7 Tips to help you stop negative thoughts.
Realizing you are self-sabotaging with Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTS) is one thing. Changing your mind is another.
Be patient and compassionate with yourself if you are on this wellness journey. Here are some tips and tools I find useful.
1. Imagine who you would be without the negative thoughts. Rather than focusing on the thought, or how you are feeling when you think the thought, try to shift to thinking about what it would feel like if you didn’t think that, or if it was not true, or even if you thought something very contrasting. Imagine who you would be without the negative thought or thoughts, and act as if you are that person. In time you will become more and more like that person.
2. Change or clean up your environment. Happiness comes from within but confidence comes from outside. Clean your room, do the dishes, and trim the bushes in the yard. By taking positive actions, you will begin to see yourself as a more positive person. Try making an “I did it” list, rather than a ‘to-do’ list, and celebrate your successes.
3. Do good even if you don’t feel great. Get up and take action on the things you know will help you feel better, or make your life run smoother. When you don’t feel like it is exactly when you most need to. Give yourself an extra pat on the back or a gold star for doing what you need to take good care of yourself, even when you are not feeling like caring for anyone.
4. Change your language. Root out ‘red flag’ words and phrases such as “can’t” and “have to”, “shoulds”, “always”, and “never”. Replace “I can’t” with “I won’t. Remember that you have choices, and stop victimizing yourself in situations that don’t warrant it. Replace “I have to” with “I get to”, and take your personal power back with subtle shifts in the way you speak to others and to yourself.
5. Remember no one else cares as much about your life as you do. Everyone has the spotlight on themselves when it comes to living life. People are not thinking about you as much as you might think, and even if they are, no one else knows you and your life as well as you do; just like you don’t think about anyone else more than you think about yourself, or from your personal point of view. No one else should care more about you than they do themselves, and life doesn’t owe you anything. If you want to change something, change it.
6. Stop imagining malintent where there is misinformation and misunderstanding. People are probably not out to get you, and even the people who have hurt you are usually acting from a place of naivete and often are simply hurt or angry and not thinking at all. I like to think of very mean people as wounded trapped animals and treat them with compassion, patience, caution, and sometimes more distance. Someone else’s bad behavior or meanness to you is not a reflection of your worth or value. Walk away if people are mean but don’t carry their meanness around with you.
7. Don’t confuse honesty for truth. This one hits me hard, as I often do think that being honest is the same thing as speaking the truth. They are not the same thing at all! You can honestly feel like you are failing or not doing things right, while also living in a truth that is larger than that incomplete and temporary perspective. Feelings are not facts, in that, they don’t necessarily mean what we think they do, and they are always temporary. When you notice yourself telling a ‘shit story’ about why you feel a certain way, try to ask yourself, “Is that really true?” I like to follow up with “Is it the whole truth and nothing but the truth?” No. It never is. We perceive less than half of one percent of the available light spectrum data, for example. There is a whole lot more that we don’t know we don’t know than we know. You can be honest and still not know the whole truth.
~GAL, September 15, 2023
