Negative thoughts have the power to darken a cloudless day, bring down an uplifting event, and dampen a simple pleasure.When such negativity frequents a person’s mind, he/she finds it hard to be happy for long.
Won a lottery? They’d be happy, but the happiness would be fleeting and then moments later you’d find them worrying over where to hide the money or contemplating on whether to tell their friends.
There are people who get a kind of sadistic pleasure in thinking negatively. They’d either be critical about a happy situation or surprised as to how a good thing happened to them! And then, philosophically ridicule it and regard it as ‘short-lived’,’leading to disappointment when it ends’ and so on.
But let me ask you, what doesn’t have an end attached to it? Everything is scripted. You may not know what comes in between, but when its purpose is fulfilled,the final chapter begins to roll in.
That’s life for you and here are some ways for you to accept your inner negativity and help resolve it.
Step 1 : Stop Thinking In Extremes
People with a negative thought process have the ‘all or nothing’ kind of thinking. Its something that occurs when we replace “i didn’t do that well on my test” with “i am so gonna fail!” when mostly former is the case. STOP IT THIS INSTANT!
Try writing down what you have been thinking negatively about. Write the extreme negative statement that comes to your mind and then be realistic and list three probabilities of how wrong a situation,according to you, can go.
Step 2 : Stop Over Generalizing It
Something bad happens to you then do you go on ahead tagging yourself as a complete failure disregarding your days in the lime light?One person messes up your life, do you go on making a pledge to yourself to NEVER trust anybody?Scold yourself to even have done it in the first place? THERE! That’s what needs to stop.
Give yourself some credit for being a survivor. There’s a silver lining to every situation. Don’t be blind to it and find yours. Not every person is unworthy of your trust and there is no situation that cannot be resolved!
Step 3 : Forced Positivism
When situations turn against you and the negativity starts seeping in, slap yourself (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED)! Stand up, and shout “BUCK UP DUMMY! Its not the end now is it? You can still do something about it! Make it stop!”
Not only will this help you look at the brighter picture for once but its a way better way to resolve problems than to sit and worry over them, waiting for someone to be our knight in a shining armor.Trust me, no one is going to be your hero but YOU!
Step 4 : Stop Mind-Reading!-
“She hasn’t texted me back,she doesn’t like me!” or “He only said that to make me feel better, he doesn’t really think that!” Having to assign a meaning to something before you have real evidence makes you more likely to believe what you imagine without question.
Your thought process should be more of a positively intriguing statement to self than a negatively formed assumption.
For example- She hasn’t texted me back,she doesn’t like me!” should be replaced with “I don’t know why she hasn’t texted me yet…”
Step 5 : Stop Forcing Your Self-Made Rules On Life!-
My father always used to say-“Look at the world the way it is, not how it should be…” A thinking like- “People shouldn’t act like that.” Or “If he loved me, he wouldn’t do that.” Is only going to add on to your depression level.
Making up tight rules as to how reality must or should be is a sure-fire way of feeling let down by yourself and others.This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t expect anything from ourselves and others, but rather that the rules need not be unreasonably inflexible.
If you still have wildly negative thoughts, then at least ‘dilute’ them by imagining a positive outcome as well as the negative one. Stopping negative thinking takes time and effort, and to an extent it’s a job that’s never done. GOOD LUCK!
Image Source: Flickr
Leave a Reply