Overcoming Negative thoughts and Beliefs

Struggling with daily challenges in life;

If you have been used to negative patterns of thinking and beliefs, I understand that it will take time and effort to change your way of thinking into a more positive one. Don’t expect to have a completely new mindset overnight. Overcoming your negative thoughts and beliefs can take years for some people to fully achieve.

Hereby several methods to combat and overcome your negative thoughts. You can use several of these methods at once as each of these methods are highly beneficial to overcoming your negative thoughts and beliefs:

1) Identify and Write Your Thoughts Down

When we get worked up in a cycle of negative thinking, it is incredibly easy to have one negative thought after another. This leads us to have many negative thoughts that reinforce negative beliefs we may have about ourselves.

A cycle like this because a habit is tough to break. However, a way to begin breaking this cycle is by slowing down and paying more attention to the thoughts you are having. This can be done by writing down your negative thoughts. In a journal or on an online document, write down the negative thoughts that you have as you experience them. If you are feeling stressed or frustrated, you will probably have a list to write down and that is okay.

Writing down your thoughts allows you to identify them. By identifying them, you become more aware of patterns in your thinking and what might be leading to certain thoughts you have. This leads us to our next methods.

2. Being Mindful

Yep, we are back to talking about mindfulness again. After you have learned how to identify your negative thinking by writing your negative thoughts down, you can now practice mindfulness by being extra aware whenever these thoughts come up.

Mindfulness allows you to think through your feelings before you act upon them. When you experience a burst of negative thinking, for example, anxiety, take a moment and sit with those emotions. What are you thinking? What events have led to you feeling this way?

Now, instead of participating in actions and behaviours that you know won’t make you feel any better. You can learn what you need at that moment and can provide for yourself in that sense. You can choose the actions that are the most beneficial and make rational decisions.

3. Positive Self-Talk

Positive self-talk goes hand in hand with being mindful. This is an extra step that would be beneficial to take when you are being mindful while experiencing negative thoughts and beliefs.

Let’s say that you are feeling a sudden burst of anxiety right before having to do a business presentation at your next meeting. When you feel this anxiety, we encourage you to slow down and become mindful.

How is anxiety impacting your body? What specifically about the presentation is inducing anxiety? How can you go about the next period of time while managing the anxiety that you feel?

Then, once you start becoming more aware of your thought processes, you can incorporate positive self-talk into your mindfulness process. In the same situation, you can begin telling yourself that you will do great during your presentation and that everything will be well.

However, what is just as important as self-talk during moments of intense negative feelings and thoughts is your self-talk after the situation. Telling yourself that everything will be fine before an event is only half of the work. Yes, it does help immensely, but it is not 100%.

This is why we want you to practice positive self-talk after the situation as well. When you are done with the business meeting and can relax, make sure to tell yourself that you did a good job. In this situation in particular, it is common for people to look back on what they said and criticize themselves. This counts as negative self-talk that leads to a more negative attitude.

After an intense moment, let yourself know that you did a good job and you faced a tough situation. Doing this over and over again will eventually lead you to rework your mindset so you don’t have those moments of intense emotions to begin with.

4. Replace Negative Thoughts and Beliefs

You now can identify your negative thoughts and beliefs, write them down, be mindful while those thoughts come up, and practice positive self-talk. Now, it’s time to bring it all together and replace/rework your negative thoughts and beliefs. This is the biggest part of overcoming your negative thoughts and beliefs and making them into more beneficial thoughts.

Start with the thoughts you have written down. Go one by one through the list, paragraph, or however you choose to express your emotions. With each negative thought you see, rewrite the thought into a more positive way of thinking. Here are a few examples:

“I am a failure.” -> “I continue to try even when I don’t succeed.”

“I can’t complete this project.” -> “I currently don’t have the tools to complete a project, but I am working to obtain those tools by asking for help.”

“Everyone at the office hates me.” -> “I can’t assume how people feel about me but I know that I do have friends in the office or people that care about me.”

As you can see, all negative thoughts can be reworked into a more positive (or at least more constructive) way of thinking. Do this for each thought you have written down, this will help you practice reworking thoughts.

At some point, you will get good enough at reworking the thoughts you have written down that you can rework any negative thoughts you have as they pop up. When you think of a negative thought, skip the step of writing it down and go straight into reworking it.

What this process does is train your brain to think more positively. You don’t give those negative thoughts any time of day before you rework them into more positive ones. Eventually, over time, you will experience these negative thought patterns less and less.

Instead, those positive thoughts you have made through reworking negative thoughts will have more strength in your mind. Your brain will automatically think positive thoughts instead of negative ones.

Once you have reached this point, you will have overcome many of your negative thoughts and beliefs. It is impossible to make it so that you will never have a negative thought again, but these are the tools to aid you when you are experiencing waves of negative thinking.

Happiness is not something made, it comes from your own actions #Dalai Lama

Have a lovely day!

RR Naomi Hesseling