What Are Negative Thoughts? Why negative thoughts come in my mind

Before understanding Negative Thoughts, it is important to understand what are ‘Thoughts’ or ‘Thinking’ in general. Thinking is an active process of mind during which we manipulate some information, form concepts, solve problems of day-to-day life, and make decisions. Thoughts can be mentally represented through an idea, image, sound, or any other hypothetical element. Thus, Thinking is an automatic process of our mind. It takes conscious efforts to stop thinking, rather than start thinking.

Now, a day it is becoming a major concern for most of us to know the methods or techniques through which we can control our thinking or silence our mind for few minutes. Many people are incorporating meditation, mindfulness, or yoga in their lives to be able to calm their minds.

Negative thoughts are the contents of our thinking about any particular object, situation, or person which are disturbing to us or disliked by us. It may also include thinking about an event that we don’t want to happen either in the future, present or past, and are fearful of. For example, if any loved one comes home late with proportionate time and not receiving the call, our mind will automatically be directed to think negatively that something wrong would have happened until we consciously control our mind to think positive.

Thus, Negative thoughts are not completely based on evidence, rather they are more emotions based, illogical and irrational to some extent. On the contrary, some level of anxiety produced by thinking negatively, i.e., Eustress as well as Reality-based thinking also protect us from any perceived harm in the future based on our experiences. So, it is essential to distinguish negative thoughts from reality-based thinking which is healthy and provides solutions to us.

Negative thoughts are automatic in nature, also called “Automatic Negative Thoughts”. Our mind unconsciously perceives an abundance amount of information from the environment, and this unconscious pattern of learning negative ways of thinking from people around us since childhood becomes our habit. This is the reason that negative thoughts are automatic or easy to process, however it takes conscious efforts to bring positive or optimistic views up to the front. Automatic negative thoughts when become uncontrollable take the form of cognitive distortions and may cause the disorders of mind such as depression, stress, and anxiety-related disorders, or to a severe extent can be the roots of psychosis.

How To Stop Negative Thoughts With This Technique

A consistent, conscious, and courageous (3 C’s) efforts are required initially to change the negative outlook into optimism. Few simple steps can be followed to think positive:

Step 1: Understand and acknowledge that negative thoughts are harmful to us both mentally and physically.

Step 2: Develop a willingness and strong desire to change negative thoughts into positive thoughts.

Step 3: Be determined to focus on just the positive aspects of any object, event, or person, no matter how hard it is to identify them.

Step 4: Keep reminding these positive aspects of your mind and also develop faith in it.

Few other techniques such as meditation, deep breathing, mindfulness, and yoga will calm your mind and give you space to pause your mind and think rationally. Forming new conscious and healthy habits have the potential to teach our mind to focus on the good and substitute previous undesirable habits. Remember, that consistent and active efforts are required to develop a new pattern of positive thinking until our mind learns to unconsciously process it automatically.