How to Change Your Negative Thinking to Positive Thoughts

Have you ever thought why we never think something really good will happen today? Moreover, when presented with a difficult situation, we are prone to think in a more negative way. Why so many of us have negative thoughts of ‘I’m stupid’, ‘I'm not worthy’, ‘I'm not pretty enough’, why we never think the opposite? Why do we never question negative thoughts, but we always question positive ones?

We always tend to think in a more negative way due to evolutionary biases. Our brains are wired to be looking out for threats for survival, which evolutionarily would protect us from harm. However, today anxiety can be activated solely by negative thinking.

We also think negatively because of past learned behaviours and unbalanced thinking. Negative thinking can be a learned behaviour from the environment of our upbringing and experiences.

Unbalanced thinking can be reinforced by periods of stress, anxiety, low mood or chemical imbalance in our brain.

Also, negative thinking can be exacerbated by a tendency to amplify negativity and only looking for evidence to support negative thoughts, ignoring completely positives. Even if a negative thought has evidence for it, you can balance it out with positives or look into gaining something positive out of a negative event.

Learning to recognise your negative thoughts and changing them to more positive ones can be life-changing.

How to change negative thinking? Answer these questions! (for the best result, write the answers on the paper somewhere)

Answer these questions when a negative thought pops up:

1. What thinking error am I having now? (Overgeneralisation, Mind reading, Labeling, etc.)

2. Question your thoughts. What's the evidence that this thought is true?

3. Counterbalance your negative thoughts with positive thoughts. What are my positive thoughts about it?

4. What's the evidence that my positive thoughts are true?

5. What supportive words would I say to my friend if they came up with this kind of negative thinking?

6. Is this negative thinking helping me or making things worse? How?

7. How can I help myself to feel better? Who can support me to change my mind about this negative thought?

Here are some negative thinking errors: 

Overgeneralisation - drawing broad conclusions from a single event or piece of evidence. 

Catastrophising - expecting the worst, magnifying negative aspects of a situation with no evidence. 

All-or-nothing thinking - believing that something is either good or bad, success or failure. 

Labeling - putting a name on something, often based on one-off situations or past experiences. 

Mind reading - making negative assumptions about a person’s intentions or thoughts.  Jumping to conclusions -  deciding that something is true or likely to happen without any supporting evidence. 

Fortune telling - thinking you know what will happen in the future, and that will be something bad. 

Dismissing the positive - paying attention to only bad things, ignoring the positives. 

Negative filter - taking things out of context and only seeing negative things that happened, making them look worse than they are while ignoring all good things. 

Emotional reasoning - emotions are taken as evidence for an absolute truth. 

Should and musts - ‘I should have done that’, ‘I should do this’, ‘I must do this’ creates negative feelings of guilt, shame and frustration. 

Predicting failure - expecting things to go wrong. 

Being down on yourself - being very critical of yourself. 

Unrealistic expectations - setting goals which are too high, leading to failure. 

Remember, we all have negative thinking, what matters is how much positive thinking you have to balance it out. You can have negative thoughts coming and going, but how much you will believe them and pay attention to them can determine how you feel about yourself and the world around you.

Check out my new diary for changing negative thoughts!