How to avoid negative thinking?
Negative thinking is one of the big obstacles towards having a happy and peaceful life. It starts with small thoughts, that if unchecked, turns into a long chain that keeps growing and eventually adds to stress. It’s highly important to understand the negative thinking – its origin, impacts and solutions so we can take timely remedial actions to overcome this problem. In this article, I am elaborating on this topic in a simplistic way so any one can understand this and then discussing remedies that can make you self-capable to not only avoid negative thoughts but also uplift your mood.
et’s first understand the origin of negative thoughts and how our brain works.
Development of neural pathways
This concept explains how we get into the habit of positive or negative thinking. There are billions of neurons in our brain. Whenever we learn, think or action something new, we are connecting certain neurons and creating a new path in our brain. When we keep repeating it, the neuron connections and the pathway becomes stronger and keeps getting stronger with repetition that eventually makes us do it in almost an automatic way.
For example, when we learn to drive a car, we find it difficult to manage brakes, gear, steering wheel etc. but with practice, all things come under our control and start happening almost automatically. Similarly, when we use a route frequently, we start commuting it without putting in any effort. Or like our cooking that becomes automatic after we get used to it.
The same concept applies to our thinking, we get used to same thinking style over time after we have established that neuron pathway. We have example of people who will always connect travelling with risk or teenagers with disrespect or high school with bullying. On the other hand, those who will connect travelling with new learning or teenagers with fun or high school with friendship. The concept applies equally to positive as well as negative thinking. It’s up to you whether you create negative thinking or positive thinking connections stronger in your brain.
If you have developed the habit of negative thinking, it’s not that you can’t change it. Surely you can. You have the full capability to leave the negative thoughts. Here are some tools that can help you achieve this:
1. Correct your neural pathways – Cognitive restructuring or neuroplasticity: The first and foremost thing to do is to correct your neural pathway. The negative neural pathway must be replaced with a positive pathway each time you think negatively, until the new positive pathway becomes automatic. What your partner or child doesn’t pick up your phone, you start worrying and thinking negatively. Now you need to replace your negative thought with the positive, that he/she might be in a store with poor network or forgot to turn on the ring volume. This is not an easy thing to do, and your mind will be tempted to your habitual negative thinking, but you will need to be mindful and strong not to fall prey to negative thoughts. With this practice, you will eventually strengthen the positive neural pathways and become free from negative thinking.
2. Meditation – Meditation is a very strong tool that leads you to clear thinking. While meditating, you can detach yourself from the situation and see clearly. You can see that you’re being a slave to conditioned responses, conditioned negative thoughts. This awareness is first step towards resolving our negative thinking problem. helps us to resolve our problem. Then mediation leads to peaceful mind that generates power, power to work towards breaking the negative thinking pattern and getting into the positive thinking cycle.
3. Exercise – Exercise produces happy hormones in our body that help us avoid negative thinking, uplift our mood and make us happy.
4. Self-belief – A lot of negative thoughts origin from the lack of self-belief. We must look inwards to find if this is the problem and analyse the reasons behind our low self-belief. One of the ways to resolve is to look at your strengths and achievements. Prepare a list of your achievements and read it frequently to reinforce your strengths to yourself. This will help you develop self-belief, but you will have to do it consistently until you develop strong positive neural connections for your strengths. Once the neural connections grow strong, your self-belief will become permanent and your confident behaviour will become automatic.
5. Working of sub conscience mind and conscience mind – The subconscious mind is responsible for 95% of our thoughts, actions, emotions and responses. As it’s not conscious mind, we are hardly aware of it. Two persons respond differently to different situations mainly because their sub-conscious drives them differently. Our sub-conscious is huge memory bank that keeps storing everything, literally everything you experience in life. Even your negative self-talk, fears and insecurities that stored in your sub-conscience mind. So, the key is to know this sub-conscious and change it for your good. We need to create positive neural pathways for ourselves in our brain consciously, so these get stored in our sub-conscience mind. Break negative thinking and worrying habits by positive affirmations, at least twice a day – before going to bed and the first thing in the morning.
Negative thoughts are an unnecessary burden and it’s essential to unload it and live light and happy. You can do it!! Don’t wait any further and try the techniques discussed above.
References:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo5caGP5dAE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nWMP68DqHE
Chapter 10, Power of positive thinking, by Dr Norman Vincent Peale
