AbstractThis research examines how people can defend themselves from the threat associated with the COVID‐19 pandemic by relying more on their recently generated thoughts (unrelated to the threat), thus leading those thoughts to have a greater impact on judgement through a meta‐cognitive process of thought validation. Study 1 revealed that the impact of the favourability of self‐related thoughts on self‐esteem was greater for those feeling relatively more (vs. less) threatened by COVID‐19. Study 2 manipulated (rather than measured) the favourability of thoughts and assessed the perceived COVID‐19 threat. Results also showed that the impact of thoughts on subsequent self‐evaluations was greater for those feeling more threatened by COVID‐19. Study 3 conceptually replicated the results using a full experimental design by manipulating both thought favourability andthe perceived COVID‐19 threat, moving from the self to a social perception paradigm, and providing mediational evidence for the proposed mechanism of compensatory thought validation. A final study addressed some alternative explanations by testing whether the induction of threat used in Study 3 affected perceptions of threat while not having an impact on other features.