5 Toxic Thought Patterns to Get Rid of for Emotional Strength and Resilience

And how to replace them.

For the last 10 years, after I realized life can be more than a big boozy party, I made an effort to prioritize my physical and mental health.

If you’re too on the blurry path of personal development for a while, you probably came to a similar conclusion: It’s an eternal process. The more doors you open, the more issues you decide to work on, the more enmeshed it can get.

Most self-help advice sucks. It works if everything is more or less in order and can give you an extra boost when life is good anyways.

But what about when life is crap? When you’re in a hole so deep you can’t imagine how things will be okay again?

When I was in that dark place everything I invested into self-improvement blew up in my face. None of it worked. Quite the opposite — it increased the pressure because I felt like it should work.

The biggest mistake while working on ourselves is to expect happiness and positivity. Once we start to chase happiness we stop seeing life as a whole; as a combination of pain and joy.

“[W]hen we feel suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong. What a relief. […] Suffering is part of life, and we don’t have to feel it’s happening because we personally made the wrong move.“— Pema Chödrön

Here are five signs of a toxic mindset that’ll harm you long-term. If you’re “guilty” of one or more of them, don’t fret, we all are. The point is to train ourselves to allow and honor the whole spectrum of emotions, good and bad.

By doing so, you’ll be able to gradually breathe more and more sighs of relief — there’s nothing wrong with negativity, unhappiness, and life unfolding in sharp opposition to your plans.

You Avoid Thinking About Death or Loss

I’ll die, you’ll die, everyone you love will die. Yet, we’re masters of pushing these thoughts away. We see death as an abstract concept instead of the only guaranteed thing in life. It’s one of the biggest human biases.

Try to talk about death in a casual setting and you’ll make people feel massively uncomfortable.

We see death as an abstract concept instead of the only guaranteed thing in life.

Everyone will witness death at some point, the question is when. I did at age 24 when my mom died of cancer at age 48. It shook and transformed me.

The problem is, as long as death is absent from your mind, so is life. An abstract perception of death makes us postpone life to an abstract point in the future.

It keeps us in jobs we hate, and around people we can’t stand. It tells us money is more valuable than time. It’s a false friend that whispers “Later!”, “Maybe…”, and “You can do this in a few years.”

What to do instead:

I live every day with the strong awareness it could be my last before I get diagnosed with a grave illness. Most people find this repelling and pity me but they don’t understand — the constant presence of death forces me to live.

It made me quit my corporate job and create passive income streams so I have more time — the only currency you can’t get back. It made me travel the world as a digital nomad. It chases me to the bouldering gym every other day for several hours because it’s what I love to do.

The Stoics call this Memento Mori and it translates to Remember you’ll die.

Don’t get me wrong — it’s more than the chase of positive feelings and experiences. Rather, it’s making decisions about how you want to live based on the inevitable presence of death.

Here’s how I practice Memento Mori:

Every few days I consciously search social media for young people my age who have to deal with what I’m so scared of. I read about their stories and send them love and compassion.

This helps me remember how lucky I am to be healthy and how I must never take ordinary things for granted. At the same time, I’m hyperconscious about how this can indeed happen to me.

It’s not a happy thought and doesn’t go well with the excessive positivity the self-improvement industry often preaches. Nevertheless, to face my fears this way, to remember I’ll die, to remember I might die slowly and painfully, and how others are doing it right now helps me to smell those roses, stop complaining about trivial stuff, and concentrate on the beauty of my present.

You’re Crazy About Your Goals

It’s good to have goals. It’s bad when these goals become your identity and you feel like your life depends on reaching them.

Oliver Burkeman has an outstanding chapter about this in his book The Antidote — Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. It’s called Goal Crazy and I highly recommend it if you’re, well, goal crazy.

He argues rigid goals require great sacrifice and goal-free living makes for happier humans. In the end,

“Formulating a vision of the future requires, by definition, that you isolate some aspects of your life […] and focus on those at the expense of others. [However], you can never change only one thing. In any even slightly complex system, it’s extremely hard to predict how altering one variable will affect the others.”

As a pointed example, he outlines the destructive goal pursuit of the 1996 Everest disaster. Driven by their relentless desire to reach the summit the mountaineers made terrible decisions which ultimately lead to their death.

Note they achieved their goal, however: They made it to the top. The unintended consequence was they couldn’t make it back down alive.

What to do instead:

Don’t make it your mission to destroy every barrier between yourself and an outcome you’re obsessed with. While we all have a vision that helps us move forward, don’t make this vision your identity. Be flexible and willing to change your destination. Life is too uncertain for a rigid tunnel vision.

As social psychologist Erich Fromm observed,

“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”

What helped me change my goal-crazy mindset was to switch from outcome-orientation to process orientation. This led to the biggest successes in my writing career.

Instead of a rigid focus on the number of words I have to write daily or the money I want to make, I focussed on one thing — to sit down and write one hour, every day.

So far, I achieved more than I would’ve ever dared to set as a goal. The pursuit of writing brought me $4,000 of commission and another $4,500 from a viral hit.

This was a process along which I wrote several articles no more than 50 people read. If I would’ve focussed on daily or monthly outcomes, I’d have given up or the least felt frustrated by my constant failure to achieve my self-inflicted goals.

You Rely On Positive Affirmations to Lift Your Mood

… and wonder why they don’t work.

Every day, I’m feeling better and better. I’m good enough. I love my body. I’ve been given endless talents which I begin to utilize today. A river of compassion washes away my anger and replaces it with love.

Ugh, I don’t know about you but just reading these makes me feel worse.

Nevertheless, we’re taught we need a positive outlook in life.

Turns out, it isn’t just my intuition that struggles with the notion of positive affirmations. As I learned from Oliver Burkeman’s aforementioned book The Antidote, there’s a study that tested their effectiveness.

They’re cheesy but they’re sure harmless, right? Wrong. The problem isn’t with you and your cynicism. You’re using the wrong method to remain positive and hide from negative thoughts. You’re trying too hard to be happy. This is toxic and harmful.

As Burkeman writes,

“Much as we like to hear positive messages about ourselves, […], we crave even more strongly the sense of being a coherent, consistent self in the first place. Messages that conflict with that existing sense of self, therefore, are unsettling, and so we often reject them — even if they happen to be positive, and even if the source of the message is ourselves.”

Read: If we want to reason ourselves into happiness and abundance even if what we feel is unhappiness and scarcity we’ll end up unhappier, as we don’t believe what we say. It causes distress due to inconsistency.

This is also what the aforementioned study by Dr. Joanne Wood reveals: Participants who started the study with low self-confidence ended up even unhappier after they exposed themselves to positive affirmations (“I’m a lovable person”). Positive thinking had made them feel worse.

What to do instead:

Forget about round-the-clock positive feelings about life, yourself, and your body. It doesn't work like that. Instead, give space for your negative feelings and accept them as a part of your human experience.

As the Buddhist nun, Pema Chödrön put it in When Things Fall Apart,

“Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look. That’s the compassionate thing to do. That’s the brave thing to do. We could smell that piece of shit. We could feel it; what is its texture, color, and shape?”

Try to observe all feelings with natural curiosity. Stop judging negative feelings. Don’t try to turn them into something positive by force.

Psychologist Tara Brach’s RAIN method as described in her book Radical Compassion is a good way to practice this. RAIN stands for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture. It’s a five-step method to deal with difficult feelings. I describe it in more detail here.

You can do this in a meditational setting or incorporate it into your everyday life based on your needs.

You Practice Manifestation

I call BS on manifestation. The Secret doesn’t work. The outcomes we attribute to it are a mixture of luck, privilege, and confirmation bias on steroids.

Writer Mark Manson rips the Law of Attraction apart here and explains why it’s harmful to live by it: It’s self-delusional and forces you to run away from negative thoughts and feelings — a recipe for long-term emotional damage.

Its danger lies in its short-term success: Due to our inherent confirmation bias, if you narrow your focus to something you desire, you will start to notice it more.

It makes sense if you have serious trouble seeing what’s good about yourself and life. If you’re constantly ridden by self-doubt and misery, seeing things from a different and more positive angle isn’t a bad idea in itself.

Nevertheless, eventually, you’ll have to do something. Your thoughts can change your mindset but they cannot catapult you into wealth, success, and eternal love.

What to do instead:

Explore your fears and anxiety. See them either as teachers or as inevitable chapters of the human experience. This is how you grow emotional resilience. They aren’t the obstacles on your path — they’re the friggin’ way.

The actual Secret™ is to move forward on days you feel shitty and cannot summon a single positive thought. The road to contentment isn’t obsessive manifestation — it’s the adoption of self-responsibility.

When you feel responsible for yourself you’ll learn to eat, shower, and do your homework even when your mindset is less than ideal. You'll realize thoughts aren’t everything and life can go on even when they throw a temper tantrum.

You Console Yourself and Others with “Everything Will Be Fine”

Everything will not be fine. Many things will but some won’t. If you tell yourself and others how the worst-case scenario won’t ever occur you increase the anxiety.

It sounds counterintuitive but see it this way: It signals the worst is, indeed, very, very bad. So bad you or others shouldn’t even think about it. Needless to say, this won’t make your catastrophic thoughts go away. It rather turns the whole thing into an evil to avoid at all costs.

What to do instead:

Stare the worst-case scenario in the face. The Stoics call this Premeditatio Malorum — the Premeditation of Evils. This helps you prepare for disaster and move on with your life. It helps buckle up for unfavorable circumstances and doesn’t allow them to paralyze you should they occur.

Don’t be mistaken — as millionaire blogger Jon Morrow makes it clear in his tear-inducing article 7 Life Lessons from a Guy Who Can’t Move Anything but His Face, you always have options.

He calls this the counterpunch:

“The people we call ‘lucky’ are ruled by the same fickle hand of fate as everyone else. The difference: when that hand turns against them, they look around, and they spot the opening. […]

The next time life punches you in the face, stop for a moment and ask yourself this simple question: What’s the counterpunch?

No matter how bad the situation, no matter how hopeless it seems, there is always an opportunity to turn it to your advantage. You just have to discipline yourself to spot the opening, and then find the courage to use it.”

You can’t spot the opening if you deny and run away from the punch in the first place.

Maybe the worst is yet to come. A massive punch from life in the face is an inherent part of the human experience. The question is: How will you deal with it? How will you punch back?

Final Thoughts

Many people are shocked to discover life is incredibly hard. I was one of them. The desire to cope is natural and necessary. The right coping mechanism, however, is crucial.

We live in a culture of toxic positivity fuelled by capitalism. The result is we undermine our negative thoughts and feelings and have a pathological desire to do more, have more, and achieve more. We all want to be extraordinary.

Complaining, thoughts of death, and a goal-free life are frowned upon. When we feel sad, unworthy, and as far from our goals as ever, we’re taught to trivialize our situation and see its positive aspects.

Yet, life is also beautiful. It can be exciting, exhilarating, and full of joy. We need to realize the two kinds of experiences — awful and awesome — go hand in hand.

The delusion life must feel good, be easy, and we’re all entitled to happiness leaves us unable to see negative experiences as an inherent part of life.

Life punched me with my lifelong insomnia, as well as when my mother died, my business failed, and my resulting anxiety. The above philosophies are how I choose to live and prepare for further punches down the road.

As Pema Chödrön put it in her life-changing book When Things Fall Apart,

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us. […]

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. […] It’s just like that.”

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