How To Turn Negative Thoughts To Positive | Exercise #1
How often do you have negative thoughts?
How many times during the day are you being critical about yourself? Thoughts like ”I will never be enough, or I’ll never be successful”, or you skip the gym and tell yourself you’re lazy.
Some people even hold themselves responsible for the happiness of others and think things like “My spouse is so upset; she or he would be better if I did more to help her.”
You might even interpret the thoughts of others by having never heard their real thoughts like: “This person won’t go on a date with me cause they probably think I’m ugly”. Any of this sound familiar?
Thoughts like this are automatic, you can’t help having them but they can change your mood and your feelings.
In this episode I’ll share with you an exercise that is designed to help you change your negative thinking with a more positive one.
That’s because unhelpful thinking leads to dead ends and when you're in a dead end you are not able to find a solution for the challenges you are facing.
By using this exercise you will be able to find helpful alternative ways of thinking that will lead you to better outcomes. I always say that when you ask your mind the right questions, it has all the answers you can ever hope for.
So our key here, will be to ask the right questions. And I promise you that your Self, knowns all the answers.
I’m Dimitris and I share insights and tools to help you design a well-lived life.
So, if we go to the basics of what many schools of psychology suggest, we will see that most of them agree on one thing. And that is that our emotions and behaviours are the result of our interpretation of any given situation.
Our interpretations can be positive and in this case they help us toward actions that will benefit us in the long run,
or our interpretations can be negative, in which case they push us to a mindset and to actions that make our lives even more difficult.
We know from several studies that negative thinking keeps us in a spiral of mental health issues, like depression or anxiety. I’ll put some links below to those studies if you want to have a closer look.
Turn Negative Thoughts to Positive Exercise
So today’s behavioural exercise will help us challenge those negative thoughts and beliefs we might have about certain issues in our lives. It will also help us create a new mindset for going about those challenges.
What we will do is that we will examine how helpful each thought we have is, and we’ll try to analyse it from different points of view.
Then, by consciously understanding those new perspectives, we will try to formulate alternatives and see where this leads us.
Ready? So, grab a pen and a piece of paper and let’s jump into it. Whenever you feel you need to pause this video to think, please do so.
Do this exercise at your own pace and know that there’s no right and wrong answer. Just let your pen write whatever comes out of your mind without judgement. Let’s do this!
So the first thing I want you to do is to draw some lines on your paper. 3 vertical lines and we’re ready to go.
Now, I’m going to use a negative thought that I often have as an example to show you how this exercise works.
Make sure you choose your own negative thought to deconstruct. So my negative thought would be “I'm not enough”. It’s a thought I have that jumps out a lot so I’ll use this one.
The Unhelpful Thought
So, the first thing that I’ll do is to write my unhelpful thought in here.. “I’m not enough”
And then I want you to think and describe the context in which this thought arises.
I’ll fill it in with my own example and my own example would be something like “I have to create a video around psychology about a subject that I don’t know much about”.
So, having to create a video about a subject that I don’t know much about makes me realise how much I don’t know.
Then this makes me feel I’m not enough, and then this makes me feel I’m an imposter.. And you see how the thoughts can go on and on and on and make me feel useless. So again, feel free to pause the video anytime and write about the situation and the context in which your negative thought arises.
Rating your unhelpful thoughts
Good, next step will be to start analyzing our negative thought and see it from different perspectives. And for our analysis, we will use some standard controls.
So in the first column, write with me the following.
How does this thought make me feel?
In the second column, I want you to rate how this thought makes you feel from a scale of 1 to 5. Personally, my thought makes me feel really negative so I’ll put 1.
The second control question will be
Would I say this to a friend I love?
And again I want you to rate the possibility of saying this to a friend. The point here is that we need to be aware that 99% of the time, when we talk to ourselves negatively and when we criticise ourselves, we use words that we would never use when talking to a friend we love and whose best interest is our priority.
And we have a duty to take care of ourselves like someone we are responsible for helping, and like someone whom we want to elevate from where they are to where they deserve to be.
But man I’m telling you that’s the most difficult thing ever. So, I don't know about you, but I'd never say to a friend that you’re not enough. So I’ll give it a one too.
Next thing we want to test is if this thought motivates us to improve the situation we’re in.
So I’m going to write here: “Does it motivate me to improve things?”. How can “I’m not enough” be motivating for anything, ever? On the contrary I’d say it just makes me feel like crap and makes me want to spend the rest of my day being miserable about how useless I am. So again, definitely not. I’ll give it a one too.
Great! So now I'm done with the control questions. Next thing we’ll do in our analysis is try to categorise this thought.
You see, there are certain let’s say styles of negative thoughts, and when you are able to identify which style you are following most of the times, it helps you go deeper into analysing yourself and becoming aware of the unconscious patterns you follow.
So I’ll go through them now and as I go through them, try to think under which one your negative thought falls under.
I’ll write them all down so you have them next time you do the exercise alone cause next time your thoughts might fall to a different style.
Negative Thinking Styles
The first one is Magnification / Minimization.
So I’m going to write it and then put a checkbox next to it, and we’ll bo the same for all the styles we’ll cover.
So Magnification / Minimization is when you either exaggerate or minimise the importance of events. So, you might believe your achievements are not important or that your mistakes are massively important. Or, you tend to magnify the positive attributes of other people and minimise your own positive attributes.
Next one is Catastrophising
and this is basically when you can only see the worst possible outcome of a situation. Like saying that this situation is “the worst ever.”, even though in reality the issue is quite smaller than what you perceive it as.
After that we will add Overgeneralization
which is when you make broad interpretations from a single event (like., “I felt awkward during my date… I am always so awkward”). So basically, seeing a single event as a repeating pattern of defeat is when overgeneralization kicks in.
Next one is Jumping To Conclusions
and this one is self explanatory and it’s when we tend to interpret the meaning of a situation without having sufficient evidence.
Then we’ll write Personalization which is basically when you hold yourself responsible for something that is not entirely under your control (e.g., “My spouse is so upset; she would be fine if I did more to help her. I must be useless”)
Moving on to Mental Filter,
which is when you recognize only the negative aspects of a situation, and you ignore all the positive. So for example you might receive many compliments during feedback at work but focus on the single piece of negative feedback.
The one before last is what we call the “Should Statements”.
So by saying “I should” or “I shouldn’t” what you do is that you put unhelpful demands and pressure on yourself.
Like, “I should not be feeling anxious”, or “I should feel ashamed” and that's when you create unrealistic expectations which turns to resentment towards yourself. And we definitely don’t want that.
The last one we’ll write is the Absolute Thinking.
This is when we ****think in absolutes, and we see only the extremes within a situation. So you are either good or bad, wrong or right, etc. or you use words like “always,” “never,” or “every.” Basically when there are no in-betweens shades of gray.
And here’s our final checklist. And now let’s go back to my example. I’m not enough. I’m not enough because I have to create a video around psychology about a subject that I don’t know much about.
In which style do you think it belongs? I’d say it’s under Magnification / Minimization cause I don’t really see all the other things that I know in this domain, I just magnify on what I don't know and fixate on that.
Ok so now that I know under which style my thought falls under, I’ll be able to see if future thoughts are falling under the same style, or if there are specific styles that I tend to follow.
And that’s usually the case. And this most of the time, has to do, believe it or not, with the style of attachment that I had with my parents.
But that’s a discussion for another video. To see how our styles of negative thinking are connected with our past and what we can do about it. I’ll definitely make a video on that at some point.
But now let’s go back and see how we can create an alternative thought.
Your Alternative Thought
So, what you want from your alternative thought is
To result in positive feelings
To motivate you to improve the situation
To match what you would say to a friend
So I’m going to have a think now and write my alternative thought in here, next to the unhelpful thought.
And then we’ll compare them. Again, feel free to pause this video and take your time to come up with one. It might not be easy at the beginning but I promise you the more you do this exercise the more intuitive it will become.
There will be a point where you’ll think of something and then you’ll be able to even stop yourself and say, hang on, what’s this about now.
So for my example I came up with a thought that sounds like : If I study for 45 minutes everyday for the rest of the week, I’ll be able to write the script for my new video about this subject I know little about.
What this thought has is 3 key things. The first one is an actionable verb. If I study, this gives me the action point of how to get out of the situation I’m in.
The second thing is that it has a very specific timeframe. I say that I want to study 45 minutes, which is perfectly doable, for a week, which is more than enough time. Having set a specific time frame creates a sense of accountability which I find useful.
And the last thing is that I can see the outcome. If I do this, then I’ll be able to do that. If I study for 45 minutes everyday for the rest of the week, then I’ll be able to write the script for my new video about this subject I know little about.
Rating your alternative thought
So let’s rate it now.
Does it result in positive feelings?
Does it motivate me to improve the situation?
Would I say this to a friend?
That was it! Keep doing it every time you have negative thoughts and I’m sure you’ll reach a point where this process becomes second nature. It’s like seeing yourself as your best friend whose interest and wellbeing is your top priority.
So leave a comment below on how you found it and how this exercise worked for you and don’t forget to like the video. It’s a really small thing you can do that means a lot for me and for the future of this channel.
Also, make sure you subscribe to get all the other exercises I’ll be sharing with you.
I’m Dimitris and I share insights and tools to help you design a well-lived life.
Keep your positive thoughts coming!