The mind is one unique and powerful gift of God to man. Your mind is the engine control of your body, how your mind feels affects your body. Isn’t God awesome?
I’m always amazed at how it works- one minute you have yourself thinking, “Yeah, everything is going great! And the next, it’s like “Yikes, it isn’t, everything is falling apart” or “No, I don’t think I can do this.”
With thoughts popping up in your head uninvited, and automatically, it’s super easy to fall prey to negative thinking.
Getting drawn into a pattern of negative thoughts leads to unhappiness and depression. And you become an absolute prisoner of your mind and this affects the level at which you enjoy life.
You never notice or experience the blessings in your world when all you do is focus and nurture your negative thoughts.
You can try to break out by distracting yourself or drowning in your sorrows with alcohol or creating a diversion. Just to mentally beat themselves up later for still being stuck in their negativity. It can feel like a real internal war.
If you fully understand your mind, you can attract what you want or repel what you don’t want. If you always think nothing’s ever going well with you, then the universe will work against you. But if you channel it into thinking, “All is well”, or “Today’s is going to be the best”, it happens that way.
That’s the power of the mind.
How To Overcome Negative Thoughts and Mindset
You can’t avoid negative thinking but you can flip the switch on your mindset. And take it from self-hating and bullying into a contagious optimistic frame. It’s all about self-awareness and understanding the patterns of your thoughts. So you can transform your negative mindset into one filled with so much positivity.
Recognizing the patterns of negative thoughts
Just like I mentioned above, it takes some level of awareness and understanding to tackle a negative mindset. The negative mind always has repetitive, energy-sucking, and counter-reproductive thoughts occupying it. These thoughts serve no real purpose; rather it directly causes negative emotions and vibes all around.
Once you train your mind to identify and become aware of the negative patterns of your thoughts as they occur, that’s when you can start to have a choice or an upper hand on how to react.
Negative thoughts can come in the form of expecting or imagining bad things to happen or that nothing good is ever going to happen to you.
Patterns of Negative thoughts
- For instance, you might fret about your career going down the drain or your health deteriorating, even when nothing has happened. You can let yourself stress about your financial future or all the lack in your life. You become trapped in negativity when your mind casts itself into the future and conjures scenes about all that could go wrong.
- Another pattern of negativity your mind constantly drifts into is self-beating and criticism. Or being harsh on yourself, and always focusing on your weak points and perceived flaws. The one thing I’ve come to know about flaws is that as you’re all high and focused on it, nobody else sees or pays any attention to it unless you point it out to them. I call this “fault finding” and if you don’t quit locating spots and flaws in yourself, you’ll always extend such habit of fault-finding and criticism to others in your life. This issue can put tremendous strain on your relationship with your loved ones.
- Ever found yourself ruminating on mistakes made in your past? Do you feel guilty and worthless over the wrongs of the past? Well, that’s a pattern of negative mindset to hinder you from creating the life you’ve always wanted. Nothing is negative about reflecting on your past experiences, that’s of course, how we learn and mature as people. But, negativity arises when you repeatedly dwell on a bad past situation without any intention of moving on or learning from it.
Other patterns of a negative mindset
- Ruminating and exaggerating the problems in your life.
- Obsessing over all the things that you think you need to live a happier life. It can be super tempting to place your happiness on external things. It could be like owning the latest sports car, a house, or finding the love of your life. But, the math there is that if damages come to those things or maybe at some point the love of your life fails you. It hampers on your happiness. And the circle goes on unless you stop your obsession and your constant wanting for more. More stuff doesn’t guarantee happiness but makes you uneasy and stressed if you don’t acquire all.
Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
james 4 vs 6
Avoid negative people
If you want to live a satisfying life and create a mindset that leaves you smiling from ear to ear, you should avoid negative people who regularly nag and revisit their problems over and over again.
Negative thinkers only make you vulnerable to developing a negative mindset. Surrounding yourself and spending time with positive and happy people instantly lifts your mood. Keep away from self-centered and toxic venting from others and keep away from doing so too.
When you’re trapped in a negative spiral, talk to a friend. Or people who you know would give you constructive yet loving advice. People who would help you put things into perspective and not those who would feed your negative thoughts.
Even in your work environment where you are sometimes stuck with habitual pessimists, people who will find the negative side of life and everything. Believe me, you surely do not have to subscribe to their negative mindset or allow them to drain your positivity.
Never sit around doing nothing
It’s easy to feel lazy and not want to do anything when you feel down, but, that’s the worst thing you can do. Because that’s when your mind starts digging through filths and negativity. The “Why am I so unlucky?” start popping out and you see yourself dwelling in it and ruminating right over those thoughts. You open doors to the feeling of fear and anxiety.
Sitting around doing nothing in your days of negative mindset only pulls you into deliberating on your fears, worries, and your ‘bad luck’. Leave that couch of ill-luck pondering and self-pitying and go do some laundry, clean out your fridge or organize your home office.
If none of the productive works are working, then put on your comfy running shoes and go running, exercise yourself, and do some yoga.
But do not meditate (unless you be careful so you don’t fall back into your thoughts).
Remember that an idle mind is the devil’s workshop.
Listen to music and inspiring Audio
Listening to Christian music does wonders for me each time I feel like I’m drifting into the negativity pit. I currently have more than 50 music albums on my smartphone. They inspire and cool me out each time negative thoughts start creeping in. The reason I love music is that some of them don’t just inspire, they get you into the exercise mood.
Find and listen to good audio messages, music, and podcasts that inspire and move you into greatness, and positivity, and let you know and understand how small every problem is for God to solve.
Memorize some super good part and sing and say it out loud to yourself always. You’ll be smiling from ear to ear and infecting others with your positivity by the time you’re through. It works, like magic!
Read positive quotes
Inspiring and positive quotes bring light and instant hope to your dark tunnels.
Make sure you have inspirational and positive quotes surrounding you. Have them on your computer or fridge door, design your workspace with them, and have them on your mirrors and walls as reminders to stay positive.
When you have your walls, mirrors, fridge doors, and smartphone popping out wonderful and positive quotes, from experience it’s hard for negativity to cloud and take over you.
Replace your negative thoughts with helpful statements
Changing a negative mindset is not always about pushing away your thoughts, and true feelings, and becoming overly optimistic. Rather it is about choosing realistic and helpful statements over harmful ones.
This is because reflecting too much on unfortunate past events or imagining and worrying about possible doom in the future are strong causes of stress, depression, and anxiety.
When you train your mind to always go on the positive side, you create mental space for your problem-solving skills to manifest. You end up seeing yourself come up with creative solutions you never thought of before in your negative spiral.
Whenever you notice a negative thought creeping up into your mind, you should try putting a lid on it with more empowering alternatives.
Ask yourself if you want to be miserable
The one purpose of a negative mindset is to keep you in misery. If you frequently fall victim to your thoughts and emotions, it’s in nobody’s hands to help you because a negative mindset is a choice you make for yourself.
By holding on to negative thoughts, you’ve chosen to be miserable. Frequently asking yourself, “Do I want to be miserable?” anytime unhappy or negative thoughts pops up amazingly puts your mind in a positive light. If you value your peace of mind, then always aspire to cultivate uplifting thoughts.
Locate where your feelings are coming from
Sometimes negative thoughts don’t just pop up on their own. Sometimes an occurrence is a reason those thoughts keep visiting you. Whenever a negative thought creeps in, ask yourself these questions:
- What am I going through?
- Are there some changes taking place in my life?
In asking yourself these questions you can be able to know and understand why you’re in a negative spiral or feeling the way you do. If the reason you’re in a negative dump isn’t obvious, then you need to dig deeper to locate your reason.
Keep a gratitude journal
A gratitude journal or diary can be your best pal when it comes to taming your mental demon. Practicing gratitude helped my mum heal emotionally.
In life there must be something or a list of things, you’re grateful for. Get a journal or private diary where you can list out all those awesome things you’re grateful about and if you already have one, try as much as possible to visit and read it whenever you’re in a gloomy state. This helps a bunch and also helps to train your mind to see the good in every side no matter how small it is.
Reading this post I can read your mind saying, “it’s easier said than done” well, that may be true, but, is it possible or doable? Absolutely! It can be done but that’s a choice you’ve to make, whether to be happy or to be miserable. Create that dream life you’ve always wanted or be trapped in gloom and negativity.
As humans depending on the nature of the bad situations we find ourselves in, it can sometimes feel impossible to overcome or change negative thoughts but constant practice and training of your mind on where to go and not to go will surely see you through.
It’s like building muscles. At the initial time, you feel sour, worn out, and want to give up, like it’s impossible, but with consistency, you feel strong and can lift beyond 5kg weight. Likewise, with constant practice your negativity will be engulfed in a deep sense of peace, light, and positivity and your whole life will be transformed right from the inside out.
You got this, my friend!
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