How to stop thinking negatively and get rid of negative thinking altogether

Have you ever paid attention to how many times a day you complain about life, events and other people? Do you have negative thinking? This greatly affects the quality of life and directly on you. New neuroscience research shows that the brains of people who are prone to regular complaints are physically changing! Because you and I are fairly adaptive creatures, our brains adapt to complaining more often. Thanks to the plasticity of the brain, you can really work wonders, so it’s unfortunate that many people choose constant complaints and dissatisfaction instead of good habits and positive thinking. Let's figure out how complaints affect the brain and whether something can be done about it.

Negative Thinking Patterns

As already mentioned, the brain is amazing in its plasticity. You can fashion almost anything out of it. You can instill negative thinking patterns in yourself, or you can learn something positive. Some things will take longer, some will take less, but our brain is like soft plasticine that changes under the influence of what you do most often. You are what you do. This is one of the reasons why advances in neuroscience challenge our habits and social norms. If you want to be a good lawyer, go and watch the work of other lawyers and immediately try to imitate them. And if you want to be able to study well and turn in assignments on time, go to university. But this is a completely different story, about which there are fierce debates.

How to get rid of negative thinking

Returning to our topic, let's think about how to get rid of negative thinking. Research in recent years has shown us that man is the architect and builder of his own brain. This amazing organ is capable of adapting to a great extent to what is asked of it. But what you demand from him depends only on your desires. It is clear that all this does not happen in an instant or even in a week or month. It takes months, or even years, of focused work on yourself, because, without exaggeration, you create your own personality. Therefore, it is impossible to become a new person from Monday or from the first of January. You have spent years becoming the person you are now, and it takes years of gradual work to become the different person you want to be.

There is a term for this phenomenon – neuroplasticity. It is thanks to neuroplasticity that the brain can change its structure.

And this is a really great ability, just some kind of gift, because it gives us so many advantages:

• we can increase our intelligence, although it is not very easy, but we can. And those who believe that we are born with given, unchangeable characteristics can exhale. You can and should “create” yourself;
• Any skill you might want to learn is available to us;
• we can recover from various traumatic brain injuries. Other areas of the brain take over the functions of the injured areas;
• emotional intelligence can also be increased. You don’t have to suffer all your life because you don’t understand others, you can learn this too;
• we can instill good habits in ourselves, teach ourselves to wake up at 5 am and be productive, quit smoking and set aside time every day to learn something new, you are limited only by your own imagination.

Strategy for switching to positive thinking:

1. Study the book “The Power of Now” by Eckhard Tolle. 2. Watch my videos in this article. 3. Start exercising daily. Positive thinking requires energy. 4. Give yourself an inspiring goal. 5. Communicate more with positive people. Read their books. Watch their videos. 6. Remove negative people from your environment. Or, when communicating with them, tune into an emotional wall. 7. Read the psalms of King David or the parables of Solomon.

And also enjoy the little things and everything that surrounds you. Start keeping a diary and note every day what made you happy and brought you happiness. Do this as often as possible. But most importantly, become a source of positivity for those around you. Praise, compliment, thank and smile! Watch useful videos and stop thinking about the bad.

Learn to enjoy life.

Create your own formula for a happy life!

Man with negative thinking

Neuroplasticity is like a double-edged dagger; you can develop something useful and good, or you can turn into a person with negative thinking, teach yourself to overeat, sleep until lunch and procrastinate. And here again, everything depends only on your imagination. You can rise to the top, or you can spend your whole life in a cesspool.

But you will always have the opportunity to get out of there, because no one can take away the opportunity to get yourself back on track.

There are many patterns and laws in the functioning of the brain, one of them is this: neurons that fire together connect together. That is, there is a direct connection between your thoughts and changes in the structure of your brain.

It has long been an open secret among neuroscientists that all our thoughts, habits, dreams, character and other features of our personality are recorded in the brain. It is he who is the repository of our “I”. Therefore, changes in lifestyle and thoughts also affect the physical state of the brain.

Simple mathematics applies here - more useful actions change the brain for the better, more harmful actions and bad habits change the brain for the worse.

Examples of idealization

This topic is well covered in A. Sviyash’s book “The Reasonable World: How to Live Without Unnecessary Worries.” There, idealizations are painted up and down. And, based on the description, you can identify your own “excessive importances” and understand how to deal with them.

In this table I have described the most common idealizations.

Many idealizations are difficult to identify, since at first glance it is not idealization at all, that is, it is difficult for a person to realize that his attitude to this issue is idealized.

It would seem that there is nothing wrong with idealizing a goal - after all, there is a plan and aspiration to achieve it. But the bad thing is that by overestimating the importance of the goal, a person sacrifices his rest, health, communication with friends and loved ones. In addition, inflated importance creates excess potential, which creates obstacles to achieving what you want.

Or the idealization of independence - it’s good that a person has his own opinion and can cope with any difficulties on his own. Why, then, prove to others that you are capable? After all, you can calmly, without quarrels and scandals, do what you consider necessary.

Regarding one’s imperfection, in general, everything is confusing, since this idealization can be in a person since childhood and it is difficult to cope with it because the reason may be weak energy. Energy practices can help here.

Idealization exists wherever there is an exaggeration of the importance or significance of something - all this brings disharmony into a person’s life. Wherever there is overvoltage, obstacles arise, which means that a person either does not get what he wants at all or gets it with great difficulty. In addition to distortion in the value system, idealizations cause destructive emotions.

For example: idealization of relationships occurs when a person knows exactly and is confident in how another person should behave in a given situation, but that (other person) behaves completely differently. In other words, a person (who knows how to behave correctly) attaches excessive importance to the behavior of another person, makes claims and shows dissatisfaction.

How dissatisfaction is expressed (indignation, resentment, despondency) is completely unimportant, the important thing is that a negative message arises. Negative energy accumulates, forming blocks that impede the movement of energy, and from this various diseases arise, depending on where the negativity is “stuck.” And all this happens only because a person is not happy with someone or something.

To get rid of idealizations, we need to give up pretensions and learn to accept what life gives us.

Negative thinking

If you are tormented by unpleasant emotions, it constantly seems that everything is wrong and you notice only shortcomings in others - this does not mean at all that there is something wrong with your brain and everything is lost. This only means that the joint work of neurons in some chains leads to an increase in the likelihood of concentrating on the negative, in other words, negative thinking attitudes appear. If a certain pattern of negativity has formed in your brain, along which you have been following, like a beaten path, for several years, then most likely you will find yourself in a kind of spiral that only leads downward. Fortunately, the plasticity and adaptability of our brains allows us to not only go downhill, but also get out of it as soon as we try hard enough.

Now let's move on to a more specific discussion of the characteristics of the brain, or more precisely, we will find out what changes in the structure of the brain cause complaints.

You can even argue that you have at least once met a person who does nothing but complain, grumble, express dissatisfaction and discuss everyone behind their back. You won’t get praise or positivity from him; he can only spew discontent. Those who are less fortunate have such a person in their close circle, and those who are not at all lucky are those who themselves are such people.

The dissatisfied have many unpleasant traits, but the worst is that they cannot contain everything within themselves, it is so seething in them that it is simply necessary to pour out complaints into the ears of their neighbors.

And although they irritate everyone, from the saleswoman at the checkout to their own mother, they should not be condemned. It is much better to try to understand what pushes them to this.

Negative way of thinking

You will be surprised, but there are even classifications of people who are characterized by a negative way of thinking. There are three types:

The first ones just want attention. No one is interested in them or takes them seriously, so they are tormented by how to attract more sympathetic glances. And they achieve this by telling stories about their most difficult and unfortunate fate, pressing for pity, trying to force tears. And some people are touched by it. They remain near such a complainer and listen to his outpourings, sometimes nodding and assenting. But most reasonable people immediately jump away from such a subject, not wanting to waste either time or energy on him.

The second type are chronic complainers. These people no longer want to attract attention; their motives are completely different. If they have any reason to complain at all. For such people, dissatisfaction is a common state. Just as a fish swims in water, so they swim in their personal sea of ​​negativity. And I want to put the excess of this negativity somewhere. This is where they find grateful listeners, pouring many liters of not the most pleasant stories into their ears. Chronic complainers are very characterized by distrust of others; they believe that everyone around them is plotting something against them, plotting and gossiping. Even if you don't do anything, they are sure that you just won't admit it.

And the third type is complainers with low emotional intelligence. They just don't understand that something might be unpleasant for you. Without showing you an ounce of empathy, these people will use everyone they meet as a mannequin to vent their emotions. You are quite suitable for complaining about someone and talking about world injustice. We did it and moved on.

Still, when a person does something disgusting, for example, constantly complaining, we want to point a finger at him as the main culprit and make him stop. But he can't anymore. He doesn't even want to. But there is no other way. No one wants to be the source of negativity, but they are trapped in their own brain. If you do something several times in a row, and then again and again, then such a behavior pattern becomes fixed and then it is very difficult to get rid of it.

The human brain has an interesting feature, namely, a tendency towards negativity. By some strange whim of nature, it is easier for us to focus on the negative than on something positive. Neuroscientists explain this by saying that negative stimuli are much easier to perceive and cause greater arousal than positive ones. This is probably due to the fact that only in the last hundred years most of us do not have to constantly fight for survival; we can afford to just go to work in the office. While our ancestors first had to escape from tigers, then from Mongol-Tatar raids and not fall under the hot hand of an aristocrat. We have adapted to escape and look out for negativity, this is a justifiable trait.

Causes

In order to know how to overcome despair and hopelessness, you need to figure out where this destructive and harmful way of perception comes from. There are several reasons for the formation of negative thinking. All of them deserve detailed consideration, in order to gradually change the attitude towards them.

Vivid negative experience

If an individual constantly encounters failures, then this imprint is imposed on other events in his head and begins to influence the perception of all occurring phenomena. When we are constantly unlucky, we have to make extra efforts in order not to despair and not lose our way. Some people withdraw into themselves and no longer want to make any attempts at self-realization. A vivid negative experience opens your eyes to what is happening, helps you free yourself from illusions, and sometimes even deprives you of the necessary hope. In this case, you have to really help yourself get out of this depressing state. But not everyone knows how to deal with difficult feelings.

Fears

A person overwhelmed by negative doubts cannot remain fully happy. He is constantly under the gun of his own experiences, which sometimes grow like a snowball. If we are driven by fears, then pleasant impressions do not linger in the mind: they simply have nowhere to come from. Immersed in frightening thoughts, an individual can replay in his head many times all the things he would like to avoid. Of course, this approach to life does not bring satisfaction. There are even more self-doubts, even more fears about the future. Guided solely by fears, we get used to driving ourselves into rigid boundaries, and then we cannot get out of them without getting hurt, without losing faith and hope.

Excellent student syndrome

A condition that occurs in people who are accustomed to always receiving the approval of others in everything. And if at some point something starts to go wrong, despair sets in, a feeling of hopelessness develops, a feeling of being unable to cope with the next obstacle. If something cannot be achieved the first time, the individual gives up and stops making any attempts to correct the current situation. The depressing situation often does not change for years, causing a whole storm of negative impressions. Excellent student syndrome is not a useful thing at all, since it largely harms the perception of reality. After all, if we stop struggling with difficulties, we will never learn to overcome significant obstacles.

Expectation of failure

If an individual constantly focuses only on bad thoughts, it becomes difficult for him to make plans for the future. This is because you have to overcome too much, worry too much about the past and present. The fact is that the expectation of failure already attracts it to some extent. The person does not allow himself to relax because he is constantly focused on experiencing negative events. To overcome despair and depression, you will have to learn to think differently. You need to open your soul and stop being afraid of the future.

How to overcome negative thinking

In the modern world, we often allow ourselves to complain about life, and repetition, as we know, is the mother of learning. So the brain helps you reinforce the habit of complaining, since you really need it. But then people have a question: how to defeat negative thinking?

There is no need to go to the other extreme, smiling at everyone around and turning the other cheek, this is also not normal, you need to show different feelings. All emotions are needed, all emotions are important.

But it is very necessary to monitor negative thinking and prevent “going too far” in this regard. Interestingly, meditation practices can help you with this. Researchers from the University of North Carolina have proven that people who practice meditation have a more optimistic outlook on life and good emotions.

Meditation has many other positive aspects, for example, it allows people to be more aware and better adapted to life in society, as well as less susceptible to mental disorders.

So, with all this in mind, consider taking up meditation. Monitor your thoughts and form only the behavior patterns you need, because, as you remember, only we shape ourselves and are the architects of our brain.

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