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Thoughts are merely suggestions

Happier Holidays with Club Soda Learning to notice Thoughts are merely suggestions

We are all prone to illogical or irrational thinking. Often there’s no harm in it and we get by just fine. But other times we can be swept away in unhelpful thought spirals. If we can learn to think more critically and challenge our illogical thinking around alcohol, we will be less at risk of the type of thinking that might make us fall off the wagon. It’s something that can help us in our day to day lives too.

We can think of our thoughts as being a bit like buses – there will be another one along soon. We have new thoughts all the time, and as soon as we’ve had one along comes another one. There is no shortage of them. And lots of them we just let go, and we don’t attach any meaning to them. But some of them, ping!, off we go attaching all kinds of meaning to them, things that come from our own past experiences, from our imaginations, from all sorts of places. But our thoughts are not truths, regardless of how long we have held them. You might have had the same thinking for years, but that has no bearing on how accurate or truthful it is.

The same is true of our emotional states and how we feel. Both can and do change many times over the course of one day. We can think of our feelings and emotions as being a bit like the tides. They can rise to a peak, and ebb to a trough, but they never stay the same. Club Soda team member Ali says it really helped them to remember things will always feel different in the morning when things got tough. Even if they don’t feel better, they will for sure feel different.

We are not our moods, just as we are not out thinking. Both are temporary, and will shift and move when they are ready. When you resist a mood you just prolong it. When you engage in a thought spiral, you are engaging in self-defeating behaviour. Learning to let them pass frees up your energy and brain power for much more useful things.

Australian relationships counsellor Fiona Lukeis says it can helpful to remember everything we experience in life comes from our thinking in the moment. We have a thought, and that creates a feeling – and it’s always in that order, thoughts always come first. We live in a ‘thought > feeling > behaviour’, not a ‘circumstance > feeling > behaviour’ world. What that means is our experience of the world is 100% internally generated, not externally. If we can work on how we handle our thoughts, watching them come and go without attaching meaning to them, we can influence our behaviour.

So far so good, right? Just watch them come and go. Buses, tides…. But sometimes that might not be enough. It takes practice to get to a place where you can easily let your thoughts pass by, so in the mean time it can be helpful to have some tools to deal with our thought spirals.

We can challenging illogical thoughts and beliefs by asking ourselves, and honestly answering, the following questions:

  • What is the EVIDENCE for this belief?
    • Is it 100% true that you can only deal with xxxx when you are drunk, is their behaviour actually a reaction to your drinking? Is it possible the situation could be better if you did not drink?
    • Does drinking when this happens normally really make you feel better?
    • Does the short term impact of alcohol in this situation help me in the longer term?
  • Is this belief LOGICAL?
    • Does it make sense to say that there are no other solutions to dealing with xxxx other than alcohol? Does everyone who spends time with them when they are difficult drink?
    • Is it logical to say that it is so unbearably difficult to go without drink in their company? 
    • Is it right this person’s behaviour should make me do something that is bad for me, and takes me away from the goal I have worked on so hard?
  • Is this belief HELPFUL?
    • Is believing that you can’t be in this person’s company going to take you closer to or further away from your goal?
    • Is remembering only the positive side of drinking and ignoring the negative aspects going to help you resist cravings and urges?
    • Is believing that it is far too difficult to avoid drinking when you have these feelings, and that it is totally unpleasant to be sober, going to make your life easier?

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