GCSE Results in England 2020: Beating Unhelpful Thinking Styles

Ofqual announced on the 17th August 2020 GCSE, AS and A level, extended project qualifications and advanced extension awards results in England. Some are of course celebrating their results and are hopeful to attain the futures they envision. However, others are left disappointed and upset and in turn may not be able to envision the future they initially were hoping for and therefore have to re-think things through. Therefore, they may be experiencing unpleasant, unhelpful, and upsetting thoughts, emotions and body sensations and may need to learn ways to take control of their thoughts.

Negative Thoughts are Common

Everyone experiences automatic negative thoughts and images. They are usually triggered by external stimuli in the world around us or by internal stimuli consisting of our own emotions, body sensations and other cognitive material (thoughts, images, memories, and urges). If left unchallenged negative thoughts can seem very believable and so have profound and detrimental impact on our emotional being.

Here are some common examples of types of negative thoughts:

Self-blaming, mislabelling, emotional reasoning, magnifying and minimisation, jumping to conclusions, disqualifying the positives, mental filter, overgeneralising, all or nothing thinking, Self-blame (when things are not your fault), Social comparison (to others’ performances) and hindsight biases to name a few.

The purpose of this blog is not to explain the different types of negative thinking styles we can get (for information on types of negative thoughts and therapy materials visit Get Self Help at https://www.getselfhelp.co.uk), it is to help you manage the automatic thoughts that are problematic for you and help prevent emotions latching onto these thoughts and then impacting negatively on your behaviors.

What can we do to help ourselves?

  1. Firstly, it is a good idea to catch these unhelpful thoughts.

Some people like to keep a track of them by writing them down.

You can refer to this as a thought record, there are simple thought records accessible for free via Get self Help site (see above link) that can help you record the situation that triggered the thought or image and how it made you feel. It is a bonus if you can record them as close to the time they occurred as that way it likely to be as detailed as possible.

  1. Have a look into the types of automatic thoughts (mentioned above)- it can normalise and destigmatise the way those experiencing them see themselves when they arise. Look up dysfunctional thought records that help you identify your own thoughts, emotions whilst also enabling you to practice identifying the biases present in thoughts.
  2. Cognitive restructuring- Challenging your negative thoughts in any of the following ways:
  3. Look at the evidence for and against the thought. If you cannot identify against evidence seek some help from a friend, use Get Self Help site for guidance or seek professional support.
  4. Court- trial Style disruption-using the metaphor of a court put the automatic thought `in the dock’. The defence lawyer can then argue that the thought is true, while the job of the prosecution is to argue it is false.
  5. Compassionate Reconstruction- examine the negative thought through a compassionate lens, activating the self-other compassion system by noticing the perspective of what you would say to others in a similar situation and activating the other-self compassion system by thinking about what a compassionate other would say to you.
  6. Practising disrupting automatic thoughts in your head (once you have practice putting pen to paper (or completing electronic records)). Disrupting over and over in many clients leads to it becoming second nature.
  7. Correct unhelpful assumptions- List advantages vs disadvantages, act against the assumption, play `devils advocate’ by supplying counter arguments and examine the long-term vs short term utility of the assumption.

Blog written by:

Ant Lacey (MSc) Senior Mental Health Practitioner, Registered Mental Health Nurse and Psychotherapist (EMDR, DBT, SFT).

References

Beck, A. T. 1963. Thinking and Depression: Idiosyncratic content and cognitive distortions. Archives of General Psychiatry, 9 (4), 324-333.

Driscoll, R. 1989. Self-condemnation: A comprehensive framework for assessment and treatment. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 26 (1), 104.

Ofqual, 2020. Results for GCSE, AS and A level results in England 2020. Available at http://www.gov.uk [accessed 17th August 2020].