When I was a kid, maybe 7 or 8, I sneaked out of bed to see what my parents were watching on TV. That night, they happened to be watching “The X-Files”; I hid in the hallway and peeked around the corner to watch. A reptile creature was crawling through some bushes and watching a person swim in their backyard pool at night. The creature jumped in the pool, and the person swimming screamed. So did I.

My parents tucked me back in, telling me it wasn’t real and that I was safe. But that one scene played over and over in my little brain. I told myself I was safe and it wasn’t real, but it felt real. My fear felt real. I couldn’t ignore it. I stayed up all night.

It took months of sleeping in my parents’ room before I could sleep alone again. Even then, I was afraid the reptile creature would sneak into the house and eat all of us. Even though I knew it wasn’t real, I still felt afraid.

{Feelings are real, even if the things that trigger them are not.}

This process replayed over and over as I grew up. Each time some event or person triggered an intense negative, emotional response (such as fear, sadness, anger or despair), I responded to it with all of my attention and focus. I tried to reason the fears away, pray them away or force them out of my head. But no matter how hard I tried, they just came back, louder and stronger the next time.

Then in grad school, I learned another word for these thoughts that seemed impossible to ignore:

ANTS

ANTs is an acronym for Automatic Negative Thoughts. This term, coined by Dr. Daniel Amen, describes the depressive, anxious, and obsessive thoughts that seem to pop into your head out of nowhere. Everyone experiences these to some degree. People who cope with depression, anxiety, PTSD or OCD experience them more often, and more loudly.

They sound something like this:

“I’m such a loser. I’ll never be happy. I hate myself. Life is pointless.”

“This anxiety will never end. I can’t do this. I can’t stand this feeling. I can’t breathe.”

“What if I forgot to lock the doors? What if I forget to turn off the oven? What if I accidentally have inappropriate thoughts while I’m in church?”

Those are just a few examples. Sometimes ANTS come and go without much interference in our day to day. Then sometimes ANT’s get loud and incessant, as if they’re the only thoughts in your head. Our knee-jerk reaction is to ignore them, force them out, or reason them away.

But that doesn’t kill ANTS in the long run.

As human beings we’re programmed to avoid pain and pursue pleasure. When painful ANT’s come into our heads, we instinctively do anything to try to make them go away. We run from them via TV or social media; we drown them with alcohol or food; anything to make it stop.

But that’s exactly what keeps them going. By engaging in those avoidant behaviors, we are telling our brain that yes, ANT’s are scary-no good-terrible things and we must be very very afraid of them. And this causes our brains to red flag all ANT’s and any thoughts that might even resemble ANT’s. Our brains become hyper-focused, like a guard in a watchtower, for any ANT intrusions.

And this makes the ANT’s, and our negative reactions to them, even stronger. And around and around we go.

Have an ANT -> Respond negatively -> Brain perceives ANT’s as horrible threats -> Become more hyperfocused -> Have another ANT -> Repeat.

So how do we stop this cycle?

We have to become friends with the perceived enemy: we must befriend the ANT’s.

This feels very counterintuitive. Why should we engage the enemy? BECAUSE we have to retrain our brains to not be afraid. If we watch our ANTS from a place of nonjudgmental acceptance, if we label them and watch them circle our head without doing anything to stop them, eventually, we’ll teach our brains that they are not a threat. With enough practice and repetition, our brains will learn not to panic at the sight of an ANT.

The less afraid we are of ANT’s, the more we can let them go. The more we let them go, the quieter they become. Over time, they’ll get so quiet, we may not even notice them in the background anymore.

Easier said than done, right? That’s okay. We can do hard things.