Positively Put the Spin on Negative Thoughts

When a negative thought pops in your head what do you do?

Do you push it aside replacing it with a positive one?

Or, are you like most people who run yourself through a spin cycle?

If you are great at redirecting thoughts congrats. If you are in the later group maybe learning about the deeper problem with this line of thought, as well as some ways to stop it, will help. Heck, it can’t hurt.

As you ruminate on a negative thought you tend to add more and
more detail to it. You bring it to life in your imagination. As you play it out over and over again in your head, you actually begin to feel like you are actually living through the event.  Your heart rate speeds up, your muscles tense, and your breathing gets ragged. Fight or flight at its finest. Your body is getting ready for action. Why?

Your brain does not recognize the difference between a thought and reality.  Your mind is actually living your negative thought and releasing all the not so fun chemicals that go along with it. Stress activities within your soar and yet nothing has actually happened to you in the real world.

Studies have shown that negative thinking takes its toll on your health and wellbeing. A test group proved that the more you think about being sick the more sick you make yourself. So don’t go there. You can control these needless negative thoughts from taking you down the drain with them.

Okay some good news. The mind works both ways. By replacing any negative thoughts that rear their ugly heads with happy thoughts, you ignite all the lovely benefits of the yummy brain chemicals available to you.

How do you replace those negative thoughts?

1. Tune into the moment. Focus on what is right in front of you. Touch something, feel its texture, hear the sound it makes, and breath in its smell.  Taste it if it brings you back to reality faster. You’ll find yourself quickly pulled back into NOW.
2. Get grateful. List all the wonderful things you are grateful for at this time. They can be big or small. Make sure to include people you’ve come in contact with whose smile you appreciated or if they held open a door. Or thank yourself for how you handled a negative situation.
3. Break it down. Think about if this negative thought actually came alive. Come up with three ways you would handle it. Write them down in your phone, then consider the “fabricated” issue dealt with as best you can at this moment and move on to the next item on today’s todo list.

Get your self out of the negativity spin cycle. The sooner you do it the sooner you can get on with your life at hand. Change your immediate state of being before it sucks up your day.

If you have a tool to crush a negative thought that you find useful, share it below in our comments with the rest of our community.

Meanwhile, use these insights to bring you further out of the negative  and into the positive:

• Negative Thoughts Can Harm Your Health, Psychology Today
• Stress and Anxiety: The Body’s Response, New York Times
• 100 Things I am Grateful for Today, The Elephant Journal