To identify individuals prone to negative repetitive thinking, some experts have begun to use scales that focus not on the content of continuous thoughts, but their basic models. The questionnaire of persistent thinking, for example, asks people to appreciate statements, such as, “the same thoughts continue to pass again and again” or “I continue to ask yourself questions without finding an answer”, on a scale from 0 For ever at 4 for almost always.

At the same time as those efforts, some therapies have emerged in recent years aimed at repetitive thinking directly. Such therapies shift the trajectory of a conversation session, says psychologist Edward Watkins of the University of Exeter in England. Watkins helped develop such therapy, known as cognitive therapy of cognitive behavior focused on gossip, or RFCBT.

For example, imagine two patients. One is diagnosed with depression and is fixed on how hopeless they feel. The other is diagnosed with mandatory obsessive disorder and cannot stop worrying about how germs in the hands can make them sick. A clinic trained in traditional cognitive behavioral therapy will often help patients understand their specific mental health diagnosis by working through the unique content of their thoughts.

A clinic trained on RFCBT, meanwhile, does not need an official diagnosis to provide care. Instead of researching why something may have happened, or deeper importance of the event, therapies aimed at negative thinking help patients move to more active questions, such as how they can do something about it, says watkins. In other words, transdiagnostic approaches seek to modify the way people think, no matter what they are thinking about.

Mental health issues

The long -term hope is that identifying and treating those who are prone to negative repetitive thinking can protect such individuals to develop more serious mental health challenges in the future, mold and Mcevoy writings. This research is young but promising. For example, in a study of approximately 250 teenagers and young adults who scored high in shows for repeated negative thinking, half of the group received training to restructure such thought patterns while the other half did not. Those who received training showed lower levels of self-reported anxiety symptoms and depression one year after the intervention, researchers reported in March 2017 in Behavioral research and therapy.

Transdiagnostic approaches to care acknowledge that people do not fit into discreet categories of mental health diagnostics, says Watkins. Neither such approaches should be limited to mental health disorders. With increasing research showing how stress affects the body, such as increased inflammation or blood pressure, clinics may consider common physical and mental factors of health at the same time. “You’re coming out … that [long-term health] It is not only transdiagnostic among mental health disorders, but transdiagnostic between mental and physical health, ”he says.

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