When Reframing Your Thoughts Doesn’t Help, Try Workability
How many times have you repeated an unhelpful story or thought in your head over and over only to give up on your goals and say, “Well, that’s just the way I am”?
I like to claim that I’m a hilarious storyteller but the stories I used to tell myself about my body were not so funny. Stories like, “I’m always going to be fat, so why try?” or, “I have no willpower/motivation, it’s easier to just not care.”
And so many times, the endings to my stories were, “Well, that’s just the way I am. I’ll never be able to change.”
One of the most frequent stories I would tell myself was that I was a failure. I believed this because I had lost 80 lbs., regained it (and more), lost it again, regained even more, and then finally lost over 100 lbs.
Deep down, I feared I would regain the weight a fourth time because I was a chronic binge eater. This was the one thing I believed I absolutely could not control.
I tried to think positively by telling myself I was successful at losing weight. But for me, losing was the easy part—maintaining a weight that allowed myself the freedom to do the things I enjoyed was the hard part.
Putting a positive spin on my weight loss history was not strong enough to get me past the belief that food was more powerful than I was. After all, this story had been on repeat for my entire adult life (well over 25 years).
The thought of being a failure is of course not a good one, so it would not have been helpful for me to keep believing it…but in this situation, the real issue was the feelings of sadness and hopelessness of not being in control of the multiple binges. And those feelings were being driven by my negative thoughts that kept coming up.
There is evidence that reframing a negative thought to a positive one can help you get past the negative feelings that keep coming up. Reframing your thoughts can be a powerful tool to move you forward in unwanted situations. [1]
Reframing is all well and good, but is it always the most effective way to combat negative thinking?
Depending on your adversity, a reframe may not be the best option if you don’t believe the new thought or know that it’s something you could never believe.
An example of an unhelpful thought for me was, “I’m never going to be able to stop binge eating.” Because I couldn’t believe that I could change and didn’t see any upsides to binge eating, reframing this to a positive thought wasn’t working for me.
Whatever the story you’re telling yourself, there’s an alternative to reframing (that doesn’t have to be positive): de-fuse your unhelpful thoughts and come up with a workable solution.
Defusion is the process of distancing your thoughts from unhelpful thoughts.
During this process, you “step back” and separate or detach from your thoughts, images, and memories [2].
Once you have defused your unhelpful thoughts, a workable thought can be used. Workability is a concept that is used in ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy).
When determining if your new thought is workable, you must ask yourself, “If this thought guides my behavior, will that help me create a richer, fuller, and more meaningful life?” If the answer is yes, then it’s a workable thought [2].
In short: What is a thought that will help you move forward and get past your sticking points?
Ask yourself, “Does this thought help me be the person I want to be?” If so, then that’s a workable thought. If not, label that thought as unhelpful and come up with a workable thought that you believe will help you move forward.
For example, my thought process went from, “I can’t control myself around food,” to, “I am practicing using the tools I learned in the Food Body Self® program to form a better relationship with food,” and, “I do not restrict the food that causes me to binge because restriction has triggered binges in my past.”
Accepting your negative (unhelpful) thoughts and committing to workable (helpful) thoughts is a way to move forward, especially when your beliefs are stuck on replay. By giving yourself the opportunity to change your thoughts, you’ll start to believe those thoughts and they will become your new, helpful story.
Using my workable thoughts and practicing eating the food that I previously restricted, my binge episodes became less often and over time I developed a healthy relationship with food.
Workable thoughts can move you toward positive actions, and your negative thoughts, although they still may arise, will fade away in the background.
References
1. Positive reframing and examining the evidence. Stress & Development Lab. (n.d.). https://sdlab.fas.harvard.edu/cognitive-reappraisal/positive-reframing-and-examining-evidence
2. Harris, R. (2021). Act made simple: An easy-to-read primer on acceptance and commitment therapy. Echo Point Books & Media, LLC.
Gustafson, C. (2019). Reclaim your life: Acceptance & commitment therapy in 7 weeks: Strategies to manage depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and more. Rockridge Press.