How To Stop Negative Thinking

Why is overcoming negative thoughts essential to your success?

Did you know that your thoughts influence your life?

To maintain negative thoughts is to create a negative inner attitude. This attitude can only lead to negative results. Similarly, when you pay attention to these intrusive thoughts, it prevents you from having clear ideas. Imagine the attention as the steering wheel of a car, would you direct it towards an obstacle? How To Stop Negative Thinking? The same goes for your attention.

Head there in the direction you want to go. I grant you, it’s not as easy to direct your attention as to turn a steering wheel. However, it is perfectly possible to change the way you think. You will learn why when you seek to remove your negative thoughts from your mind it does not work and that there is a much more effective solution.

Stop Negative Thinking

You’ll discover 7 simple techniques to help you manage your negative thoughts more easily until you get rid of them and have a more positive mindset.

“Life is either a series of endings or a series of beginning”

01 Thoughts create your reality

Your thoughts produce emotions in you, and these emotions in turn influence, most often unconsciously, the way you act. Negative thoughts cause you to experience unpleasant emotions, resulting in anxiety and even depression. This translates into a lack of motivation, low self-confidence, and a feeling of being subjected to events.

Paying attention to and believing these negative thoughts is giving your brain the wrong direction. By doing so you are telling it where to go, which is everything you don’t want, isn’t it? Overcoming negative thoughts is necessary if you want to have a more successful and fulfilling life. It’s time to change your strategy and finally take control of your life.

02 You are not your negative thoughts

Perhaps you think that your negative thoughts reflect reality and that they are an integral part of your personality?

This is not the case, they are simply thoughts and nothing else. They usually arise automatically. They are thoughts that you do not choose and that appear randomly. They are, among other things, the result of what is happening in your environment, what you see, hear, and say.

They are also generated by your emotions and the beliefs you have about yourself and others. You have the choice to consider them as simple exaggerations that your mind suggests and that do not deserve your attention.

03 To overcome your negative thoughts, accept them

As paradoxical as it may seem, to overcome your negative thoughts, it is necessary to accept and tolerate them instead of stopping or masking them. Indeed, it is not a question here of sweeping your intrusive thoughts under the carpet, because that does not work. Having negative thoughts is perfectly human, everyone has them.

On the other hand, according to several studies, it has been shown that the more you try to stop having negative thoughts, the greater the probability that they will occupy your mind. In the book, La Psychologie positive Rébecca Shankland and Sophie Lantheaume talk about this phenomenon in more detail. You can do the test now, try for example not to think about… a giraffe.

What did you think of?

The reason is that no matter what you think about, your brain visualizes it. It is precisely your right brain where the subconscious part of your brain resides. The subconscious mind is in charge of memories and emotions. One of its particularities is that it does not understand negation. For example, if you say “don’t think negatively” your subconscious mind understands: think negatively.

A much more effective solution is to let them come and go while you worry about other things. Like filtering out the background noise and focusing your attention on what is important to you. A bit like the ticking of a clock for example. As soon as your attention is focused on something else, you no longer hear it.

04 Overcoming negative thoughts is about increasing your self-esteem

If your self-esteem is low, for example, it is your self-esteem that causes you to believe that your limiting thoughts are real, and therefore you take them as true. Without realizing it, you lock yourself in a circle of negativity in which you focus all your attention. Your state of mind becomes more aggravated and contributes to ruining your life rather than going in a more fulfilling direction. The more you maintain a negative inner dialogue, the more you reinforce the negative image you have of yourself or the world around you. This traps you in a vicious cycle of low self-esteem and pessimism.