Thursday, June 23, 2011

Negative thinking

Negative thinking is the topic of the post on the ‘Thought for the day’ blog today. I hope you have noticed that I write more on positive thinking in my articles, but I decided to deal with the opposite of it too. I believe we have to stress more the positive aspect of the subject, but as most people suffer from abundance of negativity in their lives, pessimistic way of thinking should also be discussed. I have suffered a lot from the thing and believe can give you some ideas on how to reverse your thoughts from negative to positive. 

What is negative thinking?

 

Negative mentality is seeing everything from a negative point of view. Somehow whatever happens, a person notices only the dark side of a situation. People who are controlled by this kind of thinking fail to notice abundance of good things that happen in their lives daily. This is due to the fact that the pattern of the direction of their thoughts is towards pessimism and any sign of positivism is ignored subconsciously. 

How is negative mentality formed?

 

How does it happen? Nobody is born to be a skeptic. People make themselves that way. In most situations they accept negative mental attitude in their childhood while growing up in environment saturated with pessimism, skepticism and criticism. They hear a lot of bad words, the world for them is painted in the darkest colors, they are taught to distrust everybody. This information is later confirmed in life by their negative experiences and failures. If they fail a few times in a row they start believing that they are born to be failures and are good for nothing. When they fail next time they accept it as part of their personality. This as you may understand becomes a self fulfilling prophecy and they are doomed to repeat the thing till they change their self image and way of thinking. 

Negative feelings are the consequences and negative thinking is the cause

 

The obvious consequence of negative thinking is all possible bad feelings, lack of confidence in all activities that the person undertakes, problems in relationships and many more. When we fail to control our negative thoughts we will never be able to control our feelings. I talked a lot on the point when I discussed influence of thoughts in our lives. Lots of medicine today which is meant to help a person to get rid of bad feelings only affects the effect of the problem, not the root of it. Feelings as you understand are the effect, thoughts are the cause. 

How to get rid of negative thinking?

 

So if you want to change your feelings, change your thoughts. If sadness, depression, hopelessness are your daily reality, try to deal with your thoughts, not with your feelings. The root of negative mentality is negative thoughts that stay in our minds. Replace them with positive ones and half the job is done. Then keep to those thoughts and the other half of the job will be done.
I hope you see how bad consequences of negative thinking are. 

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