Turn Negative Thoughts Into Positive Ones
Can you turn a negative thought into a positive one? Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina (USA), has shown how an optimistic approach to life can help the brain fight negative emotions. The researcher has confirmed that special exercises can be used to train the body to promote positive reactions that act as natural attenuators against stress and depression.
The first thing we need to understand is that when we declare war on certain ideas, they attack. If we oppose and deny every negative thought that comes to our minds, that thought will surely remain in our minds. Each thought adds more thoughts that are similar in nature and thus produces a cognitive overload that is not good.
Our thoughts affect our daily lives. They can even affect our feelings and behavior. It is important to understand the relationship between fighting negative thoughts and reducing negative impacts. To do this, we must first identify automatic negative thought patterns. Through habit, these thoughts become part of our fundamental belief system.
Our beliefs are fraught with prejudice and cognitive distortions. It is time to recognize these distortions and fight them so that we can produce positive thoughts for each new situation. These delusions and distortions cause our minds to get rid of information that does not match our beliefs. They also magnify or exaggerate the information that reinforces our way of seeing the world.
Thoughts are the part of you that you can change
The brain is not looking for the truth. Its job is to survive. In the prehistoric world, such behavior made sense. These days, many things have changed. Fast reaction time is no longer so important for survival. Even more important is the appropriate response in each situation. We need to keep in mind that our brains can be wrong. They may show us the situation just how they perceive it to be, and not how it actually is.
The mind tries to save energy by giving us a quick reaction to a concrete event. The goal is to manage the situation and keep us safe and calm. Most distortions occur because of these mental shortcuts. Our primitive brains tend to act quickly, just as our ancestors functioned to survive. In this system of rapid action, we generalize too much, think negatively, and are inflexible.
In our current society, we do not face dangerous situations on a daily basis. The threatening situations we face are almost always imagined, or sensitively felt by overreacted individuals. Fast data processing makes us rely on our delusions again. The image is distorted because we try to process it so quickly, so our brains use delusions to clear them up.
One of the biggest unintentional distortions occurs when probability is translated into absolute truth. This can cause anxiety or depression about something that hasn’t even happened. Only about 20% of what we think actually happens. So our thoughts should not be judges in our lives, but bystanders.
Understand your mind and your mind will understand you
Most of us tend to only partially consider what we are doing at the moment. In the meantime, our minds and thoughts are working on some other problem. This kind of behavior is called living on an “autopilot”. This happens when we have very little information about the details at the moment.
Being fully aware of what is happening here and now is the best way to combat negative thoughts. Accepting that thoughts of this type are sometimes necessary and recognizing the vicious circle of negative preconceptions in which thoughts feed each other is the key to replacing them with thoughts that better reflect reality.
It is possible that in certain situations there are factors that we cannot change. Pain, illness, difficult circumstances, these are independent of us. But at least we can be aware of the reaction and respond to everything that happens to us. By doing this, we put ourselves in a position where we develop strategies to change our relationship to our conditions and the filters we use to address them.
