How To Avoid Falling Victim To Negative Thoughts

Ever felt trapped inside your head? Lost in an internal world where you are deluged by your negative self-talk?

A small amount of self-talk is perfectly normal and helps us navigate through our busy lives. While getting ready in the morning, mumbling a verbal to-do list is a harmless but useful memory aid.

When your internal dialogue starts to become hyper-critical and cyclical, you may need to take action before you start believing in a distorted image of yourself. If you have an underlying mental health diagnosis, negative thoughts may exacerbate a low mood or intensify your secret fears.

If more than half of your internal thoughts stem from a place of pessimism, this may be a good indication that your negative thinking is getting out of control.

Disrupting upsetting thought patterns may feel like it gets progressively harder as these patterns get reinforced in our brain many times over. But there are some techniques you can apply every time your own worst critic pipes up with unhelpful commentary.

Techniques For Fighting Off Negative Thoughts

In some cases, the root cause of negative thinking may require treatment with medical drugs to achieve the desired breakthrough. Someone who has adopted a dark worldview may need more than a single therapy session to break the shackles of negative thoughts.

Negativity has a nasty habit of pervading all areas of your life, which can spiral susceptible individuals into a deep depression.

Since stress is a major trigger for anxiety, it figures that it’s also a trigger for negative thoughts. Training your body and mind to respond to relaxation cues can give you an instant sense of release, which may be useful when you’re suffering in an external environment, such as while at work.

When you feel those intrusive thoughts creeping in, make a conscious decision to combat them by focusing on your breathing. Since stress and anxiety are characterized by quick, shallow breaths, try changing your mental state from the outside in. Turn all your attention towards your breathing for a minute or two. Take several slow and deep breaths, both in and out.

If you can introduce relaxing elements into your environment, bring in as many as you can to set a peaceful tone. Gentle music, a calming lavender scent, or a ritual like fetching some green tea provides a gateway to tranquility for many. If these don’t help in relieving your self-doubts, find your positive anchors and practice them daily. Use them whenever you need to bring your focus outside of your head.

Low Self-Esteem And Negative Bias

When something starts to go wrong, some of us tend to stack negatives. Suddenly, one small setback is proof of a bigger picture of failure at work, and your wall of confidence crumbles away in an instant. Worse still, after constant repetition, these thoughts become even more distorted. They can become exaggerated and loud, compounding their harmful effects.

Don’t be quick to accept blame for everything that goes wrong in your life, and don’t expect the worst of every given situation. Realize that every mistake is an opportunity to hone new skills. Life would be boring if we weren’t supposed to grow outside our comfort zone.

It’s tempting to assume that everything flows smoothly for others, especially when friends and family are all curating the deceptive facade of a perfect life on social media. In reality, this is rarely the case.

Passengers on an airplane experience a straight journey from A to B, but the pilots know that their aircraft is constantly off-course. Flying involves relentless corrective action to keep a plane going in the right direction. Unexpected forces of nature continually grapple to influence the flight path.

Learning to let go of things you can’t control is easier said than done. Ultimately, if you let criticism from someone else echo around in your head long after the event is over, you are needlessly furthering the harm.

Stopping thoughts dead in their tracks is a useful exercise, whether it’s with an arresting phrase or image that you bring to mind when you feel negativity flaring. It’s important to concentrate on shutting down the thoughts themselves before you start avoiding the life experiences that are linked to them.

Nurture Positive Thoughts And Watch Optimism Grow

Look for ways to build your self-esteem so that you feel better able to weather the storm when you’re going through a wintry spell in life.

Make a list of all the positive aspects of your life, particularly those things that you like about yourself. We all have good qualities, so don’t be afraid to jot them down and keep them nearby, so you can remember why life isn’t all that bad.

Try to turn these positive qualities into positive affirmations – statements that emphasize self-worth. An example might be “I am creative, loving, and have much to share with others.” Perhaps looking at a photo of a loved one in your wallet is all you need to come out of the darkness and see things the way they truly are.

Reminding yourself to be thankful for the positive aspects of your life will put you in a state of mind more conducive to positive thoughts.

Don’t stress out over small events – life is just a series of these small events anyway. Always keep your focus on what you want to happen rather than what you don’t want to happen. Your subconscious mind often finds a way to manifest your needs, as long as you know what they are already!

You can write a list of negative thoughts and feelings about yourself, but you shouldn’t keep this one on paper for long. Physically throwing the paper away afterward may also help you rid yourself of these intrusive thoughts.

For some, the act of writing out negative thoughts is helpful to get them out of your head and onto the paper. Allocating a small amount of time each day to jotting these thoughts down may make it easier for you to combat them.

Think about how you can flip the polarity of your negative thoughts and turn them into positive ones. Actionable steps like physical exercise, a healthy diet, getting enough sleep, and spending time with friends and family can help to boost your self-esteem and overall sense of well-being.

Develop a plan to combat every one of your negative thoughts so that when they pop back into your head, you have undermined their basis for existence.

Meditation And CBT To Ward Off Pessimism

Mindful meditation is a useful approach, which involves removing yourself from identifying as the thinker of these negative thoughts. 

Meditation in this way means allowing thoughts to pop into your head, but you watch them disappear too, without attaching to them as the thinker. After a while, the goal is to connect to the energy behind the thoughts. In doing so, you can experience the peace of being detached from this distressing mental noise.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) seeks to find and correct recurring harmful thinking patterns. Thoughts that commonly induce anxiety through self-criticism often contain the word “should.” These thoughts beat the thinker up by triggering negative emotions.

These are sometimes referred to as automatic thoughts because they crop up in certain scenarios without fail. Negative thought patterns are often closely tied to a limiting self-belief system, which must be challenged on a deeper level. 

In CBT, it’s recommended that when strong statements like “I should” or “I must” arise, soften them with a less distorted alternative. Using “I prefer” instead of “I should” is a simple way to re-frame a negative thought so that it is less likely to trigger anxiety.

We’ve shone a light on the underlying pessimism that feeds negative thinking. Use some of the tools above today to shut the door to your inner critic today! Start new habits that open the window to the world of optimism you deserve.

Jocelyn Farrar MSW, LCSW

www.yourlifepathcenter.com