How to Conquer Negative Thoughts

I don’t know how I was so fortunate as to stumble into the personal development world. Yesterday I thought to myself, how would my life look different today if I hadn’t?

I think one of the reasons some people are turned off by personal development is that they find it, for lack of a better description, cheesy. Surely most everyone wants to improve as a person, achieve and have a better quality of life. But we live in a society that beats cynicism into us from the time we are children.

Think about it. When you were a young child, the caring adults in your life – parents, teachers – told you to keep trying, to do your best… and you believed them. Somewhere around middle school, those same types of messages of hope and motivation start ringing hollow. We begin rejecting compliments, resisting the idea that we can learn or achieve certain things. We make light of anything that feels too touching, using air quotes or literally mocking what we perceive as inspirational cliches.

I believe we do this to protect our ego and out of paralyzing fear of other people’s opinions. We are terrified to dream because someone might laugh at us or tell us we are unrealistic. Worse, we might try and fail to achieve our dreams, and our hopes will get crushed. So we laugh in the face of personal development; we make light of messages that could profoundly touch our hearts. We continue living our mediocre lives, fooling ourselves to believe we are being “normal.”

But take a look at the most fulfilled, balanced and successful individuals who are living lives of joy and abundance. They do all the personal development stuff. They have relentless routines and impeccable habits. They continually feed themselves messages of hope and inspiration that others see as impractical, annoying or cliche.

If you are considering making a change in life to improve yourself as a person, but finding that the messages from the self-improvement world aren’t speaking to you, I want to offer a thought that may help. It’s true that positivity alone won’t magically move you to become a better person. One doesn’t simply start thinking more positively. You need a strategy, and it needs to be practical and meaningful to YOU. For lack of a better explanation, it needs to be believable.

If I am drowning in debt, just saying to myself, “It will all work out!” May not be enough to calm the crushing anxiety I’m feeling. If someone is feeling badly about herself because she’s 50 pounds overweight, simply telling herself, “I’m beautiful as I am” won’t solve the health problems she’s experiencing as a result of obesity.

I want to offer a strategy that has helped me tremendously in fighting anxiety and increasing confidence. It sounds like positive thinking, but its subtle distinction makes it so much more powerful. My hope is to walk you through it in detail so it becomes a tangible strategy you can use to improve your life, rather than empty motivation or fluffy positivity. 

Conquering negative thoughts:

Combat negative thoughts not with empty words of positivity, but with truths. We all have an inner voice that berates us and creates (sometimes debilitating) anxieties. At some point, we have all been told to ignore the voice, to be more confident or to just think positively. But HOW? The tangible, effective way to combat the negative thoughts that scurry through your brain all day is by disproving them with reality. MOST of our damaging thoughts are false! We believe them in the moment, but in times of clarity we are able to see they aren’t true. When those thoughts pop into your brain – I’m not a good mom, I’m incompetent in my career, I’m stupid, I’m terrible with finances, and on and on – try to identify the specific (false) reality (alternate facts!) that your cruel inner voice wants you to believe.

It’s difficult to even wrap your head around the broad statement “I’m a horrible mom,” and therefore impossible to respond to it. Dig a tiny bit and find out why your brain currently believes this. “I’m a horrible mom because I let my kids watch too much TV.” Now mentally check if this is really true. It can be very valuable to also ask yourself in this moment what outside factors may be causing you to have this thought. Did you just scroll through yet another article on Facebook about how excessive screen time is destroying the mental health of children? At which moment you looked up and realized that your toddler is watching TV during lunch while you’re on your phone, and your brain started screaming, “Screen time! Mental health!” And now you’ve plunged down the deep rabbit hole of anxiety and think you’re a terrible mom.

Take a breath. Look at the facts. How much screen time does your toddler get a day? My son, for example, watches more TV than I’d like, and a bit more than the professionals recommend. But he does not watch the 4+ hours that all these studies associate with increased risk of mental health issues. He plays, I spend time with him, I listen to him, I read to him every night, he’s well behaved and he’s happy. So I tell myself all these things. These are the facts. Combat your anxiety with the facts. Realize that what set off your anxiety might have been someone else’s opinion – a comment from a colleague, a Facebook article – which is quite possibly not valid, not scientific, or not relevant to you. It’s just an opinion. One person’s perspective. Go back to the facts of your own life. Look at reality.

Your own perception will also trick your brain. On the way to work last week, I graded one of my 5 class’s Spanish quizzes. It seemed they were all doing poorly. All the dramatic and destructive thoughts started bubbling up: “I didn’t teach this concept well. My students are unengaged in the lessons. I’m not connecting with them. I’m becoming a worse teacher.” By the time I got to school that day, I was in a state of anxiety, which I shoved down deep in order to focus on teaching that day. Later that day and the next, I finished grading the quizzes, entered them into the gradebook, and checked the averages. My inner critic was still telling me lies about how I had failed to teach my students. Then I looked at the facts. The overwhelming majority of students had done well on the quiz. The averages were solid, high actually. More students in first period had struggled, but I was able to help my brain switched to a solution-oriented mindset: I could simply ask the students what they think went wrong and take it from there. As I took a breath and observed my students the next day in class, I saw that they were engaged, they were working, they were participating, and they were smiling. Once I took in all the facts, I realized that my own distorted perceptions had tried to trick me into believing I was an incompetent teacher. The facts showed the opposite. 

If you don’t take control of your own thoughts, then your beliefs – whether they are true or false – will control your emotions. Your inner voice points out your real and imagined flaws all day long, and if you let it chatter on, you will find yourself in a state of anxiety. Train yourself to recognize when your thoughts are spiraling, take a moment to assess the situation and identify what has triggered these thoughts, and then look for the facts that disprove them. This is a strategy that gets easier over time. If you practice it, it will start to become a habit. You’ll find that when a false negative thought pops up, you’re able to recognize it as such and quickly shoot it down with the truth. 

You may be asking, “But what happens when my negative thoughts are actually true?” What if my concern over my child’s excessive screen time is founded? Sometimes, after examining the situation, you realize that the truth actually is ugly. This might sound over-simplified or overly idealistic, but I believe there is a very important switch we must make in our minds. I call it the “failure to goal mind-switch.” As human beings, whenever we are not doing something in our lives the way we wish we were doing it, we tend to see this as a failure. We say, “I’m failing at this.” Or, “I’m horrible at this.” But we have not failed at something unless we are dead. We always have another chance to improve. Turn what you see as a failure into a goal. It’s that simple (though not easy; it will require practice). Switch the way you see it in your mind. If you’re having anxiety, worry, disappointment, or any other negative emotion over some aspect or your life, it’s the perfect moment to set a goal. My kid gets too much screen time. So now what? Let me do something about it. My goal: 2 hours or less of TV a day. Now what steps will I take to achieve this? Let your mind go to work on some solutions, and try to let go of the feeling of failure.

I truly believe the strategies laid out here are effective because they are based on tangible actions you can take. It’s not about brushing off negative thoughts or ignoring them. The idea is to learn to recognize them so you can take control of them. You have two options. If your negative thoughts are unfounded, use reality to disprove them. Think of one, two or three truths that refute them. If reality supports the negative thought, use it as a chance to create a goal for improvement. Practice these steps. Keep trying, as you might not succeed in the beginning. The idea that we can control the way we think is one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal as human beings. Don’t underestimate what it means to be able to conquer destructive thoughts.