This content is designed for the participants of the GGC Pain Management Programme.

Thinking about our thinking, part 3: how can we get hold of our thoughts?

Hello, it’s Anna again. This is the third video in our section on thinking. In this talk, I am going to focus on how we can get hold of our thoughts.

I wonder if there is anything that we have been doing on the programme already that has made you aware of just how much you think and just how much your mind jumps from one thing to another and often how it doesn’t stay focused on one thing!

Hopefully, mindfulness has done that. Mindfulness can help us see where our thoughts go. Do they go to the difficulties or the worries or the distractions. Practicing mindfulness, over time, can help us notice our thoughts and see how they influence us. Mindfulness can help us to get a hold of our thoughts.

What we want you to do, before the next session, is to start to notice some of the thoughts that are causing you a problem. Maybe they’re making you feel low, maybe they are discouraging you from attempting your goal. We would like you to use the table on task 3 of the thinking worksheets to help you do this. First of all, notice when you have a strong emotion – maybe sadness, anger, worry).

Stop and reflect, if you can, on what was just going through your mind before you started to feel that way. And write this down on the worksheet. There might be lots and lots of thoughts that come to mind – write them all down.

Try, if you can, to notice which one is most closely linked to the emotion you are feeling and circle that thought. This is not always easy and there are some questions on the worksheet to help you.

This is the table that you have in your worksheet.

We want you to have a go at writing some of your experiences down. Remember that this is just for you to look at, no one else at the PMP is going to see these sheets.

So when you have noticed that change in your emotions, write down what you were doing, where you were, who you were with.

Try to describe some of the emotions you were feeling. Words that describe emotions tend to be one word – happy, sad, scared, angry

Lastly, try to write down some of your thoughts. The questions in that last column should help you to think a bit about your thoughts and might help you notice other thoughts that went through your mind – sometimes so quickly you weren’t able to notice them.

To give you an example, let me tell you about Mary. Let’s imagine Mary was at the PMP and was given this exercise to do at home.

To give you some background, Mary is 51, she lives alone, having separated from her partner.
She has 3 adult children, two of whom live nearby.

She brought the children up mainly on own. She is very house proud and has high standards for herself. She used to work as a cleaner, but had to give up work due to pain.

Every week, Mary’s son, Adam, takes her shopping to help her carry the heavier bags and drive her to and from the shop. This day, when Mary arrives home they begin unpacking the shopping.

As Mary is putting the things in the fridge, she drops a bottle of milk and it bursts all over the floor. It goes everywhere.

She flops onto a chair and starts crying inconsolably

Is Mary really sad about the milk? What else might be going on for Mary?

Later on that day, once all the mess was cleaned up and Adam had popped out to buy her another bottle of milk, Mary remembered her PMP task and she got out the worksheets. She started to fill in what her thoughts had been at the time when the milk spilt…

I’ve just wasted Adam’s time and he’s so busy.

I’m so sore from pushing myself to go around the shop and now I have to clean the floor.

But she noticed that as she wrote these things down, she didn’t feel the same sense of sadness she had done earlier. One of the questions on the sheet said, what does this say about me, what does it say about my future? Mary wrote down what came to her mind. It was a thought that had flashed through her mind earlier – “I’m so clumsy, maybe I’m getting worse”.

It was this thought that had made her feel so upset. It had the same effect on her as she filled in the worksheet, she could feel the tears coming up to the surface.

We tell this story to emphasise that sometimes we need to do a bit of digging to be able to notice what is going on in our minds. This is a really important step because if we don’t know what is really having an impact on us, in terms of our thoughts, it is much harder to change those thoughts. Once Mary identified her bothersome thoughts, she was able, as the PMP progressed, to learn new ways to reduce the power these thoughts had over her.

So, this idea of stepping back and noticing our thinking is really helpful. We have seen it make a huge difference in the lives of some of the people we have worked with. Noticing the influence of our thoughts is the first step to being less pushed around by them. And as we said in an earlier video, realising that they are only thoughts not facts.

So, please have a go at filling in the table in your worksheet – it is task 3. As I’ve said, this is an activity designed to help you identify bothersome thoughts that might be making life difficult for you just now, maybe pulling your mood down, maybe making you anxious, maybe pulling you away from the things that you have identified as your values. So please do take some time to complete the worksheet before the next session.

Because once we have identified our troublesome thoughts, we can then think about ways to manage them. That is what we are going to come on to think about in the next session on thinking.

End of video script

Return to preparation for session 4