Negative thinking can darken your day, present, and even the future. The act of thinking and only focusing on the negative doesn’t just predict how you’re likely to become engulfed in a negative state, but it can also go as far as affecting your mental and physical health, leading to all types of illnesses later in life.
Always thinking negative simply doesn’t help, and everyone knows this.
And therefore, if individuals know it doesn’t make things any better, why is it that they still hold on to it?
Why is it so hard to minimize negative thinking?
If you’re struggling to get negative thinking out of your mind, these tips will help you make improvements on a daily basis if you put some of this into practice.
Tips to overcome negative thinking:
1. Do not put all all your focus on the extremes
Life is never always black and white, this or that, or nothing at all. However, one thing negative thinking does is to concentrate on the extremes of the experiences you live day in and day out.
Your business is not doing good. Rather than doing the best you can with the intention to turn it around, you just let it fail completely because you’re just focusing on all the negatives instead of being proactive, looking at it from another angle or seeking expert help so the business can pick up. You think all is going to hell and you can’t do anything about it, so dang it should crash and burn, taking all your investment money and sweat and tears to the drain.
As you can see from the two examples above, negative thinking has one aspect; it views the future in terms of a dramatic failure or disaster waiting to happen. You focus in it so much with a high degree of passion you’re literally expecting it to happen!
It’s true that the potential for failures will always be there. But it’s important to realize that life is not made up of just failure and losing at everything.
Even though you cannot all of a sudden begin to concentrate on the positives and keep it that way all the time, you can begin searching for the easy wins instead.
If you have an impending problem, say to yourself that you will overcome it, yes recognize it’s there and don’t simply ignore it, but if you start looking at your options and the things you can do to solve the problem chances are you will more than if you just felt sorry for yourself and did nothing.
2. Do not over-generalize
Most people who can’t get these thoughts out of their mind over-generalized failures. Now what in the heck does that mean? For instance, if their first date failed, they will conclude that nothing works for them in the dating scene.
Many years ago I used to like this girl in high school, I really wanted to ask her out but I just didn’t have the confidence. I battled it out for a while until one day I built enough… I went up to her and asked her if I could talk to her. I asked her out…And long story short, I got a fat “L” and got rejected. I felt so stupid, and I never asked another girl out for a while. I created the idea that I would get rejected every time.
If you fail at something you really wanted and even prepared for, you will feel and believe you are just stupid and stop right there, instead of saying l will try again a second and a third time, I will keep going until I get a win. After all it’s a numbers game right? If you over-focus on failures, you’re giving them too much power unnecessarily. That kind of thinking will cloud your mind and prevent you from achieving so many things you could accomplish.
3. Focus on the positives too
If you concentrate on the negatives alone, you won’t see any positive even when it actually happens! You will just hear that little program in your mind telling you…”meh, you lucky son of a gun, now don’t get too excited now, you just got lucky this time” kinda like there’s a special screen inside your mind that filters positives, and lets negatives enter your mind instead.
To deal with this, get into the habit of seeing setbacks as temporary, rather than things that are permanent and “OMG the world is ending.” If you search for the negatives, you will ALWAYS find them. But again, if you stop for a minute and search for the positives, dang it you’ll find them too!
4. Stop making up s*** in your brain
If you fail on a test for that course you’re taking, you say you’d have performed well if you were a bright student, but since you’re not that’s why your dumb ass failed.
It’s been an hour and your wife isn’t back from work. Then you remember that bastard Mark who looked at her funny that day you went with her to her work’s employee dinner last Christmas. You start thinking, “oh heck no, you son of a….” you conclude she is probably seeing someone else, and it must be that a-hole, yup that’s it.
Stop making excuses that you’re dumb, you’re probably just being lazy. And man, you either have insecurity issues or gotta really feel guilty about something yourself to be making stuff up, especially if the reason she was late is because she simply passed to get some groceries.
5. Stop mind-reading
You cannot be relaxed with uncertainty when you mind-read. For example, if you text a friend saying you’re busy replacing your car filter and they took long to reply or acknowledge it, and you conclude that they don’t like you now or think they must think I think they’re being annoying. The problem with this is that you’ll believe in your own imagination, you can’t just pretend to know what they’re thinking.
But on the other hand, if you’re chill and the person hasn’t replied, you’ll probably just wonder why they haven’t replied yet instead of being dramatic. You won’t start making conclusions based on what you think they must think.
You can begin experiencing change in your life by practicing these tips. Don’t be a slave of bad thoughts that creep into your mind unnecessarily when you can do something about it and live life to the fullest.
