Lesson 186: Physical and Emotional Health

Developing Healthy Thinking Patterns

Jesus Christ Can Help Us Correct Unhelpful Thoughts

Our thoughts can have a strong impact on our feelings and our actions. When we invite the Savior into our thought processes, He can help us overcome unhealthy thinking. This lesson can help students develop self-awareness of their thoughts and establish healthy thinking patterns.

Possible Learning Activities

Responding to a bad day

To begin class, you might display the following situations and invite students to write down the thoughts they might naturally have in each of those situations. Make adjustments to any of these situations to better meet students’ needs.

• I go to a social gathering and realize I hardly know anyone.

• I have to be around someone I don’t get along with.

• I hear someone criticize the Church.

• I do badly on a test I studied hard for.

• What might be some of the thoughts you have in response to these situations?

• Are these thoughts helpful? Are they entirely accurate? How can you tell?

Invite students to ponder how often they take notice of their own thinking patterns and whether those patterns tend to be helpful or accurate.

You might share with students that they will practice inviting the Savior’s help to correct inaccurate or unhealthy thoughts. Invite students to seek guidance through the Holy Ghost to better understand their own patterns of thinking, particularly when responding to challenging situations.

Look unto Christ

Read Doctrine and Covenants 6:36, looking for what the Lord invites us to do.

• What did you find?

• What do you think it means to look to the Savior in our thoughts?

  Some examples include the following: pondering how the Savior may act in situations we face, looking for how His teachings may apply to the situation, and remembering His love.

• Why can it be difficult to look to the Savior in our thoughts?

Speaking about this scripture, President Russell M. Nelson taught:

Our focus must be riveted on the Savior and His gospel. It is mentally rigorous to strive to look unto Him in every thought. But when we do, our doubts and fears flee. (Russell M. Nelson, “Drawing the Power of Jesus Christ into Our Lives,” Ensign or Liahona, May 2017, 41)

• What impresses you from President Nelson’s statement?

  Among different truths students might identify, help them see as we strive to look to the Savior in every thought, our doubts and fears will flee.

• Why might looking to the Savior in our thoughts cause our doubts and fears to flee?

To see how looking to the Lord can influence thoughts, consider inviting students to recount the circumstances of the Prophet Joseph being in Liberty Jail. Make sure students understand that he was unjustly imprisoned while the Saints were suffering extreme persecution. Students could read all or part of Doctrine and Covenants 121:1–9, looking for how the Lord helped Joseph with his doubts and fears.

Unhelpful thought patterns

To understand how turning to the Lord in our thoughts may help us, consider doing the following activity:

Display the following chart adapted from Finding Strength in the Lord: Emotional Resilience and arrange students into small groups or pairs. You could invite students to choose at least one or two of the inaccurate thinking patterns and discuss the question that follows. Additionally, students could try to recognize other inaccurate thought patterns they have noticed.

There are additional inaccurate thinking patterns that you could use in place of or in addition to those mentioned here. For examples of other inaccurate thinking patterns, see Finding Strength in the Lord: Emotional Resilience.

Unhelpful Thinking Pattern	Explanation	Example
Unhelpful Thinking Pattern Mislabeling	Explanation Reacting to something that happened by making a broad or incorrect assumption.	Example “I failed this assignment; I can’t do math.”
Unhelpful Thinking Pattern Jumping to Conclusions	Explanation Making assumptions about others’ thoughts or imagining the worst possible outcome.	Example “I’ll bet they are laughing about me.”
Unhelpful Thinking Pattern Discounting the Positive	Explanation Rejecting all positive experiences because you don’t feel like they count.	Example “My parents said I did a good job on my performance, but I know they are just trying to make me feel better about the mistakes I made.”
Unhelpful Thinking Pattern Magnification	Explanation Exaggerating your weaknesses or comparing them to others’ strengths.	Example “I can barely talk to people, and when I do, I’m not nearly as funny as he is.”

• What are some of the dangers of having thoughts like this?

Practice responding to unhelpful thoughts

Consider distributing the handout “Correcting Unhelpful or Inaccurate Thoughts” to each student. Point out that they will practice using the events discussed at the beginning of class.

Consider doing the following to define, model, and practice a skill to correct unhelpful or inaccurate thoughts:

Define: When we have an unhelpful thought, we can influence it in positive ways by:

1. Identifying the unhelpful or inaccurate thought.

2. Asking one or both of the following questions:

• If a friend had these thoughts, what would I tell him or her?

• How might thinking of the Savior and His teachings help me correct this thought?

Model: Consider modeling this skill by working through the first row in the chart below as a class.

Identify an unhelpful or inaccurate thought we could have in response to the event. Some examples could include “everyone is judging me” or “I am terrible in situations like this. It would be better for everyone if I just didn’t go.”

Consider what you would tell a friend who verbalized this unhelpful or inaccurate thought. Some examples could include “Do you think it is 100 percent accurate that others are judging you? Is there a chance they are just as worried about themselves?” and “I like you. You’re worth getting to know.”

Consider how thinking of the Savior and His teachings might help correct this thought. For example, students might think of the Savior’s kindness to others or the scripture, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (John 13:34). As part of this model, you may even share what the Lord declared in Isaiah 55:8 to help students see that His thoughts about us are often different than our own.

Practice: Invite students to work in small groups to work through the rest of the chart, writing what they might tell a friend with this thought and how the Savior might lovingly correct this thought.

At the end of the lesson, students will fill out the blank row at the bottom of the handout.

Correcting Unhelpful or Inaccurate Thoughts

Event	What unhelpful or inaccurate thought might you have?	If a friend had this thought, what would you say to him or her?	How might the Savior correct this thought?
You go to a social gathering where you don’t know anyone.
You have to be around someone you don’t get along with.
You hear someone criticize the Church.
You do badly on a test you studied hard for.

Once students have had the chance to share what they wrote in the handout, consider inviting them to think of an unhelpful or inaccurate thought they may have and write it in the appropriate column on the final row. Encourage them to add the event that can lead to this thought. Invite students to continue practicing this skill by filling in the other two spaces on this row.

• What have you learned or felt today about healthy thinking patterns that could be a blessing to you?

You might share your testimony of the Savior’s desire and ability to help us work through our challenging and inaccurate thinking as we look to Him in our thoughts.

Additional Resources

What is a modern example of seeing our thoughts from another perspective?

The following experience from Elder Ryan K. Olsen of the Seventy could help illustrate how seeing our thoughts from another perspective can help us correct inaccurate thoughts.

The Answer Is Jesus

What are additional patterns of inaccurate thinking?

Inaccurate Thinking Pattern	Explanation	Example
All or Nothing	Seeing something or someone as all good or all bad. Look for phrases with words such as always and never.	“I always say the wrong thing.”
Emotional Reasoning	Judging a situation based on how you feel.	“I feel guilty. I must have done something bad.”
Overgeneralization	When you have one experience and apply it to all experiences.	“I did not like what my teacher said. He is a terrible teacher.” “My friend lied to me. She is dishonest about everything!”
“Should” Statements	Telling yourself how things should be.	“I should be better at this than I am.”

Supplemental Learning Activity

Alternative beginning to the lesson

To begin class, you could invite students to create a scenario for a teenager. Students could think of a name for the teenager and then come up with things that might happen to him or her during a difficult day. Examples students might mention could be sleeping through the alarm and being late to school, being in a rush and forgetting something at home, someone saying something hurtful in class, having something go wrong at work due to someone else’s poor decision, and so on. It could be helpful to direct students’ ideas to the possibility that some of the teenager’s challenges might be caused by his or her own neglect, while others are outside of the person’s control.

• What are some thoughts that this teenager might have about this kind of day?

When life is not going well, what kind of thoughts do you have? How aware of those thoughts do you tend to be?

An example of the Lord correcting thoughts

If it would be useful for students to see an example of the Lord correcting thoughts, consider using the following example or inviting students to think of other examples from Church history when the Lord helped those who were discouraged to think about their situation more accurately.

Remind students about the time the Prophet Joseph Smith gave the 116 pages of the Book of Mormon manuscript to Martin Harris. When Joseph found out those pages were gone and could not be recovered, he is reported to have said, “All is lost! All is lost! What shall I do?” (Lucy Mack Smith, History, 1845, 131, josephsmithpapers.org; capitalization modernized).

Read Doctrine and Covenants 3:1, 9–10 looking for how the Lord enlightened Joseph’s thinking.

• How was Joseph Smith’s thinking unhelpful or inaccurate initially?

• What did the Lord help Joseph see?

Recognizing how the Savior thinks about us

One way students can correct their thinking patterns is to recognize how the Savior thinks about them. You could illustrate this by inviting students to read Jeremiah 29:11, looking for how the Savior’s thoughts toward His people in Jeremiah’s day were different from their own. You can then invite students to think of examples in our day of how our thoughts about ourselves can differ from the way the Savior thinks about us. You might ask students to discuss the following.

• What impact can result from knowing that the Savior thinks about us this way?