A New Series on Mindfulness: the LABL Exercise

I will come back to the series on Anger as I have had some recent requests to do a series on Mindfulness. This post will look at an exercise called the LABL exercise that many people have found useful for dealing with feelings. This is one of my absolute favourite mindfulness exercises.

Why is it useful?
Often when we are feeling bad our minds can start working overtime. Many of us deal with feelings by try to mentally figure out a way to stop feeling so bad. However, research shows that when we are in a negative emotional state that our thoughts become restricted to mostly negative thoughts. So it's like trying to get out of a hole by digging. Thinking can as an attempt to problem solve the situation can create hundreds of "What if...?" thoughts rather than a viable solution. "What if I fail?" "What if this doesn't improve?" "What if they don't like me?" and so on.

Often our emotions are like the heat that heats up our minds and creates a 'cognitive popcorn' effect where we can't stop thinking and feel worse and worse from the stress. The LABL exercise can help get you out of your head by bringing your awareness into your body. I am constantly amazed at the breakthroughs that can occur for people when they train themselves into meeting the feeling in their body rather than analysing it in their heads.

There is a link to download a guided version of this exercise but here are the steps if you want to do it on your own:

1. Label what you are feeling. For example: “This is sadness” or “This is shame”. If you are
feeling several emotions then label the strongest emotion. If you don’t notice any emotion, then look for experiences like numbness, emptiness or neutrality and label it that.

2. Acknowledge the physical sensations. Where do you feel this emotion in your body?
Emotions are usually felt in the area between the throat and the pelvis since there are multiple nerve endings associated with emotions in this area. Sometimes they are in the arms, hands or felt as a pressure around your head. If you notice the emotion in several areas, try to focus just on the area where the sensations are strongest. Can you feel the perimeter of the emotion or the space that it takes up in your body? Can you notice how the physical sensations of the emotion change from moment to moment?

3. Breathe into the emotion and experience it fully. Imagine that your breath moves into
the area where the emotion is. Each time that you breathe in, focus on becoming a little bit more willing to experience the emotion. This step is about working towards 100% willingness to feel the emotion. This can be tough to begin with. It can help to just try to feel a little bit of it (like 5% of it) and work up. Saying things to yourself like: “It’s safe to feel this emotion”, “I am willing to feel this” or “I am in control of how much I want to feel of this” can help.
4. Let go. In this step you can let go of the emotion. Some people like to take some deep
breaths and imagine breathing the emotion out and letting it go a little more each time. This step is to remind us that no emotions are permanent – they are always coming, going and changing.

At the end of the LABL process you might notice that the emotion has changed. It might be less, or it might be more... or it could still be very similar. The point of this exercise is not to get rid of the emotion. The point is to not avoid the emotion. It is normal to want to get rid of painful emotions and most people feel frustrated if the emotion isn’t gone after you let it go. That’s why it can be useful to repeat the LABL steps several times each time that you sit down to do it. Once you let go, go back to the start and label whatever feeling is strongest and start again. This will help you to learn that trying to get rid of emotions is avoiding. The LABL exercise is designed to increase your willingness to experience emotions. This will help you to reduce the avoidance of emotion that tends to keep negative experiences going. 

Here is the link to download a guided mp3 version of this exercise: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B59Y9tDyah5AaFZLUE94c1R5S0U&usp=sharing. When you click on the LABL exercise you will see a small arrow appear in the bottom right of the screen to download the file. 

Acknowledgement
With gratitude to Belinda Khong for sharing this technique with me with the many people it has helped over the years.

Thought Challenging 2

This is the second post in a series that I am writing on a skill called thought challenging. This post looks at the foundational skills for challenging negative thoughts. The two approaches for this are to challenge the accuracy and unhelpfulness of a thought. Remember, it is essential to write down your challenges otherwise this skill won’t work well.

Recognising thoughts

The first step is to identify the thought that is causing your negative mood. Many people are not aware of their thinking but instead tend to notice their symptoms, like anxiety, shame or behaviours like shutting down or feeling paralyzed. In these cases try to guess what you might be thinking. It might help to look at the post on Common Thinking Traps (which is two below this one) in order to understand what kinds of thoughts to look for.

Challenging Negative Thoughts

Once you have identified your negative thought (or thoughts) the next step is to challenge that thought by writing down the reasons why the thought is not accurate and why it is unhelpful.

Why is this thought inaccurate?

Write down all the reasons why the thought is not 100% true. No thought is ever 100% true although it is very common for it to feel that way. Look for the reasons why the thought isn’t true in all situations, all the time, with everyone.

For example, let’s say you were challenging the thought: “I am a failure because my kids hate me”. Here is a list of reasons why the thought isn’t 100% true in all situations, all the time, with everyone. 

1. Sometimes my son can be quite caring towards me, but only when others aren’t around.
2. Just because they don’t like me a lot of the time, doesn’t mean that I am a failure. Most parents are hated by their children when they go through adolescence – it doesn’t mean that they are all failures.
3. There are a few areas in my life where I am not a failure. I do ok at my job, my husband is happy and I still have relationships with some friends that are quite good.
4. My kids don’t actually hate me all the time. Last week they seemed quite happy with me for taking them out for the day.

The idea is to keep this list handy and to keep adding to it regularly. Part of the reason why negative thoughts feel so true is that there is so much evidence for the thought. If we have a thought like the one above then we are more likely to look for evidence that confirms our belief.

Think of this like a courtroom. The negative belief has a star legal team and mountains of evidence and you are on the other side with just a few reasons why the thought isn’t true. In order to feel better you will need to collect the facts in order to build evidence against the negative belief. The more evidence you have the more likely you are to win the case against your negative belief.

Why is this thought unhelpful?

It’s usually easier to start by writing out the reasons why the thought is unhelpful. Sometimes it’s just too difficult to see how the thought is inaccurate. In these cases write out your answers to the following: 

1. How do you feel when you believe this thought?
2. How do you behave when you believe this thought?
3. How do you treat yourself unkindly when you believe this thought either in your head or physically?
4. How do you treat others unkindly when you believe this thought?
5. When you believe this thought, does it cause avoidance that will lead to long-term problems?

Troubleshooting

I can’t stress how important it is to WRITE DOWN YOUR THOUGHT CHALLENGING. This is the number one reason why I see people get stuck and unable to progress in treatment. Part of the reason why I think they get stuck is that they try to challenge the thought but their negative thinking has 10,000 reasons why the belief is true. The thought challenging may not work because each time they try to think of one reason why they thought isn’t true, their mind comes up with 20 reasons why it is true.

Writing down your challenging will slow the process down. It will help you to see that there are several valid reasons on a page that dispute the belief. It also let’s you come back to the page and add to it so that you have a solid argument against the thought instead of just a few pieces of one-off evidence.

So after reading this post write down these two questions somewhere:

Why is this thought inaccurate?

Why is this thought unhelpful?

When your mood becomes more negative try to recognize the thought by guessing what you may have believed about yourself or your situation at the time. Write down the thought then write out your challenges to it. Write on paper, in your phone, a diary, on your computer – anywhere that’s convenient. That’s the process.

Next post I will write about some more advanced techniques for challenging negative thinking.

Thought Challenging

This is the first in a series of posts that will be about an important skill called thought challenging. I have been looking at a lot of research recently about this skill. Many of the most recent trials have been consistently showing that thought challenging (even by itself without any other skills being taught) can result in large improvements in symptoms of anxiety and depression. It’s an important skill and so I thought I would go over it in detail starting from the basics in this post, then moving on to more advanced techniques in the next posts. This might be revision for some of you that know this skill well but hopefully it will be a good reminder to notice your thinking more and start challenging the ones that cause stress, frustration and pain. 

Here is what you need to know:

• If you can figure out what you are thinking then you have a chance to understand what is causing your mood to change.
• If you can challenge your unhelpful thoughts you can change your mood.
• The easy way to challenge thoughts is to recognize that the thought is unhelpful. The harder (but more effective) way is to challenge whether the thought is actually true.
• Doing written thought challenging exercises is essential. Doing it in your head will only help a little.

ABOUT UNHELPFUL THOUGHTS

Thoughts are the things we say to ourselves in our heads and the beliefs we have. They may come in the form of thoughts, images or memories. Thoughts play a powerful role in determining how we feel and behave. Thoughts happen all the time. Some thoughts are deliberate but some thoughts occur more automatically. Even though we may not always be aware of our thoughts, they’re always there – even when we sleep! Research tells us that difficult life events like trauma causes people to have lots of unrealistic and unhelpful thoughts.

While the thoughts we can have are limitless, almost all thoughts fall within 3 main categories: Positive thoughts, Neutral Thoughts and Negative Thoughts.

Positive thoughts: It’s ok if I make mistakes. It’s not a big deal because lots of people have trouble with this. I don’t have to be so harsh on myself.

Neutral thoughts: I wonder what I should do this afternoon?

Negative thoughts: I’m not normal. I have serious issues that will never change. I am definitely getting worse. I can’t seem to do even basic things that other people can.

CHALLENGING UNHELPFUL THOUGHTS

While it is near impossible to change the way you feel by telling yourself not to feel something, research tells us that it is possible to change the way we feel by challenging unrealistic and unhelpful thoughts.

The steps to Thought Challenging are:

1.            Recognise the Thought

2.            Question the Thought

Most thoughts that lead to strong negative emotions are both unrealistic and unhelpful:

1.            Negative thoughts are often unrealistic since they do not accurately reflect how probable a feared outcome actually is. The thought “Everyone at work thinks that I am incompetent” can easily overestimate how likely it is that other people think this way. You can challenge this by looking at how probable the negative prediction is.

2.            Negative thoughts are often unhelpful since they have a high cost if you think them. Sometimes thoughts might be realistic but their effects have negative consequences that keep us stuck. The thought “My husband could have been in an accident” is possible (but highly unlikely); however, the impact of this thought has a very high cost. Thinking this way might cause you to text or call your husband constantly. Over the long term, this type of thinking doesn’t even keep your or others safe but it will make you feel more and more miserable. You can challenge the unhelpfulness of a thought by looking at the cost of thinking that way.

Clients often tell say that it is helpful to:

1.            Check your thinking when you notice a drop in your mood or an increase in your anxiety – many people find this is a signal that they might be having negative or unrealistic thoughts.

2.            Start thinking about a previous situation where you felt depressed or anxious and try to think about what you were thinking – this can help to dig up common negative thoughts.

3.            Guess what you might be thinking – Many people find that their guesses are pretty accurate and that challenging the thoughts that come up is a helpful start.

And, most of all, remember to WRITE YOUR THOUGHTS DOWN and challenge them in a written format. It is very important to write out your thoughts when you think of them and challenge them on paper to start with. It’s ok to do it in your head as well but to get full benefit, it is best to challenge your thoughts on paper.

The techniques for challenging thoughts will be covered in the next post. If you are keen to learn the skills now, do a youtube search for: cognitive behavioral therapy OR cognitive restructuring.

Common Thinking Traps

Thinking traps are types of thoughts that result in negative emotions. These thinking traps are very common – everyone thinks this way sometimes. There is a lot of research evidence showing that people who can reduce these thinking styles become happier over time. 


Don’t worry about trying to memorize them all since many of the thinking traps are very similar. It is not important that you can perfectly classify your thoughts – just learn to recognize if you are in a thinking trap in a general sense. The next step is to write it down and challenge it (more on this at the end of the post). 


Check if you frequently use any of the following thinking styles:

All or nothing thinking / Black & White thinking
Thinking in terms of absolutes without recognizing that there are always shades of grey to the reality of the situation.
"If it’s not perfect, then it’s a disaster"

“It never works out for me”

“It always ends up badly”

“Nothing I do is right.”

Catastrophising
Jumping to a negative conclusion without thinking of the reasons why it might work out ok. Deflating the chances that you can cope with negative outcomes

“This will never work out”

“I’ll never cope if I get any worse than this”

“It will be a disaster like last time”

“I won’t cope”

“I’ll fall to pieces”

Shoulds / Musts / Oughts

Setting standards for yourself and others that lead to guilt (self) or frustration (others) when they are not met. Not tolerating mistakes.

"I can't make mistakes"

“80%, 90%, 95% isn’t good enough”

“I should have done it differently”

“I should be better”

“I am not good enough”

“I should have realized that beforehand”

Making feelings facts (emotional reasoning)

Using the way you feel about something to justify it as reality

“If I feel anxious I must be in danger”

“If I feel like a loser then I must be”

“If I have a bad feeling about this then something bad must be about to happen”

“The positive thought doesn’t feel true to me so it must be false/wrong”

Overgeneralising
Applying your experience in one or a few situations to all situations
“Men only want sex”

“You just can’t trust anyone”

“People will always let you down”

“People in authority will take advantage of you”


It is normal to feel uneasy as you start to recognise how often you think this way. The next step is to challenge these thoughts so that you can learn they aren't completely true. The more you feel they are true the more emotional pain will occur. Write down your answers to these quick questions to challenge your thinking trap thoughts:

1. List three reasons why this thought is not completely, 100% true.
2. List how this thought is unhelpful (How do you feel or behave when you believe it is true?)
3. How would life be different if you could let go of this thought?