Noticing what’s right in the world can have a big impact on your life
Does negativity dominate your thinking? If the thoughts in your head about people, situations-and even yourself are on the harsh side, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
What problems does negative thinking create? Negative thinking makes you feel blue about the world, about yourself, and about the future. It contributes to low self worth. It makes you feel you’re not effective in the world.
Psychologists link negative thinking to depression, anxiety, chronic worry, and obsessive compulsive disorder. Almost all people contend with it, even those born with a positive outlook on life.
It’s the way our brains are constructed. It’s because our amygdala and lambic systems are build to notice threats, to protect our survival. In prehistoric times it may have been a beautiful day, but when we were stalked by a predator, our brains we trained to notice danger.
Today the same parts of our brains are active even when threats are minimal. The threats we deal with today are more cognitive they involve finances, whether we are loved, or succeeding at work. They can set our hearts racing. That’s why we can get panicked on a Sunday night just thinking about work.
Negative thinking can become a habit. We practice worrying, and it gets worse over time. Worry is maintained by what we call ritualized reassurance. We think of the the negative scenarios that can possibly occur, and then all the ways we could solve them, to calm ourselves down.
Reassurance is a drug with a short half-life, like caffeine. If we use caffeine to combat fatigue, the more you use, the more fatigued you become over time. When people say, “The older I get, the more I worry,” it’s because they’ve been practicing.
We can work out thousands of scenarios, they story is still going to unfold in one way. It’s estimated that approximately 94% of the time, what we worry about doesn’t happen. What does happen is usually something we have never worried about.
We are constantly dosed with negative thinking because media primarily portrays negative events. They know that we are more drawn to what’s wrong than what’s right.
It is possible to change the way we think, but it comes from changing your relationship to your thoughts. We actually have about 50,000 spontaneous thoughts, images, and ideas every day. Whether they are positive or negative, they intrude into our awareness. Those that are negative are more likely to capture our awareness and stick with us.
We have to learn to watch our thoughts, rather than engaging with them. Practicing mindfulness can take you away from the thinking experience
For Example:
- Notice your breaths or your footsteps for five to ten seconds
- Notice anything that takes your attention away from them
- Then guide yourself back to your breath or footsteps
When you get distracted by a negative thought, notice something to engage with in the present. What are you seeing, smelling, tasting, feeling.
Mindfulness also helps us program ourselves a sense of that which is right. We can systematically notice what’s going well in the present. We can notice something favorable about each person we encounter. Ans words of admiration help us notice the rightness of things.
Try keeping a gratitude journal, looking for those events that did work out. Doing this right before bed is especially helpful.
By changing your thoughts from negative to positive ones can actually change your brain circuitry. It takes hard work, you can exchange bad habit for good ones because they exist deep within the brain.
But when new positive thoughts are exchanged for negative ones, they tend to stick and become automatic. Our brains may resist this practice at first, but after a while new habits form around how we relate to our thoughts. It’s take 30-60 days to change a habit, and up to 254 days to form a new behavior.
The practice of mindfulness is being used as a tool more and more to treat problems like social anxiety, depression and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Mindfulness helps people accept things as they are, rather than always being in a fix-it mode.
Our thoughts affect the way we regard our lives. Positive thinking fosters self-acceptance and self-efficacy.
Maybe you have a gift to give that makes the lives of those around you better. Saying good things about others has such an impact. It can create delight. It makes you and every one around you feel and function better, and makes the world a better place.
Developing positively can influence the ways we choose to behave, which leads us to feel better and to have better outcomes in our lives.
From Pity to Praise 