Tame those ANTs

By Ross Freake

One secret to a happy life is taming your ANTs and turning them into PETs.

No, not the little black or red creatures that crawl around your yard and sometimes even into your house, ruining your picnic. You’d look a tad silly walking down the street with an ant on a leash.

ANT stands for Automatic Negative Thoughts, while PET is just the opposite — Positive, Empowering Thoughts.

I love my ANTs. I haven’t met one I didn’t like, and I have made friends with a lot, maybe not as many as Taylor Swift has followers on X, but it feels like that some days. I treat those negative thoughts like a carnivore drooling over a steak at Madrid’s oldest restaurant or an oenophile sipping a great wine in a bistro in Paris.

PETs, not so much. I don’t know many, and the few I do know aren’t friendly. They didn’t like me, at least not enough to stick around.

That is the challenge for me, and anyone who has a bad love affair with their thoughts and would like to move on to something more empowering, ones that would make them feel happy, joyful, enthusiastic instead of sad, depressing, suicidal where every day feels like Monday morning in February.

According to an article on the BrainFit website, ANTs were given life by Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive theory, which has been called the current gold standard in psychotherapy.

Beck coined ANTs when he realized how many of his patients’ thoughts were negative. We have 60,000-70,000 thousands a day, many of which are repetitive and harmful.

Not all negative thoughts are bad. Some kept our ancestors alive. If they thought a moving bush was a tiger and ran, they survived. If they assumed it was the wind and it was a tiger, they died, and their genes ended up on the jungle floor.

All your ancestors believed it was a tiger and ran. Their genes survived and became you. Negative thoughts equalled life. Your life.

That’s not as true now as it was then. We don’t run into many tigers in the concrete jungle, but the fight-flight-freeze signal is not a flashing light anymore; for many, it is always on. Stress is epidemic, and it’s getting worse.

For many people, from school kids to CEOs, fight or flight is always on. They are constantly reading the environment and people’s faces to see if and where danger, a threat, is lurking. It has become the threat and leads to high blood pressure, lowered immunity, upset stomach and ulcers. That can kill. It takes longer than going one-on-one with a tiger, but the result is the same.

To neutralize that threat, we need to domesticate our ANTs.

While Beck coined ANTs, psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Amen popularized them, especially in his 2015 book Change Your Mind, Change Your Life.

Automatic negative thoughts are varied and many, but Amen labels nine of the most common patterns as different “species” and calls the most destructive “red ANTs.”Here are some ANTs Amen identified:

Fortune Telling

This is the ANT of almost anyone who has a panic disorder. They are masterful at predicting the worst, even though they don’t have any evidence.

Mind Reading

The act of arbitrarily believing you know what someone else is thinking, even if they haven’t told you. It’s a significant reason why people have trouble in relationships.

Guilt Beatings

Thinking with words like should, must, ought and have to. The words we use to talk to ourselves are very important. Guilt is not a good motivator for change.

Blame

Whenever you blame someone else for the problems in your life, you become a victim, unable to take action to change the situation. Stay away from blaming thoughts and take personal responsibility for changing the problems you have.

Labelling

Calling yourself or someone else a derogatory name. This diminishes your ability to see situations clearly, and labels are very harmful.

“Negative thoughts invade your mind like ants at a picnic," Amen and his wife, Tara, wrote in Brain Warrior’s Way.

“Whenever you notice an ANT infestation, the best way to rid yourself of the pesky creatures is to write down your thoughts and investigate them,” Amen said.

“Whenever you feel sad, mad, nervous or out of control, write down your automatic negative thoughts (ANTs) and ask yourself if they’re true and whether they’re helping you or hurting you,” the husband-and-wife duo write.

Of course, Amen isn’t the only one preaching against the mind-numbing and anxiety-inducing negative thoughts. Even Stoicism, the 2,300-year-old Greek philosophy, on which Beck based the original cognitive therapy, offers many insights.

Two of the foundational tenets, cited by the Roman Stoic Epictetus, suggested that when we learn what is in our control and what is not — and most things are not — and act accordingly, life becomes less anxious and much simpler.

The second tenet: it is only our opinion that things should be different from what they are.

It is only my opinion that the people who stop at roundabouts and merge lanes instead of flowing with the traffic are, well, you get the idea. Four-way stops as well. Simple, yet so confusing for some people. At least that is my opinion, even though I know what other people do or don’t is not in my control.

I’m working on it. Epictetus would be proud.

An article in Psychology Today claims that Stoicism is still relevant, (and has indeed undergone a revival in the last 20 years.)

“Aaron Beck, the father of CBT, wrote that ‘the philosophical origins of cognitive therapy can be traced back to the Stoic philosophers,” it said. “Albert Ellis, the founder of rational emotive behaviour therapy, a precursor to CBT, frequently cited the Stoics, and was especially taken by a line from Epictetus: ‘Men are disturbed not by events but by their opinions about them.’”

Byron Katie had the same positive, empowering thought in 1986 after she had a mind-blowing enlightenment experience.

She created a protocol for challenging all thoughts and called that self-inquiry the work.

Her first question at the start of investigating and challenging a thought is:

• Is it true?

• Is it absolutely true?

• How do you feel when you have that thought?

• How would you feel if you didn’t have that thought?

You can go much deeper. Byron Katie has worksheets on her web page that will take you through the process. (thework.com)

After her enlightenment experience, where she could not even remember who she was, she spent a year in the heat of the California desert killing her ANTs. However, she didn’t call her disempowering thoughts by that name.

“I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that.”

Like the Buddha, she found that suffering is optional.

“When you believe a thought that argues with reality, you’re confused,” she said.

She took a page from the Buddha’s admonition to his followers not to take his word for anything, but to investigate for themselves.

“Don’t believe anything I say. Test it for yourself. The important thing is to discover what’s true for you, not for me,” she writes in A Mind at Home with Itself, her commentary on the Diamond sutra, one of the most essential works in Buddhism.

“I don’t let go of my thoughts. I meet them with understanding, and they let go of me.”

That is definitely a way to tame your ANTs and turn them PETs.

Don’t forget the leash when you take your ANTs out from the dark and into the sunshine and the clear light of day. Or become an ANTeater. But cover them with chocolate first.

Ross Freake initiated at Chilliwack in 2018.