Look at your achievements not always only at problems
Many of us are guilty of only seeing negativity in our life. This is easy and unfortunately how our brain works. Negative news sell a lot better than positive ones, we are more interested in scandals, than celebrations. However, we need to take more time in our life to look at and celebrate the positive. We should I bit he overwhelmed by negativity and fear - look at the bright side of life - there is always reason to celebrate.
We all have those thought patterns where we just happen to go into a spiral of negativity. We all become little disaster planners and love to think about every possible thing that could go wrong for us. What is worst, we know that this kind of thinking is highly toxic and anxiety inducing but we cannot just switch it off. There are various different of those anxiety inducing thought patterns such as blaming ourselves and living in the future but not actually dealing with what is happening in the here and now. What they all have in common, we should work on overcoming those negative ways of thinking.
There are different ways of how to do so. Firstly, we need to accept and reflect that this kind of thinking is not making us happy, quite the opposite it can lead to anxiety and depression. Once we agree on that, we can actually work on optimising our ways of thinking.
Of course, nobody wants to necessarily be
trapped in anxiety inducing thoughts. However, we all have certain trigger points that make those spirals if negativity and anxiety emerge. The first step for us is therefore to consciously identify those triggers. This is much easier said than done and can take a while. What can help is to write times when we have those negativity attacks down like in a diary and identify patterns. This way, we consciously see it when we fall into certain habits of thinking while at the same time we may even be able to understand the cause of those thoughts to come up again and again in certain situations.
Once we identified a few of those triggers, we can learn how to deal with that spiral of negativity we are so focused on. There are two ways we can do this. One is distance the other one is challenge.
Distance means that the minute when we consciously realise that we fall into one of those negative thought spirals, we distance ourselves, quite literally and watch our thoughts from afar. It is like the image of taking a step back out of a dark cloud and seeing things from a different perspective. Distance helps to consciously reflect and break the habit here.
Challenging those thoughts is the other option. We can challenge our thoughts by asking questions and telling ourselves that the way we are currently thinking is wrong and anxiety inducing.
By applying the principles of distance and challenging we will learn to know when those thoughts come and we will have tools to see them let go very quickly again . This will ultimately allow us to start focusing on the positives and get back to celebrating wins rather than living in a world of anxiety.
Life is too short to be in the negative so start celebrating the positive more by breaking through anxiety inducing thought patterns.
