Critical Thinking Therapy: Intervene in Your Bad Habits of Thought

If you want to be happy and yet are in the habit of entertaining and indulging in bad habits of thought, you will need to develop the opposing tendency of routinely monitoring your thoughts throughout every day to override these harmful patterns. You will need to intervene in your thinking so that you stop falling prey to the bad habits of thought you have developed in your lifetime. These negative routines may keep you trapped in various dysfunctional rituals created by your own mind. They may cause feelings of frustration and discontent. They may lead you to harm others while thinking you are the one being harmed. It is only when you monitor and deliberately change these thoughts that you can experience contentment as an overall state of mind. But altering a habit of thought will take much commitment in the form of practice, since you may be facing an unconscious, long-running mental pattern or process that naturally repeats itself.

For the next twenty-four hours, actively observe your thoughts and then evaluate them as follows:

1. Today I had the following powerful thoughts that seem to be habits for me [perhaps disturbing thoughts, perhaps empowering thoughts, perhaps destructive thoughts] . . .
2. I realize that these thoughts are largely determining my level of happiness and contentment. After evaluating these thoughts, I see that most of them are [realistic or unrealistic, empowering or debilitating, etc.] . . .
3. I uncovered the following irrational thoughts that I need to change, because these thoughts are causing problems for me . . . [For example, I thought mainly about my past mistakes, or I worried a lot of the time about what bad things might happen tomorrow or next week, or I was frustrated with the same person over and again when that person seems incapable of being reasonable, or I thought other people were leaving me out or not appreciating me.]
4. I need to replace these thoughts with the following reasonable thoughts . . .
5. I frequently have trouble changing my unreasonable or illogical thoughts to more reasonable thoughts, because . . .
6. However, when I permanently change these thoughts, I am certain to experience the following positive outcomes . . .
7. Therefore, I intend to . . .

For the next week and beyond, revisit the concerns you detailed in 1-7 above to make sure you are actively replacing the bad habits of thought uncovered in your reasoning. Reread (and, if necessary, rewrite) your answers until you find yourself sufficiently commanding and replacing your bad habits of thought.

We encourage you to let us know how this activity is helping you better command your mind by sharing your results here in a comment, or in a comment on the original post in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online:

https://community.criticalthinking.org/blogPost.php?param=249

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This blog has been excerpted (and slightly revised) from pages 54-55 of the upcoming book Critical Thinking Therapy: For Happiness and Self-Actualization by Linda Elder (2025), Treely Green Publishing Co. (treelygreenpublishing.com), due for release Dec. 15.