Text on screen reads: ‘Rashida Dungarwalla, registered psychologist.’



Rashida: Hi everyone, my name is Rashida Dungarwalla. I'm a registered psychologist practicing in Sydney. 



Text on screen reads: ‘How to recognise unhelpful thoughts’



Rashida: So there's a few different ways we can recognise that we're having unhelpful thoughts. One might be that we are having binary or black and white, all or nothing thinking, meaning that we lose the grey, we lose the nuance and it feels like things are good or bad, wrong or right. Another might be that we notice some physiological somatic symptoms associated with the thoughts. So when the thoughts come in, we start to notice our heart racing faster. We start to notice our hands getting sweaty, brain fog, dizziness, those type of symptoms. Another might be that we ruminate on the thoughts. So we're having them over and over again and we can't seem to step away or zoom out from them. And another might be that we jump to these really extreme or worst case scenarios. A lot of ‘what-if’s coming up in our thought patterns. So all of these could be indication that some of our thoughts are becoming unhelpful.