Читать книгу The Road to Resilience - Adam Przytula - Страница 20

The human mind does one heck of a lot of thinking. Some psychologists suggest that the average human brain has up to 60 000 thoughts a day! But hang on — 95 per cent or so of these thoughts are actually the same ones we had the day before. What's more, around 85 per cent are negative thoughts. These thoughts seem to pop up out of the blue. But why do we have them?

If you're interested in psychology, or if you've studied it at school, you might have heard of a famous psychiatrist called Dr Aaron Beck. He's known as the father of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). In the 1960s, Dr Beck spent a lot of time working with patients who were experiencing symptoms of depression. Dr Beck noticed that his patients were experiencing repetitive thoughts such as:

‘I'm not good enough’

‘I always fail’

‘I'm such an idiot’.

Dr Beck called these ‘Automatic Negative Thoughts’. He became convinced that Automatic Negative Thoughts affected his patients’ happiness and confidence, and contributed to their depression.