Reasons for Negative Thoughts Coming Easily
Negative Thoughts Coming Easily
Have you ever been paralyzed with fear while thinking the worst is yet to happen?
One day, you were all cheerful and merry when you suddenly had one negative thought. It doesn’t even need to be a big deal –it could be something you said behind someone’s back or hearing the news someone got into an accident.
Before you know it, you just can’t shake off the feeling that you are in extreme danger. The fear becomes so real you feel your heart racing and it seems to be the end of the world.
Negative thoughts become monsters under the bed. Sometimes those monsters grow so big they eat you whole.
I’ve had my fair share of struggling with negative thoughts. It may be challenging, but there’s actually a way out of that vicious cycle.
Most of us are better at giving advice to our friends than in actually applying our counsel to ourselves. Ironic but true. When you feel overwhelmed by the negativity in your head, Socrates’ way could be what you need. The father of Western Philosophy’s Socratic questioning was proven to be effective in reducing symptoms of depression. What does this therapeutic method involve? First off, you need to think that your thoughts are actually a friend’s concern and not yours. Since you are intimately familiar with the issue, what advice could you possibly give your pal? By contemplating about your thoughts as a friend, you may have a more realistic way of viewing the situation. While this may be hard to do at first, doing this exercise frees you up from a lot of worries. When you are breaking a sweat while doing aerobic exercise, it’s easier to keep negativity at bay. Working out is among the best methods to distract you from having dysfunctional thoughts. A study conducted on depressed students supported the theory linking exercise to reduced depression. Aside from helping you shake away destructive thoughts, exercise has tons of health benefits too. For all you know, daily exercise might just be what you need to steer clear of your pessimism. While ruminating, I heard some noise outside and had to check what happened on the other side of the door. To my surprise, getting back on track of my destructive thinking was harder to do afterward. It turns out psychologists have also associated doorways with purging thoughts –any thought, to be exact. In one experiment conducted in a virtual environment by the University of Notre Dame, participants found it harder to remember the objects they were carrying after passing through a doorway. The same study was repeated in a laboratory. The conclusion from these studies was the same –walking through the doorway makes you more forgetful than traveling the same distance in one room. Next time you are struggling with a negative thought, get up and try walking through some doorways. When was the last time you made a mental list of all the things you are grateful for? If it was so long you couldn’t recall, it might be why you are attracting negative thoughts. Your gratitude for all the awesome things that happened to you has a huge impact on your mental state. Research on gratefulness was conducted by two psychologists, University of California’s Dr. Robert A. Emmons and University of Miami’s Dr. Michael E. McCullough. The findings from the research revealed those who expressed gratitude regularly were more optimistic and had to visit their physicians less than those who wrote about the things that aggravated them. When you are getting caught in a negative thought process, injecting some gratitude could just be what you need. Don’t just be thankful when you are depressed, make it a habit.
