Taking Charge of Your Thoughts: Noticing, Managing and Reframing the Stories in Your Head
Following on from last week's podcast episode and blog post, where we explored emotional triggers and how to navigate them, I want to turn to something closely connected: our thoughts. So I wanted to explore more closely how we can take charge of our thoughts. In the work I do with clients, and in my own life, I've become really present to my thinking patterns — what am I thinking, moment to moment? Over the years I've learned to look more closely at my thoughts, to challenge them, and to ask myself: is this a fair point? Is this thought helping me? Is this perspective good for me?
Today I want to talk about how we engage with our thoughts, and the relationship we have with them. Because believe it or not, we do have a relationship with our thoughts.
Do Your Thoughts Control You — Or Do You Control Them?
The first question to ask yourself is simple: do your thoughts control you, or can you control your thoughts? Often, our thoughts control us because we hear them and assume they're true. Maybe the thought is an anxious one — I can't do that today, something bad is going to happen, people are going to judge me, this isn't going to end well. Straight away, that thought is handing you a prediction about your day, or about a situation, before anything has happened.
The first step is simply noticing these thoughts, and recognising whether they're helpful, or whether they're creating a state of mind that puts you at a disadvantage — one that takes you out of being curious, present and willing to engage, and into something more fear-based. When our thinking is fear-based, we become more cautious. We take a step back. We start seeing everything through that lens: what could go wrong, that person doesn't like me, I'm not comfortable around them. None of this means we should ignore these thoughts — but it does mean we need to notice them.
Noticing Your Thoughts: The Fitness Example
Once you start paying attention, you'll notice certain thoughts show up again and again, often right before you're about to do something that matters to you. Take fitness as an example, though this could be any goal. Getting fit requires moving your body more and committing to specific exercise. But in the moment, say you've just got home from work, the thoughts show up: I don't have the energy tonight. I don't feel like it. It's too cold. Straight away, your mind is telling you a story that talks you out of the very thing you set out to do.
This is what I mean by noticing: becoming vigilant about which thoughts are helping you move toward what you want, and which ones are quietly steering you off that path.
Managing Your Thoughts: Small Steps and Testing Them Against Reality
There will be days when you really are too tired, and that's fine, give yourself a break. But if that same thought, I'm too tired, I don't feel like it, shows up every single time you plan to exercise, and it keeps scuppering your intentions, that's the point to get more mindful and start testing it.
One of the simplest ways to test a thought is through small, physical steps. Get your trainers on. Get your jacket on. Walk towards the door. Often, by the time you're out the door, or walking into the gym, the thinking stops, because your behaviour and your actions have already challenged the thought, and the thought loses its grip. That's the essence of managing your thoughts: noticing whether a thought is genuinely helpful and then testing it against reality rather than accepting it as fact.
Watch the Language You Use with Yourself
Part of managing your thoughts is paying attention to the language you use with yourself. Many of us carry a harsh inner critic: you're being lazy, when really, you're just tired. Today was a busy day, and you're genuinely drained. So, what do you do with that? You can offer yourself some compassion and kindness: okay, I'm tired, so instead of pushing for a hard run, I'll go for a thirty-minute walk instead.
This is the key skill: listening to what your thoughts are telling you, without letting them take ownership of your actions and behaviours. You notice your thoughts. You observe them. You reflect on them. But you don't let them run the show. When you can do that, have an internal dialogue with your thoughts rather than simply obeying them, you build the capacity to filter your thinking: recognising what supports you, and what creates a response that leaves you feeling low, unmotivated, or hard on yourself.
From Fear-Based Thinking to Curious Thinking
A lot of our unhelpful thinking is fear-based: if you do that, this bad thing will happen, this isn't going to end well. Its language built on predicting outcomes that haven't happened yet, a kind of hypothetical thinking that keeps us stuck in "what if" rather than "what is."
The shift is to rephrase that fear-based thought into something more curious and open: let me try this and see what happens. Instead of letting your mind jump ahead to a feared outcome and talk you out of acting, you pause, note the thought, and ground yourself in the present: this is what I'm actively going to do today, this is the behaviour I'm going to test out for myself, and then I'll see what happens.
Letting go of the hypothesis and leaning into curiosity, rather than fear, changes how you show up, not just for yourself, but for the people around you. When you're at ease and open, you create a completely different energy in any encounter than when you show up fearful, self-critical or wary. There is, of course, a balance, some caution is appropriate in some situations, but for the ordinary, day-to-day moments of life, allowing yourself to have the experience, rather than deciding in advance how it will go, is where the real growth happens.
Let the Experience Be the Proof
Here's the thing about hypothetical thinking: you don't have the answers until you've had the experience. Once you have, go back to the thought you had beforehand and compare it to what happened. Nine times out of ten, the thought and the reality turn out to be two different things, usually it's not as bad as you imagined, and usually you come away having gained something simply by having done it.
That builds your sense of autonomy and confidence, because you're allowing yourself to have experiences even when part of you resisted or felt uncomfortable going in. Confidence doesn't come from waiting until you feel ready, it comes from allowing yourself daily experiences, approached with openness and curiosity rather than fear. That's the nuts and bolts of being human: having experiences, learning from them, and letting our curiosity guide us, rather than deciding in advance, before we've even tried, how something "should" go.
A Simple Process You Can Use
So where does this leave us? I think of it as a process with four steps:
Notice your thoughts. Catch the thinking as it happens, without judgement.
Manage them. Ask whether a thought is helping you or getting in the way and test it rather than simply accepting it.
Rephrase them. Shift fear-based, hypothetical language into something more curious and open.
Respond differently. Choose a new behaviour to test out, rather than reacting the way you always have.
It's also worth tying this back to what we talked about last week: alongside the thought, there's often an undercurrent of emotion, a familiar worry or anxiety. You don't need to fix or deny that feeling. Just notice it, acknowledge it, take a breath, exhale, and then choose to go ahead and have the experience anyway, and see what comes from it.
And when an experience is genuinely difficult, it's worth stepping back afterwards and looking at both sides: what was hard about it, and what, despite the difficulty, you managed okay. Life is a mix of good, challenging, easy and limiting, rarely only one or the other, and noticing both sides is part of building that curious, open relationship with your own experience.
Your Takeaway
Thoughts and cognition are a huge subject, and this is just a starting point. But the takeaway for today is this: start noticing what your thoughts are. Lean into managing them more proactively. Look at what you can rephrase. And choose how you respond, so that you become the driver of your own thoughts, rather than being driven by them. That shift, from fear-based thinking to curiosity, is available to you every day, in the small decisions you make about what to do next.
If this resonated with you, or you have questions, I'd love to hear from you. You can reach me directly or find this post along with more resources on cedarwillowwellbeing.com. I've also just launched a few self-reflection workbooks designed to help you get to know yourself more fully and clearly, which might be a useful next step if this is an area you want to explore further.
Take care, and I'll speak to you again soon.
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