Instead of wrestling with self-defeating thoughts, try this

Need to know

You know the kind of day. You wake up late, spill coffee on your new shirt, forget to pack your child’s lunch, or otherwise get off to a rough start, and by the time you sit down for a busy day of work, your mind is already in overdrive. ‘You can’t handle this,’ it might whisper. Or even: ‘You’re useless.’ Thoughts like these creep in, uninvited, and suddenly they’re not just thoughts – they feel like facts.

Perhaps you try to push the difficult thoughts away, telling yourself to ‘snap out of it’ or ‘stay positive’, but the harder you fight, the louder they seem to become. Maybe you get fully caught up in them, replaying the times you’ve messed up in the past, spiralling deeper into self-criticism.

If you’ve ever found yourself caught in a loop like this, you’re not alone. Our minds are brilliant, busy machines, but they have a tendency to get tangled up in self-defeating thoughts. Many of us have these kinds of thoughts daily as we face our responsibilities and challenges, worry about whether we’re up to them, and experience inevitable setbacks and mistakes. These include thoughts such as:

• ‘I’m not good enough’
• ‘I’m bound to fail’
• ‘I probably look like an idiot’
• ‘There’s no point in trying’

In a fast-paced and often overwhelming world, it’s common to have thoughts like these, which can promote anxiety and stress. But you don’t have to allow these thoughts to consume you; there are more skilful ways to respond. Ways that don’t involve constantly fighting with them or pushing them away.

Why these thoughts are so ‘sticky’

Before we get into better ways of responding, there are some key things to know about how the mind tends to operate, and they help explain why certain thoughts have such a powerful hold on us.

The mind is naturally drawn to negative information, especially when it’s about you. This tendency likely evolved as a survival mechanism. Human ancestors who were anxious about potential threats were more likely to avoid danger – and to survive long enough to pass on their genes. As a result, the modern brain is wired to focus on perceived threats, problems and mistakes.

The mind is also a storyteller. It excels at making sense of complex information quickly, even if it means oversimplifying or jumping to conclusions. This ability helps people make decisions, but it also leaves one vulnerable to cognitive distortions. For instance, if someone looks at their life so far and comes to believe that they are ‘a failure’, they might hold tightly to this story about themselves, even in the face of strong evidence to the contrary. Why would someone do this, especially when it causes them pain? Because coherence, the feeling that the story ‘fits’, often matters more to the mind than accuracy. The mind prioritises keeping a story intact over questioning whether it’s actually true.

A related difficulty has to do with our ability to learn by association. To give an example, see if you can answer the following question: how are a whale and an eggplant similar? You probably haven’t been asked this before, but your mind can likely come up with some creative answers – perhaps their shape, or the fact that both are edible (in theory). This ability to relate even seemingly unrelated things is central to language and thought. However, this same ability can cause trouble when it comes to negative thoughts about yourself. If someone once told you that you were ‘not good enough’, for example, your mind might have started linking this evaluation to other experiences of failure or rejection. Over time, these connections can form a tangled web of associations that reinforces a belief like ‘I’m a failure’. Even small challenges might trigger this belief, not because it’s objectively true, but because your mind has derived this connection repeatedly.

In short, thoughts such as these stick because they’re part of a vast relational network built on past learning. They feel familiar and logical, but that doesn’t mean they serve you.

Why grappling with thoughts doesn’t always help

When you have a self-defeating thought, one possible response is to try to argue with it. For example:

• Thought: ‘I’m not good enough.’
• Response: ‘That’s not true – I’ve achieved things.’
• Thought: ‘Maybe, but what if I fail this time?’
• Response: ‘No, I’ll be fine. I’ve got this…’

While this sometimes helps in the short term, it often leads to a mental tug-of-war. The more you argue with a thought, the more attention and power you give it.

Relational frame theory (RFT) explains this well. When you engage with a thought by arguing or rationalising, you strengthen its relational connections. It’s like adding more threads to an already tangled web. Each argument can also spawn new worries: ‘If I fail, maybe they’ll judge me,’ or ‘Even if I succeed, what if I can’t maintain it?’

The ‘solution’ to tricky thoughts isn’t just more thinking. Instead, it involves changing how you relate to the thoughts. Let’s explore how to do this now.

What to do

Recognise when a thought is unworkable

One reason negative thoughts can feel so powerful is that they often contain a grain of truth. For example, the thought ‘I might fail’ is true – failure is always a possibility. The thought ‘I’m not good enough’ might have a bit of truth to it, in the sense that you (like everyone else) probably have room for growth and improvement. But just because a thought is true, or partly true, doesn’t mean it’s helpful to you.

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) encourages people to evaluate thoughts not based on their truth, but on their workability. This means asking yourself:

• Does holding on to this thought help me live the life I want?
• Does it move me toward what is important to me?

If the answer to these questions is ‘no’, it might be worth letting the thought go, even if it feels true. For example, the thought ‘I’m not good enough’ might feel true, especially if it echoes how you perceive your past experiences. But if this thought leads to self-doubt and avoidance (not engaging with a new hobby, skill, friendship, etc), it’s not workable. That is, it is not helping you live the life you want, nor is it moving you toward what is important to you. Instead of debating how true or untrue the thought is, you can recognise that it is not serving you – and decide to respond to it in a different, more skilful way.

This approach involves grounding yourself in the present, distancing yourself from the thought, and then choosing actions that line up with your values. The next steps will help you put these ideas into practice.

Connect to the present moment

Self-defeating thoughts often take you out of the present: your mind drags you into the past with rumination (‘I can’t believe I messed that up’), or into the future with worry (‘I won’t be able to manage’). Cultivating present-moment awareness can help you regain a sense of clarity.

Here’s how:

1. Notice what’s happening: acknowledge when your mind is spinning into worry or self-criticism. Pause and tell yourself that you are having a difficult thought, but you don’t need to fight it or fix it.
2. Focus on your surroundings and your breath: bring your attention to your immediate environment. What can you see, hear or feel right now? You can also ground yourself by paying attention to the sensation of your breath as you inhale and exhale. This can be brief, just for a few seconds, or longer if you have the time and space.
3. Repeat: each time your mind pulls you back into a spiral, return to this process.

By refocusing your attention on the present – allowing yourself even just a moment of peace – you’ll be better positioned to choose how you respond to distressing thoughts.

Create distance from your thoughts

When you’re caught up in tricky thoughts, they can become all-consuming and start to feel like facts. But thoughts are just that: thoughts. They are fleeting mental events, not necessarily accurate reflections of reality. By building some distance from your thoughts, you can see them for what they really are. This distance can take the sting out of the tail of the thoughts and give you the space to consider your actions more fully.

Practical techniques for building this distance include:

• Notice the thought without judging it. Observe the thought as if you were an outsider. For example: ‘Ah, there’s the thought that “I’m not good enough.”’ Here, you are moving away from judgments about the thought as either good or bad, and merely acknowledging that you are having the thought. If judgment creeps in, acknowledge that too, with kindness: ‘There’s the thought that I’m judging myself for having this thought.’ The goal isn’t to stop the thought but to create some distance, allowing you to respond rather than react.
• Use distancing language to step back from the thought. You can add an additional mental buffer by thinking to yourself: ‘I’m noticing I’m having the thought that I’m not good enough.’ In doing so, you create a metaphorical distance between the thought and yourself, such that it seems less a part of you and merely something that your brain is throwing at you.

1. Try for a moment, starting with a thought such as ‘I’m not good enough’ – notice how it feels to have the thought.
2. Now try: ‘I notice the thought “I’m not good enough”’ – how does that feel?
3. Now try: ‘I notice I’m having the thought that “I’m not good enough”’ – how does that feel?

• Acknowledge the thought with humour. For example, you might say: ‘Thanks, mind, for trying to protect me!’ Our minds are not always good at differentiating between genuine threats (such as being in danger right now) and hypothetical threats related to your thoughts (such as the possibility that you will fail). Therefore, by thanking your mind in this example, you try to acknowledge that the mind has a function here, but not one that is currently helpful or practicable. Thanking your mind can interject some humour into this misapplied process.

Make a choice that aligns with your values

Once you’ve grounded yourself and created some distance from your thought, the next step is to choose how you will act. By reminding yourself of what is important to you in life, you can focus your actions on moving toward these things, rather than just moving away from what you would like to avoid.

Ask yourself:

• How would I like to act in this moment?
• What’s important to me right now?
• If I could choose to be the kind of person I want to be, what steps would I take?

Instead of letting the difficult thought you’ve had dictate your behaviour, reconnect with what you value. Consider again the thought ‘I’m not good enough’, which may come with an urge to avoid something – for example, to quit a hobby or give up on learning a new skill. You can ask yourself: what is it about engaging in that hobby or learning that skill that’s important to you? What values or qualities underlie it, for you? Creativity? Self-expression? Exploration? Self-development? Reflecting on what’s important to you can help you see past a self-defeating thought and act in a way that aligns with your values – which, in this case, might look like persisting in your endeavour and seeking some tutoring or support, rather than quitting.

Other key values that might inform your behaviour could include empathy, fairness, loyalty and many more. By unpicking your underlying values, you can use them to focus your actions, instead of being steered by negative thoughts or fear of those thoughts.

Tune into the emotion behind the thought

Even after you’ve gone through the preceding steps, you might find that some unpleasant or distressing feelings require attention. Self-defeating thoughts are deeply intertwined with emotions, and true freedom requires attending to your emotional world. This means noticing the emotions related to your thoughts, allowing yourself to feel them, and responding with compassion, rather than avoidance.

For example, if you’ve been having the thought ‘I’m not good enough,’ you might pause and ask: ‘What am I feeling right now?’ The emotions might be uncomfortable, but by turning toward them with openness, you can begin to process them, rather than getting stuck once more in a loop of unhelpful thinking.

Once you’ve identified the emotions, you can respond in ways that help you cope. For instance:

• If you notice fear, you might take a moment to ground yourself by focusing on your breath or reminding yourself of your values and why you’re doing what you’re doing.
• If you uncover shame, you could practise self-compassion by acknowledging that everyone struggles and that it’s OK to not be perfect.
• If you feel sadness, you might allow yourself to simply sit with the feeling for a while, offering yourself kindness and recognising that it’s part of being human.

Attending to the emotions connected to negative thoughts is another way to shift from battling with your thoughts to taking care of yourself in a meaningful way. This helps loosen the grip of a thought and allows you to act based on what truly matters to you.

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