Fitness
Think Your Way Out of Negativity: 6 Thought Exercises That Can Save Your Mental Health
Have you ever felt trapped in a cycle of negative thinking you can’t seem to kick? It’s easy to fall into these thoughts, especially when you’re feeling stressed or sleep deprived. In honor of Mental Illness Awareness Week, let’s talk about one of the simplest ways to boost your mental health: Thought exercises. They’re a simple and no-cost way to break those negative thinking patterns and change how you perceive things.
They can also help us make our subconscious thoughts go in more productive, helpful directions over time, and they’ll eventually cut out those negative thinking patterns entirely. Regain control over your mental health with the best thought exercises you can start right now.
Also learn which foods to eat for a happiness boost and which color to paint your bedroom for the best mental health.
What is a thought exercise?
Thought exercises are new ways to think about a given circumstance or experience that can help us get out of a stuck or unhelpful way of thinking. While some thought exercises have been studied extensively by psychological researchers, others are offered by psychologists and clinical mental health counselors because they’ve been helpful anecdotally for specific types of patients. Thought exercises may be suggested by your therapist, whether they are online or in-person.
It’s important to keep in mind that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all thought exercise. Feel free to try one of them for a few weeks and see if you like the way they impact your mental health and feelings of well-being. If not, you can try a different one. Thought exercises are meant to be a method of seeing the world differently, not a medical treatment.
What are the benefits of thought exercises for mental health?
Reframing thoughts is one of the building blocks of cognitive behavioral therapy, which has been found effective in many studies.
- A go-to thought exercise can help one maintain calm during a stressful moment and continue functioning, staving off a more severe reaction like an anxiety attack.
- Thought exercises can reduce the duration and intensity of anxiety symptoms even when not combined with traditional therapy.
- When paired with a mental health app, thought exercises can provide a log of one’s growth and changes in mental health.
- Thought exercises can make us more mindful of what triggers our anxiety, allowing us to make life modifications that help us to experience anxiety less often.
6 thought exercises that will boost your mental health
Next time you’re feeling stressed out, try one of these methods to help combat overwhelming feelings.
The self-observation exercise
Many spiritual traditions include some kind of self-observation or mindfulness exercise, but it is helpful in a completely nonspiritual context as well. When you begin to experience the symptoms you associate with anxiety, you can use this exercise to get curious and learn more about what you’re going through. Here’s how to do it:
1. When you’re feeling anxious and have the opportunity to take a couple minutes to yourself, do so. Get away from others so you won’t be interrupted, even if it’s just a few minutes.
2. Start noting the way that every element of your body feels. Are you feeling the anxiety in your shoulders, neck, stomach or head? Are you experiencing other symptoms, like fatigue or a headache? Don’t judge the feelings, just note them, like you were observing a scientific experiment and needed to catch everything.
3. Then turn your self-observation to your thoughts. What are the specific stressors cycling through your mind? Try to catalog them, rather than letting them overwhelm you. When you’ve noticed one, let it go, recognizing that you’ve “heard” it.
4. If you can get to a place of fully focusing on bodily and mental sensations, you may find yourself able to calm down, doing things like releasing the muscles you’ve discovered are tense or letting thoughts go instead of holding onto them intensely. This may take a few tries.
The act of self-observation can be a way to take your mind off the anxiety and come back to your body. When we’re in fight-or-flight mode, the anxiety gets us to safety, but if we are physically safe, this can be a way to evaluate our body and find our baseline again.
Self-observation exercises can help you stay grounded in the present.
Keep a thought record
One of the ways that people better understand their anxiety symptoms is by recording their thoughts. This can be done in a traditional paper journal, but there are other options, especially when it’s inconvenient to carry an extra notebook everywhere. The app Thought Diary is a simple interface, letting you write down your mood and any details about it. It also includes other thought exercises, such as practicing gratitude and analyzing a thought.
Reviewing your thought record occasionally can help you draw connections, including things like how sleep, exercise and nutrition impact your anxiety symptoms.
Interrupt anxious thinking
Anxious thinking responds best to being distracted by a different task. These techniques are more about what effectively distracts you and less about a technically “right” method.
- Try tensing and relaxing different muscles in your body, focusing on the muscle activity and seeing if it can help you stop thinking anxious thoughts.
- Breathing with an intentional count, like four counts in and four counts out.
- Putting on music, an audiobook or a radio show can interrupt anxious thoughts and bring your mind to bear on something else.
- Loudly saying that you’re done thinking this way or verbally speaking affirmations can help get out of one’s head and hear a positive voice more clearly.
- Choosing a soothing task that is also mentally engaging: word games on your phone, loading a dishwasher, doing a yoga flow or other set routine of stretching can all be effective anxiety interruptions.
- Counting backward slowly sometimes works to interrupt the flow of anxiety.
Use cognitive defusion exercises
Cognitive defusion exercises are all about getting an outside perspective on our thoughts, or strategies that help us detach and look more clearly at our thoughts. They are used frequently in CBT and other types of cognitive therapy.
- Use a silly voice: Some people find it helpful to detach from their thoughts by using a silly voice to say something like, “Oh, you think this is very concerning, do you?” or some other observation about the thought.
- Leaves on a stream: Some people use the visualization that their thoughts are floating down a river, coming to them and then going away, as a way to see the thoughts as separate from their core identity.
- Label your thoughts: Some people find it helpful to identify “that is an anxious thought” or “this is a fearful thought” as they have the thoughts, helping to take them out of being an assessment of reality and treating them as separate items which don’t have to be believed outright.
- “Thank you mind”: When our minds tell us a warning in the form of an anxious thought, we can offer gratitude to our mind for trying to help us and warn us.
Practice self-compassion
Anxiety sometimes presents as excessive worry that one isn’t good enough or has negative traits. These thoughts, when played on a loop, can be demoralizing and can make everyday activities miserable. A way to combat this negative self-talk is to practice self-compassion. While it may seem odd at first, trying to see your current situation the way you’d see it if a good friend was going through it can be a start. Give yourself the kind of comfort you’d give a friend, instead of the harsh critique you often give yourself.
Another self-compassion exercise is to find and focus on a photograph of yourself from childhood. Instead of directing your thoughts toward your adult self, direct them to that child. Recognize that your adult self deserves the same kind of comfort that a child deserves, as you are also still learning, albeit different things.
The worry tree
The worry tree is a tool developed for those who experience compulsive or continual worry to help them make a conscious decision between worrying or doing something else. It is a flowchart graphic that is customizable to the person, but essentially starts by questioning, “what exactly am I worried about?” then “Can I do something about it?” and “Can I do something about it right now?” The tree guides people to let worries go when nothing can be done, to make a clear plan if nothing can be done right now, and to go do something if there is something useful to be done about the worry right now. It can help avoid rumination, where we think the same anxiety-inducing thoughts over and over without relief.
The bottom line
Thought exercises can feel different from our typical ways of thinking, but if you remain curious, you may find your mind changing, experiencing more methods for how to think positively over time. If you find that thought exercises make your anxiety symptoms worse, you may have an ineffective thought exercise for yourself, or your anxiety might respond better to treatment from a psychiatrist or counselor. Talking with a mental health professional is a good idea to get better answers about your specific situation.
More mental health advice
Quad almighty!
Dr. Nick Pappas, a board-certified hand surgeon in the New Orleans area, is sharing the exercise he believes will help you live longer — squats.
“If there’s one exercise you should try to do consistently, I would make it squats,” Pappas captioned a Wednesday TikTok. “Don’t skip leg days, and you might just live longer… or at least be healthier.”
Pappas pointed out that after 35, people tend to lose 1% to 2% of muscle mass per year, a phenomenon known as sarcopenia.
That’s why preserving muscle mass is crucial as we age. Squats, Pappas argues, primarily work three of the largest muscle groups in the lower body — gluteus maximus, quadriceps and hamstrings.
Cleveland Clinic reports that squats can strengthen the core, burn calories, improve posture and enhance stability and balance.
Megan Roup, celebrity trainer and founder of the Sculpt Society, demonstrated proper squat form to Well+Good:
- Get your feet nice and wide
- Keep your chest proud as you shift back into the weight of your heels
- Ignite your glutes and squeeze back up
Common squat mistakes include hunching your back and overextending your hips.
“Squats can be done with or without resistance (bodyweight is OK if you have hip, back, or knee problems),” Pappas explained. “However, resistance is better for building and maintaining muscle.”
If you have knee pain, The New York Times recently gave some suggestions for squat modifications, including not squatting as low, turning your toes outward by about 30 degrees and adopting a wide stance.
And if squats are not an option, Pappas proposes walking a treadmill that’s on a 6-degree incline or more.
“Friends don’t let friends skip leg day!” he emphasized.
Fitness
‘Abbott Elementary’ Star Lisa Ann Walter, 61, Says This Low-Impact Workout Keeps Her Flexible
When Lisa Ann Walter returned to film season three of the hit ABC sitcom Abbott Elementary, she wasn’t in her usual routine.
The cast hadn’t been on-set in months. Instead, they’d been hitting the picket lines as part of the combined 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes. Plus, Lisa had been on-tour doing stand-up comedy and spending time with her family for the holidays. As a result, she was “stress eating” and wasn’t feeling her best.
So during the first week back filming, Lisa tried cutting her portions back, but took it too far—her blood sugar was crashing, and she just felt “sad.” Her boss, Abbott creator and star Quinta Brunson, immediately noticed something was up.
“She goes, ‘Your energy is different,’” Lisa recalls to Women’s Health. Once Lisa told her about the diet, Quinta went into mom mode. “She goes, ‘You can’t do that. It’s not good for your body and it’s not good for you.’ She was right. God bless her—for being her age, she’s a very smart young woman.”
From there, Lisa said she made a “conscious decision” that she was “not going to go to an unhealthy place” in her health.
“I enjoy food. I love to cook. I love to go out and eat dinner,” she says. “I also don’t want to be a nasty, cranky b*tch at work, so I’m going to have balance. I think that was a really important decision.”
Lisa, who spoke to Women’s Health on behalf of her partnership with Centrum for their “Hot Conversations” series about menopause, has totally revamped her view on wellness over the last decade or so, incorporating stretching and lots of sleep into her life.
Here’s what to know about Abbott Elementary star Lisa Ann Walter’s workout routine, diet, and self-care rituals.
She does a mix of strength and flexibility workouts.
When she was younger, Lisa said she had an unhealthy mindset around wellness, under-eating and working out for at least an hour, all in the hopes of losing “the mythical, magical 10 pounds that was going to change my life.”
But after finishing menopause a decade ago, Lisa said she couldn’t lose weight, no matter what she tried. Her ob-gyn said she would have to be restrictive, which she didn’t want to do.
Instead, Lisa decided to focus on flexibility workouts, because she “didn’t want to get to a place where I was creaky.”
“That’s the thing I noticed was different—my knees,” she said. “I always say I can get down like Megan [Thee Stallion], but I can’t get back up!”
Now, Lisa does a dance class two to three times a week and works with a trainer one to two days per week for strength.
She doesn’t restrict herself.
Lisa isn’t a fan of rigid diets. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she made her mother three delicious home-cooked meals a day, “including bread!” And like her Abbott character Melissa Schemmenti, she’s also a fan of Sunday night dinners with her family, which includes daughter Delia and sons Jordan, Spencer, and Simon.
Plus, after that conversation with Quinta, Lisa said she’ll always prioritize fueling her body over crash-dieting.
“I’m so grateful that I’m in a show where my boss literally says, ‘Stop trying to lose weight. I don’t want you cranky at work. You need to look like a teacher in America—and oh, by the way, you look great.’” she says. “I’m like, ‘You know what? I do!’”
She prioritizes sleep and stretching.
Although Lisa doesn’t have a problem with energy (she calls herself a “non-stop girl”), she now makes sure she gets at least seven hours of sleep every night, especially on filming days.
“I never used to do that—I was up until the party was over,” she says. “When you get up at 4:30 or five in the morning, you have to make sure that you have energy for a whole 12-hour day.”
In addition to her flexibility workouts, Lisa starts off every day with some stretching, much to her own chagrin. “People used to talk about, ‘I get up and I touch my toes,’ and I was like, ‘Boring!’” she says. “Now I’m like, ‘I’m going to touch my toes and make sure my palms are completely on the floor, because I’m short, so I can still do it.’”
Although Lisa was “never a yoga person,” she and co-star Sheryl Lee Ralph are planning on attending a class together at the Warner Bros. studio’s gym.
She’s also focused on getting the word out about the wide-ranging symptoms of menopause, since she said there were “no conversations” around them when she went through it in her late 40s. Once, she broke out in a hot flash during an important audition, but refused to say anything for fear she wouldn’t be seen as “sexy”; another time, she experienced a mysterious pain in her shoulder, which she later found out years later was actually a symptom of menopause.
Lisa encourages women to not think of menopause as an end, but as a beginning—she’s feeling more excited than ever about the future of her Abbott and her career.
“I do not feel the need to force myself to be in a different stage of life,” she says. “I feel comfortable here.”
Charlotte Walsh (she/her) is an associate news editor with Women’s Health, where she covers the intersection of wellness and entertainment. Previously, she worked as a writer at The Messenger, E! News, and Netflix. In her free time, she enjoys reality television, tennis and films starring Nicole Kidman.
Walking is a wonderful way to stay active and comes with all kinds of health benefits, including less back pain and improved fitness and mental health.
But what if the weather is unbearably hot or cold? Or what if you don’t have easy access to a walkable area? Is walking indoors just as good for you?
While there are many unique health boosts that come from being outside, indoor walking or walking on a treadmill, can still be great exercise, says Stephanie Mansour, certified personal trainer and Start TODAY contributor.
Benefits of walking outside
Walking or running outside tends to be more challenging than inside, which may be a pro or con depending on your goals and your fitness level.
When you’re walking outside, “there’s more variation in your speed and your pace,” Dr. Jeanne Doperak, a primary care sports medicine physician at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, told TODAY.com previously.
You’ll also be more likely to encounter different inclines and types of terrain, Mansour adds, like uneven pavement or a rocky, dirt road. “Physically, the different surfaces challenge your balance more than they would if you were on a treadmill or walking in place inside,” Mansour explains.
That means your workout will engage your leg muscles in a more “randomized” way, Mansour says. “When you walk uphill, you’re using more of your glutes and hamstrings as opposed to walking downhill, when you’re using more of your quads,” she explains.
While you can replicate some of that by adjusting the incline on a treadmill, it’s not the same as being challenged by what nature throws at you.
Simply being outdoors also comes with a ton of other sensory and mental health benefits, especially if you tend to stare at a screen while working out inside.
“There are a lot of physical benefits to being in nature, and (that’s) been shown in many studies,” Dr. Stacy Beller Stryer said on the TODAY show previously. These include reduced hypertension and risk of stroke, lower heart rate and risk of heart disease, improvement in diabetes symptoms and an increase in cancer-fighting cells in the immune system.
“It’s important for people of all ages to spend time outside regularly,” she said. Other research has shown benefits of being outside for our mental health, too, Stryer said, including reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression, as well as lower stress levels as measured by cortisol in the body.
“It’s always still good to go outside,” N’Namdi Nelson, an exercise physiologist at NYU Langone’s Sports Performance Center, told TODAY.com previously. “You want to look at different buildings, trees, birds, everything,” Nelson said. “That’s going to be healthier for you than just looking at a screen all day.”
Mansour calls it the “meditative aspect” of being outside. She regularly encourages people to focus on the smell of flowers or a freshly mowed lawn, as well as the feel of the heat from the sun or a cool breeze on their skin.
“It helps you to be a little bit more present and in-tune with your body, as opposed to being on a treadmill or being indoors,” she says.
Benefits of walking on a treadmill
Walking or running outside gives you natural variation in pace, incline and terrain, but using a treadmill takes that variability and unpredictability out of the equation. For some folks, that’s a major benefit of an indoor workout.
“If you’re someone who struggles with balance or is prone to spraining your ankle,” Mansour recommends starting with indoor walking workouts, ideally on a carpeted surface. That will be lower-impact than walking on pavement outside or on a treadmill, she says. And if you prefer to walk on a treadmill, take advantage of the handrails, Mansour says, which will help keep you steady while you walk.
The other advantage, of course, is that your treadmill is still available rain or shine, which means getting your walk or run in during the day is convenient no matter what the weather is like.
Walking pads, which are small enough to fit under a standing desk, are a popular option to get steps in during the day. However, note that many walking pads don’t come with handrails. “If you’re someone that has any problems with balance or any problems multitasking, don’t even look into a walking pad,” Mansour says.
Should you walk outside or on a treadmill?
If you can, the experts recommend trying to do your walking or running outdoors for the most well-rounded and mental health-boosting workout. But if you can’t be outside for whatever reason, that’s OK. Know that you’re still getting major health benefits from your physical activity — indoors or outdoors, Mansour says.
She recommends people think about going for their walk like they’re choosing an adventure for the day: If you enjoy going on your walk every day outside no matter what the weather is like, then stick with that routine, she says. If it helps, think of your sweaty summer walk “like a detox,” Mansour says. “Or if you’re walking in the winter and you’re bundled up, look at it as free cryotherapy.”
But if you’re someone who’s less motivated to get your walk in or someone for whom the weather is a major barrier, keep your treadmill in your back pocket as a perfectly fine alternative.
The most important thing is to get moving — and keep moving, Doperak said. “All in all, any exercise is good exercise,” she added. “And the health benefits of exercise are just endless.”
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