How To Stop Having Negative Thoughts

Let go of negative thinking as it can become a habit of mind, and it can have a serious, sometimes devastating impact on all aspects of your life. It seems unfortunately that with most people, positive thinking requires some effort, whereas, negative thinking comes easily and often uninvited.

“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but thought about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral. It is as it is.” Eckhart Tolle

You must get rid of all your negative thoughts and false beliefs about yourself. You must redirect your frustrated aggression and resentment and find ways to overcome your feelings of loneliness and emptiness.

May I assure you of this: If you’ve never failed at anything, it is certainly that you never really tried anything? Or in the words of Roman philosopher Seneca, “If thou art a man, admire those who attempt great things, even though they fail”

Was Thomas Edison a failure? Of course not. The thought is absurd. Yet dozens of failures preceded most of his brilliant creations. Edison learned from his failures and built his success on them. Discovery is born on error; there are no creations without unsuccessful experiments.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work” Thomas Edison

This sums up one of the most important lessons that I have learned from life: Blunders, errors in judgement and applications are unavoidable unless we retreat from life into a state of apathy. And even then in that state of idleness, we still make mistake. The secret of successful living is to rise above our failures to our good moments. This is the key concept, to forget our errors, to stop grieving over them, to have compassion for our own human fallibility. Then unburdened with guilt, we can step out decidedly into the world, seeing ourselves at our best, formulating our goals, and bringing out into the game of life, our success instinct.

Never deny your mistakes, admit them freely. But learn from them to minimize your mistakes in future. Be tolerant toward yourself as you would be tolerant toward a friend or you must throttle your experimentation.

“Without failure we can learn nothing, and yet we have learned to treasure success as the only acceptable standard” Wayne W. Dyer

Every day examine the negative beliefs which pull you down. Do you feel stupid? Are you obsessed with the feeling that you are ugly? Or do you torture yourself with the thought that you are weak? I don’t know what negative beliefs you use to determine yourself. But I can assure you that your thinking is irrational. In examining your accusations against yourself, let’s see if you are not being unfair. If you punish yourself as being “stupid”, on what do you base this charge? Granted that you have been unwise, perhaps many times, have you never been wise? Have you never been shrewd? Have you never been intelligent? Then your self-criticism is basically self-mutilation. What it comes down to, is that you feel you have no rights; you believe in short-changing yourself.

OK, sometimes, there might be a grain of reality to them, but are these the devastating indictments that you build them into? No, this is irrational thinking. People are people. The strong are weak, and the weak are strong. Some low-to-medium IQ people have rare common sense. Some homely-looking women are devoted friends and can look beautiful. Some people with physical handicaps are most compassionate. Some emotionally unstable people are extremely brilliant. These are greys; there are no black and whites. But what do you do to yourself with your negative thoughts? You make yourself all thumbs, all negating.

“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid” Albert Einstein

Now that you have examined your negative beliefs about yourself and are in the process of reducing them to reasonable proportions, let’s see if you can discard them. If you can’t, at least maintain them at the reasonable dimensions so that you can live with them.

Go to the next step now, and visualize a success picture, one that you are really proud of. Fill your mind with it, see it, smell it, feel it, grab hold of this success picture and hold it in your mind. When the critical thoughts counterattack, kick them out, and do this process again and again. You have read and heard about people with a pacemaker in their hearts; who are living so graciously and with peace in mind; learn a lesson from them. Let your self-image be the pacemaker of your heart, your mind, and your soul. Each day reactivate your successful instincts until the success habit becomes part of you. Until it hypnotize you.

Say to yourself: I shall concentrate on the confidence of my past successes, not on my past failures. I deserve the good things in life. I am the captain of my ship, and I shall steer my mind to a productive goal.

“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul” William Ernest Henley