One secret to a happy life is taming your “ANTs” and turning them into “PETs.”

No, not the little black, or red, creatures that crawl around your yard, and sometimes your house and ruin your picnic. You’d look a tad silly walking down the street with an ant on a leash. ANT stands for automatic negative thoughts, while PET is the opposite — positive empowering thoughts.

I love my ANTs. I haven’t met one I didn’t like and I have made friends with a lot, maybe not as many as Taylor Swift has followers on X but it feels like that some days. I treat those negative thoughts like a carnivore drooling over a steak at Madrid’s oldest restaurant or an oenophile sipping a great wine in a Paris bistro. PETs, not so much. I don’t know many and the few I do know aren't friendly. They didn’t like me, at least not enough to stick around.

That is the challenge for me and anyone who has a bad love affair with their thoughts and would like to move on to something more empowering, ones that would make them feel happy, joyful, enthusiastic instead of sad, depressing, suicidal, where every day feels like Monday morning in February.

According to an article on the BrainFit website, the term ANTs were given life by Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive theory, which has been called the current gold standard in psychotherapy. Beck coined ANTs when he realized how many of his patients’ thoughts were negative. We have 60,000 to 70,000 a day, many of which are repetitive and negative.

Not all negative thoughts are bad. Some kept our ancestors alive. If they thought a moving bush was a tiger and ran, they survived. If they assumed it was the wind and it was a tiger, they died, and their genes ended up on the jungle floor. All your ancestors believed it was a tiger and ran. Their genes survived and became you. Negative thoughts equaled life—your life.

That’s not as true now as it was then. We don’t run into many tigers in the concrete jungle but the........

© Castanet