264. How to Calm the Mind & Not Feed the ANTs (Automatic Negative Thoughts)

May 06, 2026

Calming the mind sounds simple, right? And yet most of us would rather do almost anything other than sitting quietly with our thoughts. In this episode, Dr. Aimee Prasek and Dr. Henry Emmons dig into the science of Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs), the surprising research on just how much we think, and the powerful practice of the observer self: the part of your mind that can step back, see what's happening, and choose differently. This episode makes the case that our relationship with our own minds might be the most important resilience work we do.

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About: The Joy Lab Podcast is an Ambie-nominated podcast that blends science and soul to help you cope better with stress, ease anxiety, and uplift mood. Join Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek for practical, mindfulness-based tools and positive psychology strategies to build resilience and create lasting joy. Take the next leap in your wellbeing journey with the Joy Lab Program.

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Sources and Notes for our Element of Resilience:

Joy Lab Program: Take the next leap in your wellbeing journey with step-by-step practices to help you build and maintain the elements of joy in your life.
Joy Lab Episodes referenced:
- Last episode: From Surviving to Thriving: The Science and Soul of Resilience (ep. 263)

Chemistry of Calm (Dr. Emmons' book referenced in this series)
Dr. Catherine Panter-Brick- Yale faculty page
Resilience definitions, theory, and challenges: interdisciplinary perspectives
Annual Research Review: Positive adjustment to adversity -Trajectories of minimal-impact resilience and emergent resilience
Adaptive growth of tree root systems in response to wind action and site conditions.
Brain meta-state transitions demarcate thoughts across task contexts exposing the mental noise of trait neuroticism.
Effects of a 12-week endurance training program on the physiological response to psychosocial stress in men: a randomized controlled trial
No man is an island: social resources, stress and mental health at mid-life
How does the brain deal with cumulative stress? A review with focus on developmental stress, HPA axis function and hippocampal structure in humans
Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind (this is the study of people shocking themselves out of boredom)
Emotion Suppression and Mortality Risk Over a 12-Year Follow-up
Cumulative Stress and Health
Ordinary Magic, Resilience in Development
Summary of the Project Competence Longitudinal Study
The Times of Our Lives: Interaction Among Different Biological Periodicities

Key moments:

[00:00:00] — Welcome Back to Joy Lab & Resilience This month's focus is Resilience, and today we're tackling one of the most deceptively simple things — calming the mind.

[00:00:20] — The 4-Year-Old and the Balloon: How Convincing (and Wrong) Our Thoughts Can Be Aimee opens with a story about her daughter, who came to her in tears over a thought that she'd float away in a balloon. When asked if it was true, her daughter said yes — because her brain was thinking it. With her feet planted firmly on the floor and not a balloon in sight.

[00:01:45] — Introducing ANTs: Automatic Negative Thoughts Building on last episode's tree metaphor, Aimee introduces ANTs — Automatic Negative Thoughts. These are recurring, often unconscious negative thoughts, so deeply patterned through repetition that they arise automatically. They show up about ourselves, our futures, and the world around us — and they're strongly linked to anxiety and depression. The good news: everyone has them, and we can learn to navigate them.

[00:02:20] — Categories of Cognitive Distortions Aimee connects ANTs to the broader framework of cognitive distortions familiar to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) practitioners. Common types include black-and-white thinking, overgeneralization, and emotional reasoning (feeling like an imposter, therefore being one). Essentially: seeing scary balloons that aren't there, grabbing onto them, and letting them carry us deeper into worry and rumination.

[00:02:55] — The Numbers: How Many Thoughts Do We Actually Have? Aimee shares the research: approximately 7 thought-changes per minute — meaning a completely different thought roughly every 9-10 seconds. Accounting for sleep, that's around 6,200 thoughts per day. Henry wonders how many of them are the same thought. (Spoiler: a lot of them.) The real problem isn't just the volume — it's that we believe so much of what we think.

[00:04:30] — The Internet, Our Collective Brain, and the Power of Belief Henry draws a parallel between the internet and our minds: just as we know the internet isn't always true but somehow still believe it, we treat our own thoughts as if they're sourced from some objective ground truth. He connects this to the Buddhist teaching from the Dhammapada — Buddha's opening lines: "with our thoughts we make the world" — written 3,500 years ago and still holding up.

[00:06:30] — Aimee's Counter-Take: Idiocracy and the Stakes of Mental Autonomy Henry takes the optimistic philosophical turn. Aimee takes the Idiocracy route. Both, somehow, arrive at the same conclusion: now more than ever, we need to reclaim the power of our own minds — for our inner worlds and the world we create around us.

[00:07:45] — Why We Grab Our Phones Instead of Facing Our Thoughts If we're not actively training our minds, it's infinitely easier to reach for a phone and chase dopamine than to sit with difficult thoughts. Aimee and Henry name this dynamic honestly — not to shame anyone, but to make the case for why this work matters.

[00:08:30] — Learned Optimism: The Skill of Choosing How You See Henry introduces Martin Seligman and his landmark work Learned Optimism — one of the foundational texts of positive psychology. A key finding: pessimists often do see reality more accurately. And yet pessimistic thinking is strongly correlated with depression. Optimism, whether or not it's always technically accurate, is a learnable skill — and training it is one of the most effective preventive tools against depression. This isn't toxic positivity. It's a practice.

[00:10:30] — The Observer Self: Your Most Underused Mental Superpower Henry introduces the concept of the observing self, a part of the mind that is fundamentally different from the part doing all the thinking. The observer doesn't get swept into the thought. It simply notices. It steps back. It stays above the fray. And once you can access it, you have a choice: do I want to believe this thought, or do I want to choose a different one?

[00:12:00] — Awareness Is the First Step (and It's Harder Than It Sounds) Aimee affirms: becoming aware that we are thinking sounds obvious but is genuinely difficult. Most of us are oblivious to our own thought process most of the time — and until we're not, we're at the mercy of it.

[00:13:00] — The Electric Shock Study: Why Sitting With Your Thoughts Is So Hard Aimee shares one of her favorite studies from Dr. Timothy Wilson and colleagues. In brief:

55 participants were left alone in a room with nothing to do
They were instructed to entertain themselves with pleasant thoughts for 15 minutes
A button in the room would self-administer an electric shock
42 of 55 participants had previously said they'd pay money to avoid the shock
43% of those 42 people shocked themselves anyway
The conclusion: being alone with our thoughts is genuinely, measurably uncomfortable. We sometimes choose pain over mental stillness. This isn't weakness — it's the reality of an untrained mind. And it's exactly why this work matters.

[00:16:30] — Learning the Observer Self: Like Riding a Bike Henry reassures: this skill is learnable, and once you've got it, you've got it — like riding a bike. It seems impossible until it suddenly isn't. Practicing the observer self gives us back our freedom: the ability to see a thought as just a thought, and choose what to do with it.

[00:17:30] — Energy Vampires: Negative Thoughts as a Drain on Resilience Henry extends the resilience metaphor from the previous episode (the container of magic elixir) to a new one: a battery. Unconscious negative thoughts are energy vampires — like cords left plugged in around the house, silently drawing power even when you're not using them. Awareness lets us unplug them, stop the drain, and start recharging.

[00:18:40] — Anne Lamott, Unplugging, and the Power of Simply Noticing Aimee brings in Anne Lamott's wisdom: "Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you." The goal isn't to silence all thoughts — it's to notice them, step back, and stop letting the automatic ones run the show.

[00:19:15] — Joy Lab Program Invitation Aimee invites listeners to join the Joy Lab Program — free this month — where the practices in this episode are applied step-by-step. Head to JoyLab.coach to sign up.

[00:19:45] — Closing Quote: Brené Brown on Owning Your Story Aimee closes with Brené Brown: "When we deny our stories and disengage from tough emotions, they don't go away; instead, they own us, they define us. Our job is not to deny the story, but to defy the ending — to rise strong, recognize our story, and rumble with the truth until we get to a place where we think, Yes. This is what happened. This is my truth. And I will choose how this story ends."

Please remember that this content is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice and is not a replacement for advice and treatment from a medical professional. Please consult your doctor or other qualified health professional before beginning any diet change, supplement, or lifestyle program.

Please see our terms for more information.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call the NAMI HelpLine: 1-800-950-6264 available Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. – 10 p.m., ET. OR text "HelpLine" to 62640 or email NAMI at [email protected]. Visit NAMI for more. You can also call or text SAMHSA at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org.

Episode Transcript

264. How to Calm the Mind & Not Feed the ANTs (Automatic Negative Thoughts)
===

[00:00:05] Henry: Hello, I am Henry Emmons and welcome back to Joy Lab .

[00:00:09] Aimee: And I am Aimee Prasek. We are in our Element of Resilience, and we're talking about calming the mind, which sounds so simple and wonderful — calming the mind. Of course, all of us know how difficult this is. I've told this story on the Pod before, but it just always comes back to me when we talk about our busy mind.

So several years ago, our daughter, she was about 4 at the time, came to me full of tears saying, "I had a scary thought, mama." And she told me that her thought was that she floated away in a big balloon. And I asked her, "do you think it's true?" And she responded, "Yeah. My brain was thinking it. So it was true." And her feet are on the floor as she's telling me this, there is no balloon in sight.

And I always come back to that little piece of evidence for how convincing and often ridiculously inaccurate our thoughts are. We believe so much of what we think. We think that the thoughts must come from some source of truth. And the wild thing is that so often, I think, they just don't. And that's not a bad thing, it's just, like, a thing about our thoughts.

Last episode I talked about trees and so now, I wanna talk about ants, but the acronym ANTs — which is Automatic Negative Thoughts. So ANTs are these recurring,negative thoughts that rapidly come up, unconsciously even, because they've been so patterned in our mind through repetition. And these thoughts are often about ourselves and our future opportunities, but also about the world around us. And no surprise, having more of these thoughts, is linked to anxiety and depression. But we all have these thoughts. They are not uncommon. And so we have to be able to navigate them, and not get hooked by them, or they can really take over.

And we actually deal with these ANTs a lot in Joy Lab, and how to not feed the ANTs — we usually call them cognitive distortions, you might have heard us say that, pretty much the same thing. So those of you familiar with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy might know that. But they usually fall into categories like black-and-white thinking, or overgeneralization; emotional thinking, where we think something is true because we feel it, like, I feel like an imposter, so I must be one. Essentially we're seeing negative, scary balloons that are probably not there, and we're grabbing onto them, and letting them sort of fly us away into even more cycles of worry and rumination.

One more thing, actually, I wanna say: we just think a lot. So, this is tough research to do but the most accurate, I would say guess, is that we have about seven thought-changes every minute — there's some good research on this — which is a lot of hopping around.

[00:03:25] Henry: I would've thought it was more. Hahaha.

[00:03:26] Aimee: Well — I know — but then, I mean, seven less than every 10 seconds, it's...

[00:03:30] Henry: Oh, that's true.

[00:03:32] Aimee: It's a thought and then a totally different thought, you know, 9 seconds later or so, and then a totally different thought. And if we account for sleep — let's take a break for sleep — then in our waking time, we're dealing with about 6,200 thoughts per day, which...

[00:03:49] Henry: How many of them are the same thought, though? Hahaha.

[00:03:51] Aimee: Oh God, so many of them. There's different — it's hard to know, there's different research on that. But yeah, a lot of them are the same thoughts we had like four thoughts ago, right? Those seven [thoughts] can cycle. So, you know, all of this to say, we think a lot of thoughts, and we think a lot of negative thoughts, and maybe the most problematic, we believe a lot of what we think. So in this episode, we wanna focus on how we can change our relationship with these thoughts a bit and then calm some of that chatter.

[00:04:26] Henry: Yeah. It's a great, uh, a great goal for this episode.

[00:04:30] Aimee: Yeah, let's do it.

[00:04:32] Henry: So sometimes I think that the internet is kind of like our collective brain. If it's on the internet, it must be true, right? And of course we know that that — most of us know that — that sounds ridiculous. And yet, don't we often believe that if it's in print or a picture, it's real? That's kind of being challenged these days, but we're living in a time where reality and truth are being called into question and hard facts can seem pretty subjective.

Part of me feels optimistic about this. Maybe we need to go through this collectively to wake up the power that our minds have, or to realize that — you know, teachings of the spiritual leaders for eons — that we create the world as we experience it with our minds, our perceptions, our beliefs. The first lines of the Dhammapada — Buddha said very succinctly, "with our thoughts we make the world." It's pretty amazing that [those were] the first lines, and 3,500 years ago.

There can just be a huge advantage in realizing the role we have in creating our day-to-day reality. And we do it by where we put our attention — what we believe to be true. Usually we don't realize this. We don't know how much power our minds have to change the quality of our experience, and we need to learn that.

We need to own that.

[00:06:19] Aimee: Oof. Yeah, we need to own that. Or the AI robots will do it for us. I referenced Pauly Shore's _Biodome_ last episode, and now all I can think about is the movie _Idiocracy__ _as a preview of our future. Oh my God, Henry, have you not seen _Idiocracy_?

[00:06:38] Henry: No, I haven't, I don't think I've even heard of it. It's a pretty compelling title.

[00:06:44] Aimee: Yeah, it's worth the watch, folks, if you haven't seen it. It will — it's a bit of a preview of our future, I think, if we give up the power of our minds to technology and the folks who control that tech. So that's dark. I did not take the optimistic turn you took into the Dhammapada.

[00:07:04] Henry: I'm starting to think you and I have different watch-lists, Aimee.

[00:07:08] Aimee: Oh my God, you're reading the classic, like, deep texts and I'm watching trashy movies. But yet, we come to the same philosophical wisdom. Haha. There's many paths.

But yeah, I think you're right. Now is the time, more than ever, to tap back into the power of our thoughts and the realization, the ability, the responsibility, we have to work with our minds tocreate the inner world that we wanna move from, and then the outer world that we wanna live in. And so we have to work with our thoughts. And sometimes our thoughts are scary or overwhelming — or gnarly, as you say often, Henry —or they're depleting, because they're just happening so often.

And so if we aren't training — like practicing this stuff, working with our mind — then it can seem so much easier to just grab our phone and get some dopamine hits, hit the internet, get some distractions, rather than face our thoughts. So let's talk more about what we can do.

[00:08:23] Henry: Well, we don't want to let our minds be run by an addictive need for dopamine, not if we want a calm mind. So as you pointed out, Aimee, I think I am something of an optimist and there is a reason for that. It makes me feel better, hahaha, to see the good rather than the negative. I just am happier when I'm more hopeful, when I believe things are going to work out.

We're both fans of Martin Seligman and his kind of seminal book was called "Learned Optimism." He was an early pioneer in positive psychology, and one of the things that really stood out from that early work was that he acknowledged that pessimists probably do see the world closer to actual reality. Hahaha.

[00:09:20] Aimee: Haha. Every pessimist is like, "Told you so. No crap." Hahaha.

[00:09:23] Henry: However, there's a strong correlation between thinking pessimistically and being prone to depression. It just kinda weighs down on your mood.

So choosing — it is a choice, or it can be a choice; it's a skill — to be more optimistic, whether or not it's always true, and then training yourself to be better with that skill can be a really powerful preventive for depression.

So I'm not sure, frankly, if I'm an optimist by nature 'cause I have had plenty of times where I go down that spiral of negativity like most people do. But whether or not it's my nature, I know I can choose how I see things and what I put the majority of my focus on.

The thing is that it's not a one-and-done choice. I have to make it again, and again, and again. And if you're just starting to do this, it is work. At the start, it is work. But it gets a lot easier with time. It just becomes second nature. And it's just a skill, remember, like any others, that can be learned and improved with practice.

The first step in learning this skill is simply to realize that you are thinking. It might sound obvious, but most of the time we are oblivious to the fact that we're thinking, or changing our thoughts every ten seconds, or whatever. Until we become aware of that we are at the mercy of our thoughts. Now, we do have an ally here within us that is often referred to as the observing-self or the observer, and it is powerful. It's located somewhere in our minds, I can't tell you exactly where, but it is different. It's decidedly different than the part of the brain that is doing all this thinking. The observer is able to be aware that we are thinking. So it's like being aware of our awareness, which I know starts to feel complicated, but the observer is simply able to step back, stay above the fray, and see what's happening without being pulled into it.

[00:12:05] Aimee: Yeah, I... so the first step is to become aware that we are thinking. I think that's so important to point out, that it seems obvious, but it's also very difficult. I also wanna note, just quickly, with learned optimism — it's very different than toxic positivity too, and we're gonna get into that, and we always get into that here at Joy Lab, because I am not so much an optimist by nature necessarily. I skew a little toward the other side, of survivalist, as I like to say. but I absolutely, well here we are at Joy Lab. Learned-optimism is a powerful tool. This is a skill. It's why we're here.

So, again, now I'll come back to becoming aware that we are thinking. It sounds easy, but there are some obstacles to be aware of, and this gives me the opportunity to bring up one of my favorite studies to highlight this. I've shared this study before, but I know you all must love it as much as me, so I wanna highlight it quickly. For those of you who maybe are new, this is worth your time.

So this is a study from Dr. Timothy Wilson and colleagues. There were 55 participants in this study — so not big by any means, but enough to get some solid data — and they had each participant sit alone in a boring room rating the pleasantness or unpleasantness of some positive images that were being displayed on a screen. And then they were asked to rate the unpleasantness — or I guess pleasantness they could have rated as well — of an electric shock that they were given. Hahaha.

[00:13:50] Henry: There we go with the electric shocks. Hahaha.

[00:13:53] Aimee: I know. Pretty much in PubMed I'm like [searching for] electric shocks on humans and then I find these hilarious studies that I love.

And it gets better. Okay. They were then asked, if given $5, would these participants, would they pay any amount of that money to avoid another shock? 42 of the 55 participants said yes. Please do not shock me again, right? I will give you this money back if you don't shock me.

[00:14:24] Henry: Oh my gosh.

[00:14:25] Aimee: Okay, it gets better. Those same participants, those 42 participants who don't want a shock, were told to sit in that boring room for 15 more minutes, okay? They were instructed to stay awake, and to entertain themselves by thinking pleasant thoughts. That's the encouragement. Think about something good. Simple enough. Here's the twist. At any point during those 15 minutes, they could also press a button to self-administer that same electric shock. So guess how many of the 42 people who said they would pay to avoid the shock actually shocked themselves anyway. I think you've heard this. Do you remember how many people, Henry?

[00:15:11] Henry: I do not, but it's amazing to me that any of them would do this. Hahaha.

[00:15:18] Aimee: 43% of them. 18 of those people wanted to shock themselves.

[00:15:25] Henry: Oh my gosh.

[00:15:26] Aimee: They did. One guy did it 190 times. Which is roughly one shock every 5 seconds. In the last episode, we talked about how many thoughts we have every 10 seconds or every minute, and it essentially boils down to about seven thoughts every minute. So I just... I'm seeing this guy, he's like, 'I want a shock' — shock. 9, 10 seconds later, 'I'm gonna shock myself' — shock. Those were his thoughts. Okay, so I think this is pretty telling. Being alone with our thoughts can be really tough. Many of us would rather shock ourselves, right? So let's get into that. How can we take that first step to calm our mind, to be with our thoughts in a way that doesn't feel so difficult?

[00:16:10] Henry: So we talked about the observer, the observing-self, and that can seem kind of vague at first, but I wanna reassure you, once you have the experience of this, it's — you're gonna see, it's just really pretty simple. You will not forget it. It's kind of like learning to ride a bike. It seems impossible at first, but as soon as you've got it, you've got it. And even if you're not very good at it right away, you stick with riding that bike and you're gonna get better pretty quickly. That's what this is like. Practicing this, learning to connect with the observing-self, is really helpful because it gives us back our freedom.

When I can see that this is just a thought and nothing more, then I have a choice. What do I do with it? Do I choose to believe it, or do I opt for a different thought instead? Do I want to see what's [going] wrong, or do I wanna see what's [going] right? I would prefer to choose to see what's right. So we can take back the power we have given away to our unconscious mind — this constant thinking that's just happening in the background all of the time, influencing our day-to-day, moment to moment experience.

So back to resilience for a moment. We used this metaphor to talk about the water cooler that we need to keep filled with the magic elixir of resilience. Now, imagine a different metaphor here that there's a big battery in us and we draw our energy from it. And there's this concept called phantom power — when we leave cords plugged in around our house, you know, and even if we're not using whatever it's plugged into, they keep drawing power from that. Those are energy vampires. Our negative unconscious thoughts are our energy vampires. But as soon as we become aware of them, we can choose to unplug them. We can stop the loss of our energy; the drain of our resilience. It just gives us a chance to charge ourselves up again, restore ourselves.

This is what we wanna become good at.

[00:18:44] Aimee: I love that, 'cause I think what you're emphasizing, Henry, it's like — the power of the awareness — it's not like we're trying to stop all of these thoughts. The first powerful step is to become aware of them and to step back. I love the idea of unplugging those thoughts too. It reminds me of Anne Lamott's wisdom. She said "almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you." I love that.

[00:19:10] Henry: Hahaha. I wish I had come up with that. I love it.

[00:19:14] Aimee: Hahaha. Yeah. So, we work on this a lot, again, here at the Podcast, kind of unplugging from those thoughts. Probably in every episode. We also do this really step-by-step in the Joy Lab program. So if you're already a member, head to your Joy Lab app for your Experiment. We'll be working on this.

If you're not a member yet, join us, we are offering the Program free this month. You'll find practices there that will help you build your resilience and calm your mind. So head to JoyLab.coach for more info and to sign up, and it'll be great to have you in the Program.

So I wanna close with some wisdom, some encouragement — some truth telling, I'd say — from Brene Brown, here's what she wrote. "When we deny our stories and disengage from tough emotions, they don't go away; instead, they own us, they define us. Our job is not to deny the story, but to defy the ending—to rise strong, recognize our story, and rumble with the truth until we get to a place where we think, Yes. This is what happened. This is my truth. And I will choose how this story ends."

[00:20:26] Thanks for joining us!: Thank you for listening to the Joy Lab podcast. If you enjoy today's show, visit JoyLab.coach to learn more about the full Joy Lab program. Be sure to rate and review us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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264. How to Calm the Mind & Not Feed the ANTs (Automatic Negative Thoughts)

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