When a person lives with stress, anxiety, chronic stress, or another mental health disorder, they know how negative thinking can affect their health. Sometimes it seems that there is nothing you can do but own the thoughts and allow them to influence your emotions, behaviors, and actions. However, according to a report published by CNET, this should not be the case.

Thinking exercises can help you see experiences from a new perspective, and change the amount of force with which negative thoughts put pressure on a person. Thought exercises can help relieve stress in the moment, as well as help make subconscious thoughts go in more productive and useful directions over time.

thinking exercises

The report presented the six best mental exercises you can do to improve your mental state and mood. Thinking exercises are new ways of thinking about a particular circumstance or experience that can help you break out of stuck or unhelpful thinking. There is no one thought exercise that can fit everyone, but some thinking exercises have been studied extensively by psychological researchers, and psychologists and clinical mental health counselors offer some other thinking exercises that have been shown to be beneficial for certain types of patients. Any of the thinking exercises can be tried for a few weeks and see if it positively affects mental health and improves mood. And it must be kept in mind that thinking exercises are a way to see the world differently, not a medical treatment.

Mental health benefits

Reframing is one of the building blocks of cognitive behavioral therapy, which has been shown to be effective in several studies.
• Reflection exercises can help you stay calm during a stressful moment and keep going, avoiding a more severe reaction such as a stress or anxiety attack.
• Thinking exercises can reduce the duration and severity of anxiety symptoms even when not combined with conventional treatment.
• When paired with a mental health app, thinking exercises can provide a record of an individual's growth and changes in mental health.
• Reflection exercises can make a person more aware of their anxiety, allowing them to make life adjustments that help them avoid feeling anxious more often.

1. Self-monitoring exercise

When a person feels anxious, they can take any opportunity to take a few minutes for themselves, and should be allowed to move away from others so as not to be interrupted, even if it is a few minutes:
• Begins to notice the way each element of his body feels. Does he feel anxious in his shoulders, neck, stomach or head? Do you have other symptoms, such as fatigue or headaches? He shouldn't be judging feelings, just observing them, as if he were observing a scientific experiment and needed to catch every detail.
• Then he converts his subjective observations to his thoughts, to see what are the specific pressures that revolve in his mind? And to try to classify it instead of letting it confuse him. When you notice an item, it leaves him with the realization that he "heard" it.
• If he can get to a place where he is fully focused on his physical and mental sensations, he may find himself able to regain calm, doing things like releasing muscles he finds tense or letting thoughts go instead of holding them tight. This may take a few tries.
Doing self-observation can be a way to take the mind off anxiety and back into the body. When a person is in a fight-or-flight situation, anxiety leads to safety, but if the person is already safe, this may be a way to assess their body and find their baseline again.

2. Keep a record of ideas

One of the ways some people better understand the symptoms of anxiety is by recording their thoughts. This can be done in a traditional paper blog, but there are other options, especially when it is inconvenient to carry an extra notebook everywhere. Any electronic applications on the smartphone can be used to write down the mood and any details about it.

Reviewing your thought log from time to time can help draw connections, including how sleep, exercise and nutrition affect symptoms of anxiety.

3. Distracting anxiety by thinking

Anxious thinking responds best to being distracted by a different task. They are techniques that relate more to what effectively distracts and reduce anxiety as follows:
• Tighten and relax the various muscles in the body, focusing on muscle activity and seeing if it can help you stop thinking about worrying thoughts.
• Breathing with deliberate counting.
• Playing music, an audiobook, or a radio program can interrupt troubling thoughts and attract the mind to influence something else.
• Saying out loud that the person has finished thinking in this way or verbal affirmations can help the worrying thoughts out of the head and a positive voice more clearly.
• Choosing a calming, mentally engaging task such as playing word games on the phone, loading the dishwasher, doing yoga, or any other stretching routine, all or any of which can be effective anxiety interrupters.
• Counting back slowly sometimes helps to interrupt the flow of anxiety.

4. Cognitive confusion exercises

Cognitive distraction exercises are about getting an outside perspective on ideas, or strategies that help you separate and look more clearly at what's on your mind. They are frequently used in CBT and other types of cognitive therapy.
• Some people find it helpful to get away from their thoughts by using a silly voice to say something like, “Oh, you think that's too troubling, it's not” or some other observation about the thought.
• Others use a way of imagining their thoughts floating in the river, coming to them and then going away, as a way of seeing thoughts separate from their primary identity.
• Some people find it helpful to specify that “this is a troubling idea” or “that is a scary idea” because by trying to categorize ideas it is possible to help dismiss them or take them out of being an assessment of reality and treat them as discrete elements, which should not be explicitly believed.
• When our minds tell us a warning in the form of an anxious thought, we can express gratitude to our brains for trying to help and warn us.

5. Practice self-compassion

Anxiety sometimes manifests as excessive worrying that the person is not good enough or has negative traits. When these thoughts are played up repeatedly, they can be frustrating and can make everyday activities miserable. One way to combat this negative self-talk is to practice self-compassion. While it may seem strange at first, trying to see the current situation the way a person would if a good friend were going through it can be a starting point. The person could be trying to give themselves the kind of comfort they would give a friend, rather than the harsh criticism they often give themselves.
Another exercise in self-compassion is to find and focus on a person's image of themselves since childhood. Instead of directing his thoughts to his adult self, he directs them to that child. A person should know that his adult self deserves the same kind of gentleness and comfort that a child deserves, because he, too, is still learning, albeit different things.

6. Anxiety Tree

The Anxiety Tree was developed as a treatment tool for those who suffer from compulsive or persistent anxiety to help them make an informed decision while experiencing anxiety. It's a customizable flowchart graphic, but basically it begins with the question, "What exactly worries me?" Then "Can I do something about it?" and “Can I do something about it now?”.
The worry tree instructs how to let go of fears when nothing can be done, make a clear plan if nothing can be done at the moment, and do something if there is something useful that can be done about worrying in the moment. Technology can also help avoid rumination, in which people think about the same anxiety-causing thoughts over and over again without rest.