How Your Relationships Affect Your Thinking and Your Health
In my work, people often describe a mind that won’t settle. The same worry on a loop. A running tally of resentments. A quiet conviction that things will go badly. They’ve usually been told to think more positively, and they’ve usually found that advice useless. I have too. So when this comes up, I’ll ask myself what theory would say here, and the answer is rarely “change the thought.”
This post takes a Bowen family systems view of negative thinking. The short version: what you think does seem to matter for your health, but not because thoughts are switches you can simply flip. Negative thinking is better understood as a readout of something underneath. Change what’s underneath, and the thinking tends to shift on its own.
What does negative thinking actually tell us?
Bowen theory draws a line between the thinking system and the feeling system. Under low stress, most of us can tell the two apart. Under chronic anxiety, though, the feeling system tends to take over, and the thoughts we produce are really feeling-states wearing the clothing of reason. The worry feels like analysis. The resentment feels like fact.
So negative thinking, in this view, isn’t primarily a content problem to be argued with. Rather, it’s a signal that the emotional system is running the show. The relevant capacity here is differentiation of self: the degree to which you can keep thinking clearly while still feeling what you feel, rather than being governed by the feeling. The lower that capacity in a given moment, the more your thinking gets pulled into the current.
This reframes the question. Instead of “how do I stop this thought,” it becomes “what is my anxiety responding to, and what’s my part in it.”
Where does the chronic anxiety come from?
This is where your relationships come in. Bowen distinguished acute anxiety, a response to a real and present threat, from chronic anxiety, a lower-grade response to anticipated or imagined threat that can run for months or years. Much of it is generated in our closest relationships.
How does overfunctioning create anxiety?
Overfunctioning is the position of taking responsibility for other people’s functioning: managing their feelings, solving their problems, making their decisions, carrying more than your share. It often looks like competence and care, and it’s usually rewarded as such. Underneath, though, it’s anxiety-driven, and it’s depleting. The overfunctioner tends to feel chronically responsible, frequently resentful, and rarely at rest. That internal state is fertile ground for negative thinking.
There’s a reciprocal piece worth naming. Overfunctioning and underfunctioning usually travel together: as one person does more, the other does less. In this pairing, the more visible symptoms often show up in the person doing less, the one absorbing the borrowed capability. The overfunctioner can look fine for a long time. But that doesn’t mean the cost isn’t accruing.
How does not defining a self create anxiety?
When you don’t clarify your own principles and positions, and instead shape yourself around keeping others comfortable, you stay fused with the relationship system and reactive to it. That reactivity is anxiety, and anxiety is what the worried, resentful mind is made of.
Can how you think really affect your health?
Here I want to be careful, because this is where it’s easy to overclaim. Bowen, and later Michael Kerr, proposed that chronic anxiety generated in relationship systems contributes to physical, emotional, and social symptoms. That’s a theoretical claim, and it’s a reasonable one.
There’s also a broad body of stress research showing that sustained stress affects the body: cardiovascular strain, immune changes, and more. That part is well established as general physiology.
What I can’t tell you is that the specific pathway, from your particular relationship patterns to a particular illness, has been proven. It hasn’t, at least not to the standard you’d want. The mechanism is plausible and partly supported at the level of general stress biology. The Bowen-specific version of it remains a suspected mechanism rather than a demonstrated one. So I’d hold the health claim loosely: chronic anxiety is hard on the body, your relationships are a major source of chronic anxiety, and that’s worth taking seriously without pretending it’s settled.
What can you do about it?
Notice that none of the useful moves are about fixing the thoughts directly. Instead, they’re about changing your own functioning, which is the only part you actually control.
- When you notice the loop starting, ask what your anxiety is responding to in your relationships, rather than arguing with the thought’s content.
- When you catch yourself overfunctioning, carrying, fixing, or deciding for someone, experiment with doing a little less and stay with the discomfort that follows.
- When you tend to dissolve into what others want, practise stating one clear position of your own, calmly, without requiring anyone to agree.
These moves are small and unglamorous, and that’s the point. The shift isn’t dramatic. As you change your part in the patterns, the chronic anxiety has less to feed on, and the thinking usually quiets without being forced.
I’ll add one thing I notice in my own work: how I think about a problem is often part of the problem. As a result, it helps to have someone who can think with you, more objectively, rather than someone who simply agrees. If that’s something you’re looking for, you can read more about working with us.
Thank you for your interest in family systems.
Comments are welcome: dave.galloway@livingsystems.ca
Learn more about Bowen Theory here.
Living Systems is a registered charity, and we provide counselling services to low-income individuals and families. You can support our work in several ways:
