Find Out How Your Thoughts Alter Your Mind

A new study shows metacognitive therapy is the new cure for thinking about negative thoughts, which could lead to depression.

Once you have depressive symptoms, it’s easy to fall into a pattern where you aggravate the disorder by excessive and intrusive thoughts about negative experiences and feelings. The results of a new study on the topic have recently been published in BMC Psychiatry.

Metathoughts or metacognitions are the thoughts we think about the thoughts we think. Thoughts about our thinking are not harmful in themselves.

Positive thoughts about our thinking can lead us to reflect on topics we want to reflect on more often, and maybe even enjoy more. But that can go awry for some people. Read on to know more about it.

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‘Metacognitive therapy is a new form of treatment that helps to discontinue negative thought processes and overcome the depression that ruins our self-confidence.’

Am I Abnormal?

Negative metacognitions can be thinking that focuses more on negative aspects of one’s life is a sign that we are damaged, or we might think that our focusing tendency is uncontrollable.

For some individuals, this kind of thinking gives rise to thoughts that can be difficult to break out of. Those thoughts can quickly lead to getting wrapped up in a self-reinforcing, negative pattern.

“It’s only a problem when we have a lot of those negative thoughts about our thinking, and we fall into an unfortunate thought pattern that can be difficult to stop,” says Prof. Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) Department of Psychology, and main supervisor of the current study.

Don’t worry!! Learning that you can control the brooding yourself can be done pretty quickly with metacognitive therapy and you’re not alone either.

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Girls are More Vulnerable

The new study findings based on a survey from NTNU that included close to 1,200 people aged 16 to 20 show that depressive symptoms and depression are common in young people. Girls have these symptoms more often than boys and more often have a depression diagnosis as well.

Both positive metacognitions, or thoughts that rumination is helpful, and negative metacognitions are about their thoughts. Girls and women ruminate more in general.

Here we find clear gender differences. But the reasons that some people get stuck in depressive thoughts are the same for both sexes.

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Metacognitive Therapy Can Help

Getting better involves overcoming self-reinforcing patterns, thoughts, and actions. In that case, metacognitive therapy can be an effective treatment for treating depressive symptoms in young people, too.

Metacognitive therapy focuses on changing what maintains depressive illnesses: the depressive brooding and the negative thoughts about our thinking.

Brooding and negative metacognitions can be both triggering and maintaining factors for depressive symptoms. So, it can be useful to concentrate on this to prevent depression.

This therapy enables us to help both people who are already developing increasing depressive symptoms and to prevent others from developing such symptoms.

Source-Medindia

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