Positive thoughts

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Welcome everyone!

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Our first thought shows us who we are trained to be, our second thought is who we are.

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I would like to talk about positive thoughts in this blog, as I feel a lot of people struggle with it

Thoughts are a constant proces going through our minds. In my case, it’s the thing I wake up to and fall asleep on. Naturally, there are a lot of different types of thoughts. Thoughts hold emotions and influence our actions. Often, we have weird thoughts, funny thoughts, memories, and positive and negative thoughts going through our minds. The thing is, negative thoughts influence our behaviour negatively, but it can be really hard to chance them into positive thoughts.

What are negative thoughts?

There is a range of thoughts that fall under negative thoughts, although I believe there are two main types. First off, you have the obviously negative thoughts like “I can’t do this” or “Why did I even start?”. They are demotivating, depressing and sometimes even dehumanising. Yet, we can’t avoid them. It’s natural to think something negative that when watching a complicated lecture or reading a hard exercise. There is a certain point where we simply cannot see every thing as a challenge without it burning us out.

But we still want it to be a challenge, so we could tell ourselves “You really think you can’t do this?” or “Only a loser would not even try” and go to work. But how would you feel if someone else where to call you a loser for not doing something? These thoughts might even have a worse impact on us over time than regular negative thoughts. It might be motivating, but it is also toxic and not a healthy mindset at all. However, I often feel like downright cheering myself on like “You are a genius and can figure this out!” sounds too fake. However, positive thoughts don’t have to be like mantra’s you tell yourself you don’t believe in.

How to think more positive?

I’ve found it helpful to make the negative thought more realistic. “The exercise may be hard, but if I try something then it’s not too bad to look in the answers for the solution. And if I take over the solution because I truly don’t know it, I can still learn from it.” It’s still not truly positive, but it’s reasonable. I’ve found that telling myself something like that after a negative thought, motivated me to give making the exercise a serious chance and still learn something from using the answers.

I’m not telling you every thought should turn positive over night, because negativity is part of our life one way or another. But I do think life becomes a bit more manageable with every negative thought we catch, and every negative thought we manage to chance. It might feel like you are catching nothing, then maybe write it down. Write down your negative thought, and what you tried, or managed, to chance it into. I think you’ll see that it’s quite a lot.

Positivity exercises

Sometimes we can’t catch a thought when it happens, so I have also three exercises that could help there.

Exercise 1: write it down

Sometimes we are just in a bad mindset. It could help to write down some bad thoughts that pop into our minds then and chance them later. Or what I mentioned earlier to write down some thought-changes you did during the day. It’s one I’m going to try this week, but I think it could help a lot with showing progress or being mindful about changing the thought, which might help make it easier to chance thoughts in the future.

Exercise 2: CBT triangle

The CBT triangle, if that’s what it’s called in English, is a triangle showing the constant relation between thoughts, behaviour and emotions. Every situation you are in is a proces going event -> thought -> feeling -> behaviour -> consequence and the consequence is technically a new event, keeping the cycle going. If ever something happens and you feel like it’s a pattern, or you aren’t happy with your reaction, fill it in.

Write down the event, what kind of thoughts ran through your head (I’ve found they are mostly negative), how it made you feel, what you did and what happened as a result. Then think about, or write down, what would happen if you changed your thoughts and/or behaviour. How could you be happier with the outcome? You could keep this for yourself, try to apply it when a similar situation happens or approach one of the people in the situation and use the ‘new’ behaviour you found to try and make it better.

Exercise 3: better thoughts

It can also happen that your mind is negative because of something you can’t control that well, like getting overwhelmed. It might help to have a ‘helpmotion’ in place then. This is a meditative exercise meant to give you a certain motion which is connected to a happy memory and emotion, so you can call upon it whenever you need.

Sit down in a chair, both feet firmly on the ground if you can. Place your hands on your legs of stomach with the palms down. Breathe in for seven seconds, hold your breath for a bit, and breath out for five seconds. When you are calm, feel the ground under your feet, and keep breathing. Feel how your hands rest on either your lap, or your stomach, and keep breathing. Feel how you sit in the chair, and keep breathing. When you feel calm and relaxed, put your hands on your lap if you haven’t already, and turn your palms up. Keep breathing slowly. Slowly clench your fist, but not so much it starts hurting, and think of a happy memory. Keep doing this for a few breaths, and realise how you feel. When you are ready, open your eyes.

Besides the fact that this is a quick and relaxing sedative exercise, if you practice this a few times (for me once a week is enough) it should help in overwhelming situations. Just clench your fist, and the positive emotions of the memory should come in your mind.

Outro

I hope you found some tips in this blog. I do want to mention here that everything I said above is from personal experience and things I learned at therapy. I do not have any reliable internet and/or book sources for this. However, I truly believe these info and tips are logical and could help, otherwise I wouldn’t share them.

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The picture I used as cover is mine, and the quote is:

You’re not obligated to win. You are obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day ~ Marian Wright Edelman