How big of a piece does this really take out of your day? Look for the exceptions to your thought and flip it! Fight Back! Think in percentages (kind of like a pie!).Your first thought was, “Ugh! I missed two questions! My day is ruined!”. When you got your test back, you only got 18/20 questions right. You took the test with confidence, and felt pretty good when you turned it in. Example: Your studied so hard for your math test.Fight Back! Look for the evidence against the thought and be specific in your truth.Īll or Nothing Allie: Makes us see things as either totally successful or a complete failure.When you get home you get mad and yell, “I can’t believe I had to have chicken salad today! You ALWAYS forget to pack my lunch.” Because of this, you had to buy lunch on your least favorite lunch day (chicken salad – blech!). Example: Your mom forgot to pack your lunch last week.He tends to use words like always, everyone, and never in his thoughts. Ollie focuses on a single event that occurred and makes a conclusion based on the single piece of negative evidence that ALL similar events going forward will result in the same failure or negative experience. Overgeneralizing Ollie: Makes us think that ONE bad thing means EVERYTHING is bad.
The ANT Buddy Activity Kit teaches students 5 ANT Buddies at a time, so that is how I’ll lay them out here, too! Don’t forget – you can find 3 free handouts to help teach these bugs to your students on the Sketches Resource Page! Let’s meet the ANT Buddies, then talk a bit about how we can catch, question, and challenge them! This also helps to “depersonalize” the thoughts a bit, allowing us (and them) to challenge the thought (and resulting behaviors) without putting the child on the defensive. So, personifying these thoughts through the ANT Buddies has given my students an engaging and empowering way to take control of their thoughts when they’re stuck in the negative. It can be abstract and difficult for children to understand at first. Thinking of our thoughts is a higher level executive functioning skill. Just like adults, children can easily fall into the ANT traps – leading to meltdowns, frustration, anger, and guilt (among other things). Unfortunately, our kids are not immune to ANTs. They tend to pop up without us having any real control over them, and it doesn’t take much for them to build and become overwhelming. What better time to formally introduce all of you to the ANT Buddies than right now?!Īutomatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs) are normal for all of us. (Don’t even get me started on the snow and wind chill!) So, I’m naturally sitting by the fire with a cup of coffee.
I hope this post finds all of you cozy and warm in your homes! It’s currently a balmy ZERO degrees here in Indiana.