Negative Thoughts Bringing You Down?

“Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love” – Brene Brown

Self-care is about caring for your mind, body, and soul.  I often hear from people they exercise, meditate, and do other forms of self-care, but they still feel overwhelmed.  

This quote reminds me that mental self-care is crucial to our well-being.  Specifically, I am thinking about how our thoughts affect our emotional state.

Negative thoughts cloud our thinking until we believe they are true.  I researched this and found that roughly 80% of our thoughts are negative.  That is a tremendous amount of negative thinking as we have over 6,000 thoughts in one day, so we have over 4,600 negative thoughts.

Most of the time, we are not aware of our negative thinking.  It is important to have a better awareness of our thoughts as negative ones can cause anxiety and self-doubt.

Many of our negative thoughts are untrue or exaggerated.  They cloud your thinking until you believe they are true.  These negative thoughts are called cognitive distortions.  Here’s a list of some of the most common cognitive distortions, according to therapistaid.com:

• Magnification and Minimization

• Catastrophizing

• Overgeneralization

• Magical Thinking

• Personalization

• Jumping to Conclusions

• Mind Reading

• Fortune Telling

• Emotional Reasoning

• Disqualifying the Positive

• “Should” Statements

• All-or-Nothing Thinking

I do not recommend thought-stopping as this leads to more negative thoughts and more intense feelings of anxiety.  Instead, I recommend reality testing and mindfulness.  Once you have practiced mindfulness, you could ask yourself if you are exaggerating or catastrophizing.

Here’s a comprehensive routine you can try to halt negative thinking whenever you realize it is happening:

1. Take a step back and use the STOP skill(Stop, Take a step back, Observe, and Proceed mindfully)

2. Identify the thoughts and acknowledge them

3. Use self-compassion towards your thoughts and yourself

4. Practice mindfulness by meditating

5. Replace your thoughts with more positive ones

I hope this post helped you to become aware of your negative self-talk, and how to deal with these negative thoughts.  Let me know if you want to know more about dealing with cognitive distortions.