There is a prevalent misconception out there that if you are prone to negative thoughts, it will impact you for your remaining life. Know that it is not an innate quality and can be challenged like any other bad habit of yours. Negative thoughts hold the capacity to push you down in your life. There are the people who let their thoughts overpower them and overwhelm their mental state.
As a matter of fact, negative thoughts like I mentioned before is like any other bad habit. It can be changed with the right knowledge, strategy, and behavior. When we know the inherent reason and the very cause of negativity, we are better able to develop a positive outlook. It enables us to change the frame from which we look at things. Doing so can bring us great benefits in both our professional as well as personal lives.
5 ways to tune your mind away from negative thoughts
The following are 5 actionable steps you can use to keep yourself away from negative thinking and develop a positive outlook:
Actively look out for positivity by reframing the status-quo
It is essential that you reframe any situation you are in, to a positive one as opposed to a negative one. What you can do is that you can list out even the smallest of positivities. For example, if your flight is delayed and you can do nothing about it. There are chances you may get clouded by the negative consequences of your reaching late. But a better thing to do would be to think of things you can accomplish while you wait for your delayed flight. The key is to keep your head clear of all the negative thoughts.
Embrace when something positive happens
A big issue with people who are dominated by negative thoughts is the fact that they allow negative thoughts to cloud all other things. This causes severe impairment to judge things in the right manner. For instance, if you are offered a raise in your income but it is lower than what some of your colleagues got. There are high chances that you will let that one thing cloud the fact that you got a raise. Therefore, it is about the perspective that you hold in this situation.
Stop looking at things in black and white
Life is never lived on just extremes. People who understand this happen to factor it into their thought process. People who are more likely to get negative thoughts are the ones who think of things in black and white. They look out for either the best-case scenario or the worst-case scenario when they are faced with any problem. Instead, you should look at the shades in between the back and white. There are always some positives in any given scenario, so listing it on a paper that can guide you through the tough times.
Write your negative thoughts in a journal
We dread negative thoughts more because they are formless and ambiguous in our minds. This is what makes it hard to quantify or resolve. You should jot down all our negative thoughts, put it out of our head, and look at it from a third-person’s perspective. You will get more clarity and will be able to think better. It can be hard to translate your thoughts and how it makes you feel like on a piece of paper. My advice to you would be to focus on just writing how you feel, directly and quickly. Do not try to phrase things logically, just what you experience. Once it is on the paper then you may start to review and evaluate. It is important to come up and look out for triggers or common themes. This habit can help you outside of just managing negative thoughts like resolving interpersonal conflicts.
Sleep well
Negative thinking often emerges from depression. You need to sleep well to harbor a sound mind. There exists a deep connection between negativity, sleep, and depression. These three factors and their links to one another have been explored at length in multiple scientific studies. One of the studies showed that the subjects who were diagnosed with depression happened to sleep less than 6 hours. To mitigate all of it, you should focus on maintaining a healthy sleep cycle. Not just healthy but also sustainable, so that it does not get affected with time. Make sure you get an eight-hour sleep everyday and create a routine around the same.